Presenting SharePoint as a service back to your organization

Editor's Notes

• #4: How organisations are presenting SharePoint as a serviceSeveral of the key services presented to business usersBest practices for measuring adoption and return on investmentIncorporating guidance for optimised information architecture
• #5: How organisations are presenting SharePoint as a serviceSeveral of the key services presented to business usersBest practices for measuring adoption and return on investmentIncorporating guidance for optimised information architecture
• #6: Governance committeeRepresentation from every area of the businessA way of ensuring that SharePoint is a platform that drives real business valueWho owns the site?Is the site still accessed and used?
• #7: Have a way of measuring you success.A list of goals and targets for projects…A way of measuring performance of your environments:Business and Technical SLAs – Backed by real investmentIs the site still active?Is the content still accurate and relevant?
• #8: Build a good policy and security/governance model- How do we prevent sharing of confidential documents?
• #9: Is there classified data that is stored in areas that is high risk to the business
• #10: Make sure you know who has access to what.Make sure you know what types of content you are allowing in the farmNot all content should be stored in SPEg. Videos be stored in a media system etc.
• #11: Build an information architecture for SP in a way that makes it easy for people to use SP to do their jobs better.Find information easily.Are search results relevant?Not knowing where to look?
• #12: How do I manage storage growth?How do I make sure the infrastructure resources have the highest amount of performanceWhat are the SharePoint uptime service level agreements?
• #13: SharePoint Governance means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and is often an overused term. Microsoft defines it as “the set of policies, roles, responsibilities and processes”“that guides, directs and controls”“how an organisation’s divisions and I.T. teams cooperate”“to achieve business goals”.The key here is “how” you can “guide, direct and control”, sometimes called “enforce” or “govern”, the users within SharePoint.
• #14: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_governance_of_information_technologyWhat are the major focus areas that make up IT governance?According to the IT Governance Institute, there are five areas of focus:Strategic alignment: Linking business and IT so they work well together. Typically, the lightning rod is the planning process, and true alignment can occur only when the corporate side of the business communicates effectively with line-of-business leaders and IT leaders about costs, reporting and impacts.Value delivery: Making sure that the IT department does what’s necessary to deliver the benefits promised at the beginning of a project or investment. The best way to get a handle on everything is by developing a process to ensure that certain functions are accelerated when the value proposition is growing, and eliminating functions when the value decreases.Resource management: One way to manage resources more effectively is to organize your staff more efficiently—for example, by skills instead of by line of business. This allows organisationsto deploy employees to various lines of business on a demand basis.Risk management: Instituting a formal risk framework that puts some rigor around how IT measures, accepts and manages risk, as well as reporting on what IT is managing in terms of risk.Performance measures: Putting structure around measuring business performance. One popular method involves instituting an IT Balanced Scorecard, which examines where IT makes a contribution in terms of achieving business goals, being a responsible user of resources and developing people. It uses both qualitative and quantitative measures to get those answers.http://www.cio.com/article/111700/IT_Governance_Definition_and_Solutions
• #15: Summary Section: Bring back and expand upon all four talking pointsReplace:People: Service RequestProcesses: WorkflowPolicy: DocAveTech: GA+People: The “People” in SharePoint Governance are not just from IT but from people throughout the organisation.They each have their own business requirements & agendas within the organisation and are allocated roles and responsibilities to ensure that the SharePoint platform is aligned to these.Policy:IT AssuranceArchitectureInfrastructureDisaster RecoverySLAsPerformanceProject GovernanceProject managementStakeholder managementInformation GovernanceInformation ArchitectureInformation ManagementTechnology & Business AlignmentAgreeing what the business drivers areTelling the users what they can and can’t doContinuous Improvement Continually improving the processes in placeProcess:Systems to enforce Governance PlansManualRegular checks on randomSite content, Audit Logs, Managed Metadata Term Stores, My Site contentKeeping manual records of ownership of Sites and ContentBenefitsBetter than no enforcementProblemsHuge overhead on individualsSlow turn around timesBottlenecksLack of business agilitySemi-automatedHardening what Users can do through permissionsCustom Site Provisioning workflowsCustom Site TemplatesBenefitsIT outside of processBetter visibility and control for UsersProblemsNeeds more training and investment in processesBetter turnaround timesAutomatedMonitoring of SharePoint UsageFull blown Site ProvisioningTransferring of ownershipBenefitsIT outside of processBusiness agilityEnforces to policiesWorkflow, delegation and auditingAbility to reportProblemsNeed deep technology knowledgeTechnology:Can’t create policies unless you can enforce themTechnical limitations SLAs Complexity of building Platform built in particular way
• #17: Not all SharePoint Governance is treated equal and depending on the workload of content the balance between stricter management and control varies. [CLICK]This typically is dependent on the workloads and their visibility, for example, the Intranet Portal will be consumed by every employee in the organisation and therefore will be tightly managed and controlled and have stricter governance policies.[CLICK]Content workloads such as My Sites, which are contributed to by individual owners and shared with their peers will have looser controls and fewer governance policies.
