This is a scenario I run into frequently as part of my
professional life. An organization
decides to purchase SharePoint, and make it available to their user base
throughout the organization. The
software is purchased, IT installs the software and ensures it is running,
various managers and units within the organization are provided sites for their
usage, and they are given “site owner” permissions in order to allow them to
select and configure the tools.
Other than keeping the software running, no official
SharePoint support is given, and the sites and tools developed using the
SharePoint toolset grow in a completely organic way, with some users embracing
the technology and creating multiple sites and process management areas, the
majority of users focussing on common and familiar tools, such as document
repositories, and some sites and areas remain dormant, not used at all. The initial success of the installation is
high as end users feel empowered to create the sites and tools they need for
their specific purposes.
When some organizations first install SharePoint, they view
its management as similar to other installed applications, such as Microsoft
Office, an Account Tracking system, a Case Management System, or a Library
system. Where the responsibility of IT
or the server admin with the SharePoint installation is to deploy it and keep
it functioning. They then struggle to
keep control of requests, cannot keep up with end user questions around custom
configuration, they are in a consistent reactive mode as opposed to pre-planning,
having processes, responsibilities and plans in place to handle the needs of
the end users and organization.
As there is no overall guidance or structure to how the tools
should be used, and no processes put in place to restrict the ability of end users,
toolset choice, sites, navigation, and usage is highly dependent on the
individual site owners and their teams.
This leads to inconsistencies across the SharePoint installation as each
independent area is entirely self-directed.
Users begin to express frustration, inconsistency in
navigation between sites leads to trouble finding important information,
misunderstanding of document libraries and how they function lead to, at best,
unreliable search results, and, at worst, exposed private documents to areas of
the organization that should not have access.
Users, misunderstanding security, break permissions for their sites to
create their own groups, but do not have the knowledge nor the planning to
ensure the groups accurately control permissions or the processes in place to
ensure those groups stay current as staff move or change responsibilities.
The very thing that made SharePoint a strong toolset choice
in the first place, the ability of the end user to self-manage and self-create
their own process support tools within the sites they have control over, (no
need to involve IT in selecting and configuring tools) becomes part of the
problem. IT staff do not have
availability for full scale SharePoint support since it wasn’t planned for, end
users on their own develop inconsistent, and, in some cases partially
non-functional, toolsets and sites to support their processes.
How do we counter this?
How do we allow our organization to fully leverage SharePoint and see
some of the great efficiencies that can result from managing various processes
from start to end within a single unified platform? How do we build on the local successes
achieved by site owners in supporting their own business processes within
SharePoint? The answer lies in
Governance.
What is SharePoint?
Before we look at Governance, we first need to understand
what SharePoint is.
The majority of users I encounter that express frustration
with SharePoint end up blaming the platform for what was built with it. SharePoint is a very sophisticated set of
business support tools that allow extensive custom configuration to your own
purposes. It is also “just” that. It is a toolkit. It’s not the end product. The success or
failure of a supported business process, a department’s site, an entire
organizations SharePoint installation, is based on what you are able to build with
it, rather than the native abilities within the toolset itself.
As SharePoint’s true value is in what you can build with it;
this will require expertise, planning and experience to leverage. You can have the finest tools in place to
build whatever you need, but without the processes in place to manage that
building, without the expertise to create those solutions, you end up with a
sub-standard product. For a successful
long term strategy with SharePoint, you not only need the product, you need a
strategy for its organizational usage and the expertise in place to support
it. You need governance.
Governance
Governance, at its highest level, is putting in processes
and support systems that support the development, configuration and expansion
of SharePoint throughout your organization.
The governance plan you have can differ greatly from other organizations
in its specifics, but in general, all organizations undergoing governance are
looking to take SharePoint beyond the random abilities of individual site
owners, and the lack of coordination between sites, to a coordinated and
planned installation that allows users quick and easy access to the information
and tools they need.
Governance anticipates the needs of the organization, and
customizes the SharePoint platform to support those needs, focussing resources,
planning, and training on those areas identified as high priority.
Governance goes beyond delivering individual solutions and
looks at the potential benefits of SharePoint organization wide.
As an example, some of the early benefits my clients see
from SharePoint come from InfoPath and Workflow based systems, such as Vacation
Request or Expense Claim form systems. A
company with an eye for governance will not look at these systems as individuals,
but as a small portion of a potentially much larger system. They understand that once they develop a
single InfoPath system, they can save templates, processes, interfaces and
approaches from that system to apply to another, to not only speed up
development of new solutions, but also allow, through the use of a universal
approach, organization wide ability to maintain those solutions as the approach
is researched, known, documented and universal.
Governing the development of these systems allows this to occur.
