February 2010
Good Governance Part II - Reporting
Following-up from my previous article, in which I covered off the essential need to identify site and content owners across a deployment, it seems that many companies don't really know what they don't know! By this I mean that many governance groups do not know what information is of value, and site statistics can be misleading, or simply irrelevant.
One of the questions we are always asked is "What data is important to me?" It is all very well to have a strong governance structure, but a lot of time and effort is wasted on analysing site statistics or in compiling reporting. This distracts the group, and reporting should be completely automated, with summary views clearly presented.
It is only important to get into the detail of the site data, if a summary report highlights a potential issue; there is simply too much noise around site statistics in a deployment and you can find yourself buried alive under the weight of usage data, database logs, and document audits.
The most effective solution we have found with SharePoint in particular, and one that we use ourselves, is Nintex Reporting. This can be deployed as part of the initial installation and it provides a readymade set of reports that meet the needs of a wide range of governance roles from the Records Manager to the System Administrator.
When defining the governance roles in an organisation, each member will likely have their own focus and scope, and these will vary across an enterprise. Nintex Reporting allows each member to have their own set of pre-defined summary reports, and each dynamic report can be drilled down into, to get to the raw data. The summary reports provide a very clear dashboard view into what is occurring within a SharePoint deployment and alerts the user to trends and potential issues before they occur.
An example would be for a Records Manager; the dashboard report identifies how documents are being used and accessed, and even highlights those active authors and major contributors to document repositories. By understanding the usage and activity across your document libraries, you get a very clear picture around user behaviour, and can begin to anticipate growth trends and future database requirements.
Within the IT Manager dashboard view, a much more specific set of views around document storage and content database growth is provided, as well as Team Site sizes, and this allows an IT department to assess future infrastructure needs, before they become a problem for an enterprise.
Step One is to set-up your governance structure. Step Two is to make sure that group has access to the information they need to complete their roles effectively. Unless a governance team are able to quickly and easily measure and report on user activities, they become impotent and cannot function or govern well.
Nintex Reporting offers a unique set of reports that take the work out of designing and implementing a reporting regime. In this way, even if the group don't know what questions to ask, the reports provide them with all the guidance they need to highlight the important trends, before they become issues.
John Robson, Manager, Strategic Consulting
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