Do you feel like there is a "missing link" in your SharePoint plan? No, I'm not talking about broken links that occur when you migrate existing pages into SharePoint, I mean something more fundamental. These days SharePoint deployment and configuration are relatively straight forward. It still takes a great deal of skill and care so don't get me wrong. But it isn't something that usually requires extensive planning and innovation anymore. For most companies and most implementations, there is now a growing body of "best practices" that provide solid guidelines for deployment.
But once it is deployed, what do you actually DO with it? Most of the SharePoint failures that I'm aware of have been technical successes but business failures. Somewhere between deployment and successful business use there is a missing link.
The answer is in the creation of a policy taxonomy. This taxonomy is not an ordered structure of nouns used to classify documents. Essentially the policy taxonomy is a set of business domains that are used to both organize the site structures within SharePoint, but more importantly serve as a method to organize a governance team to oversee and manage SharePoint use "within the cloud" without crushing it.
Each of the seven-to-ten policy taxonomy buckets has a governance owner who is responsible to act as steward for that section of SharePoint use, its policies, look and feel, growth and structure. Together the various bucket owners form the business governance team for SharePoint and work together to establish enterprise-wide standards.
So there is probably a missing link hiding somewhere in your executive ranks, but it is easy to fix. In two days the policy taxonomy can be established, agreed to, governance owners assigned, and a project charter written.
Interested in more information? Please email me at mark@vitalskill.com and put "workshop" in the subject line.
Thanks!
