IT’s Bullet Proof Shield: Governance Document

Another post about a governance document?  Absolutely.  I have worked with many clients and this has seemed to boil to the surface more often than not.  Well over 90% of the companies that I consult who are planning a SharePoint environment or already have a SharePoint environment do not have a governance document.  There are a lot of reasons as to why there is a lack of these documents.   I will try to cover a few of these reasons during this post.  One of the things as the economic times are a bit more trying then usual, IT departments are being whittled down to skeleton crews at best.  Their budgets are being slashed and yet they are expected to continue to run the company infrastructure and applications as well as continue to work on projects adding to their environment.  If something happens in the SharePoint environment the possibility for a knee jerk reaction from upper management is a high possibility. A reaction that could be detrimental to the environment.  This calls for a bulletproof shield.  This calls for a governance document.  A document, when created had buy in from the higher ups as well as all the stakeholders.  A document that has the steps documented on how to handle situations in a logical manner, leaving the knee jerk reactions to the way side.  A governance document is more than a bulletproof shield (protect) it is also to server.  It is to serve as a map, a blueprint, a guideline for your SharePoint environment.  A document to help mold and guide this unbelievable application into a well oiled, viable tool that solves specific business problems brought to the IT Department from multiple areas in the company.  The governance document is also there to server your user community to facilitate in direction and focus.

Assorted Reasons

1. One of the biggest, if not THE biggest reasons companies do not create governance documents is because of the price tag attached to SharePoint.  It’s cheap! It is very cheap compared to other collaboration and document management systems.  Your Documentum’s and your P8 (Filenet’s) out there have massive price tags.  (Please understand, I am not bashing these systems.  They are very good at what they do.  They have also seen the value of SharePoint as they both have created web parts to tie into SharePoint)  A good example of price tag is WSS 3.0.  Its free, yet it has a lot of functionality and versatility.  Having a tool that has little or no cost usually flies under the radar as something that would have a large business impact, or for that matter, become a mission critical application.
2. The second reason that comes to mind, is the ease of deployment.  SharePoint easy one button install makes it very appealing to install as well.  Chose the stand alone radio button and let the installer do everything for you.  Even get SQL Lite thrown in.  Most companies use this deployment because it is easy and works quite well.
3. Another reason is SharePoint is tenacious.  Pieces of SharePoint can be miss configured or even out right non functional, yet the end users don’t even realize it as they are still able to use the environment to upload documents etc.
4. The fly under the radar has been something I have encountered quite a bit as of recent.  This is where a employee, usually a new employee has used SharePoint in their past place of employment and know the benefits and features of SharePoint.  They usually ask for SharePoint from their IT, who more often than not, don’t really understand what SharePoint is.  They throw SharePoint out of box install onto a server and let the user at it due to the #1 reason in this list.  Well he tells his friends who tell their friends, and so on and so on.  The next thing IT knows is when it goes down this application turns out to be mission critical.

Fuego Fuego!

Very likely, one or more of the reasons I listed may have affected you one way or another.  If you are of the 10% who do have a governance document well done.  There are numerous symptoms that come with an environment that does not have a governance document or any formal planning what-so-ever.  These symptoms may include:

1. No clear owners of the application as a whole
2. No site structure or hierarchy
3. No information architecture
4. Only one content database
5. No (or) 1 service account running the entire application
6. Security is completely ad hoc
7. No Disaster Recovery Plan (DR)
8. No Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
9. Search “doesn’t work”
10. Navigation is atrocious

There is a lot more that can fall into the list, but for the sake of you not getting carpal tunnel syndrome from all the scrolling you would have to do, I will behave and keep the list to 10.  The problems that come with lack of planning point to the fact that SharePoint is a “legitimate” application.  Not some free piece of shareware, that is nice to have.  SharePoint is indeed a contender in the content management arena.  SharePoint also has a very strong end user adoption rate due to its ease of use.  This is why I chuckle when I hear a company tell me, we have this SharePoint proof of concept up for the last 2 months, I have to laugh.  I tell them, you mean its been in production for the last seven weeks then.  SharePoint is viral…. highly infectious and will spread through out a company like a fire in a gasoline and match factory.

Protect Yourself

It never is too late to put a governance document together.  If you don’t have a governance document, you want to start planning on creating one.  If your SharePoint environment is in planning or it has been deployed since 2003 you want to build one.  You may very well find that you will need to remediate your current environment or even build a second farm under the guidance of our governance document then migrate (Carefully!) the content and data from the first SharePoint environment to the new one.  There are many companies out there that can help facilitate you in the building of the governance document as well as the remediation of your current environments if you find your IT staff spread thin already.  I go through the paces with each client I work with to help facilitate them in this regard.  When I first started in the consulting end of SharePoint, I tired to tell them of all the pitfalls and things to avoid, but never actually defined a document.  I go back to the client a few months later and heard things like I know you said “not to Blah” but I did, or I don’t remember you telling me that.  SharePoint has been a growing process for everyone it has touched.  It will touch millions of other lives in time as well as it continues to grow more popular.

One thing you must be sure of is that all the stakeholders have a say, even at a token level as to what is in the governance document that pertains to them and their role.  This will ensure a solid document that is backed up by the company as a whole.  This will also give the IT team or whomever is designated as the owners of the SharePoint application/environment a bulletproof shield during those high energy knee jerk reactions.   The bullets may fly, but the protection will be there.  The ability to say, “We understand your pain point, we have a document that will help us get through this without causing other problems. Please remain calm.” – PRICELESS

I could go into what needs to be in a governance document but that is another blog post all together.  There is a lot of good information out there of what needs to be in it.  I wanted to give you the reasons behind why you need it.  I love to talk as you probably well figured, and tend to be long winded at that so I best quit here before this turns into something that rivals War and Peace.

David J Pileggi Jr.

Insight