Information technology provides the knowledge worker with the tools necessary to independently create, share, and manage information without the intervention of a system administrator or a software developer. Good governance balances this freedom with just enough organization to guide individual decisions toward the organization’s goals. The balance point between structure and chaos is unique to each organization and often changes over time. Obviously, then, good governance is difficult to achieve, but it is critical to a successful deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The creation of governance and high-level taxonomies for your Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployment is, in and of itself, a best practice. So if after reading this chapter you think that you’ve not found many references to SharePoint Server 2007 or its deployment best practices, it is because the entire chapter represents an overall best practice that requires significant explanation.
Many organizations don’t even try to find the right governance balance because the task seems quite intimidating. Those organizations usually move to one extreme or the other in the governance continuum; either they "lock down" everything and remove freedom from the knowledge workers, or they move toward chaos by removing all restraints. Either extreme is damaging. A locked-down computing environment becomes a constraint that knowledge workers must avoid entirely or surrender their minds. At the other extreme, organizations often choose to unleash a tool on the organization and wait to see what happens, hoping that intelligence and understanding will arise from a chaotic mass of undifferentiated information and random activity. In the end, neither approach will deliver a desirable outcome (see Figure 5-1).
The difficulty behind effective and balanced governance lies in real-world execution. Although it goes by many names, governance ultimately involves a small committee of professionals who set policies and standards that limit the flexibility and use of a computing environment. Historically, the governance committee existed in order to say no to requests for new technologies or new uses of existing technologies. Governance has typically been driven by a desire to reduce technology costs, improve system stability, ensure security, and meet regulatory compliance requirements. Up until recently, information management technologies have been narrowly targeted on specific functions and capabilities. These technologies were then grouped into a technology portfolio that was zealously controlled. In fact, the role of most corporate governance committees has been to detect and prevent change to the information technology portfolio. The introduction of a new technology generally meant the retirement of an existing class of technology from the portfolio. Therefore, governance had more to do with life cycle management than with identifying and encouraging adaptive behavior among knowledge workers.
Governance has received a bad name in many organizations because it has often been driven by emotional loyalty to existing vendors and outdated products that no longer met organizational needs. The tendency of the governance committee to avoid change at all costs often necessitated underground efforts to circumvent its policies and decisions in order to keep the business running. So, the more the governance committee attempted to set and enforce policies and standards, the more diverse and uncontrolled the information technology became. In defense of the historical efforts of governance committees, the available technologies did not provide a meaningful alternative to technology lockdown.
The key information management systems that made up the organization’s technology portfolio were either best-of-breed collections that were ultimately incompatible or integrated enterprise solutions that usually provided strong applications in some key areas and extremely weak offerings in others. Because open anarchy was not a viable option, what were the governance committees supposed to do to bring order to the computing environment?
Innovation is driven by impossible demands. The growing management tension between technology control and the need for organizational agility has given rise to a new genre of technology embodied by SharePoint Server 2007. SharePoint Server 2007 is a new layer in the information technology architecture that makes it possible to have both agility and standardization. It is agility and creativity without chaos. Before SharePoint, each application in an organization’s information management portfolio had to provide for its own user interface, security, database management, communications and networking, and other needs. Each application in the portfolio duplicated many of the functions provided by other applications, and usually these duplicates were not compatible across applications.
This ad hoc use of technology resulted in a very fragile information management environment. Unintended consequences from even the simplest change could render the entire environment inoperable. Governance had good reason to seek out and block all change—any change could be a disaster in the making. With no way to analytically prevent failure, governance decisions were based on exhaustive and expensive empirical testing. Older and less useful technologies were dogmatically supported and preserved simply because the organization had learned how to use them without experiencing disaster. New technologies, no matter how appealing, were simply too risky to use.
SharePoint Server 2007 provides basic information management services to all users and applications within the computing environment. Upon request, SharePoint provides an interface to operating services that provides for storage, information life cycle management, version control, security, messaging, scheduling, workflow management, Web session management, and other services that are common across information management tasks. With these services standardized by SharePoint, the applications within the organization’s technology portfolio are free to focus on the specific business processes they seek to support and automate.
No longer does the accounting application need to manage its own database operations, storage locations, security, search, indexing, and integration with other applications. These services are provided and managed automatically through SharePoint Server 2007. Applications designed to cooperate within a SharePoint Server 2007 environment are automatically able to share information, provide security, integrate with enterprise workflow management, support information auditing, send and receive e-mail, and automate messages simply by issuing requests to operating systems services through SharePoint.
