What Are the Element of Good Governance for a new administration? Some of the elements of good governance are accountability, transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness. They also include the capacity and flexibility to respond rapidly to societal changes as well as take account of the expectations, and a forward vision. Whether your organization is implementing new or upgrading existing technology, governance is an integral component in user adoption. Why does anyone need governance? Technology always requires some training and laying the groundwork for how work can get done, which will affect successful use of technology, regardless of work styles. The following questions and answers about governance planning can help your organization make the transition to successful implementation of social software in the workplace. What is a governance plan? A governance plan describes how you administer and direct usage of any technology. The premise for governance in social software is to help users apply practical procedures to new types of social tools. Technology implementation practices will always need some type of governance. Why does your organization need a governance plan? Guidelines for any organization need to ensure content quality, including compliance with your administrations policies for maintaining information security, and alignment with business objectives of knowledge management and distribution, like business intelligence, which are important factors that require governance policies. Essentially, users focused on the business value of social collaboration will make technology usage a competitive advantage while demonstrating a set of effective best practices within your organization. Why do you need to be concerned about user adoption? The failure of technology implementations is largely due to peoples lack of understanding why the software is needed and how it will be used. Adoption occurs when users believe they will benefit. Furthermore, user adoption rises when everybody can see the business value of information sharing and collaboration, finding experts when you need them, and critical thinking for decision making that is done through collaboration and group productivity. What are the keys elements of a governance plan? Your governance plan needs to include several key elements: Executive sponsorship of the governance plan is required to ensure organization-wide acceptance. Goals and objectives must clearly state the business purpose for using social software. Roles and responsibilities will describe how employees will be responsible to ensure success of the software and sharing information. Community management roles may be included and are recommended in designing a cohesive strategy of community participation. Service level agreements will help identify how the software users will be supported throughout the life of the product, whether it is your technical support group, help desk, or software vendor. Training plans need to ensure how everybody will be trained to use the software. Communications plans need to define communication protocols, usage of blogs and micro-blogging about the administration and its products or services, communication style guidelines, branding, and content review guidelines. Information architecture and security plans will define user permissions, data dictionary, taxonomy, file storage, security, database management, system maintenance and software updates. Risk management and metrics will measure your organizations effective use of social software. What is the best way to get started writing a governance plan? Your organizations governance plan needs to reflect the leadership decisions of several responsibility areas, so a governance team-based approach is your best bet. Planning, several IT representatives need to be included, including people responsible for information architecture, information security, and systems maintenance. In addition, policies that affect other departments need to have leadership involved from areas like human resources, corporate communications, marketing, and training. In many situations, software purchases are made through these departments as well. Representatives from business units quite possibly may be included, so that you can ensure a cross section of people can help shape the plan before you implement it. Agreement from all areas of the organization needs to be reached on how the software will be used so you can be assured people will use it. What are the key steps to implement a governance plan? When your governance team has completed the documentation, together with your executive team you can: Roll out governance to employees Be responsive to questions and suggestions Monitor governance ongoing Conduct periodic review of governance policies and procedures What are the critical success factors for a governance plan? Support is a critical success factor for adoption of social software and an important variable in the total cost of management. Support must be properly defined in your governance plan. Information security is a function of your governance procedures so a properly defined information security plan is a significant factor in governance planning. Usability driving business value, as defined in your governance goals and objectives, will become a measurement of success.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:20:47 +0000
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