The Importance of Governance

Is governance something that needs to be implemented with SharePoint, or should the SharePoint environment be a place for creativity and freedom? Although cases can be made for lack of structure, most organizations don’t need to think for too long before they can come up with examples of IT projects that could have gone better and produced better results, and of technologies that failed to deliver the functionality that was expected. A governance plan must carefully balance user innovation and freedom versus manageability and support.

An almost universal experience is that of data repositories that have not had the proper governance, whether it be paper-based files, file shares, or the email environment, and these generally tend to be inefficient and sources of contention. There are many strong reasons for putting governance in place for any applications, three of which follow:

• Although maintenance costs of “unmanaged applications” seem low initially, the impact on the organization can be significant in the long term in less tangible ways. User complaints about “not being able to find anything,” or not understanding the purpose of different applications through lack of training, or not being able to get support when issues are encountered, erode the level of confidence in the application and ultimately in IT.

• Unmanaged applications over time will either become abandoned or fail to garner user adoption. Consider a poorly managed intranet. It may have cost a considerable amount of time and money to create, and there may be recurring software costs and resources dedicated to keeping it running, but without appropriate governance, it can become disorganized, the content stale, and users unhappy with levels of support provided.

• Unmanaged applications are difficult to secure. If policies for entitlement and rights are not well defined from the beginning, securing vital corporate assets can be difficult later on. It is typically harder to take away user privileges and tools than just to control what is provided to begin with.

SharePoint is a powerful tool with tremendous potential. By spending time prior to or during the implementation of SharePoint 2010 on the governance plan, IT can help ensure that the project is initially perceived as a success, that the environment offers a well-defined set of tools to end users, and that it will be managed over time as it evolves.

A final thought for this section is that the governance plan does not need to fall into place all at once. There can certainly be phases to a governance plan, as there are phases to technology implementation projects.