Employee-Driven Design: Part 7 — Governance

Governance refers to an organization’s living, breathing, decision making processes, not necessarily the actual decisions that are made. Specifically, digital workplace governance involves defining and documenting the policies and procedures around how to use a company’s intranet. It includes assigning permissions to roles and responsibilities (rather than individuals), and creating an easy-to-follow framework for industry compliance, cybersecurity, and document management. 

Govern, Review, and Repeatintranet-governance

The cloud is constantly evolving, so how decisions are made today might not be the best way to do things three months from now. An organization needs to be able to adapt to changing technology, changing processes, and changing employee habits. New features that extend capabilities are being rolled out all the time, so governance is something that should be constantly reviewed and revisited.

If you’ve provided a personalized workplace with engaging content, and you’ve made it easy for employees to find information, connect with one another, and collaborate effectively — governance will be a piece of cake. 

What to Govern When

Not every user needs access to all information all the time, and information overload only detracts from productivity. With the many options available in Microsoft 365, it’s easy to get confused on what type of sites and what type of features to use. It’s not necessary to govern all the every growing solutions.

Create Positive Guidance

There’s so many features  that your Information Technology team does not support and even some that they actively do not want people to use. However, the best guidance I’ve seen is the 10 things TO DO in an organization. Use SharePoint for X. Use Microsoft Teams for Y. Use OneDrive for U.

Keep is simple with Templates

You’ve positively guided your users to take advantage of the features that are supported in your organization. Guide them further by creating templates – documents, pages, sites, teams, plans – to help get work done and follow governance at the same time.

Classify and Tag Everything

In  Search & Find we talked about the importance of metadata. Here I want to note that it’s not only applied to content, but templates too. This allows your organization to display intranet or collaborative spaces in many ways, allowing users to navigation, search and find where they are working.

Technology is powerful stuff, but without governance, you can’t take advantage of the capabilities that exist. Stay tuned for the last part of our series, where we will talk about continuous improvement.

Topics: Corporate Intranet Tips, Intranet Design
Adam Levithan

Adam is a Principal at Withum and is a Microsoft MVP. He is a seasoned business strategist, SharePoint advocate, and information architect, focusing on designing information management and collaboration solutions leveraging Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 technologies.