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While generic in nature, there are some components of SharePoint that require specific consideration, and are discussed and addressed by the interviewed subject matter experts and the included case studies (see Planning for SharePoint Success).

“Without proper architecture and governance, I can guarantee you that SharePoint will fail,” says Bob Mixon, President of Mixon Consulting, addressing the annual Enterprise 3 conference in San Diego.

In particular, the powerful Team Site features and easy deployment features (Site Collections) of SharePoint make it even more demanding of a rigorous plan and detailed governance model. While intranet governance provides clarity and rules: namely the titles, roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers, stakeholders and contributors.

Sadly, very few organizations actually have a well-defined governance model, and many of those have spent hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars on their website or intranet – amounting to extraordinary investments left to chance and execution on a whim.

According to the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey:

• only 47% of organizations have a defined governance model (32% have 6,000 employees or more; 11% have 30,000 employees or more);

• of the tools and platforms being used by survey participants, a whopping 47% are using SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in some shape or form.

Intranet Sprawl

As IP technology has advanced corporate intranets have become more complex and interactive including human resource and purchasing applications, collaboration tools, business intelligence and real-time reporting tools. Some organizations without intranet governance and enterprise standards (for web page and content creation) have seen the birth of individual intranets for every department and work team. “Do-what-you-like” was the only rule and the corporate network became the wild west or ‘intranet sprawl’.

'Intranet sprawl' can be a poisonous side-effect of SharePoint Team Site and site collection use without the proper “rules” for deploying and managing sites. However, its not merely a SharePoint problem. At one point at the turn of the millennium, IBM's network was choked with approximately 10,000 intranet sites before they undertook a governance process and federation (consolidation campaign) that saved the company untold millions (IBM claims its saved more than a $1 billion).

Perhaps more so than most, SharePoint (MOSS 2007 or WSS) requires a governance model. I categorize intranet governance by four broad approaches or models:

• Decentralized (no single owner; do-what-you-like)

• Centralized a single owner or department controls it all; highly bureaucratic; common in small organizations)

• Collaborative (shared ownership via committee)

• Hybrid, centralized (single owner, with collaborative accountability, decentralized content ownership)

Learn more about planning and governance for the corporate intranet, with a specific focus on MOSS 2007, during our free webinar Planning for SharePoint Success (April 13).

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