At Perficient, we view governance as a critical piece of a portal implementation. We often recommend building out your governance model early in a portal project to avoid many of the pitfalls that we see when governance is an afterthought. In fact, we have been brought into many clients to help fix a poor portal implementation, and quickly identify lack of good governance as a key contributor to that project’s problems.
But there is a pretty strong dichotomy in the portal & collobartion industry as to what governance actually means:
- In the SharePoint world, governance most often refers to the tasks of managing the environment.
- In the Java world, governance most often means organizational structures that can define roles and responsibilities and provide prioritization of projects
MicroSoft provides a SharePoint Governance Checklist Guide that is clearly more focused on implementing infrastructure tools to manage the SharePoint servers. I call this Operational Governance. While their guidelines do include some organizational aspects, the underlying tone of most SharePoint Governance recommendations involve operating the platform correctly. Here are some quick guidelines from Microsoft’s checklist:
- Consistency of platforms, browsers, search
- Manage as centrally as possible with a tight team
- Have a killer backup strategy
- Provide training and education to end users
- Have a Governance and Information Management Plan (i.e. Branding, taxonomy are right in master pages)
- Enforce workflows and approval and leverage versions
- Manage site collections life cycle
- Properly secure assets
- Develop a corporate browse and search policy
- Implement development and test environments
In the Java world, we have defined a Portal Governance model that is much more focused on organizational aspects of governance. Originally developed at Perficient by Jim Hertzfeld and extended over time, our model defines the corporate structure needed to successfully implement complex portal projects over time. I call this Organizational Governance. Perficient’s Mike Porter recently spoke at Lotusphere about Portal Governance. You can view his slide presentation titled Using Portal Governance to Create a Better Web Experience. I have produced a key chart to the right that shows the Governance Framework we typically talk about. 
So why are there two different sets of ideas for the term Governance – Operational vs Organizational? My opinion is that early on the Java-based Portals were used to integrate data and applications from a broad spectrum of areas within a corporation, such as Finance, HR, Sales, Production, etc. This integration led to arguments over who was responsible for Portal as each department had competing interests. The natural response to this is to set up a governance structure to manage the organizational aspects so priorities can be set correctly.
In most SharePoint implementations, they set up team and department sites and for the most part, content could be added to SharePoint without affecting other departments. However, when the content starts to bog down performance or the vast number of sites becomes unmanageable, the natural response is to set up operational governance to cope with managing the infrastructure.
I’m seeing signs of a convergence of these two distinct uses of the term Governance. As the use of SharePoint to implement Web Parts grows and complicates the organizational aspects of governance, I’m starting to see Sharepoint-focused companies develop guidelines for the Organizational Governance model.
However, I think our Portal Governance model can be used broadly across both SharePoint and the Java-based Portals. When you look at the framework shown in the picture it is pretty comprehensive and not at all vendor specific.