Now application software providers are free to focus on their areas of expertise. They can provide maximum value to the knowledge worker without having to focus valuable resources on managing low-level services that should be (and now are) provided by the operating system and hosting environment. Governance teams are free to choose the best information technology solutions without having to obsess over stability, compatibility, and interoperability issues. In short, governance teams are now able to focus their energies on actual business needs and requirements rather than endless technology discussions and compatibility testing. The ability of SharePoint Server 2007 to provide both stability and agility with minimal governance intervention has placed a great deal of stress on traditional governance committees. Now that governance teams are able to focus on organizational effectiveness, efficiency, and competitiveness from a business perspective, how do they operate? What are the new best practices for a SharePoint Server 2007 environment?
When SharePoint Server 2007 is effectively deployed and used, the governance team must achieve balanced thinking. To govern effectively, the governance team must give up direct control of information in favor of influencing the daily decisions made by the knowledge workers. For governance teams that have heroically struggled to protect fragile systems by preventing change, this is going to be an uncomfortable transition in thinking. It is important to recognize that they weren’t wrong to avoid change in the past, but with the advent of SharePoint Server 2007, the rules have changed for the better.
So what is an intelligent and measured approach to governance in light of the agility and stability provided by SharePoint Server 2007? How can technology governance transform information technology into a strategic organizational asset rather than a tactical constraint? As mentioned previously, no two organizations will decide upon exactly the same governance model and processes, nor should they try to do so. Each organization has unique goals, constraints, and technology histories that must be taken into account in evolving an effective technology governance model. However, there are common characteristics that describe effective governance, whatever form it takes. The following are a few best practices to help your organization achieve an effective, sustainable, and well-balanced technology governance strategy.
Technology is a tool used to meet the organization’s business objectives and not an end in itself. In the end, there are no technology issues, only technology solutions to business issues. So when establishing technology governance, look for a successful governance process from elsewhere in the organization and emulate it. If none exists, then you’ll be starting from the beginning. Give yourself time to grow into a working governance model, and allow yourself and your team to make mistakes.
Although technology is a supporting activity that enables the business to pursue its goals, it is probably the most pervasive and strategic asset of the organization. The major purpose of technology governance, then, is to keep technology investments and activities focused on the goals that will provide the greatest benefit to the organization.
Taxonomy has become one of the hot buzzwords surrounding SharePoint Server 2007, and unfortunately, very few people understand what the word means. With guidance from a technology governance team, SharePoint Server 2007 is able to automatically categorize and manage information as it is created in a collaboration setting. In order for SharePoint to do this, it needs a basic set of definitions it can use to place the information in broad and meaningful categories. These broad categories are defined by the organization’s high-level taxonomy, which is much simpler than it sounds.
A taxonomy is a system of definitions that are used to describe, categorize, recognize, organize, and manage information. Because a taxonomy represents an organization’s world view, it can be very painful and difficult to change a taxonomy. It is especially important in SharePoint Server 2007 to make sure that the high-level taxonomy does not change. High-level taxonomy definitions are not agile.
Big, broad categories bolstered by a simple method of extension are the way to a sustainable taxonomy. The following are a few ideas to help you develop your taxonomy plan:
Keep the top-level categories of the taxonomy as simple as possible. Hold to no more than ten topics.
Use broad, horizontal categories that are not tied to the organizational chart. Good examples are Documents, People, Projects, Knowledge Areas, Marketing/Sales, Reports, and Finance. Although Marketing and Sales are often supported by a single organization or department, no company can last long if it doesn’t sell something to somebody sometime.
Consider the organization’s "noise words.". For example, law firms, when searching internally, will ignore their most important keywords, such as Lawyers, Litigation, and Clients, as "noise." And teachers’ unions will ignore words such as Teachers, Curricula, and Certifications. These words are candidates for top-level categories. They are certainly candidates for seeding search engines outside the company. One person’s noise is another person’s keyword.
A simple taxonomy governance group must be created to govern and maintain the taxonomy definitions. From a strategic viewpoint, the chief purpose of governance is the creation and maintenance of taxonomy definitions.
