Community

• Blogs
  • Expert Blogs
  • Community Blogs
  • Create a Blog Entry
• Discussions
  • Start a Discussion
• Job Center
• Chapters

Does SharePoint Cause Information Management Problems?

• 
• 
• 
• 

I recently read an interesting discussion on this subject and wanted to share some thoughts.   SharePoint as an application should provide better capabilities around administration AND information governance. 2010 is better but more out of the box functionality is needed.  As a result, organizations need to spend the additional money on 3rd party solutions for admin/security/governance — which, in my opinion, is a necessity, not a “nice-to-have”. However, tight times and tight budgets haven’t helped the situation. As a result we see alot of out of the box vanilla SharePoint deployments whose main use is a glorified fileshare. While that hasn’t been a bad thing — the simple fact that users can easily share documents (vs emailing them) has created a “Shareplosion” in many organizations — which further adds to the problem. Combine all that with a lack of information architecture, lack of internal marketing and little if any end user education— you have an “information mess”.

Perhaps AIIM might consider rethinking the term “information management” and rebrand it as “Information Governance”.  Maybe IT will spend more time and/or money on planning SharePoint with the right governance.  Good governance will empower users, make them more productive, help them find information better, and allow the business to create solutions that actually improve project management, collaboration, & business processes — way beyond simple sharing of documents.  Governance is all about — user adoption and empowerment being a direct correlation to IT’s ability to administer, govern, deploy, and support a stable application.  Governance is about BALANCE — balancing IT control against user empowerment to ensure security and foster adoption. And it’s not just “governance of the application” — it’s also about governance of the information. 

Comments

Submitted by Rudiger Wolf August 06, 2010 - 9:06 AM

Do you have any tips to sources of information that help one create and setup the right “Information Governance” for a SharePoint2010 implementation?
It seems that this is so important and SharePoint2010 has its specific interpretation of ECM technology that there must be a book out there called "How to create Information Governance for SharePoint 2010".

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

Reply

Subject  

Comment  

Submitted by Bert Sandie August 09, 2010 - 11:12 PM

Depending on the company and the types of data they deal with on a day-to-day basis there is a wide spectrum on what needs to be governed.

Rich what are you referring to when you say better governance?

My experiences are that if every piece of data is attached to a social/user profile and there is no ability for anonymous contributions/edits then the need for governance goes way down. There is still a need for security but SP provides more than adequate functionality for this.

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

Reply

Subject  

Comment  

Submitted by Rich Blank August 10, 2010 - 11:31 PM

Very interesting comments and a very timely topic for me. I have heard it from several clients in just the past week -- they have consulting firms developing and implementing platforms like SharePoint or related ECM technologies....but they all have a void with information architecture / governance.

The challenge is exactly what Bert describes. You have more structured content combined with unstructured (perhaps more "social") content ... and the combination and integration of data. And I think you need to separate governance of knowledge vs. governance of information. They are related of course but there are differences.

When it comes to knowledge -- traditional KM tried to codify everything which was just unnatural and too hard for users. Why? Simply because we are social animals and knowledge tends to be in our heads. You don't want to make it hard for users to create, collaborate, share, innovate... Yet you want to somehow capture what's between our ears in all the great web 2.0 tools now available. And that social and tacit knowledge still requires some type of folksonomy. At the same time, you need to have a platform that enables users to find, browse, and filter all types of content (rich media, documents, etc..) ....which requires some type of information governance and taxonomy.

I wish there was a more "defined" definition of information governance as a concept or a goto book on the subject. With something like SharePoint or other similar all-encompassing platforms, information governance MUST incorporate SITES, PEOPLE, and CONTENT....at least at a high level...and the CONTENT might need to be further broken down into specific buckets (more relevant to your organization).

I'm planning on writing a blog post on setting up the right information governance in the near future. Stay tuned...

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

Reply

Subject  

Comment  

This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International