Governance: The What and Who for SharePoint 2010

After being ridiculously busy at the beginning of this year of 2012. I finally got some time to blog and follow up on what I presented to SharePoint Saturday VA Beach and SharePoint Saturday Philly.
 
PART I: Overview

So here's a series of blogs to follow-up for the governance presentationAccording to Cooper and Edgett, from their book Product Innovation and Corporate Strategy.
 
“Governance is about the processes through which a company implements strategy, allocates resources, and makes decisions at various organizational levels, across functional areas, and among individual business areas within the company.”

The term governance has become a popular term not just in corporate but to any new products or technology that is being implemented within the company. The policies in organization such as confidentiality of information, auditing, information disclosure with the clients, all of these are governance, and it plays a vital role in ensuring that the strategy that you put in place to control your organization will work together.
Microsoft has the same definition of what the governance is when it comes to the deployment of SharePoint in your organization.
“It is a set of policies, roles and responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how organization’s business and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals”

There are three major areas for governing your SharePoint 2010

First you have the IT Governance of the software itself and the services that you provide. This is the back-end system such as site quotas, Active Directory groups that needs to be created, making sure that you have the current software updates etc.

Second, we have the Application Management which is the management of the custom solutions that you are going to provide such as customization policy, what tools are you going to allow customizing the site, are you going to allow SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio? Who are the people who can perform this? Is it just going to be IT or are you going to allow non-technical users to customize your site with proper training in place? What are the processes and guidelines that you need to put in place when somebody wants to change the customization.
One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is the sandboxed solutions where developers can use to deploy solutions in the production environment without being scared that they might shut down the entire farm but even if you can isolate the solution because the solution hasn’t been reviewed or tested yet you need to think about some policies and guidelines on how developers can use this solutions
Branding, one of the new features of 2010 too is the site owner’s or site designers ability to apply lightweight branding on the site such as making changes to the colors and fonts. One of the things that you need to define on your governance plan when it comes to branding for example the team sites, which parts of the site the users can customize, are you going to allow different department sites to have their own branding or does your organization needs a consistent look and feel for easier development and management of the sites.
Lifecycle management deals with the applications that are based on 2010 that you needs to be manage such as what are the processes that you need to put in place when developing new solutions or new features, should you develop it first in your development server, then QA and then production.
Then the Information Management governance which deals which deals with the information for the entire organization such as documents, lists, web pages, web sites, the security such as who has access to what content.
On my governance presentation, I tackle the front-end parts SharePoint,  the part to which the business users use all the time but I included some links to references if you want to know more about governance from the back-end such as software deployment. Benefits of having a comprehensive Governance Plan

1. Governance plays a vital role in ensuring that all of the components of your planning and implementation strategy works together
   The thing about SharePoint is especially with the new version, users has more power. User’s is not just the consumer of information but in some way or another they can be producers as well.
   
2. Helps protect your organization from security threats and non-compliance liability Policies such as letting the users know that they cannot download or post copyrighted materials on the site and providing best practices such as instead of uploading copyrighted materials such as publications you can just post the link so that only those people who have the rights to access that material can access it.
   
3. It stream lines the deployment of your SharePoint
   By providing governance to those parts of SharePoint that needs to be governed. You can make sure that there’s a consistency throughout your organization such as things like how users upload documents and tag with the right metadata to make sure that all of the contents will be searchable.
   
4. It helps ensure that resource deployment are clearly aligned and helps ensure that the business decisions are clear and timely
   You will have the governance plan as your tangible resource for references.

Related Blog: Steps in Developing Effective Governance Plan Governance ResourcesSharePoint Server 2010 Governance Model
SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning
Implementing Governance on SharePoint 2010