SharePoint Governance: Beyond the Buzzword

In 2011, I was lucky enough to spend time on five continents with the largest SharePoint customers in the world.

As I documented my community outreachstatistics as part of my year-end procedures, I came to realize that I had personally touched one in ten of the largest enterprises on the planet. Inmy meetings with these companies, SharePoint teams shared their problems, gave me insight into the solutions they had developed, and trusted me toprovide guidance and to share the lessons learned from hundreds of other SharePoint implementations.

While the SharePoint journey is somewhat unique for any organization, and is heavily dependent upon the organization’s requirements, several themeswere consistent. By far the most common theme is—shocker!—governance.

In Amsterdam, I debuted a new keynote speech titled, SharePoint Governance: Beyond the Buzzword. It’s a popular and highly-rated talk inwhich I frame the discussion of governance and provide some structure and sanity to the noise and the hype.

Various Layers of Governance

I set forth my perspectives on what thevarious layers of governance mean—from business governance to IT governance to service governance, and down to the technical layer—and provide usefultools to help organizations move forward thoughtfully and effectively on their SharePoint journeys. I’ll be presenting the keynote at several premierSharePoint events in early 2012, and I will work to make the talk available online to those who cannot attend one of those events.

But, today, I’d like to focus on one topic related to the “buzzword” governance: Is the word being used to describe both governance and management?

Governance is, without doubt, the buzzword of the day in the SharePoint space.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of noise around governance, and the wordhas become overloaded with perspectives and guidance that cover the gamut from strategic management to project management to design and architecture toservice delivery and even to user adoption. Governance has become the catch all for anything that an organization believes it needs or is missing tomake SharePoint successful.

In my opinion, SharePoint governance is not about documenting every setting, policy, and procedure in an attempt to define how SharePoint will lookforever and ever.

Rather it is about establishing a process that enables the organization to move forward, with each step and each new solution addingto the organization’s understanding of its information and service management requirements. In my keynote, I share tools to help establish thatprocess and forward momentum.

Where Governance Ends, Management Begins

Where governance ends, management begins. This is another place where—in the SharePoint space—the term "governance" has become overloaded.

In most IT (and other) contexts, service governance defines the people, processes, policies, and technologies that deliver a service such asSharePoint. Too often organizations stop when the governance document is complete.

They discover—all too painfully—that it’s not realistic to simply“expect” that governance policies will be followed consistently, if at all. Therefore, it’s critical to consider how to make the service manageable ina way that supports or, better yet, enforces governance policies and, if possible, automates the implementation of policies.

In order to create a service that supports enforcement, automation, and management of governance policies, you must have an architecture that supportssuch enforcement. And that is easier said than done.

As I’ve seen even in some of the biggest and smartest companies in the world, SharePoint’scomplexity makes it difficult to understand the close relationship between governance, architecture, and manageability. Poor architectural choicesmake it impossible to manage—let alone to automate—the implementation of governance policies and procedures.

In my opinion, it is time for all of us—community, MVPs and experts and consultants, vendors, and Microsoft—to tease apart the concepts of SharePointgovernance and SharePoint management.

Like other IT platforms and initiatives, management is about the day to day implementation and support ofa service. Management should be guided by the policies and procedures established by the governance plan.

But governance itself is quite differentthan management, and by bundling the two together in our terminology we do ourselves a disservice.

Even in the keynote at the SharePoint Conference, it was proposed that SharePoint governance is a non-issue. I think what was really meant is thatSharePoint (especially when extended by ISV tools) exposes numerous management controls that allow an organization to manage SharePoint according tojust about any governance policies.

But SharePoint governance is clearly an issue—company after company make it clear to me that it is the cause of alot of pain. The governance they refer to is the more standard definition of governance—they are having troubles wrapping their heads around theprocess of defining the roles, responsibilities, policies, and procedures for delivering business solutions on a rich platform like SharePoint.

Andthey struggle with moving effectively from requirements gathering through design, development, and deployment of solutions that are fully definedacross information architecture, information management, and service management dimensions.

Those of you who read my column regularly will know I’m a stickler for terminology. I believe that we need to be speaking the same language before wecan move forward effectively.

So: Governance and Management. Both are important. But they are different.

Does that seem like a fair statement to you?How can the distinction help you communicate about and move forward with SharePoint governance (and management) in your enterprise?