Governance means many different things to many different people.

In a previous post I talked about there being three distinct flavours of Governance, and certainly within the SharePoint and Office 365 world, this holds true:

• IT Service Governance (How) – How your SharePoint farm is configured, back-up schedules, sizing etc
• Ongoing Information Governance (How & Who) – Maintenance of IA, Site provisioning, content retention etc
• Project Governance (What & Why) – The activities and processes used to ensure that the “SharePoint Project” delivers the right business outcomes

Let me give you some examples of why Governance isn’t working in typical organisations today:

• Lots of documentation (that no-one reads)
• Takes too much time from precious resources (your expensive SharePoint people)
• Costs too much to deliver properly (do we really need it?)
• Doesn’t deliver value for money (because its never fully completed).

I think it’s fair to say that in the past, although we all (I hope) know and accept that Governance, in all it’s forms, is absolutely critical to SharePoint (or Office 365) project success and ongoing delivery of business outcomes, we can almost never, hand-on-heart, say that our projects and the ongoing delivery of the technology was properly governed.

And what happens? Well we have all witnessed the aftermath of poor Governance, whether it’s failed back-ups, scalability issues, poor user adoption, the Celery Effect, a lack of ROI, inefficient site structure, not delivering business value, unhappy customers, spiralling costs, the list goes on…

In most cases the technology project (the thing with the Gantt chart and a project manager glued to it) was deemed a success, despite the problems that occurred during the project or will occur later. So where does that leave you, the ‘business stakeholder’ or the ’SharePoint guy’? Well it’s likely you’ll be fire-fighting the project and it’s legacy on many levels for the rest of it’s life, and why, because we don’t focus enough time, resources and attention on the project’s foundations, SharePoint Governance.

What if Governance as we know it ‘changed’?
What if our attitudes towards delivering governance became positive?
And what if the Governance value proposition actually became really compelling?

What if we rebooted SharePoint and Office 365 Governance, what would it become?

Just imagine a world, late in 2011, where Governance isn’t difficult any more, Governance documents don’t contain huge reams of paper, you haven’t hired more people into your organisation just to govern your SharePoint projects and you are financing your Governance activities in an economically compelling way?

In this new world, Governance has become ubiquitous, it’s embedded into your project culture, it’s delivering clear business value without you increasing your teams headcount and you’re paying for it monthly on a subscription basis.

Just think about what your SharePoint and Office 365 projects would be like in the future if you’ve subscribed to ‘Governance as a Service’ (GaaS) with on-line access to:

• Consultants with a wealth of project governance experience and Knowledge on-tap
• A proven methodology
• Effective tools
• Academically backed techniques.

With all these resources aligned to making sure your SharePoint and Office 365 projects deliver clear and measurable business outcomes…

What if you had access to ‘Governance as a Service’ 24*7, 365 days a year for a low-cost monthly subscription, how would that change your world and what value would that deliver to your customers?

21apps have Rebooted SharePoint and Office 365 Governance

21apps now offer ‘Governance as a Service’

If you think that your SharePoint and Office 365 projects could benefit from ‘Governance as a Service’ then sign-up for our GaaS Mailing List or get in touch with us now and find out how you can benefit from this new and unique service from 21apps.