SharePoint Governance Is Data Governance

From Platform to Principles

Each platform and vertical industry “hires its own.” SAP teams want SAP people. Healthcare teams want healthcare experts. Salesforce teams look for SalesForce developers. Banks look for financial services people. It’s the way of the workplace.

SharePoint is no exception. Being a “SharePoint person” conveys membership in a deep-dive community of technical expertise that speaks its own language, from farms and site collections to Designer workflows and PowerShell scripts.

Being a “data governance person” is new. The discipline hasn’t been around very long, and most “data governance experts” emerged from whatever platform needed governing at the time. And the older a SharePoint deployment is, the more likely its “SharePoint governance” is to be focused on document and content management, for the simple reason that SharePoint began its life in the digital workplace as a web-based file share, and in many cases it continues to be one.

SharePoint isn’t a platform where most people expect to find a data governance expert. And yet SharePoint governance is a great exemplar of data governance, for three reasons:

1. Microsoft and the SharePoint community have done a great job communicating the importance of governance, so that when you go to a SharePoint Saturday or a SharePoint conference, it is an in-joke that “you can’t talk about SharePoint without mentioning governance.” Can’t beat the awareness there.
2. Governing SharePoint gives hands-on experience in every aspect of data governance, from the obvious to the not-so-obvious, as we’ll see below.
3. Effective data governance demands collaboration—not the technology, but the practice of negotiating and communicating among stakeholders that becomes second nature to every SharePoint governance lead. “Repeat after me. You have to Share. That’s the Point.”

The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management defines Data Governance as “The exercise of authority, control and shared decision making (planning, monitoring and enforcement) over the management of data assets.”  DAMA has identified 10 major functions of Data Management in the DAMA-DMBOK (Data Management Body of Knowledge).

So, how is SharePoint governance really data governance? What functional principles can we see in the platform? Let’s walk it through.

The Obvious

The most obvious data governance for SharePoint is the farm administration involved with Database Operations Management. Most data governance teams would recognize the infrastructure governance tasks involved in content database deployment, database backup and restore, database-attach upgrade, and disaster recovery. Ensuring that these operations function smoothly is essential to data governance. A truly great operations team is self-governing in this regard, whether it’s the offshore admins working 24/7 shifts or the busier-than-a-one-armed-paperhanger “SharePoint dude” (or dudette) who’s running three Central Admin farms with one hand and migrating entire site collections with the other.

Think SharePoint, and you think of Document and Content Management. Managing document libraries and web pages is the most basic form of data governance, so much so that many data governance plans explicitly focus on “structured data” and exclude unstructured content. Which is a shame, because more and more data is becoming more and more unstructured, both in documents as data models and as snapshot report extracts for ad hoc analysis. For some data governance stewards, the mere mention of such practices evokes a reflexive response. “Well, that’s not governance.” Somehow, data management in documents, or even managing documents as data, has become the antithesis of governance. (It might be useful to ask, “why not?”)

User access and permissions is another obvious area for SharePoint in Data Security Management. Here again, many data governance plans define collaboration and knowledge sharing sites as open areas for information management, and may either govern by exclusion (financial records may not be posted to intranet portals) or by location (all financial records will be stored in SAP). SharePoint’s flexibility and granularity of permissions can tilt data security management quite far toward the front office, and well beyond the comfort zones of enterprise CISOs. Effective SharePoint governance requires (and supports) strong enterprise controls on information and data security, and these can be implemented with the same level of attention and investment one would expect of any enterprise platform.

In SharePoint, Data Development is an organic process that touches content development, content organization with folder structures and metadata tags, coauthoring and versioning, data collection and analysis, review and approval, publishing, and iteration. Often, the concept of data development arises only when a team is preparing to share their work with others and begins to focus on presentation and communication. Data development in SharePoint is paradoxically obvious (it’s everywhere, adding content and data is what people do with the platform) and not-so-obvious, as it’s not nearly as structured as data developers on other platforms may expect.

