Innovation and Governance in Virginia Beach (#SPSVB)

Joining my fellow speakers and participants of the 6th annual SharePoint Saturday in Virginia Beach, Virginia, I started out the morning with a 100-level and *very* snarky/sarcastic session about killing innovation in SharePoint, which seemed to go over pretty well. It’s intended to be light and funny, but at the same time informative about the leading ways in which people sabotage their SharePoint deployments. I have not yet uploaded the content to SlideShare, as I’ll be giving the same session to the SharePoint Saturday Stockholm audience on Jan 25th, after which I’ll share online.

Directly following this session, I stayed up on the main stage to give a second session – this time with my serious face on – talking about the governance gaps when moving SharePoint beyond the on premises world into social, cloud-based platforms and storage, and even talked briefly about the governance impacts of mobile platforms. You can see my slides below (although without my background stories and witty remarks).

I have several, fairly consistent themes when I talk about governance as it pertains to your social, mobile and cloud strategies, but really dug into three today:

1. Go in with your eyes open. Move beyond the often overly enthusiastic marketing and understand what these solutions can and cannot do, so that you can may your requirements to their capabilities and make the right decisions.
2. Focus on the people and culture. If you want your enterprise platform, whatever it is, to be successful, you must build with your user experience and corporate culture in mind. You can have the most technically perfect system in the world, and if nobody uses it – you have failed.
3. Know your constraints. Understand and document the hard-and-fast rules that your system must comply with, including monthly auditing, roles and permissions, storage policies and procedures, and other security requirements. Capture your information architecture, as well, so that as you make decisions, you can get a better handle on the potential impacts to your system.

I’ll continue to talk and write about governance. I’ve been doing so since long before SharePoint existing, and will take my perspective into whatever other technologies I represent – but it is system critical for SharePoint.

[By the way, if you’re in the Washington DC area and missed the SPS Virginia Beach event, don’t worry – you have a ton of community activities around you. Check out the latest post by Dan Usher (@binarybrewery) with links to the various DC-based user groups.]