Figure 5-2 offers a typical technology governance team structure. You can use this sample team structure as a reference for our discussions in this section.
The technology governance team is a microcosm of the people in the organization who most rely on the technologies being governed and should be composed of no more than 12 members, including the CIO (or the CIO’s delegate), who serves as chair. If the CIO elects to delegate the chair to a staff member, then the CIO serves as the sponsor of the technology governance team and is responsible for supporting the team and making sure that its decisions are validated and enforced.
For the team members, membership rotation seems to work best on an annual or biannual basis. Shorter terms of office do not provide enough time to learn the role. The rotation should be staggered so that the team is a mixture of experienced members and new members with a fresh perspective. At first, the team should meet at least once a week as it drives to create its initial set of processes, standards, and documentation. Because startup efforts can drag on indefinitely, it is important to plan the startup effort to last between three and six months. Any issues still outstanding may be dealt with during ongoing meetings.
To be effective and avoid group-think, the members should be representatives of the major functions or departments in the organization. At minimum, the technology stakeholders should be selected from IT Operations or Service Delivery, Development, and, if needed, Desktop Support or the Help Desk.
The governance team should use a team site in SharePoint to develop and maintain its governance standards.
In order to fulfill its strategic role in focusing technology investment and activities on mission-critical projects, the technology governance committee must thoroughly understand its role in the organization and the business imperatives the organization seeks to address in its business plan. A well-managed organization evaluates the key business drivers that shape its market position relative to competing organizations. The organization that develops the best mix of capabilities, products, and services in response to the business imperatives that form its marketplace wins.
Technology governance must keep its technology base agile enough to adapt to shifting business drivers while maintaining enough focus and standardization to target specific accomplishments that will help address those drivers. Each organization either implicitly or explicitly develops a business strategy that identifies and prioritizes market drivers in an effort to provide a competitive advantage over other organizations. With the trend toward ever-increasing organizational dependence on timely and accurate information, the ability to capture, organize, and use information is usually the critical factor in determining an organization’s strategic success.
After an organization identifies and prioritizes its business imperatives, the business will construct a portfolio of business initiatives to focus its resources on the biggest threats and opportunities it has identified. The portfolio will be critically dependent upon the organization’s technology base, but the business planners might not realize this until it is too late to effectively adapt the technology investments and activities to support their initiatives.
It is important that the technology governance team be made an integral part of identifying, prioritizing, and planning the initiatives. The team will be able to provide important insight into the impacts of the planned initiatives on technology investment, projects, and costs. Early information about long-term initiatives will also provide the team with information necessary to shape long-term technology investment to meet upcoming challenges. The result will be faster and more effective application of technology solutions in helping the organization meet its business imperatives.
Figure 5-3 outlines a sample governance approval process. You can use this process to help your governance team establish a method of accepting or rejecting new ideas for governance in your organization. Note that you’ll need to work with your site collection owners to help them identify new ideas that are working at the site and/or site collection level that should be considered for inclusion in the enterprise standards. This will require good training of your site collection administrators as well as an ongoing relationship development and maintenance effort that is initiated by the governance team.
Once the governance team has a solid understanding of the organization’s business imperatives and planned initiatives, it can develop a technology strategy that will align its investments with the business’s long-term needs. This end-state description of the capabilities and services to be developed by the technology stakeholders in response to the organization’s business imperatives is expressed as a series of business requirements as described in Chapter 4.
After the business requirements for supporting the business initiatives are written and approved, the technology team performs a gap analysis by comparing the current state of the organization’s technology base with its planned future-state technology base as described in the business requirements. A gap analysis defines the difference between what exists today and what needs to exist in the future in order to fulfill the project requirements.
A technology roadmap provides an ordered list of projects and investments that will need to be undertaken to evolve the organization from its current state in order to meet the business requirements established. This roadmap may span several years and encompass both minor and drastic changes to technology and practice in the organization. Because market imperatives are fickle and technology is in constant flux, this roadmap must be refreshed and revisited on a quarterly or at least annual basis.
The roadmap is the primary tool for selecting, prioritizing, defining, and funding technology projects each fiscal year. Enough buffer must be built into both the schedule and budget to address ad hoc and unforeseen projects and activities, but the major thrust of technology development will be governed by the roadmap. This, then, is the tool for keeping the business and technology strategies aligned.
Although they might not be documented, the organization undoubtedly has existing governance processes, standards, and decisions that must be identified, at least superficially documented, and discussed. It is always important to find out what has been done in the past, what worked, and what did not. If there are existing processes and standards that have worked well, make an effort to incorporate them into the new governance model.