SharePoint Governance Benchmark:
Where Do You Stand?
CHRISTIAN BUCKLEY
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT EVANGELISM @METALOGIX

Christian Buckley
Director, Product Evangelism & SharePoint MVP
Metalogix
cbuck@metalogix.com
www.buckleyplanet.com
@buckleyplanet

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What is Governance?

Defining Terms
Your Process
Nightmare
Governance definitions
vary, so it is important to
figure out what it means
within your company, and
proactively manage it

A 2012 CIO survey by Gartner shows an increasing
push in collaboration, analytics, and cloud
computing. They predict that by 2016, 20% of CIOs
in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing
to implement the discipline of information
governance successfully.

Why are we talking
about governance?
•
SharePoint out of the box is a powerful platform
•
But many organizations don’t think they have
the time, money, people to spend on planning
•
The result?
o
Site sprawl
o
Unfettered content
o
Process lawlessness

What does governance
look like in SharePoint?

Draft Outline of presentation

The
Business
Matters
SharePoint
Doesn’t
Matter

Business
Need
GOVERNANCE
Service
Governance is the set of
policies, roles, responsibilities,
and processes that guide,
direct, and control how an
organization's business divisions
and IT teams cooperate to
achieve business goals.

From ‘Creating Passionate Users,’ Kathy Sierra

Governance is not a checklist
It’s not something packaged,
purchased, and installed
over a weekend

Governance is
about taking action
to help your team
organize, optimize,
and manage your
systems and
resources.

Governance Benchmark Survey
Survey captured in four areas:
•
Governance perceptions within the organization
(what they think it means, where respondents believe their organizations are)
•
Governance roles
(defining differences in roles and accountability)
•
Governance planning
(implied healthy practices, whether organizations are thinking about the right
things and the right scope)
•
Governance readiness
(asking questions to help determine ability to implement best practices)

How do you align
your service to your
business needs?

Business
Need
GOVERNANCE
Service

Gaining Some Perspective
Before you can talk about governance,
either strategically or tactically, you need
shared understanding of two things:
o
The business value to be delivered
o
The scope of what is to be built

The Keys to
Successful
Governance

Structure/Architecture
Sub-si
Site
Site
Collection
Web App
Web App
Site
Site
Site
Collection
Farm
Sub-si
Site
Collection
Sub-si
Site
Site
Site
Sub-si

Policies, Process, and Standards

Ownership and Accountability

Measurement and Reporting

Automation

Pillars of SharePoint Governance

Technology Assurance
Delivering assurance that the technology platform supports the needs of
the project requirements, both in the short-term and in the long-term. It is
one thing to have a "performant" platform that works well today, and
another to design a solution that will meet your needs as the business
grows and adapts to a changing business climate.

Project Governance
Utilizing your established IT project methodology, ensuring that everyone
involved has a shared understanding of what needs to be done, and how
the task or solution will be delivered. Having a SharePoint Center of
Excellence is a great way to stay on top of project governance.

Information Governance
Understanding of what is created, facilitated and managed within
SharePoint. Information governance ensures that any content that is
created and stored within SharePoint has defined value, and how it fits
into SharePoint is understood.

Pillars of SharePoint Governance

Business Technology Alignment
If it does not have a measurable benefit to the organization, simply put —
you should not be doing it. Business and technology should be aligned,
with a shared vision of what is to be delivered.

Continuous Improvement
This should facilitate ongoing efforts to implement feedback and manage
change to the platform. Governance, like SharePoint itself, is not a static
activity, but must change as the organizational needs change.
http://tinyurl.com/spmfsto

Everyone wants
an easy button

Are you effectively managing
your SharePoint Permissions?
•
Perform regular security checks across your farm,
down to the document level
•
Proactively review, delete, and reassign user
permissions as needed
•
Clean up users who are no longer in Active
Directory but are in SharePoint
•
Review SharePoint groups
•
Have a process to backup and restore
permissions
•
Document site permissions (roles) so that
its easier to duplicate for new employees
•
Monitor SharePoint CALs

Any changes required to
your Content & Storage?
•
Monitor and track the growth of sites for better
planning, especially with migrations
•
Analyze web part usage to determine which
sites are using which web parts
•
Understand and manage SharePoint features
•
Ensure consistent branding and behavior:
site themes, quotas, regional settings

Do you know your Usage
and Activity trends?
•
Analyze activity down to the site, page, document level
•
Identify who is accessing which documents, including
details on that activity (i.e. checking in a document,
editing a document, or just viewing a document’s
properties)
•
Isolate sites that are no longer needed and
delete them
•
Compare activity from the past to help
anticipate the future
•
Find sites with the most or least activity

Do you need to reorganize your farm?
•
Proactively manage architecture of your site
collections, sites, lists, libraries, folders and
items within your farm or across farms
•
Have a plan for moving content and
structure from test environment to
production environment
•
Understand impacts due
to architectural changes or
business changes

Best Practices from
Survey Respondents
“Your priority is to get an information architecture and
taxonomy linked to business process management.”
“Make sure that any
innovations are championed
and advertised to that others
can see what can be
achieved and they can
relate back to their own
challenges.”
“Ensure governance is
prioritized from the outset.”
“Think about the basic services being
provided and how staff can be more
productive rather than introduce the
bells and whistles.”
“Organizations will have to increase
their investment in related tools and
technologies, both the facilitate the
development and refinement of
policy, and to distill policies into
executable rules that tools can apply
to information.”

Readiness
o
How important is governance in your
organization/company today?
o
Do you have a SharePoint governance plan in place today?
o
If yes, who are the stakeholders included in your governance body?
(end users, IT managers, administrators, etc)
o
Do you have specific information management policies in place?
o
Do you maintain Service Level Agreements with your end users?
o
Do you have an operational change management model in place to
review and prioritize feature requests and customizations?
o
Do you regularly run audits on usage, security, content, or permissions?

Are you asking
the right questions?

Thank you!
SharePoint Governance
Maturity Benchmark
http://tinyurl.com/SPgmb
cbuck@metalogix.com
www.buckleyplanet.com
@buckleyplanet