SharePoint governance is essential and it shouldn’t be an afterthought. Your data security is paramount and a well-planned and executed governance plan is the best way to ensure the protection and control you need. Keep reading to learn what you need to do right off the bat when building a SharePoint governance plan.
Defining Roles and Responsibilities
If you’re looking to apply a SharePoint governance plan in your own business, you need to start by defining roles and responsibilities. All SharePoint users in your organization must have a solid idea of their role and their responsibilities when using SharePoint. This helps to set boundaries so users know what they can and cannot do when interacting with the system.
For example, you might start with a steering committee whose responsibility is itself to assign roles and responsibilities, as well as defining other aspects of the governance plan. Next, you might define roles such as developers, site owners, and help desk staffers, each of which has clearly defined responsibilities to carry out when interacting with the SharePoint system.
IT Roles
It’s easier to define SharePoint roles and responsibilities for your organization when you start with the information technology side. The IT roles should include anyone who is to some degree responsible for making sure that the system is running, whether or not they are explicitly in the IT department. Aside from the roles already mentioned, consider roles like systems engineers and SharePoint administrators. This process is less complicated than the business side, because you can align many of the desired responsibilities with the technical skill set of your employees
However, rather than taking a list of your current employees and pigeonholing them into roles, you should ideally create a list of the roles that you believe you require in order to implement SharePoint governance for your organization, and then see how your employees match up. Just because a role you require is empty doesn’t mean that it can’t be filled by someone who steps up to the plate, or someone whom you later hire.
Business Roles
Defining business roles for SharePoint governance requires a deep familiarity of who in your organization is using SharePoint and what departments they belong to. Although you may have many business users, ask yourself who is providing more knowledge and support around the sites, and whether they are sharing content across multiple sites. You may wish to designate these individuals as site managers and give them separate security permissions from the standard business users.
Continue moving up the permissions chain as you define the business roles for SharePoint governance. People such as power users and site managers should have greater permissions across a larger area, perhaps across a collection of sites. Next, consider defining the steering committee: a body of individuals who have a business stake in SharePoint and who make higher-level strategic decisions about what the system should accomplish for your business.
Finally, at the very top, there should be one or two who control the budget and sponsor the initiative. They should be the ones who believe in the power of SharePoint to help distribute info and manage knowledge across your line of business.
Final Thoughts
Strictly delineating those roles and responsibilities is a very important action when you’re coming up with your company’s SharePoint governance plan. This initial work can directly translate into the permissions structure that you set up for your site and your site collection, and should feed into your organization’s broader IT governance objectives.
