Portal Governance

Governing Your Way to Portal Success

LDS defines Portal Governance as being the organizational structures, roles and processes by which enterprises ensure their portal's ongoing relevance, quality and value. Portal Governance preserves the integrity of the portal by:

• Establishing portal ownership with clearly defined lines of accountability
• Defining performance targets and metrics with a clear linkage to business objectives
• Developing Change Management plans that directly address those factors that can influence the portal's adoption and sustainability, such as existing business processes and organizational structures, underlying IT structures and corporate culture (the foremost obstacle to change).
• Defining publication and content review procedures and responsibilities
• Enforcing design standards.

Without a robust framework to coordinate activities across business owners and repositories, enterprise portals evolve organically. This is especially true when a company introduces a platform such as Microsoft SharePoint^®, which makes it much easier for employees to create and manage portal pages.

The result of such uncontrolled growth: site erosion and content sprawl.

Our Approach to Governance

LDS approaches Governance design and management through two separate but tightly integrated areas of focus:

• Strategic Governance is the concept of establishing clear ownership and accountability for the portal, aligning key stakeholders in a common purpose and vision for the portal, and establishing sound governance processes. Strategic Governance is composed of the people and processes that ground this channel in a business-centric context and ensures the portal remains a continually relevant, valuable and viable tool for the business.
• Operational Governance consists of the practices, standards and tools that keep the site fresh and relevant by assuring the appropriate ongoing monitoring, maintenance and enhancements of all aspects of the portal. It includes support and oversight for the publishing and management of all content types, as well as change management of the portal’s design and functionality. In short, Operational Governance allows your organization to effectively execute upon its Strategic Objectives.

Planning Proactively for your Portal's Success

When properly designed, Portal Governance will help you answer questions critical to your portal's success, such as:

• How can you assure that your portal strategy stays aligned with your company or function’s business strategy as priorities shift over time?
• During your annual planning process, can you develop sufficient support across your stakeholder groups to effectively endorse your funding requests (e.g., development, maintenance, enhancements)?
• How should ownership and accountability for communications and content management be assigned across your organization to best support the unique design of your portal and the volume and complexity of your content?
• Who should be represented on your Strategic and Operational Governance bodies? Which roles are "must-haves," and which might be less obvious but crucial to organizational buy-in and change management?
• How do you ensure that your portal’s stakeholders have appropriate input into the portal’s ongoing development? Are your international employees appropriately represented? What about employees who access the portal remotely?
• How do Governance roles and responsibilities change pre- and post-launch?
• Have you considered the Governance requirements for a successful content migration to the new platform?
• Do employees have the processes, tools and training to effectively manage content, design and functionality changes, as well as portal communications, on an ongoing basis?
• Even if implementation goes flawlessly, do you have the change management and communications plans in place to assure successful adoption by your employee population?
• Are there metrics in place – both leading and lagging – to make sure you’re on track to meet your operational and business objectives?
• How do you ensure that the quality of your portal’s content and design will not break down over time?

Governance - whether it's successful or unsuccessful - is extremely visible to both senior management and key stakeholders. At LDS, we have implemented and observed best practice Governance Models at many Fortune 500 companies, and can ensure that you will get it right from the start.