The Not-So-Obvious

Data governance teams familiar with ERDs and data dictionaries might not as readily recognize site collection and site structures as Data Architecture Management. However, SharePoint has a clearly defined and well-structured hierarchy of data structures, so much so that they can be easily taught to business users. Defining some basic mappings of data structures to business domain objects can be a pattern map for a business-driven logical architecture: one site collection per department, one site per project, one library per fiscal quarter, &c. SharePoint architects have to be good data architects, working with levels of structural granularity from the content database to the list field and everything in between.

Those in the know about SharePoint will associate Metadata Management with the Managed Metadata Service, as well they should. Governing a MMS term store with multiple business taxonomy owners and both enterprise and site-level term sets is an exercise in cat-herding that will have most data governance teams reaching for their data dictionaries. But the real taxonomists will dive deep into the business ontology of business-created Site Columns and List Columns. These Choice, Lookup, Person, Date, and Calculated fields are where business users can (and do) extend data models on the fly. Set some alerts on the most active sites, then watch and learn where your business is evolving, and where your governance teams can do some outreach on the fly too.

A simple change of column type (say, from text to date) or a Required field can restore Data Quality Management as quickly as it gets diluted by the fluidity of SharePoint data modeling. The adaptability of lists is one of the easiest ways to teach DQM to a business team, since they can tune their data quality requirements easily through the UI as site administrators. There may be no easier way to engage business users with their own data quality than to convert an unstructured Excel document to a SharePoint list with a source and target set of columns (text fields for the source and appropriate datatypes for the target), and invite the document owners (aka data stewards) to complete the mappings hands-on. You’ll have them clamoring for strongly typed data before they know what it is.

Column type changes can also be used to drive in-flight maturity and adoption of Reference and Master Data Management. Replacing a choice column in a list with a Managed Metadata column from the Enterprise Term Store is a simple way to communicate master data to business users without documentation or training. A content type from the Enterprise Content Type Hub can carry multiple columns of reference data directly into the UX layer, often making the adoption and master data change entirely transparent to business users.

Most people would reject the concept of a typical SharePoint farm as a repository for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Management. And yet, for many business users, their SharePoint site is their “document warehouse” and a searchable knowledgebase for the intelligence they need to do business. As data governance emerges from back-office ERP and CRM systems into the unstructured world of the front office “digital workplace,” SharePoint and Office 365 might start to look a lot more like the BI/DW of the future, especially if data integration and web parts can make it the UX to the Data Lakes of the Cloud.

Collaboration and Data Governance

“Many people are completely on-board with Data Governance – up to the point of working collaboratively across business units, where only roadblocks are envisioned.  Data Governance is definitely disruptive but in a positive way (if approached properly).  It does entail change – including organizational change (e.g., Data Governance Council, Data Stewardship Coordinating Committee, etc.).  We’re not talking about a guerrilla approach to Data Governance where some visionary, but under-authorized data architect tries to effect change using influencing skills!” (http://blogs.perficient.com/healthcare/blog/2012/06/12/data-governance-vs-data-management/

Funnily enough, that guerrilla approach is exactly where SharePoint governance shines, and where the next generation of data governance stewards must learn to shine too. Because Big Data has escaped the twin fortresses of ERP and CRM, and it’s headed to the cloud as fast as mobile developers can get it into their apps and business users can upload it to their OneDrives so they can play with it in Tableau or Spotfire. And the fastest way that data moves today is, more often than not, as a document in a SharePoint site, far beyond the reach of any enterprise data steward.

A “No, no, don’t touch” approach to enterprise data governance will starve a data warehouse as quickly as it bloats the SharePoint farm with Excel extracts. Business users trust data that they own, manage, and control, so that learning to share becomes the foundation of data governance.

Data governance needs to do more than say No. It needs to find acceptable ways to say Yes to the speed of business.

Data governance demands collaboration. And the SharePoint community has learned a critical lesson for driving collaborative change across business units: WIFM. What’s In It For Me? Only enlightened self-interest will prevail, and it will do so when (and only when) stakeholders engage each other directly for mutual gain. WIFM is a much more powerful driver of organizational change than any council or committee. Insofar as a Data Governance Council or Stewardship Committee can foster that sense of shared stewardship by discovering and communicating WIFM to its membership, that will be the measure of its success.

