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Sometimes, otherwise intelligent people manage to do stupid things. Yesterday, I was guilty of being such a person; well, I consider myself to be intelligent. We are working on an information management project in SharePoint, and we decided that it was time to talk about governance. The reason that this is the right time is because we have only just started building this solution. The reason we need to talk about it before we move forward is that some of the different types of content that we might want to group together, may in fact have different governance requirements. We tend to approach governance on an individual solution basis, building off of some generally accepted company governance concepts, so clearly the time to act is now. So, what’s the stupid part?

I started to build a presentation to explain governance to a group of my coworkers who are fairly new to the concepts and practices of content management. I also needed to cover how SharePoint supports and allows us to implement governance and how we would suggest applying the available features in this project. Of course the latter objective requires that we offer a certain amount of validation of the general concepts. This seemed like a lot of work, until I realized – it’s already done. I am a professional member of AIIM, and I have access to the AIIM SharePoint Governance Toolkit, and the toolkit includes almost everything I need to make this presentation. The fact that I am working out of an AIIM Toolkit automatically adds the validity that I need, so all I have to do is add my unique content and stir.

The really stupid part of this brief oversight was that the toolkit was developed by Nick Inglis, and Nick just happened to mention that fact when he delighted the audience at the November meeting of the New England Chapter of AIIM. I arranged that event, I introduced Nick during the event and I sat in the first row during his presentation!

I can’t match Nick’s dynamic presentation style, I don’t typically use Prezi for my presentations, and I didn’t write the toolkit, but I will be able to make a dull subject a little less dull now that I have some professional material to work with. If you want to see Nick in action (I would strongly suggest that you do), he will be speaking at the AIIM Conference in March – so will I, and I’d love to see you in New Orleans.