Overcoming Sharepoint Governance Challenges

Defining SharePoint Governance

SharePoint governance refers to the policies, processes, roles, and metrics that ensure SharePoint environments meet organizational business needs. Effective SharePoint governance is essential for managing risk, driving adoption, and realizing ROI from SharePoint investments. Key components of a SharePoint governance model include:

• Executive sponsorship to provide leadership support
• Steering committees to set priorities and roadmaps
• Policies for security, compliance, change control, and lifecycles
• Standards for taxonomy, metadata, interfaces, and customizations
• Stakeholder roles and responsibilities across IT, business, and security
• Training programs to drive governance knowledge and accountability
• Service catalogs to track project intake requests and approvals
• Reporting dashboards to monitor operational health and adoption

These governance components enable organizations to balance business needs for collaboration with corporate requirements for manageability, security, and compliance. Lacking governance controls, SharePoint environments often experience inconsistent user experiences, redundant efforts, security gaps, namespace sprawl, and integration complexity over time.

Common Governance Challenges

When establishing governance, SharePoint deployments often face challenges including:

Lack of Executive Sponsorship

Executive sponsors provide vital leadership, visibility, and resourcing for governance initiatives. Without engaged executive advocates, governance efforts frequently struggle to secure stakeholder commitment or gain funding priority relative to other IT and business projects.

Unclear Roles and Responsibilities

Ambiguous authority between IT administrators, business content owners, and governance team members prevents accountability for governance processes. Explicitly assigning governance duties and decision rights through responsibility assignment matrices clarifies expected actions across stakeholders.

No Formal Policies or Standards

Undocumented governance expectations lead to ad-hoc, inconsistent policies based individual discretion across sites and containers. Codifying governance standards into formal policy documents professionalizes guidelines for intake processes, security models, change control procedures, and decommissioning timelines.

Poor Change Management Processes

Unstructured development processes fail to safeguard stability, security, and service levels for production environments. Imposing change control workflows ensures proper testing, reviews, approvals, release windows, back-out plans, and communications accompany SharePoint solution deployments.

Establishing Governance Fundamentals

Organizations can address common governance gaps by:

Gaining Executive Buy-In and Support

Secure executive sponsorships from C-level business and IT leaders to visibly endorse the governance program. Influence leaders by quantifying financial risks from decentralized SharePoint sprawl and emphasizing compliance obligations for regulated data. Pitch governance to senior management both as a necessity for information security and as an enabler for driving SharePoint usage and project ROI through reliable delivery.

Defining Stakeholder Roles and Ownership

Document governance roles across IT teams, business power users, project managers, content owners, security analysts, compliance officers, and end users. Delineate specific duties, decision authorities, and qualifications for each persona in responsibility matrices. Establish naming conventions for identifying content owners and accountability for informing stakeholders upon role changes or responsibilities.

Creating Policies for Content, Security, and Change Control

Develop formal, published policies that define expectations for appropriate content types, data protections, access models, change control processes, and decommissioning timetables. Align to industry standards where applicable, including security protocols like CIA triad and CIS benchmarks along with ITIL change management procedures. Support special use cases with tailored policies that adhere to regulations for financial data, healthcare information, intellectual property, or internal audits.

Implementing Effective Governance Practices

In addition to foundational governance building blocks, organizations need operational processes that embed controls into daily routines. Best practices include:

Automating Policy Enforcement with Metadata and Workflows

Reduce reliance on manual governance activities by integrating controls into platform tools. Apply metadata tagging rules that restrict content types and enforce retention labels based on sensitivity markers. Configure automated workflows triggered by metadata that restrict access, disable features, or apply encryption upon content creation.

Institutionalizing Training and Support Programs

Educate users about the goals, mechanics, and individual responsibilities involved in governance protocols through both formal training and ongoing community support. Maintain an online knowledge base site with governance documentation, policy listings, webinars, chat groups, ticket logging, FAQs, and user forums to minimize oversight incidents.

Monitoring and Reporting on Governance Metrics

Evaluate operational governance using dashboards, analytics, and notifications configured across platform security, compliance, performance, and usage indicators. Analyze trends over time periods and against thresholds that trigger alerts for intervention. Provide both real-time monitoring and scheduled reports tailored to technical admins, business owners, and executive leaders.

Sustaining Long-Term Governance Success

Once implemented, SharePoint governance programs require care and feeding for sustained viability. Important longevity factors involve:

Regularly Reviewing and Updating Governance Plans

Revisit governance charters, policies, procedures, and tools periodically to address evolving needs from new solutions, changing standards, acquisition shifts, or regulatory updates. Institute annual reviews aligned to budget planning cycles to formally assess program effectiveness and resourcing.

Recognizing Governance Champions

Reward contributors who demonstrate exceptional governance commitment or innovation through Kudos bonuses, spot awards, special assignments, and feature case studies. Seek nominee input across both volunteer community participants and formal governance team members.

Making Governance Part of Organizational Culture

Drive persistent governance adoption by incorporating concepts directly into employee onboarding checklists, new project intake forms, performance management frameworks, and IT service catalogs. Celebrate program milestones in newsletters and town halls alongside other strategic initiatives to underscore executive expectations.