Organizations of all kinds have taxonomies, whether they’ve written them down or not. Organizations outgrow their taxonomies as well. This usually happens because of mergers, reorganizations, an increase or decrease in sales volumes, the introduction of disruptive technologies, and changes in markets or regulatory constraints. When two organizations merge, the winner is often the one whose taxonomy dominates the new organization. Never underestimate the power of words on daily life. Sometimes, when organizations merge and the taxonomies are not reconciled, it is possible to have vice presidents reporting to managers who report to directors who report to vice presidents, and so on. What happened? There was a collision of taxonomies. People from the "old school" cling to their obsolete taxonomies in an effort to retain their position, influence, and effectiveness.
So the high-level taxonomy is a simple roadmap of an organization’s information culture and world view. By implementing and managing the taxonomy in SharePoint, you can fit the information to the organization automatically. You can also easily capture intellectual property that arises from collaboration within the organization’s operations because the information that is developed and owned by the organization is more easily findable. In the end, the most important benefit of governance is in its ability to define, manage, and protect the organization’s taxonomy, and therefore its intellectual property and culture.
Technology governance provides a means for an organization’s leadership to understand and evaluate the technical impacts of their decisions. This is especially useful in that the leadership may be unaware that nearly all business decisions will, at one level or another, impact the organization’s technology base for better or worse.
Staffing the governance team with a representative mixture of business and technology stakeholders provides an opportunity for the business to understand how short-term and long-term technology decisions are intertwined. A short-term decision to reduce the investment in technology may hinder the organization’s ability to meet its objectives in the future. The organization’s leadership must decide whether this tradeoff is wise, and technology governance should be designed to support their decisions with integrated business and technology information, impact assessments, and expert opinions.
It is a tragedy when the community of knowledge workers in an organization views technology governance as the end of innovation, creativity, and job satisfaction. To prevent this, it is imperative that the technology governance team emphasize its goal of finding and promoting excellence whenever and wherever it is found. Excellence is created through the experience, dedication, and wisdom of the worker. Technology governance’s role is to identify this excellence and, where possible, fit it into the tapestry of technologies and best practices that it promotes and supports. If the governance team is able to establish itself as the champion and rewarder of individual excellence, then it should enjoy enthusiastic "grassroots" support.
Knowledge workers are best led through influence rather than dictatorship. When given the option, knowledge workers will use the simplest, easiest, and most effective methods to accomplish their daily tasks. Very few will pound a nail with a rock when a hammer is within reach. If the technology governance team is able to make the preferred method of accomplishing information tasks simple, easy, and effective, then the knowledge workers will voluntarily use the standard methods. No coercion is necessary if the standards and best practices are based on merit and governed by a representative group of knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers are judged on their ability to manage information quickly, concisely, and effectively. They will rightly judge technology governance as a failure if it does not meet their needs in a similar fashion. This doesn’t mean that the technology governance team must say yes to every, or even most, requests. It means that the community of knowledge workers must know that the technology governance team will hear, evaluate, and respond to their requests for help quickly and decisively.
In order to remain responsive, the technology governance committee must have an effective means of triage to screen out requests that have a low chance of adoption. It also means that the technology governance committee must have a well-known charter that delineates its scope of responsibility. Knowledge workers need to understand when the technology governance team should be involved—and when they should not be involved—in making technology-related decisions.
The technology governance team should remain technology agnostic in its viewpoint. In other words, governance defines the business objectives and needs to be met by the knowledge worker community, but it does not dictate the technologies used in meeting those needs. The technology selection process must be owned and driven by the technology professionals and stakeholders responsible for delivering technologies and services to the organization. The governance team is the reviewer and validator of the technology choices made by the technology stakeholders, but the technology governance team does not dictate technologies.
Technology governance teams must avoid the temptation to build the entire framework of standards and best practices immediately. The first decision the technology governance team must address is the alpha process. The alpha process refers to the process that describes how the team will create and implement new processes. The team must have a consistent method for considering, approving, and implementing its policies and decisions, even when those decisions focus on the team’s self-governance.
After the alpha process is established, the next task is to identify key processes, standards, and best practices that are working well and to consider them for addition to the technology governance team’s body of standards and best practices. All organizations have best practices and standards whether they realize it or not. They may be unwritten, poorly organized, and even conflicting, but any time an organization accomplishes something, a de facto standard is being used. After it organizes itself, the technology governance team must focus on identifying, documenting, refining, and socializing the best of these de facto standards.
The technology governance team focuses on standards and best practices that impact the entire organization while giving departments and teams freedom to innovate and discover ways to collaborate on information-related tasks. However, when a team is ready to publish its information to a larger audience, some level of formal or informal governance must be employed to make sure that the published information meets information quality standards and best practices.