More organizations are starting to realize the importance of having a solid SharePoint governance policy in place. As such, it is becoming more common for them to invest a significant amount of time and resources into making sure that their SharePoint governance documents thoroughly address their organizations' needs.
But whenever you put a lot of time and money into a project, it becomes just a matter of time before someone asks whether or not the project was worth the investment.
Quantifying the success of your SharePoint governance policy is not an easy task, but it has an important purpose. Even before the current economic downturn, many organizations thought of their IT departments as an expense rather than an asset.
With companies laying off employees
in record numbers, it's a bad thing
when any employee is not considered
to be an asset. Although you may not
be able to completely shed this unfair
image of IT, you definitely don't want
to draw attention to the department
by making bad business decisions.
When someone from top management
asks you why 200 man-hours
and $5,000 in legal costs went into
producing a SharePoint governance
document, you had better have a
good answer.
So how do you justify the resources that went into producing your SharePoint governance document? And
how can you quantify your governance
policy's success? There are no
easy answers, but there are several
angles that you may be able to use
with senior management.
Regulatory compliance
If your
organization is subject to any of the
various federal regulations pertaining
to information management, then
defending your SharePoint governance
plan is easy. Just make sure
that the document addresses regulatory
issues. You can use the argument
that you did what was required by
law. Enough said.
Legal protection
SharePoint governance
plans often include an acceptable
use policy. Having such a policy
in place may offer you...
To continue reading for free, register below or login
To read more you must become a member of SearchWinIT.com
r company a
degree of legal protection if an
employee were to upload something
illegal to a document library. You may
be able to make the argument that
the fines and legal fees associated
with getting caught with illegal material
would far outweigh the cost of
creating a governance document.
Fewer help desk calls
If your goal
is to be able to quantify the success of your governance plan by comparing
the cost of producing a SharePoint
governance document against the
return on investment, then the best
place to start may be at your organization's
help desk.
A governance policy typically dictates
the acceptable use of SharePoint resources, and it usually
requires employees to use document
libraries in a uniform, specified manner.
Once employees begin to interact
with SharePoint in a uniform manner
that is proven to work, you may see a
decrease in help desk calls.
Various research firms have produced
estimates as to how much
each help desk call ultimately costs
an organization in terms of resources
used, lost productivity and things like
that. You may be able to use these
figures to justify the costs that went
into producing the SharePoint governance
document. Even if the reduction
in the number of help desk calls
hasn't offset the cost of the governance
document, you may be able to
show evidence of substantial savings
over the long term.
Better use of resources
A SharePoint governance policy typically
states what the SharePoint servers
can and cannot be used for. Because
a server has a finite amount of disk
space and CPU power, such a policy
can help ensure that the server is
being used in the intended manner.
This can save an organization money
in the long run because using server
resources responsibly adds time to its
useful life and keeps you from having
to upgrade or replace the server as
soon.
Continuity of business
Although
most medium-sized and large businesses
have a disaster recovery policy
that addresses continuity of business,
SharePoint-specific disaster recovery
procedures can and should be documented
as well. SharePoint document
libraries often contain critical data,
and there is a cost associated with
losing that data or with the server
being down for an extended period of
time. You may be able to justify the
costs of creating a governance document
by explaining that the document
creation process forced the IT
department to develop detailed contingency
plans that will save the company
money if a disaster ever strikes.
In a lot of ways, the justification for
a governance document is a lot like
the justification behind implementing
SharePoint in the first place. If your
organization is using SharePoint, you
must have had some good reasons
for employing it. If those rationales
worked before, they will probably
work now.
Maybe your organization needed
a good content management tool, or
maybe it needed individual departments
to be able to create websites
on the fly. Whatever the reason,
somebody used it as a justification
for implementing SharePoint.
You may be able to use similar
reasoning to justify your SharePoint
governance document.
For instance, you might be able to
say that the organization invested a
lot of money in a SharePoint deployment
in order to accomplish a specific
goal. Your governance document ensures
that you remain focused on that
goal, and it will prevent your SharePoint resources from being squandered
on unimportant projects.
A SharePoint governance document
probably will not contribute directly
to a company's bottom line, so try to
focus on areas in which having the
document helps to save costs. You
may also be able to focus on ways
the document may be able to insulate
the organization from the fallout from
various legal situations. Ultimately,
it can be really tough to quantify the
results of your SharePoint governance
policy, so you may have to get creative.
In the end, it will be worth the
effort.
[IMAGE] Brien M. Posey, MCSE, has received Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional Award four times for his work with Windows Server, IIS and Exchange Server. He has served as CIO for a nationwide chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities, and was once a network administrator for Fort Knox. You can visit his personal Web site at www.brienposey.com.
