Keeping up with the constantly changing world of enterprise software, can be challenging with all the terminology being thrown around. If you’ve heard the term “SharePoint governance” but haven’t fully understood it, you might be asking yourself two questions: what is SharePoint governance, and why is it important for your organization?
What is SharePoint Governance?
Broadly speaking, governance is the set of policies, processes, roles, and responsibilities that provide structure and guidance to the business and IT operations of a system or organization. SharePoint governance, then, is just a collection of these governing processes as they apply to your organization’s use of SharePoint.
To go more into depth about SharePoint governance, we can break it down by, what I consider to be, the four pillars including;value statement, policies and processes, roles and responsibilities, training and communication.
Value Statement
Defining your policies can be a simple yet critical task. Your SharePoint governance should begin with a simple usage statement defining value so that users can know and expect what they should find when using SharePoint. For example, if you use SharePoint to collaborate on working versions of documents, but the final versions are saved elsewhere, then your users should know this. Ultimately, everyone in your organization should know what SharePoint is and is not to be used for and what purpose it has for your business.
Policies and Processes
When defining your processes for SharePoint governance, you need to provide answers to “how-to” questions for users, such as:
- How does a user upload content, or get permission to upload content?
- How does a user create a new site?
- How does a user add a new label or category to navigation?
- How does a user add a new column to a list?
You should also provide an answer to the question of how decisions about SharePoint are made in your organization. Defining your processes gives you structure and provides guidance for how users should behave in the SharePoint ecosystem.
Policies can provide operating guidance and clear rules on parameters on how to use features and their respective thresholds.
Roles and Responsibilities
Finally, at its heart, SharePoint governance means that you have a list of roles and responsibilities that are clearly but loosely defined. Everyone who uses SharePoint in your organization should know what their role is and what their responsibilities are when using the system. These roles and responsibilities should be specific enough that anyone using the system would know who to approach for questions about or issues with the system, but should not be so specific that they are too restrictive or lose their meaning.
Training and Communication
Every governance plan should include a strategy around the continual communication and training plan for anyone involved with the usage or care and feed of the SharePoint environment. I like to think that training should occur continuously with SharePoint, and as the technology continues to evolve and change, an even better reason to ensure your users are armed with the most up to date knowledge.
Why Is SharePoint Governance Important?
First of all, SharePoint governance is important simply because SharePoint contains a lot of moving pieces. It can be challenging to consider exactly how it will be used, and how you plan to use it to enact your organization’s goals.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, SharePoint governance can help avoid unfortunate incidents for your organization. For example, if one of your departments begins to use SharePoint for both collaboration and storing finalized work documents, then SharePoint might house documents with personally identifiable information, which can cause compliance issues and even fines for your business. Having a solid SharePoint governance in place could have averted this problem.
Final Thoughts
The most important concept to realize about SharePoint governance is that it’s a living, breathing thing. Your governance statement isn’t finished and written in stone once you’ve defined it. Rather, it can and perhaps should continue to change while your business evolves.
Your organization’s steering committee should be the group that continually drives the evolution of SharePoint’s role in your business. When the steering committee decides upon new changes to your SharePoint governance, these changes must be propagated into your governance plan, which should be updated in all relevant components.