We need to Share. That’s the Point. It’s just good data governance.

Crossing the Chasm For Digital Business: A New Manifesto

Digital business. Digital marketing. Digital workplace. Digital innovation. Digital <insert noun> seems to be the Next Big Thing in the field formerly known as IT. Because it’s not IT anymore, it’s business. Or business is IT. Somehow it’s both of those things together. But how?

I’ve lived and worked in the business of IT for two decades, so “digital” feels a bit redundant. But I can smell change in the zeitgeist, even before Google Trends. So, six months ago, I took a Tess Vigeland-Style Leap out of a global IT innovation firm to follow my star as a business architect and digital workplace strategist. I reworked my personal brand as Digital Ecology Consulting, as a bridge between my two careers in environmental heritage stewardship and global IT strategy and operations.

Taking New Leaps For Global Change 

Right now, trying to find my next move in the digital workplace feels like being a polar bear tap-dancing on shifting ice floes. Ecologically, we’re confused, and it’s kind of scary. Huge pyramids of command-and-control enterprises are melting from below in clouds of contingent-workforce contractors and mobile entrepreneurs, even as global corporate platforms consume hot startups in volcanic eruptions of innovation. Rapidly automating hiring processes have left a lot of us marooned in an inbox fog of keyword alerts and recruiter calls. It can be hard to find a compass and chart a course, even if you know where your own true north lies.

Some Say the World Will End in Fire, Some In Ice

The world of IT as we know it, and as my generation of Boomer/GenXers built it, has come to the end of its road. Gartner suggests that business fire two-thirds of their IT departments. Why, and what’s next? The last six months of my career search suggest some of the chasms that people like me, with dual careers in business and in IT, need to cross to get to that new land of digital business in the cloud. We need a stairway to heaven. We need a manifesto.

Stairway to Heaven: Gartner Calls for a Digital Workplace Manifesto

This lady’s not sure that all that glitters is gold in this new digital realm. But Gartner, Inc. is a good place to start digging for thought leadership. According to Gartner, a business manifesto should be an essential tool in communicating the intentions and motives of the digital workplace.

“The core idea behind the digital workplace — boosting employee engagement and agility through a more consumerized work environment — can be hard to translate into tangible actions that are easily understood by the broader community.” — Gartner

Matthew W. Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, says that the core principles and desired outcomes of a digital workplace need to be explained in plain language. ”The manifesto is aspirational in nature and should inspire employees to take action.” Employers need to take action too.

The Future Masters of Technology Will Be Lighthearted and Agile

There’s a famous manifesto that guided software development for the new millennium. On February 11-13, 2001 in Utah, thought leaders in the emerging field of human-powered methodologies met to brainstorm a new approach to software. What emerged was the Agile Software Development Manifesto. It was an unabashedly “mushy,” values-driven approach, and its plain language changed the world. Fifteen years later, there is a familiar rallying cry for “organizational agility.” We need a new approach to business and to IT.

Today, we need alternatives to monolithic, IT-driven, heavyweight business development processes. It’s time for a new manifesto. It’s time to bridge the chasms of either/or with a balance of both/and. Here’s one polar bear’s call for solid ground. Because you know, sometimes words have two meanings.

Manifesto for Digital Business

We are evolving better ways of doing business by being human organizations and helping these organizations work with machines. Through this work we have come to value:

Business equally with Technology
Customers equally with Employees
Makers equally with Managers
Machine learning equally with Human Learning
Structured data  equally with Unstructured content
Synthesis equally with Analysis
Configuration equally with Custom code

That is, while future vision may be emerging from the items on the left, we work to respect and balance them with items on the right during times of rapid organizational and societal change.

©  CC BY-NC-ND 2015 • Lynn E. Noel, Digital Ecology Consulting

More detailed analysis of  Gartner recommendations are available in the Gartner report “Create a Business Manifesto for Digital Workplace Success.” This report is part of the Gartner Special Report “Boosting Workforce Effectiveness with a Digital Workplace.”

Where Do You Stand?

What do you balance for digital business? What’s your personal manifesto?