While traveling to
Perth, Australia, I participated in a roundtable activity with some of the
local Microsoft team and a handful of vendors and customers from the community
in a discussion around the topic of changing SharePoint governance needs as
organizations move toward the cloud. The roundtable provided a good
cross-section of enterprise and small-to-medium businesses across various
stages of the SharePoint deployment lifecycle.
The prevailing
question of the meeting was, "How do we define governance?"
Participants acknowledged the importance of the topic, but it was clear that
organizations are struggling to agree on a definition within their
organizations, as well as across the SharePoint community. Everyone has a
different take on what it means, from specific records and data management
policies to a broader change management philosophy that guides how a company
administers all information technology. As one participant put it,
"Different companies bring different perspectives. Governance is very
broad, and there's no single definition that fits all organizations."
And in many
organizations, the group agreed, the inability to agree on a definition has
slowed or halted progress on establishing consistent policies and procedures.
On the
topic of how movement toward the cloud affects governance, the group agreed
that moving certain workloads to the cloud reduces the kinds of tasks which
require active management. IT teams don't have the same pressures to provide
handholding of basic SharePoint activities, as many of the common
administrative services are handled as a service, usually by the vendor. In
fact, there may even be a decrease in these requests as there is a service cost
associated with them. In other words, when an organization is using a
cloud-based and multi-tenant service, and does not have the ability to
customize or extend it as they would on prem, their requests for extending the
platform may become more focused and specific around specific, measurable
business outcomes.
While
offloading these service requests to the cloud may be advantageous to the
business from a cost perspective, the group agreed that there may also be costs
to the business. Consensus was that if you reduce the ability to customize, you
lose some of the inherent value of SharePoint. Added one participant,
"Nobody is really talking about this lost opportunity cost when it comes
to moving to the cloud, but it is very real. And every time you need to make a
change, whether hosted or on prem, there is a cost associated with it. It's
mostly just a matter of paying for that up front (with the cloud), or on the
backend (more resources needed on prem). Most organizations are not thinking
about this."
When asked how their
companies are doing with their governance activities, one participant noted
"The policies and procedures that have been defined don't really fit into
what is viewed as the best practices for SharePoint. SharePoint is viewed as this
free realm where you can do anything, so as you define your governance you need
to do a better job of communicating out that this is how you should conduct
yourself."
"Communication
is key," claimed one consultant, "as well as clearly defined service
level agreements." The group agreed that transparency of defined policies
was critical to helping end users to understand just what was involved in managing
this very complex platform, and then spent some time discussing the merits of
introducing a formal charge-back model to help end users better understand the
true costs of servicing a growing SharePoint environment. "It's an easy
game if you define (your SLAs) and communicate them well, but if you don't do
that, you're setting yourself up for problems."
When the group was
asked if their organizations are doing a good job at defining and communicating
SLAs, the response was negative. One member added "Not yet, but we're in
the process of getting them defined." Almost everyone agreed with this assessment,
which is consistent with recent industry-led surveys that show a majority of
organizations view governance as business critical, yet have not spent the
necessary time for governance planning.
As the discussion
turned to how the dialog around governance has changed over the past 2 to 3
years, participants acknowledged that the conversation had changed as
SharePoint has matured, but that many companies are still catching up to what
is happening within the technology, and starting to really think about not just
"what" is being deployed (the technology) but "how" it is
being deployed (the actual business solutions). This has led to more discussion
around governance. According to a panelist working for a global customer,
"We have learned that SharePoint needs to be fine-tuned, adjusted, and
configured to get what you want out of it. SharePoint is much more complex. It
is not a static platform at all. It needs proactive management to get the most
benefit out of it."
"The key to
governance," added one vendor participating in the discussion, "is
that when one of your end users steps outside of the boundaries you've set up
and agreed to, you know what to do." The group conceded that when the
responsibility tends to fall on one person, like the service manager, they just
want to make the exception rather than have to enforce SLAs (i.e. deliver the
bad news). Most agreed that enforcement was a major issue in governance, and
that when it comes to enforcing many of the rules of the system, they're not
always willing to support it. The group recommendation was to make enforcement
part of a governance committee's activities, so that one person would not have
to be solely responsible.