I just found out about this new website for SharePoint Governance: http://SharePointGovernance.org . I like the idea, and have already submitted 4 comments on how to improve what’s there.
The biggest gap I see is that it needs text or a link on the home page that explains what SharePoint Governance is. Here’s my attempt:
SharePoint Governance is the policies and procedures an organization puts in place in order to maintain an appropriate level of control over the organization's SharePoint deployment.
Every organization that deploys SharePoint should have some sort of governance plan. Such a plan, what we at Magenic call a SharePoint Roadmap, can cover a wide variety of management issues. This isn’t about server monitoring, though a governance plan would say that IT must put a server monitoring plan and process in place. This is about how the organization plans to use SharePoint in the short and long term, and what policies they need to create to support that. This can include how the organization plans to deploy, use, and control the wide variety of SharePoint functionality.
This can also include defining where the division of control is: collaboration sites for example may have their adoption stunted if IT chooses to exert too much control, and not delegate enough. On the other hand, no control can lead to unplanned data growth, emergency storage upgrades, and other forms of chaos. Figuring out what the right level of control is can vary by usage scenario. Collaboration sites to support teams and projects may need a very different level of control than general employer-to-employee intranet portal sites . The regulatory environment in which the organization lives may also have an impact on this.
Other things a governance plan or roadmap may cover is the need for policies that address allowing business units to engage consulting firms to perform SharePoint work. Such policies might specify who is allowed to perform what type of work and how they engage with IT.
Other policies that might emerge from governance planning include IT service level agreements regarding availability and restoring from backups, or definitions of IT job roles, skills, and responsibilities for SharePoint jobs and hiring for those.
Other aspects that are covered might include site branding requirements – should every intranet site be branded? The list of things covered by company policies can be quite extensive.
Large organizations can create a governance committee or steering committee for this, but for small organizations it might just be “the IT guy” and a business decision maker. It most cases, it should be a group that includes both IT and the business, not just IT.
If you are looking for which SharePoint MVPs to watch for governance guidance, the first two that come to mind are Joel Oleson and Rob Bogue. Joel for example, has a sample governance plan on his website at Sample Governance Plan and page 5 of it is a good start for understanding what a governance plan is for. Rob has things like this list of governance resources: http://www.thorprojects.com/Notebook/Wiki%20Pages/Governance.aspx
--Michael