The relationship between a governance plan, and a successful implementation of Managed Metadata Services (MMS) for SharePoint can be said to be, to some extent, arbitrary. But merely to the point of allowing some flexibility with regard to how to address the challenge of determining which component (the governance plan, or MMS) must come first.
Otherwise, both components must be in place if an MMS program is to be successfully implemented for an organization. Chris McNulty demonstrates the relationship between these components in another video tutorial in his set on Managed Metadata and Enterprise Content Management. The title of this video tutorial is “Growth of Information Architecture”. The video tutorial is a little over 7 minutes in length.
The first indication of a governance plan in this tutorial appears when Chris mentions a very important “business rule” required to support any successful effort to implement MMS and produce an Enterprise Content Management solution with SharePoint. The rule amounts to an edict. Any/all information specific to the organization must be reposed in SharePoint. Any edicts about how information is to be handled, in my opinion, are components of a governance plan.
Chris next directly mentions “governance” as he describes the growth of the hypothetical organization featured in this tutorial. Governance, in this case, dictates the process by which departments, within the organization, will submit requests for SharePoint sites. Once again, the governance policy for the organization provides clear guidelines to the community of SharePoint users as to how SharePoint features, solutions, etc. are to be implemented.
While not mentioned in this tutorial, it’s nevertheless worth describing the importance of guidelines to control how users request SharePoint sites. Bottom line, this control provides SharePoint stakeholders with a method of controlling “SharePoint sprawl”. Without a clear policy on this point, users can simply put up sites whenever they feel the urge, which is certainly not a recommended approach.
The final example of the importance of governance in this tutorial has to do with managing semantic tasks, in other words, the recommended method of ensuring the same artifacts are not arbitrarily named from one SharePoint Library, to another. Certainly, as Chris illustrates in his example, taking the same term and spelling it with, and without a dash character can become a formidable obstacle to a truly useful search feature for a SharePoint farm. So stakeholders should use a governance plan to provide the community of SharePoint users with a clear naming convention for artifacts.
© Rehmani Consulting, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved