Bad IT governance plagues a vast number of businesses globally. While smaller organizations with less than 100 employees might be able to offset this by having someone handle the exceptions, challenges, and issues that occur with poor governance. As the organization scales to hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of employees, it becomes clearer that pro-active planning is critical to avoid significant costs, inefficiencies, and significant risks.
Businesses have any number of issues to take care of, making it easy to sweep some of the growing pains under the rug, temporarily at least. One of the growing pains often swept under the rug is the critical role IT governance plays in the digital workplace. The larger an organization is, the more it becomes difficult for anyone in the company to understand how digital workspaces are designed, how they are structured, where people work, how they work, and more.
Poor IT governance creates many challenges but before we go any further, let’s take a step back and make sure you understand what effective IT governance is. For most organizations, it’s not just risk management and mitigation but a way of working more effectively and efficiently.
Here is another way to think about governance for any football fans out there. In football, how effective and successful will a team be at winning if it doesn’t have structured sub-teams? Imagine a football team with no defensive line, offensive line, or special teams.
What if sometimes the quarterback played the role of wide receiver, linebacker, or kicker? How effective would that team be? What if the team had no planned plays, never practiced those plays, and had no coaches or clear direction?
Essentially, the plays, structure, roles, responsibilities, and patterns are all critical in reducing risks of injuries and losses but, far more importantly, allowing the ‘organization’ or teams to perform well. This is the real goal of IT Governance for the Digital Workplace. It helps the Digital Workplace deliver more value and better maximizes the investments you make around it.
Here, we will break down the basics of IT Governance, especially as it relates to managing Microsoft 365 effectively.
Inside your organization, content, communities, teams, groups, and sites grow over time. This is a positive result of digital adoption. As those digital workspaces grow in usage, volume, and variety, it can be extremely challenging to manage and understand how digital technology is leveraged, by whom, and where.
For many organizations, the level of understanding of digital workspaces is extremely low. We know that a space exists, but not much more about it. Certainly not enough to pro-actively manage the lifecycle, support adoption, manage compliance effectively, or improve how people work within and across these workspaces. This is often classified as unmanaged sprawl and transitioning this to managed sprawl is the number one focus of effective IT Governance for the Digital Workplace.
Looking for more insight into tackling sprawl? Be sure to check out this prior webinar from our team and Orchestry:
Some of the areas of IT Governance for the Digital Workplace and Microsoft 365 to review are:
For over 115 million active daily users, Microsoft Teams is their go-to communication and collaboration platform. It is ease-of-use is great for most scenarios, minus when creating a new group becomes extremely simple. This simple feature can easily escalate out of hand and create various abandoned, misleading, and unofficial groups.
Simply looking at some of the areas of governance mentioned above, we are certain you see at least a couple that you can improve and work on.
Many of the consequences of unmanaged sprawl – a result of poor governance – can be seen in the list below:
There are more challenges that result from poor governance and unmanaged sprawl. We breakdown the 8 most common SharePoint and Teams Sprawl issues in our eBook, “Most Common SharePoint and Teams Sprawl Issues and How to Solve Them.”
It is no shock that there has been a surge in working from home, putting newfound stress on digital workplaces everywhere as adoption has accelerated. However, that doesn’t mean that adoption was guided, governed, or supported in a way that will lead to continued success and business objectives met. Even companies with governance and provisioning under control before the pandemic have struggled to keep those efforts afloat based on increased demands, accelerated adoption of technology change, and less time/resources to respond to emerging needs.
The need for strategies and objectives around better governance and provisioning is more crucial than ever. This means that it is increasingly critical to stay on top of these issues before they get out of hand.
As we mentioned, getting ahead of these issues is vital in stopping them before they get out of control.
That is why we are teaming up with our incredible partner, Orchestry, for a webinar titled “Proactive Governance & Adoption in Microsoft 365: Everything You Need to Know.” Join our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge and Orchestry’s CEO and Microsoft MVP, Michal Pisarek, in a webinar you do not want to miss.
I WANT TO GET PROACTIVE ABOUT GOVERNANCE
While common, these sprawl impact your organization in major ways. Understand how they impact IT, your end-users and ultimately, how to solve them in our eBook!
