As someone who is often asked to help plan and implement governance strategy for SharePoint I found the decisions surrounding governance shared by Mark Zuckerberg very interesting. SharePoint project managers should spend the couple of minutes to watch this cool video.
What I really like about the process implemented by the Facebook team is how they engaged the Facebook community. From my experience when organizations get the users and stakeholders involved as early as possible in a SharePoint deployment it can make a big difference in the technology adoption ratios.
Far to often I see entire governance plans submitted by consultants that contain only information that might be found in a service level agreement. (SLA) I am encouraged to see the Facebook team take a different approach.
Like SharePoint deployments, not all governance should be an IT initiative. The best deployments I have participated in succeeded because there were roles defined to engage business process owners and decision makers from the beginning.
When I am engaged with a client and assisting with governance I find it useful to think in terms of unified governance, similar to the SOA model. A unified governance plan will consist of the following sections.
- Planning
- Development
- Operations
I prefer to engage users of the system when considering each of theses sections of a unified governance plan. While some pieces of a governance document may not be appropriate to be decided by your community, many decisions might be decided easier with information from internal experts.
Imagine, deploying SharePoint, then emailing a governance document around instead of collaborating as a team using a team site. Learn from the Facebook team and use a community site to collaborate, vote and decide what makes the most sense for your organization. In some cases the community may be a large IT department, process owners, analyst and decision makers. For others it may be the entire organization.
Governance is an important consideration when deploying any encompassing system. Kudo’s to the Facebook team for getting this right for 250 million users!
Facebook Site Governance video with Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (Governance Document)
The end result is an AMAZING ongoing balance of community and corporate governance. Facebook Site Governance Page!
