4 factors critical to good governance in a digital workplace
July 27, 2011 at 8:52 am | Posted in application, benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, governance, intranet, mark morrell ltd, news, plan, standards, strategy, value, web accessibility | 2 CommentsTags: benefit, best practice, digital workplace, governance, intranet, Mark Morrell, publishing, standards, strategy, usability, users, value
In my last four posts on the digital workplace I have covered ‘Must have digital workplace principles’, ‘5 steps to a great digital workplace strategy’, 7 ways to engage people in a digital workplace and lastly ‘Create a brilliant digital workplace with me’.
To have a successful digital workplace (my definition is ‘work is what you do, not where you go to’) organisations must have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It becomes the natural way of working so everyone is more productive and your organisation more efficient with:
- people work from any location as well as their office workstation
- IT infrastructure for the same or similar experience
- everyone can read news, collaborate, search and complete tasks
- individuals choosing tools – RSS, mobile, etc. – that help them
- organisations measure benefits and encourages digital workplace
Follow these ‘must have’ principles including strategy, engagement, governance, HR policies and IT infrastructure and you will have a great digital workplace.
Governance
It is important the whole of the digital workplace is managed so that it brings benefits to the organisation, individuals and collectively, everyone. It should mean the feeling that ‘things are better’ permeates through to everyone and encourages even greater use of the digital workplace.
It means the level of governance balances the rewards to be gained while avoiding any risks. That doesn’t come naturally but through good governance of the digital workplace including:
Ownership
Who is responsible for developing the strategy, implementing the digital workplace and ongoing management of it? It is difficult for one person to have overall responsibility for so many key roles and activities. Neither is it best for it to be one person.
The best solution is to have a steering group made up of stakeholders from key parts of the business most affected by the digital workplace. These stakeholders should be senior people with decision making authority not someone who has to refer back to his/her line manager and delay matters.
There may be dedicated roles for people responsible for collaboration, ways of working, etc, but they should ultimately report in to the steering group.
The worse solution is to have competing groups of people each implementing conflicting standards, designs and ways to use the digital workplace. That will be a disaster and must be avoided!
Consistency
You really need a consistent level of governance across your digital workplace. By consistent I don’t mean the same. I mean it is what everyone using the digital workplace would expect or need.
For publishers/site owners who are publishing in the digital workplace accredited types of content (policies, factual stuff) the expectation is for a more rigorous approach than for collaborative content where opinions and views require a lighter touch.
For people using the digital workplace to view information and news, use workflow applications or collaborate with each other, they expect the look and feel of the digital workplace to be similar. Tools needs to be branded in line with the business’ colours and designs. Features need to encourages everyone to use them more such as help links, contact points, easily laid out and functional designs.
All the different parts of the digital workplace need to be integrated so they are seen as one whole entity not a different set of silos, resources with some electronic sticking plaster added to make them look as if they are connected when they don’t give that impression to anyone using them.
Standards
One approach is to have a set of standards based on the needs of the organisation (information retention), regulation (who has permission to see what), legal (web accessibility) and technical (DNS policy). These can be applied appropriately across the digital workplace for each activity. So for formal type content (policies and procedures) it’s most likely all the standards will apply. For applications (HR processes) it’s probable that most will apply too. But for collaboration you will apply a lighter touch.
Alternatively you can create standards that only apply to certain information and applications to meet the purpose people need to use it for.
It is about getting the balance right again. You don’t need to be too restrictive and stifle innovation and collaboration. But you don’t want it to be too loose so that the business and individuals risk non-compliance with a legal or regulatory requirements. It’s not easy but getting it right is critical and benefits everyone and the business.
Integrity
This is the real litmus test, the crunch point for me. Do people have confidence in the information and tools they are using in the digital workplace? Does everyone feel encouraged to use the digital workplace more after each time?
The answer has to be ‘YES!’ to these questions. That is the outcome your strategy and plans should aim for.
However you do this it must balance the needs of the business with those of people working well in a digital workplace.
My next post will cover the HR policies which enable digital working.
The difference with SharePoint 2010 content
April 20, 2011 at 11:42 am | Posted in collaboration, engagement, intranet, publishing, SharePoint 2010, standards, value | 3 CommentsTags: collaboration, content, engagement, governance, publishing, sharepoint 2010, standards, users
In my last post ‘It’s how you use SharePoint 2010 that decides the value it brings 2’ I covered how vital it is to set the right level of permissions for people using the information published.
In this post I will show how people can distinguish different types of content in SP2010. The value to be gained by your organisation can vary tremendously depending on how you achieve this.
You can break SP2010 published content in to two types:
Accredited
Accredited content is official, authoritative, reliable & up to date. People will able to trust it, use it with confidence, knowing it is current and relevant. It is usually information that has a large audience. A limited number of people can edit the information, with access controlled by permissions. Usually one person will have clear ownership.
Collaborative
Collaborative content can be owned by everyone, an individual or community. It can be open to anyone to contribute or comment upon the information. It can be an opinion expressed on a blog posting or a wiki article for others to contribute to and improve further.
Branding
The best way is to brand the content types differently.
SP2010 ‘out of the box’ functionality is good enough for most people publishing and viewing content. So, you can use this for your collaborative content.
Customising the SP2010 masterpages with your corporate branding for accredited content will show clearly the difference from what is ‘out of the box’.
