Your corporate governance strategy is an organized, orderly way to approach business problems and quickly come to an agreement on solutions. At a high-level, it is a pre-determined framework for how the business will address and solve problems. In many organizations, governance is a key part of the company culture, helping drive decisions across IT and operations. When it comes to SharePoint governance, it can also play an important role in end user adoption. As user adoption increases, the platform reaches the limits of its default settings, introducing concerns around managing and scaling the platform, business productivity, and, inevitably, governance issues. More end users on the platform + more activity per user = more companies needing to think about proper SharePoint management and governance. As a result, the topic has become important within the SharePoint community.

The purpose of governance in an organization is to create a decision support system to encourage desirable behaviors in system usage. Properly designed governance models follow a specific strategy, such as better customer responsiveness, improved innovation, or identification and measurement of the cost effectiveness of your IT programs. Successful organizations are proactive in their design and use of a governance infrastructure, including committees, financial reviews, approval workflows, and other organizational tools that drive the decision-making process. An effective governance model will help your company manage and measure your systems and will play a significant role in helping your IT organization perform its role in the company's competitive strategy.

A broad governance model also helps the organization to recognize cost, time, and technology benefits across the entire system, instead of requiring teams and business units to track and measure on their own-which can lead to imbalanced and improper resource allocations. A properly constructed and executed governance framework provides your company with a decision support system for managing IT projects successfully.

We've all heard the complaints: "We spend so much time on process, but I just don't see any value here," or "I'm not going to waste another dime on this black hole." Your governance framework should be one of the core components of your organizational nervous system. These kinds of comments may indicate poor visibility into the process or-more likely-an immature (or nonexistent) governance model. As with any business activity, building without a clear purpose, defined roles, and some sense of what the end result should look like might just be a big black hole.

Many organizations have a difficult time evaluating the business value of their IT projects. Expanding SharePoint may fall under this description and raise questions from the business-whether adding new servers to improve performance (Do we really need to buy more hardware?), add new or improved functionality (Why do we need FAST? Doesn't SharePoint already include search?), or customize SharePoint to meet specific business needs (Why are we building that in SharePoint when we can go buy another tool?). Historically, IT organizations cannot readily demonstrate the return on investment for these activities, which impacts executive buy-in as well as end-user support. Executives want to see that they are getting the biggest bang for their buck. End users want to know that the tools you provide will solve their business needs. You want a way to demonstrate value to both.

There are some key components to successful governance: For one, it requires senior management leadership. They must understand and agree to the framework and drive accountability through all levels by following the recommendations that come out of the framework. Nothing will cause your process to lose legitimacy more quickly than the executive override. On that note, the process should be transparent so that everyone understands and follows the process and gets behind the end result. Following closely on the heels of transparency is a change management mechanism, which is the key to gaining end-user support. Give people a voice, and they are more likely to accept the changes that occur. Successful governance empowers decision making at lower levels, distributing accountability and control broadly to the teams that own the action-and are impacted by the decisions that are made. Finally, governance frameworks should be continually improved so that users don't "game" the system and so gaps can be filled as they are identified. Transparency here is also essential-tweaks and changes to the process should also be visible and broadly communicated.

A successful governance framework helps show value by providing a framework through which these 'proofs of concept' can be tracked, measured, and evaluated to help demonstrate value. It provides a common denominator-a sandbox, if you will-for system planning.

Christian Buckley was a Speaker at the European SharePoint Conference 2011. Why not check out his Conference presentations by clicking here>>

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