Controlling Collaboration Technology?

Organizations face a unique challenge when implementing SharePoint or any collaboration technology—how to encourage the viral, grass-roots participation and growth, yet keep it productive and not spiraling out of control.  By out of control, I mean things such as generating sites with no real business purpose, lack of consistent information architecture, duplication of sites, documents and many related issues.  Because a major component of the core of collaboration is people, there really is not a one-size fits all solution.

In a recent seminar where I spoke, one of the members of the audience commented “Our test pilot showed us that this (SharePoint) can be a real beast- the demand for sites is phenomenal but left to their own devices, they may not support the mission.”  He then asked “How do we tame this before we rollout in production?” The solution is in the creation of the governance plan—one that offers enough ability to keep the system manageable while it still encourages grass-roots growth.

The plan should fit your organization’s structure and must also understand the current culture.  One highlight of SharePoint is that doesn’t need IT to create and configure sites—that should be handled by the workgroups.  So, any governance plan needs to address both the IT governance that covers the technology issues, and what I call the ‘Organizational’ governance, which covers a wide assortment of issues from permissions and access levels to metadata, training, library structure, business processes and more.

Embarking on an implementation of collaboration technology without a governance plan puts an organization on a slippery slope. Take the time up front to create a plan—one that is flexible and will easily adapt to changes as needed.