Thanks to everyone who came out to SharePoint Saturday Ottawa! It was a great event! Here is the presentation given by John Brown, CEO of Helux Systems, on Planning for Governance.

1. SharePoint Saturday
Governance
November 21, 2013

2. Helux Systems
• A Microsoft Gold Partner in Collaboration and Content
• A dedicated SharePoint and Information Management
Consulting company since 2003
• Client and partner list includes private and public-sector
organizations across North America
• End to end solutions including requirements analysis,
metadata and classification schemas, implementation, and
custom development

3. Clients and Partners

4. The Anatomy of Information Management
IM
ECM
EDRMS
The Norm
•
ECM PLUS
Information Management
Taxonomies
Metadata
Classification Schema
Governance
EDRMS PLUS
Enterprise Content Management
Web Content Management
Digital Asset Management
Computer-Aided Design
Enterprise Document and Records
Management
Enables organizations to
manage documents and records
through the lifecycle of information
CHAOS

5. Why SharePoint
• To get more business value out of the organization’s
information assets
• Streamline business processes
• Simplify the way people work together
• Simplify IT administration, extensibility, and interoperability

6. Governance
• The first thing to determine is
what do you want to build?
• A Wild West ?
• A Fortress ?
• Each has a different set of
rules and processes
• Each has a different set of
roles and responsibilities

7. Governance in SharePoint
• What is Governance?
• Why do we need Governance?
• Who is responsible for Governance?

8. What is Governance
• Governance is not easy to define
• It can mean different things to different organizations and
even different things to people in the same organization
• Let’s look at a couple of definitions to provide perspective
• “At its core, governance provides direction or guidance on how solution or
service should be used to improve the current state of an organization”
• Wikipedia says that governance is meant to “assure the investments in IT
generate business value and mitigate the rules that are associated with IT”

9. What is Governance
• We need Governance to guide us to our destination, it is the
compass for business solutions. The destination will be
different for different organizations but it should always steer
us towards an improved state overall as well as greater
efficiency.
• The Microsoft definition of Governance for SharePoint is:
• “The set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guides, directs,
and controls how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams cooperate
to achieve business goals.”
• At its core, governance provides direction or guidance on how
a solution should be used to improve the current state of an
organization.

10. Why do we need Governance
• Governance is NOT just putting up “red tape” to deter bad
behaviour but in lighting up the roadway to good behaviour.
• Governance is NOT only to mitigate risks, but to improve
efficiency, including establishing standards in best practice.
• So, there are two goals for a proper Governance strategy and
plan:
• Mitigate risk – legal, regulatory, or compliance
• Improve operational efficiencies and promote collaboration and best practices

11. People, Processes & Policies, Technology
• A properly implemented and successful Governance plan
involves people, processes & policies, and technology
People
Processes &
Policies
Technology

12. People
• People are the most important part of any Governance Plan.
They provide the inputs to all the other parts of the
Governance Plan
• The Governance Plan needs to cover all affected people, the
roles they play, and the tasks they perform
• Incorporating change is never easy and it is important for the
designers of the Governance Plan to be sensitive to the rate of
change that people can accept

13. Processes & Policies
• A business process consists of the steps it takes to achieve a
business goal where the output is typically a product or
service
• Processes can include paying invoices, on-boarding new
employees, routing documents for approvals and all sorts of
other mechanisms that make a business operate efficiently
• The implementation of SharePoint will often retire old
processes and introduce new ones as we strive to increase
operational efficiency

14. Processes & Policies
• One of the primary reasons that a SharePoint project will fail is
lack of planning and lack of consensus on how the business
will use the system and what steps people must take to
achieve the stated goals of the system
• Users, when left to themselves, will not simply “figure out
SharePoint”
• Sure, they may be capable of opening files and modifying tasks but without
proper planning and training they will not optimize their use of SharePoint
Users need guidance – be sure that your Governance Plan
provides that guidance to ensure your solution doesn’t become
a dumping ground - a file share in the browser

15. Processes & Policies
• In many cases, regulatory or statutory requirements are a
mandatory part of a Governance Plan – an example might be
patient data in a hospital
If SharePoint is responsible for safekeeping records or
automating processes, we must have policies in place that are
clearly spelled out
• It’s also important to differentiate between Policy and Best
Practices
• For instance, it might be a Best Practice, but not a policy to have version
control. It’s important that users understand what is a must and what is a
should

16. Technology
• The technology, in our case SharePoint, is important in a
Governance Plan because you must understand the
technology and not ask it do things it cannot do
You must do Business and Technical Requirements BEFORE
selecting the technology
• If the technology cannot satisfy the business and information
management requirements, then it should not be selected

17. The Governance Equation
• The SharePoint service is delivered and supported by three
key elements – people, processes & policies, and technology
SharePoint Governance guides people in their processes,
ensuring compliance to corporate policies . Technology acts
as a facilitator and, if necessary, enforces the policies. If we
focus on these 3 key elements we can create an effective
SharePoint Governance Plan

18. How to Start a Governance Plan
• Create a Governance Board
• Create a Governance Plan
• Identify Business Objectives
• Prioritize and map objectives to technology solutions
• Develop a technology roadmap and identify technical objectives
• Provide communication, incorporate feedback and engage users
• Provide tactical operation planning and coordination
• Provide tactical development planning and coordination
• Provide tactical support planning and coordination
• Repeat and review these steps

19. How to make sure it’s working
• There are two ways to ensure that your Governance Plan is
working – manual governance or automatic governance. You
can also have a combination (recommended)
• Manual – create committees that meet regularly (3 or 4 times
a year) to make sure that users are using the technology the
way it was intended and to ensure that the solution is meeting
business goals
• Automated
• SharePoint out of the box has tools for auditing and governing your sites
there are a number of 3rd party tools that can be utilized
• 3rd party tools designed specifically for Governance – Gimmalsoft, AvePoint,
Titus and others provide tools

20. Questions & Answers
?