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In Oleson and Wagner’s SharePoint Governance Plan from 2007, the pictorial model on page 16 focuses on ungoverned (My Sites, project team sites, and department and team sites) versus governed documentation (divisional and corporate portals). 

As I type late into this evening, a few thoughts stand out in my mind.

With the introduction of Enterprise 2.0, it’s a post-modern information world.  Transparency is developing into a byword of corporate success.  While the MOSS 2007 governance plan encourages a rash of My Sites from the bottom up, divisional and corporate portals from the top down should still be guided by the team…strange—the trust is in a Reagonomics approach to managing content of a few select, high-profile pieces that will trickle down to the individual users. But as any good Enterprise 2.0’er will tell you, a company changes from bottom-up, from middle-out, and from top-down, one employee at a time.

Of course, the diagram is missing the records angle. The industry standard calls for 6—10% culled pieces of information to be declared as records (with the understanding that all information is discoverable).  Oleson and Wagner make a nice attempt at retention: everything’s to be kept permanently, except for collaboration—that’s short-lived.  

I understand what they were trying to say—create it now because when we migrate to the next platform we will answer the more technical retention questions.  The design team has done so.

Enter SharePoint 2010 and its brilliant capture of Records Management mise-en-place. Records in place: instead of the cold transfer of final records to a central repository, records can stay in their original location and the metadata wrapper is applied to each object. It’s a warm end user experience.

The good news? Records Management mise-en-place begs more complicated, intensive “what is a record?” question and answer periods with end users—if the training is designed correctly. It depends on your culture, so Records Managers, you’ll need to make sure you’re in THAT meeting.  How much time will your company spend on such questions? I must confess I find it unlikely end users will care about retention because today they care more about expediency. The “what is a record?” question seems like a luxurious remnant from better economic times. The bad news? IT could simplify a records implementation to the application of a period per object and the role of the Records person could be potentially minimized after the basic suite of Records documentation is completed.  

Careful what we wish for.

No, I think it’s important to message IT there’s nothing so dangerous it can’t be discussed—and we need to not only address risk, compliance, document control, retention, ediscovery, disaster preparation and recovery but also how can SharePoint tools help us in these realms?

Because, as one C-level said to me recently, “what do you mean by, ‘declare a record?’ I have no idea what that is.”