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SharePoint Governance: How Much Does Your Organization Need and How to Enforce It

By Matthew Bretzius posted 06-20-2013 14:55

  

This is a guest post by Jeremy Thake, AvePointChief Architect and Microsoft SharePoint Most Valuable Professional (MVP)

(Note: This is part of our series “Collaborate with Confidence”. Previous posts: SharePoint Governance: What You Need to Know to Put a Plan Together)

You’ve deployed SharePoint at your organization, and all you keep hearing is how you need a governance plan. I talked about the importance of a solid governance plan in my last post. But where do you even start? Before implementing your governance plan and policies, you need to be able to understand what it takes to enforce it:

Evaluate
Understanding organization-wide SharePoint adoption in terms of content ownership and security structure helps establish the foundation to a solid governance plan. Having up-to-date information on how your organization operates will not only help you minimize risks of non-compliance and reduce total cost of ownership, but also maximize productivity.

Execute
A good governance plan takes into account the needs of all stakeholders, including all business and information technology (IT) resources. In order to effectively implement policies established by your governance board, not only does there need to be clear guidance on operating within these policies, but ownership needs to be given to the right parties to ensure that the right people are making the right decisions.

Enforce
Even with the right governance plan and policies in place, solely educating users will not prevent errors in daily operations. Establishing procedures around policies help close the gap and curtail human error. Standardizing processes for business verticals not only protects against non-compliance with policies, but sets the right expectation around service level agreements (SLAs) for your IT operations. Along with monitoring usage statistics, this provides additional information for establishing the correct chargeback model for optimal SharePoint return on investment.

Evolve
As enterprises adopt new technologies and grow to meet changing business needs, it is essential that corporate SharePoint governance can adjust with new adoption schemes, additional customized solutions, and changes in IT operation SLAs. Scaling your governance with organizational growth not only requires constant monitoring of progress, but also the ability to implement changes without disrupting productivity.

How much SharePoint governance do you need?

Developing and implementing good governance is not easy. Why? SharePoint is a complex platform with numerous services available – including portal, collaboration, document management, and search – each of which could require their own policies and procedures. The amount of governance needed for any particular service or application often correlates to the intended size of the audience.

The amount of SharePoint governance your organization needs will vary based on visibility. Highly visible portals accessed throughout the organization will undoubtedly need the highest level of governance enforcement. On the flip side, those sites that have the least visibility will require the least amount of governance enforcement.

Higher visibility areas like your main portal or your community sites will require a greater governance enforcement, while sites with lower visibility to your organization like project/team sites or personal My Sites require less governance enforcement, and thus less expended effort.

While visibility will be the main factor in your governance plan, there are always exceptions that will require examination on a case-by-case basis. Your organization may have content that is subject to regulations, like financial information, and can only be accessible to certain members of the company. This could require strict access controls, robust SLAs for content availability, and retention requirements, all in spite of visibility level.

Essentially, it is imperative to have a clear idea of what kinds of business needs your organization has before planning out a governance policy. No two enterprises are alike, so no two governance plans will be alike either.



#Collaboration #sharepoint #SharePoint #governance #Collaboration #InformationGovernance
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