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"Governance might be one of the most overused terms in the SharePoint community. Governance exists at many levels in different organizations. There is corporate governance, legal governance, project governance, system governance and many more. SharePoint governance might fall under system governance. It is a small piece of what might be a much bigger effort. Most often SharePoint governance discussions are a sub-topic of system governance, specifically one of many systems in our organization. (We need to) begin to break governance issues down to small efforts."

~ Paul Swider (@pswider), SharePoint Consultant

At the end of the SPTechCon Boston event this summer, I found myself sitting at a table with fellow presenter Paul Swider and AIIM.org community expert Chris Riley (@rileybeebs) embroiled in an argument around SharePoint governance: what it was, who owned it, whether it was something that belonged in a binder on a shelf, or whether it was something misunderstood that required more proactive management.

While Paul tried his darndest to be provocative and disagree with Chris and I, I found myself agreeing with just about everything Paul was saying. Governance IS overused in the SharePoint community. Governance IS something that should be on a checklist, that you complete and then you're done. Governance IS a small piece of a much much bigger overall effort to align tactical activities to broader corporate goals and initiatives. We found ourselves arguing over semantics, when really -- we were in agreement.

In my mind, there are two parts: the guiding principles that help shape your direction (what Paul was referring to as governance), and the actions taken to enforce those guiding principles (what most people are talking about when they refer to SharePoint governance). And defending the tactical steps for enforcement (if we can call it that) is probably what made Paul think we were not on the same page. But you can't have the one without the other. You need the guidelines to know what to enforce, and you can't enforce anything if there are no guiding principles -- you're just a SharePoint bully :-)

Governance is most definitely something that should be a task on your corporate checklist, something that is done up front to provide guidance and direction for shaping your company infrastructure, especially your IT systems. At the core of governance are one or more company objectives -- the things that drive your business forward, and which help employees strive to improve. Example might be "Reducing the number of defects in our processes to zero" or "Improving employee innovation." Your corporate governance should take these objectives in mind, with all systems and initiatives taking into consideration how they can best move these objectives forward.

It might sound a bit touchy-feely when talking about it in the abstract like this, but many companies take it very seriously. Microsoft has made it part of their annual planning cycle. All employees have a personalized, annual commitment plan that they perform against. Each individual plans rolls up under their manager's commitments, which correlates to the business unit commitments, which rolls up to the divisional commitments, which ties directly into the corporate goals. You better believe that tactical management of SharePoint environments -- how much content, how many sites, usage statistics, system performance, policy enforcement, and so forth -- are part of those commitments, and can be tied directly to the high-level governance strategy.

Yes, Paul, governance "the strategy" is something done up front, signed off on, and largely put on a binder on a shelf (although regularly reviewed and refreshed, as needed). And governance "the tactical actions" are something you do day-in and day-out to ensure that the strategy is being met.