• #18: The “People” in SharePoint Governance are not just from IT but from people throughout the organisation.Governance CommitteeExecutivesBusiness OwnersIT RepresentativesLegalRecords ManagementCorporate CommunicationsHuman ResourcesThey each have their own business requirements & agendas within the organisation and are allocated roles and responsibilities to ensure that the SharePoint platform is aligned to these.
• #19: AtAvePoint, we have spoken to our existing customer base and looked at the SharePoint Governance plans that have been put in place. A key driver for defining policies is to set the expectations between I.T. and the business on how SharePoint will be run as a Service to the organisation.We typically see that the policies within these plans fall into these 9 policy categories. Most organisations Governance plans will always have policies focused on Infrastructure and Operations as these are close to I.T. teams needs and costs. These will include service level agreements, storage costs and disaster recovery policies.[CLICK]Another focus area will be around Information Architecture due to the concerns within the business on accountability, restrictions and discoverability.[CLICK]Information Management is often neglected due to the Information Managers not involved in defining the policies and is often reactive due to organisational records management policies around disposition and legal holds.[CLICK]SharePoint is a series of ongoing projects with an organisation as new initiatives get introduced into service such as Intranets, Extranets or Collaboration services. Each of these requires project management and policies should be put in place defining how these initiatives are conducted to set expectations. Each project will involve following policies around communication plans, release coordination and business prioritisation.[CLICK]Many organisations understand the organic growth of SharePoint and will encourage leadership to be present from day one. This will include the forming of a Governance Board along with ensuring that there be policies that align the SharePoint Governance plan with the IT Governance Plan and Corporate Governance Plan strategic objectives, values and vision for the organisation.[CLICK]To many, SharePoint is a platform that can be customised to the organisations needs. It is important that policies be put in place to set the expectation on the level of customisation allowed within each workload of SharePoint.[CLICK]Adoption is a key factor that should be measured to enforce the return on investment of SharePoint as a Service back to the organisation and policies are typically put in place to define how adoption will be measured and ensure that this be taken into account by all workloads within SharePoint.[CLICK]Continuous improvement is critical to the success of system that is formed within an organisation. Having measurable outcomes that can be revisited at certain checkpoints throughout the year ensure that all policies are revisited and tweaked to improve the system for the future.
• #20: It is one thing to define policies for your governance plan, but it is key to have a process in place to enforce these. At AvePoint we see different levels of process being executed.Some organisations have manual processes in place that rely on encouraging users to do the right thing. We all know that users will do what they like in most cases and there is a higher risk associated with not complying to policy. To lower the risk of not complying, some controls can be put in place to prevent users from doing the wrong thing but this can often be resource intensive. In some cases, there is not the ability to control SharePoint based on the policy you may be trying to enforce.[CLICK]To reduce the resource intensity we see organisations leveraging PowerShell to semi-automate switching on these controls in bulk. Our customers leverage our platform to do this via the DocAve 6 user interface or via the APIs. Where these controls cannot be put in place out of the box in SharePoint, organisations leverage products, such as DocAve 6, that report on non compliant content after the fact that can be reactively dealt with to comply to policies.[CLICK]In more mature organisations, we see them building out custom applications that proactively put controls around SharePoint to guide users to do the right thing and typically take away the right to do these directly from within SharePoint.[CLICK]We had lots of requests from customers to reduce their custom code gap and these customers often heard from other organisations with SharePoint that they were also building out similar apps. The pressure was on us to build a product to replace these custom apps and let all our customers benefit from the functionality we were seeing.
• #21: How organisations are presenting SharePoint as a serviceSeveral of the key services presented to business usersBest practices for measuring adoption and return on investmentIncorporating guidance for optimised information architecture
• #30: How organizations are presenting SharePoint as a serviceSeveral of the key services presented to business usersBest practices for measuring adoption and return on investmentIncorporating guidance for optimized information architecture
• #37: One of the largest concerns with content in SharePoint is accountability, with Governance Automation we have come up with a solution.[CLICK]When a site collection, or site, is provisioned via a service request we have a concept of a site lease that is attached based on the policy of the site selected. The lease for a Gold policy may be 2 years, whereas a lease for a Bronze non-business critical site may be 6 months.[CLICK]On the expiration of the lease, the accountable business contact will be notified and asked to either renew the lease or choose to delete or archive the site.[CLICK]We know that users often make the wrong decision, so rather than deleting or archiving immediately…we look the site for a set period of time, based on policy and then act on it after that period.[CLICK]We all know that some business contacts will just keep clicking renew the lease. If you have a chargeback model in place, this will have an associated cost.If you do not have a chargeback model, we can also check activity on the site. If the site has not been accessed for 6 months, again policy driven, we will notify the accountable business contact and make them decide to either keep the site, archive it or delete it.[CLICK]During the lifecycle of a site, often the accountability gets transferred. So Governance Automation has the ability to change this.[CLICK]We also know that business criticality of content changes over its lifecycle too and the policy can be changed from Gold to Bronze to both save the business unit being charged for the service money and also I.T. in the management and operation costs involved.[CLICK]This can also be the case for the classification of the site too. Maybe it was originally classified as a Project site collection in the Medium size group, but now has become a Enterprise size group classification.[CLICK]We also know that some users are proactive and give the ability to request a site be deleted or archived based on policy.