This counters the challenge of many SharePoint installations
where an individual approach of site owners, usually due to lack of guidance,
may lead to customizations or other configuration that is specific to that site
only, and therefore hard to maintain, or hard for users unfamiliar with the
site to use.
A high level approach goes beyond unifying the way individual
systems are developed and implemented however.
It also allows the development of solutions that touch many areas of
your enterprise, such as an employee on-boarding/off boarding process, where
the entire process, from the
original job posting and description, through resume management and review,
interview, hiring decision, involved groups informed of new employee (Security,
IT for new accounts/groups, Library, Training, Human Resources) through to the
end of the employees hire is managed in SharePoint. Each stage is fully track-able; each party
responsible for each element of the hiring process is automatically informed. Overall system management is done using
dashboards that allow site owners to monitor and maintain the system without
involving IT.
This multi-departmental collaboration on a business process
simply doesn’t occur with organic or unmanaged growth. And it is one area where the improvements in
efficiency that are gained through SharePoint are significant, over 50% less time than managing the same process than using the previous
approach. An efficient system can end up saving the equivalent of multiple full time individual salaries in
measured time savings.
Governance provides a high level universal approach to your
SharePoint installation so that navigation, document handling, security, form
and workflow systems, reporting, and multiple other areas all use a standard
organization wide approach.
This universal approach allows users familiar with one area
of your SharePoint installation to easily navigate and interact with unfamiliar
areas; it simplifies maintenance and ensures security is being correctly
applied, so that information integrity is not compromised. A universal approach to Form based systems
means that once users become familiar with the usage and maintenance of one
system, they can easily use newly developed systems based on the same
templates, as process and interface are similar. And users familiar with the maintenance of
one system will understand and more easily be able to maintain others. No more isolated systems that only one
specialized user can maintain.
Governance allows SharePoint to move beyond disparate
approaches, tough variable navigation, unreliable searches and individual
approaches to an optimized experience where the end user spends less time
attempting to learn the technology and find information to more time using it
to increase the efficiency and track ability of the processes they are
responsible for.
Move beyond organic SharePoint growth, with only specific
local benefits to an optimized environment where the focus is on organization
wide business process support improvement.
Truly benefit from the many advantages the SharePoint platform can
provide and see real and measurable improvements in the efficiency of the
supported business processes.
Effective governance, once implemented, allows you to focus
on your business, the needs of your organization, rather than the technology
required to track and manage that information.
There are three key elements to any effective governance
strategy. Without any of these elements,
the overall approach will not succeed, and you will only see partial success
over organic growth. Let’s look at each
of these three elements in detail.
The first key to effectively managing a SharePoint
installation in an organization of 200 or more regular users is the hiring or
training of a full time SharePoint farm administrator. Unlike many other commercially installed
applications, SharePoint requires the constant monitoring, request gatekeeping,
and analysis necessary to respond to the needs of the user base. This means monitoring security, site usage
and reporting to ensure they are set up to organizational standards and do not
expose information to groups that should not have access. It means assessing and optimizing the search
experience, ensuring that end users can easily find the information they are
looking for. They ensure custom
developed applications are safe and have been tested using known processes
before deployment to production. They
deploy and monitor these custom developed applications and ensure they continue
to function after patches and other upgrades to the overall system. And they create and apply permissions to new
site areas before allowing individual users to customize those sites to their
needs.
This is just a small portion of the potential tasks a
SharePoint administrator may have, the specifics are highly dependent on each
organization. But regardless of
individual organizational needs, the scope and complexity of any SharePoint installation supporting a
reasonably large user base (200+) is a full
time commitment.
A long term commitment to a farm administrator is also
essential, as aligning your SharePoint platform and toolset with your specific
organizational needs is a long term project that continually evolves as it
goes, and really never ends. The amount
of time needed to take an experienced farm administrator and get them familiar
with the intricacies of your institutional processes, responsibilities, and
other integrating technologies is considerable.
And the SharePoint farm needs to constantly be in a state of assessment
and adaptation to keep up with changing needs.
A 3 month engagement from an external resource is simply not sufficient.
A full time, internal dedicated SharePoint farm
administrator is the first key in effective governance of any medium sized or
larger SharePoint installation.
High Level Long Term Planning
Far before templates can be determined, navigation schemes
developed, and tools configured, high level analysis of the current
organizations needs has to occur. This
analysis can be phased, where a specific area of need is focussed on and developed
before another or, a coordinated approach where a number of areas are developed
in conjunction with each other.
