The Purpose of Governance

Why establish governance over any human activity? Why not just let everyone do their own thing? Isn’t freedom supposed to be a good thing? For an answer, take a look at any country in the world where the government has failed and a new one has not replaced it right away. It is not a pretty picture.

Of course, failing to assign storage quotas on your corporate intranet isn't likely to result in hordes of crazed co-workers fighting to the death over the last of the copier toner. More likely, the system will just crash or be left in an unusable state. Developing policies and standards and assigning responsibilities to the appropriate departments creates a system that can support business needs without becoming an impediment. Or maybe users shouting angry slogans while waving burning torches are a normal part of your corporate culture?

The most important consideration in developing your governance strategy is determining the needs of the users and adapting the governance plan to meet those needs as effectively and unobtrusively as possible. This requires an understanding of the users' business processes, preferences, and working culture. SharePoint is a widely varied product with many features that can be productive, useful, confusing, or annoying depending on the needs of the system's users and how those features are leveraged.

The two most common mistakes when establishing governance are to implement too much governance or too little.

There is no such thing as a SharePoint installation with no governance. Anarchy is not a default; it is a choice. Even if an organization has intentionally avoided putting any restrictions on users, that is a governance choice. SharePoint sites where users have absolutely free reign are all too common. The result is most often a site clogged with massive amounts of data, but very little useful information. Users can't find anything except the most recent content they added themselves. Older data or content contributed by others may as well be on a floppy disk in someone's desk for all the good it will do them. Eventually, the site becomes slow and unreliable and falls into disuse.

Too much governance, on the other hand, robs users of the opportunity to innovate and use their creativity to find new ways to do business. If you have an inherently collaborative corporate culture, unnecessarily restricting access to SharePoint's collaborative features such as team sites, document workspaces, wikis, and social networking may cause that collaboration to shut down. Alternately, team members may abandon the portal to collaborate effectively. Overly aggressive security restrictions can also prevent users from finding valuable information they need to make important business decisions. Too much governance, like too little, is likely to result in a system that users don't choose to use.

No one wants to live in total anarchy or a police state. That's why effective governance must take a “Goldilocks” approach. Not too little, not too much. Not chaos, not prison. You want users to be comfortable using SharePoint. It should be as natural a part of their work day as opening their e-mail. Otherwise, they will seek easier ways to perform their tasks outside of the portal. After all, Goldilocks didn't stay in the bed that was too hard or too soft, but in the one that was just right.