Governance: It’s a word you undoubtedly think of often when it comes to information management and SharePoint in particular – whether it’s actually spoken aloud in the meeting room or tradeshow floor, or when you’re simply “reading between the lines” when learning about the latest enterprise collaboration technologies. This is great, you may think, and it could help us to drive adoption and increase productivity, but how do we keep it under control? How do we ensure the necessary policies, processes, and technologies are in place to allow our users to get the most out of our collaboration investments while ensuring our data meets our internal and external policies?
While some significant announcements were made at SharePoint Conference 2014, governance was not a word you heard often from the main stage. However, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t on the minds of most attendees and even Microsoft’s. Anyone who was there can tell you it reverberated often throughout the exhibit hall and beyond. As Microsoft Senior Solution manager Carrie Doring said when speaking about all of the “new ways of working” discussed throughout the event in a Channel 9 interview broadcast from the exhibit hall, “As IT we need to think about the consequences of that.” Governance continues to be of utmost importance as data grows throughout the enterprise and the latest disruptive technology trends continue to come into play, whether it’s cloud technologies, social collaboration, or BYOD initiatives.
Along with Tahoe Partners, we’re excited to launch a new blog series that will focus on building, implementing, and enforcing an effective governance plan to ensure you stay ahead of those potential consequences. Insights will be based upon our extensive work together to help customers across a broad range of verticals address all kinds of challenges related to governance. Over the next five weeks, we invite you to join us here on the AvePoint Community every Tuesday for new posts covering the following topics:
Part 2: Meet the Needs of the Business with SharePoint
The next part of our series will share tips on how to determine how SharePoint and other collaboration tools can be leveraged within an organization to maximize the value obtained by the business. This includes the services IT will provide to users as well as the policies and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that should be put into place in order to deliver those services. Think of this as your guide to designing a SharePoint Roadmap for your organization, and we’ll highlight customers that have benefited from this roadmap.
Part 3: Empower End-Users While Maintaining Control
Next we will delve into the “balancing act” inherent with all governance plans. How do you enable your end-users to maximize productivity in SharePoint and the overall enterprise collaboration environment while ensuring all activity falls within your established policies? Here we’ll take a look at how to automate the processes of policy and service request management as well as effectively monitoring and reporting on your deployment.
Part 4: Gain Insights through Technology
In this post, we’ll take a look at available technologies to help you best determine how users are adopting SharePoint, what features are being used, and what services need to change over time. A governance plan is never static – it needs to evolve along with an organization’s collaboration requirements. We’ll talk about how technology can be used to better understand business needs to ensure your governance plan aligns accordingly.
Part 5: Educate End Users and Enforce Policies
Finally, we’ll dive into the topic of education. Without proper education, even the best governance plans are destined to fail. We’ll wrap up the series with advice on how to promote the services available to executives and employees to help them do their jobs better through effective training on process, products, and configurations.
For more on the topic of governance, please be sure to check out past posts on both the AvePoint Community and the Tahoe Smart blog.
Until next week’s post, we’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment below and let us know your burning questions about SharePoint governance for our team of experts to answer.
