Craig RothI’m happy to announce that my “Website Governance: Guidance for Portals, SharePoint, and Intranets” has just been published. It’s an update to my Methodologies and Best Practices document on governance which is the most popular document that I’ve written for Burton Group (out of 17), even though only came out in March of 2009 and therefore has had less time to accumulate document views than others I’ve written.
I updated the document based on some new ideas and clarifications that have been needed since its original publication. The main updates to the doc since publication are as follows:
- My ITIL research and document began after initial publication and has given me a clearer view of the difference between Governance and Management and how to draw the line. I fond of clearing up governance confusion by pointing out all the important things that are not governance. My ITIL work follows the story of those important, non-governance things and where they should be addressed. The ITIL document (“ITIL for SharePoint: Defining SharePoint as a Service Using ITIL Service Strategy”) is already my #4 document and since it just came out after New Year’s I think it will catch up to my governance document quickly.
- I provide a better picture of the document hierarchy that shows how the statement of governance spawns other docs, and makes room for ITIL as a peer document to the statement of governance
- In November of last year, as the icicles of winter gripped the windows outside, Burton Group heated things up with an internal cross-domain discussion about governance. We developed a standard definition of governance that I’ve included that is more complete than the one I’ve used for my portal and SharePoint audience. Most SharePoint folks are coming from an ungoverned environment and the simplified “people, process, policy” approach I use is just enough to structure their efforts without being so complex as to be untenable given the authority they possess. So it will still be used for "website governance" as a subset of generic governance. And those who want a more complete approach now have a peer reviewed option from Burton Group to take them as far as they want to go with governance.
- I’ve added wording about how governance is a process, not a document. I keep getting asked for a template with wording people can copy/paste from. But all the hard work is in the process – the interviewing, the hashing out of difficult political issues. If you just shortcut that to create the deliverable it’s probably worthless. The guidance document provides a skeleton to fill in and tells you how, but doesn’t give you the exact wording.
- I added an option in the “people” section to first define roles, then do assignments to those roles. That can come in handy depending on the organizational situation.
- I did some field work on SharePoint governance at the beginning of the year and developed a "cultural tenets" methodology that balances capturing all the specific cultural and political elements from the interviews, but doesn’t pre-empt the committees. I’ve described that methodology in the new document
There are many minor edits as well, but those are the major additions. I hope readers find it to be useful guidance and I welcome all your feedback.
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