Just like a rock-solid business plan is key to business survival and sustained growth, every organization that uses or plans to use SharePoint should invest in defining a robust and practical SharePoint Governance Plan that focuses on desired business outcomes achieved by using SharePoint. Without a well defined SharePoint Governance Framework and Plan, your organization may be already facing the following challenges:
- Without proper governance, even the best-planned Portal (Intranet / Extranet / Internet) can eventually become out of control and lead to chaos.
- Disparate Portal projects bubble up from various departments, resulting in multiple separate deployments, each with its own server farm.
- Often, No forethought is given to managing development & deployment processes. As more departments add content, Portal grows organically and the user experience grows more inconsistent.
- If users are unable to find the content they need, for instance, due to poor IA or lack of an enterprise search strategy, the value to users is entirely lost.
- Unauthorized access & reuse of digital information will occur more frequently and inappropriate document retention is more likely to happen.
- Brand inconsistency across portal implementations.
- Controlled site provisioning, which includes creating user policies, guidelines for appropriate sites and content, and a plan for how these issues will be reviewed, is frequently an afterthought.
- Inadequate testing of the portal prior to launch might result in quality issues – from broken links to a site that doesn’t meet business stakeholders’ goals.
- Organizations typically fall short in adequately training employees for using or creating content for the Portal, once again severely reducing its ongoing value.
How can we help?
KLST “Governance101” Program of Work is an engagement with KL Software Technologies, a premier Microsoft Managed Partner and a global leader in providing Microsoft Business Solutions to Fortune100, ASX100, and FTSE100 organizations around the world. This engagement will focus on helping your organization rollout an effective governance plan, which ensures your SharePoint portal is well-managed, used in accordance with its designed intent and to prevent it from becoming an unmanageable system. The plan will include the rules and procedures for the use of the SharePoint portal and also identify the tactical, technically-competent team to manage the routine operational tasks that keep the enterprise-wide portal running.
Based on our extensive experience of rolling out robust SharePoint Governance Framework for global large enterprises (30,000+ users worldwide) to mid-sized organizations (250+ users nationally), we have defined a series of proven SharePoint Governance Plan templates that can accelerate a complex and time-consuming process of defining an organization-wide SharePoint Governance Framework that is aligned with original business vision and desired business outcomes around using SharePoint. Here are some of the key areas that we tackle within our “Governance101” Program of Work:
- Promote Controlled Growth and Reduce “CONTENT CHAOS”.
- Centralize Deployment Procedures.
- Consistent User Experience Across Portals and Business Sites.
- Improve Content Findability and Promote “REUSE” via Pre-Approved Site and List Templates (Apps).
- Centralize Security Policies.
- Promote Consistent Portal Branding.
- Control Site Provisioning.
- Define Quality Metrics and Testing Framework for Portal Customizations.
- Define Enablement Plan for End-User Training and Rapid Adoption.
- Reduce eDiscovery Costs.
- Automatic Archival Policies.
