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A good SharePoint corporate intranet site is concerned in many ways with empowering collaboration between employees and facilitating more effective internal communications.  It may also be about promoting better document management policies and procedures, and making people more effective in their respective positions by giving them easy to use tools that support these knowledge management policies.

So, What is Software Governance and Why is Governing a web-enabled environment Important to planning, designing, managing, and maintaining the SharePoint 2010 collection of web sites?

It's largely about creating a safe communications environment within which the organization has control over who sees what content (Internally Public Information vs. Private Data accessible to team members only) , who has access to edit that content, and how the information is structured and presented.

Effective governance anticipates the needs and goals of your organization's public serving Lines of Business, their internal IT teams, and other internal departments who provide services to those product driven lines of business.  When appointing members to a company-wide governing body or a set of smaller expertise based governance committees, You need to make the team members aware that the governance team was put in place to establish the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and the processes that Your Organization will need to execute within this business model to guide, direct, and control how Your organization uses SharePoint 2010 to more effectively accomplish its business goals.

Consider a Four-fold focus to define or identify:

1. Policies – defining specific policies reflecting decisions about rules and standards for your company's web environment.  For Example: File names should be topical and descriptive.  Generally, file names should not include dates or versions as those should be handled as separate metadata attributes owned and maintained  by the over-arching content management system.
2. People: Roles & Responsibilities - Authoring User Experience and Software Requirements spec documentation specifically describing how each employee as an individual or as a member of a particular role or group is responsible for ensuring success of the SharePoint solution.  For Example: Identify groups such as strategy team, tactical team, etc…
3. Process - Instructions describing how to execute processes.  For Example:: creating new sites, removing content and adding metadata attributes to the corporate taxonomy.
4. Technology – Site templates, available feature sets to be used, You need to determine how governance is built into the solution, and how future customizations will be addressed.  For Example: what features or non-standard uses are prohibited vs. other  prospective functional enhancements that are fair game for future 'to-be'  development efforts.

The SharePoint Governance Pyramid illustrates (see diagram previous post on IA and site structure below) How Governance levels differ dependent upon the nature of the content (for example) publishing and records management artifacts are tightly governed; while collaboration dept. and project team sites content is more looely controlled, and My Sites, (that will differ from other content areas If Enabled), in that they are governed by the end users themselves.  This parallels the notion of strict vs. flexible usage policies and doc storage and retention policies, for example: Records and Communications follow strict policies where Documents and 'Works In Progress' (or non-regulated team artifacts) follow medium to low policy and enforcement guidelines depending upon the nature of the content.

Best practices of web design and on-Line publishing Industry standards can help dictate the needs of a Collaboration portal that will be best supported by good information architecture and that 'IA' can be planned and further defined by the use of:

• a clean, clear, concise navigation system consisting of a horizontal global navigation bar displaying main menu or parent-level sites by category
• topical menus (drop-down items) containing site segments collected within a parent site
• landing page menus (supporting longer lists of Tier 2 Navigation items where necessary)
• localized content lists and sub-menus displaying links to Tier 3 content items in the left-hand margin.
• Additional Tier 3 and 4 links to deeper content distributed consistently through content and application links lists.

 (of course these UI Controls and the site structure that they govern will need to be tailored to the individual needs and contnet of an enterprise the size of Your company)

This logical site structure will be defined at a high-level by an Information architect as a ‘site map’ which must be provided to the governing body to be used as a guideline against which to measure proposed enhancements and future growth.

To be effective, a SharePoint Governing Body should encourage consistency in site design and usage by providing Site Owners with several pre-configured ‘site templates’ to choose from when provisioning a new site.

A base-lined feature set can be provided to those requesting a new SharePoint site via 'provisioning' or deployment of a new site based upon one of the following pre-designed site templates:

• Internal Communications or Publishing Site
• Department Team Site
• Project Team Site
• Community of Practice Site
• My Sites
• Meeting Workspaces

This is a best practice which provides a reproducible and easy-to-learn User Interface framework without ultimately limiting site diversity (because a site administrator can always go in and add additional features and custom work flows  on an as-needed basis wherever there is a valid business case for such functionality).

The Governing body must approve or deny approval of such customizations when they require some projected Level of development Effort from IT Operations beyond the site owner and administrator’s purview or capability.

Collaboration or Social Networking is a User Behavior associated with set of tools empowering employee to employee communications and User productivity; however, User Behavior must be monitored for appropriateness in such a direct communications based environment.

• The Governing body needs to enforce Your Organization's policies on User Access rights and security working directly with those technological resources responsible for the care and maintenance of Access rights via Active Directory and associated Global Address List.
• An export control procedure must be in place to verify and validate external partners and vendors before they can be granted access to the environment via AD, and even then the level of access provided must be limited to non-sensitive information. There should be an information sensitivity rating scale in place (example 1-5) whereby anything level 3 and above is for internal use only.
• Existing policy and security guidelines should be made available to the governing body to be included in the scope of their governing planning and enforcement.  Extranet or externally available resources should be audited form time to time to determine if internal resources, Personal Information, or PII are being inappropriately made public.

Executive Management must support adequate communications with regard to SP, socialization of the Benefits of SP, and training for SP Users in order for the platform to be successfully used within the desired Departmental business parameters set forth by the Strategic and Tactical governing sub-committees (is Your Organization getting enough of the desired & valid business uses out of the system, if not, then why?).