INFORMATION GOVERNANCE
You Rolled Out Your Remote Workplace in Record Time
Now Let’s Talk Governance When it comes to the digital workplace, governance and expediency are not always the best of friends. Governance essentially takes a longer-term view, establishing controls, processes and rules that makes the digital workplace sustainable going forward. Expediency tends to yield to the short-term view, cutting corners to drive forwards an immediate need, with the mid- to longerterm view filed under “worry about it later.” BY STEVE BYNGHALL
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f course, with the COVID-19 crisis, expediency has been the primary concern of most digital workplace teams with urgent needs to provide business continuity. Many digital workplace professionals have had to rush to support vastly scaled-up remote working, potentially rolling out new collaboration tools, accelerating the launch of Microsoft Teams, Zoom and so on. By all accounts it sounds like most digital workplace teams have done pretty well and probably after a few hiccups here and there, people are now getting into their rhythm, working remotely and getting on with using the new tools at their disposal.
NOW IS THE TIME TO CONSIDER GOVERNANCE If you have successfully achieved some state of business continuity, then you have done very well. Now it is time to start thinking about governance and introducing it as soon as possible. For example, many organizations will have rolled out Microsoft Teams and bypassed some of the essential governance steps that
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help you to manage the platform and ensure it doesn’t corrode into a messy sprawl that employees find increasingly frustrating to use. Leave a Microsoft Teams platform in place in its current state and a few months down the line you may have significant issues with a proliferation of spaces, leading to: •
Many duplicated and unused sites, making management of the platform harder.
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Higher risk of misuse of a Teams space.
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Poor findability where users cannot find the right space.
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People using Teams in a suboptimal way, for example where another tool would be better.
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Users feeling overwhelmed with too many spaces and channels.
A lack of information about the sites on the platform that make it harder for the central team to manage. Of course, similar problems can apply to any collaboration tool that has been rolled out.
INTRODUCING RETROSPECTIVE GOVERNANCE The word governance makes some digital workplace teams nervous. It still has negative connotations. By establishing some rules and processes on their site owner community or their users, they feel like an overprotective parent who is breaking up a teenage party. They also worry they will introduce a barrier to adoption or add to the workload they are creating for themselves. There may also be a natural reluctance to introduce another change that may feel like it impedes current ways of working, which are already strained because of the lockdown.
THE WORD GOVERNANCE MAKES SOME DIGITAL WORKPLACE TEAMS NERVOUS.
