Confused by the term "Governance" where SharePoint is concerned? The problem is that SharePoint is intended to delegate administration tasks out to groups of end users so that they can be self-governing. To most of us in IT, it seems like we've given the asylum keys over to the mental patients. How will we maintain order?
Enter the concept of federated governance. SharePoint provides for administrative control through inheritance. This means that any individual is able to act as administrator at a site they own and those that are attached below it as subsites. So, in SharePoint there are a number of locations in the site structure that are critical to administrative control. These provide ideal locations to establish self-governance opportunities for communities of end users.
Here is how it works. Above and outside the SharePoint environment is a "Policy Governance" board or team. This is composed primarily of organizational policy makers from across the organization. The Policy Governance Board should have no more than twelve members and ideally only seven.
The Policy Governance Board manages the Policy Taxonomy (or top-level taxonomy) that organizes policies and workflows for categories of information across the organization. These taxonomy categories can be implemented as site collections or content types depending on the design of the SharePoint implementation.
The Policy Governance Board establishes and maintains business policies like document retention, approval processes for outwardly facing information, security models, handling of financial or human resources information and so on. This is primarily a technology agnostic board that sets the "Business Policy Architecture and Business Policy Taxonomy for the organization. This is the focus of my Governance and Taxonomy Workshops.
The IT Governance Board. This is the focus of nearly every other governance speaker and writer in the SharePoint universe. This board may be a federation of infrastructure, support, operations, administration and development stakeholders. The IT Governance Board owns the technology standards and best practices used to implement the policies of the Policy Governance Board.
Top Level Governance Board. Each Top Level Site Collection has an owner who is reponsible for managing the subsites in his or her collection. These are power end users and not controlled by IT. They provide user support, mentoring, and administration for the site collection under their control. All the Site Collection Administrators form a collaborative board to share ideas and problems across all the Top Level Site Collections.
Site Owners. The Site Owners can form a collaborative group that shares information and ideas through the use of one or more team sites.
A Sketch of the Escalation Process. Governance escalation occurs when a Governance Board needs to move a problem or idea "up" to another Board. As an example, the Top Level Governance Board may see a need for a new business policy or taxonomy category to meet a need among the user community. The request is submitted to the IT Governance Board to make sure it is feasible and necessary, and then it is escalated to the Policy Governance Board.
Federation refers to the cooperation of governance teams "vertically" through the chart above. Collaboration refers to cooperation horizontally through the chart.
© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved
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