To keep costs down design the branding so that it is minimal – enough to make a difference so people spot it when they use the content – but easy to maintain the masterpages.
With SP2010 you can have a page published with both types of content shown on it. This is because you have different webparts – sections of the page – that can be inserted by the publisher.
You need to consider very carefully if you need to extend the customising to each webpart. The costs and maintainability will increase greatly. It is best to test out with a sample of people what is needed, if anything, so they can distinguish accredited from collaborative content in each webpart.
As with any planned changes, test as early as you can with a sample of people, act on their feedback, be flexible in what the final versions could look like.
That will give you the greatest chance of success of maximising the value your organisation can gain from using SharePoint 2010.
It’s how you use SharePoint 2010 that decides the value it brings
April 7, 2011 at 10:00 am | Posted in best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, SharePoint 2010, value | 7 CommentsTags: best practice, governance, publishing, sharepoint 2010, value
My post on ‘Measuring the value SharePoint 2010 can bring to your organisation’ caused a few comments, for example, Stephen Arnold posted ‘SharePoint: The new black?‘ and an intranet professional said ’I'm struggling to find the value I expected, at least obvious enough to sell to management’.
The real lesson you must learn is IT IS HOW YOUR ORGANISATION USES SP2010 THAT WILL DECIDE WHAT VALUE IT BRINGS.
Like any other technology SP2010 can do lots of things well, or not so well. That’s mainly down to how you implement, manage and use it.
As part of your SP2010 strategy you need to get the governance right for your organisation – restricted if you are highly regulated, looser if you are creative and innovative - for publishing and for accessing and using the information.
Setting the right level of permissions for people publishing and using SP2010 is critical to the value it can bring to your organisation
Publishing permissions
What level of control do you want to have centrally? What level of control do you want publishers to have?
I know of two organisations of similar size (100,000+ people) that have decided on who should be site collection administrators. One organisation has less than five while the other has made everyone who publishes a site collection administrator. Both may be right but that is a big, big, difference! For me this is the key role for SP2010 publishing. Much to my surprise I could not find a role description on Microsoft’s site but it should include:
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Advising users how to access and use SharePoint, granting or removing access to the Site Collection
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Regularly reviewing the content published for best practice.
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Logging service faults and dealing with day-to-day enquiries from site users.
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Agreeing and implementing the structure and access control permissions required for sites, lists, and document libraries.
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Referring users to relevant documentation and support processes.
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Helping users understand how they should use it appropriately.
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Making sure relevant policies, such as information security and information retention, are understood and followed by users.
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Making sure users have the necessary skills to use the Site Collection.
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Making sure that the Site Collection is renewed or deleted by actioning the site expiry messages.
You must be very careful about who you give site collection administrator rights to. There are other levels of permission you can give publishers to create pages and sub-sites, edit content or just read only for some parts of the site collection without making them site collection administrators.
There are good reasons for making people site collection administrators. It cuts down on the central administration, training, awareness and education if a lot of this is done at site collection level.
It is vital you have a long term strategy if you are planning to use SP2010 in a big way. This may involve using SP2010 for collaboration, document management, content management, etc.
It may be right to give site collection administrator rights to encourage collaboration and innovation by removing any unnecessary barriers that prevent this happening. But you really want tighter management of the corporate memory in documents with an audit trail and limit permssion rights to a few.
How you get the balance right and assign different levels of permission to MySite, TeamSites and MyProfile is critical to whether SP2010 brings the value your organisation expects or not.
In my next post I will cover the value to be gained by setting the right level of permissions for people using the information published.
How to encourage SharePoint 2010 best practice
January 18, 2011 at 9:51 am | Posted in best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, SharePoint 2010, strategy | 9 CommentsTags: best practice, bt intranet, governance, publishing, sharepoint 2010
In my last two posts I have covered how ‘SharePoint 2010 governance strategy in action’ has to be very different to other publishing or collaborative tools and the ‘Strategic benefits and drawbacks of SharePoint 2010′ of restricting use.
I will now cover the benefits and drawbacks of encouraging best practice of key SP2010 features such as SP Designer and site administration rights.
Benefits
- You inform people of all the benefits to be gained.
- You train people to use the right tools.
- You design a registration process to direct people to the right tools.
- You point them to guidance on how to follow best practice.
- You encourage innovation by giving them freedom of use.
Drawbacks
- You can’t prevent people using different tools to those you recommend.
- You risk confusing people using content unsure of its integrity.
- You can’t prevent people ignoring best practice when publishing.
- You may make it difficult for people to share knowledge effectively.
- Your governance model may be ineffective and need improving.
Getting the balance right between encouraging best practice and having some governance to deter behaviour which can destroy the value from using SP2010.
Again, I’d really like to hear about firsthand experiences dealing with these points/decisions and what tradeoffs you had to make. More about how to prevent problems happening in the first place in my next post.
Make a great user experience even better
September 28, 2010 at 1:03 pm | Posted in benchmark, best practice, governance, intranet, plan, research, standards | 2 CommentsTags: benchmark, bt intranet, governance, publishing, research, users
I have been invited to speak at the latest IntraTeam conference. It will cover how you create value through great intranet design and usage. Your well-functioning intranet can be the base for developing new ideas and improving your working relationships.
I have been asked to talk about how to ‘Make a great user experience even better’. I will cover:
I’m really looking forward to hearing from some great speakers on intranets. If you can’t make it, you can find my slides here.
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