This includes looking at current systems, and identifying
those that transfer well to the SharePoint technology. And not just translating those systems to a
newer technology, but also doing an assessment of the current system, what is
working well. What isn’t? There is not nearly as much value in using
SharePoint to simply replicate current systems as there is in being prepared to
optimize and change a process for the better, allowing simpler interface and
workflow, enabled through SharePoint. This
holds true for sites to be migrated from prior versions as well. The assessment needs to include experts in
both the current systems usage and ability (most likely internal employees) as
well as experts in SharePoint technology, such as Architects and SharePoint Specialists
in other areas (Branding, Records Management, Business Intelligence, Migrations,
Custom code based development, etc.).
While internal resources can be used to describe current
systems and some of the challenges they include, most likely, an external
partner will need to be hired for governance planning and execution support. This partner can assist in the planning and
execution of a governance model, including setting realistic milestones and
coordinating the various components of the plan.
Even if you plan to approach governance on a large scale and
to roll out multiple solution elements simultaneously, such as branding using
master pages, form and workflow systems, and document management within a short
period of time, I would still look for a long term commitment from your
SharePoint partner, definitely nothing less than a year, as governance is going
to have to necessarily evolve and focus on unanticipated areas as usage
increases and the real value of SharePoint starts to be realized. It also takes a good deal of time and effort
to understand your organizations specific needs and how they can be supported
by SharePoint, you want a long term commitment from supporting partners so that
the business knowledge they develop can continue to be leveraged over time
without having to re-teach new experts your system and approaches.
A long term partner in developing and maintaining strong
governance is necessary in any organization that does not wish to make
significant investment in currently scarce individual expert SharePoint
resources. A company that can provide
this support long term also has the ability to provide expertise as it is
needed, a SharePoint Records Management expert is valuable indeed, but is only
required in certain phases of governance planning and execution. The overall Architect should remain as
consistent as possible throughout governance planning and execution, other
experts should be brought in as needed by your SharePoint partner.
High level long term planning with an expert partner will
result in a long term maintainable SharePoint strategy that can adapt to user
needs as necessary, and prevent and counter many of the challenges described
with organic growth.
Training
Another area that is consistently overlooked when doing long
term governance planning is the training of the end users of the system, as
well as site administrators and anyone else involved in the creation and upkeep
of custom developed sites and solutions.
SharePoint is fairly unique in that it allows end users to
develop and evolve reasonably complete business support solutions without
involvement of IT staff. This means the
technical resource availability issue that occurs with all other types of
custom solution development (.net, java, open source) does not occur with
SharePoint, as the end users are enabled to do so much more.
However, as with any set of tools, training in how to use
those tools and develop technical support for your environment is
essential. You may have a highly
experienced farm administrator at the helm of your SharePoint farm, a well
designed and implemented governance strategy, but if the end users are unable
to use the templates, processes and tools you have put in place to support
them, the effort is wasted.
Training should not be the “out of the box” generic training
provided by multiple SharePoint training providers, it should be focussed on your
specific needs and environment. A
training partner should be willing to look into and understand your governance
plans in detail, and provide expert recommendations on what and how to train
end users and site owners in the technology.
They should be willing to adapt and modify the materials being presented
to your environment, and train your users on
site using your custom configuration.
Training is a key element of governance strategy as it enables the execution of all of that
careful planning and strategy you have already engaged in. SharePoint is all about empowering the end
users to develop their own sites and toolsets.
Having them understand in detail both the technology they are working
with and their roles and responsibilities within the governance plan are
critical to successful long term SharePoint use.
Third Party Tools and Governance
I am not going to go into real detail here about third party
tools, except to say that there are some specific third party tools that can
assist in the technical components of the governance process, tools that can
perform tasks across sites, site collections, and farms considerably more efficiently
than the toolset that comes standard with SharePoint, such as SharePoint
Central Administration and the SharePoint client itself.
These tools definitely don’t replace expertise, but they can
increase the efficiency of farm administrators and other experts on governance
tasks, in some cases significantly. I
will be reviewing one such tool later in this blog.
The larger the installation, the more value such toolsets
may have. I leave it up to my clients to
determine if the final cost of a third party tool represents good value to them
by clearly defining the benefits that tool can provide, and letting them make
the final determination.
Conclusion
SharePoint is a powerful and highly adaptable portal toolset
that can allow the simple creation and maintenance of business support
solutions by the users who are closest to those processes, the end users. While this will occur after initial
deployment and during organic growth, it quickly runs into technical, expertise
and planning barriers as its usage grows.
Truly leveraging SharePoint’s toolset and seeing the
efficiencies it can provide enterprise wide requires expertise, planning,
resources and training. A governance
plan can coordinate and develop these necessary elements to allow successful
enterprise wide adoption of SharePoint, and a long term commitment from a
partner, in coordination with your farm administrator, along with a
well-planned training effort, will result in long term success in all of your
SharePoint developed and hosted systems.