SharePoint Server 2007 not only provides a technical organizing principle for information management, but it can also serve as the practical vehicle for governance activities in daily practice. SharePoint’s team sites provide a means for governance team members to accumulate and organize source information, publish policies and standards, debate and discuss options, and vote on decisions without having to align schedules for meetings or conference calls. The simple inability to get busy decision-makers together for a meeting often defeats an organization’s efforts at governance. The burdens of organizing and maintaining documentation, as well as the difficulties involved in communicating decisions to the community of knowledge workers, often render the governance team ineffective.
To offer maximum service to the organization, the governance team must center its activities on its own SharePoint team site. In the next sections, you’ll learn how practical, day-to-day governance activities can be supported by a SharePoint team site.
Technology governance requires that stakeholders from different areas in the organization participate in different roles within the governance team’s activities. This means that the team must be able to support a rotating membership and be able to systematically leverage the skills of a constantly changing group of subject-matter experts and resources. The team must also be able to capture, evaluate, prioritize, and act upon a broad range of supporting and source documents in the course of creating its policies and standards. This requires source and draft document management for use internally by the governance team as well as the ability to author, validate, and publish official policy documents to the larger organization. Governance teams, in other words, need the support of a SharePoint team site.
Governance teams are typically composed of six to twelve members. These members usually serve a term of office and are then rotated out and replaced at staggered intervals, which provides continuity. Because all members are not rotated at once, team veterans are complemented with a supply of fresh viewpoints and opinions.
The SharePoint governance team site must provide a role for team members who are able to do the following:
Read and alter the team’s source and draft documents
Submit documents for consideration by the team
Review, comment, and approve documents prior to publication
Participate in online forums and discussions
Electronically vote on decisions considered by the team
Normally, this role would be the Members role within the site.
Governance teams also typically include non-voting individuals who participate in discussions but do not have the right to vote or issue policies. These individuals may be subject-matter experts in a particular discipline that is vital to the company, an external vendor or consultant, or an expert in a mission-critical technology.
The SharePoint governance team site must provide subject-matter experts outside the team who are able to do the following:
Read but not alter selected source and draft documents
Submit documents for consideration by the governance team
Participate in subsites while working on subcommittees
In most instances, either the Reader or the Visitor role will suffice for ex-officio members.
Governance teams also must fit within the larger management structure of the organization. When a governance team must address an issue that will impact the larger organization, it must escalate the decision to a higher-ranking leadership or executive body. In some cases, technology governance decisions are so strategic to the operation of the organization that the governance team must submit its recommended policies to a broader leadership or executive body for ratification and approval before putting the policy in force.
The SharePoint governance team site must provide a role for senior executives outside the team who are able to do the following:
Read but not alter the team’s source and draft documents
Submit documents for consideration by the governance team
Review, comment, and approve documents prior to publication
Review, recommend, and approve the addition of new members and removal of others
In most cases, this will be a customized role created by the site administrator.
Governance policies and standards are useful only if they are effective in guiding the thoughts and behaviors of the knowledge workers they serve. The organization’s community of knowledge workers must have permission to:
Read published documents
Submit new ideas and suggestions for consideration
Seek clarification
Pursue variance requests
Point out problems in the existing policies
Find and use relevant policy and standard information in a timely fashion
In most cases, the Reader or Visitor role will suffice, with special rights being given to a list where new ideas and suggestions can be uploaded for the team’s consideration.
At a minimum, a number of informational lists should be included in the governance team site in order to accumulate, manage, and communicate key information needed by the site’s members and readers.
In order to provide effective leadership for the organization’s knowledge workers, the governance team must be predictable. The most important step in governance predictability is to provide the governance team’s members, sponsors, subject-matter experts, and readers with a published calendar of its important events, deadlines, and meetings. Some of the major items to include and track in the governance team calendar are the following:
Deadlines for submitting requests
Deadlines for the issuance of new policies
Meeting dates
Term of office end dates
Orientation meetings to explain new policies and standards to the community of knowledge workers
Informational meetings, broadcasts, vendor presentations, brown-bag lunches, and training opportunities
Governance teams must proactively identify, document, assign, and complete tasks. This may seem obvious, but every information worker has participated in meetings that assigned no specific tasks and had no measurable results—nothing was accomplished! In order to keep the governance team moving measurably toward its objectives and in order to communicate that progress to the larger community, the governance team must establish and use a SharePoint task list as part of its team site. This allows a central location for documenting, assigning, and tracking governance tasks. Some of the tasks to be supported are the following:
Evaluation of documents
Drafting of policies
Research and analysis activities
Assignment of resources
Triage and evaluation of requests
Scheduling of meetings, presentations, and educational opportunities
In contrast to the proactive nature of a SharePoint task list, a SharePoint issues list provides a method for reactively dealing with a broad mixture of unplanned events and problems. Typically, these events represent problems caused by a malfunction of or gap in a policy or technology. Issues lists keep track of the individual who brought the issue to the team’s attention, who is responsible for resolving the issue, what the progress is, and what other issues are related to the listed item. This provides a method for identifying trends in the issue log that may indicate the issue is merely a symptom of a larger problem that can only be seen as a trend. The following are some of the potential issues that may come to the attention of the governance team:
Security breach due to inadequate policies
Conflicting policy requirements
Policy gaps
Inconsistent policy wording or structure
Inadequate policy communication and enforcement
Duplicate policies
Regulatory issues that must be addressed by policy
Negative impact of policies on operations or costs
The governance team may need to keep track of outside resources, vendors, regulatory contacts, competitors, partners, and resources that are not listed in the company directory. The SharePoint contact list provides an excellent method for the team to manage and use important lists of external and internal contacts.
Governance teams are primarily focused on the creation, elimination, management, and publication of policy documents. The SharePoint document library provides version control, archiving, publication, collaboration, review, and editing support that makes this process simple to manage. Some of the functions that can be automated or supported are the following:
SharePoint forums provide an effective means for governance team members to discuss policies, suggestions, and other details of the team’s operations. The use of a forum means that all members of the team will remain informed because all have access to the same information. No one will accidentally be left off a copy list or miss a hallway conversation if the information is entered into a SharePoint forum. Also, a permanent record of the discussions leading up to an important decision can be recorded for historical reference and to provide context when evaluating the decisions of the team.
Over time, the governance team may wish to expand its site to take advantage of additional lists and libraries as well as custom workflows and other SharePoint features. But, as always, it is wise to start small and grow the scope of the site over time.