Guest Author: Paul Culmsee
www.cleverworkarounds.com

I was recently involved in facilitating discussions and debate on the topic of governance for the leadership team of a public/private/community sector consortium. It was absolutely light years away from SharePoint governance, yet they struggled with it just as much as we do – and they get paid lots more than us! :-)

Much time was spent trying to pin down what governance actually is, and everyone had a different view, depending on their experience, career vocation, organisation they belonged to and other factors. While working with that group, I was dialogue mapping the debate and captured all of the argumentation into a large issue map. (For those of you who haven’t read the one best practice series of articles, dialogue mapping is a facilitation and sense-making technique that I use on every SharePoint project that my company is involved with).

While I was mapping this non SharePoint governance debate, I was struck with the idea that the best way to understand governance and make it work for your organisation is to use argument mapping. Argument mapping allows you explore the depths of the issue from a multitude of perspectives. But then how to make that argumentation visible and accessible to people?

In addition to this, End User SharePoint regular, Joel Oleson, talks about a SharePoint governance plan needing to be a ‘living’ document. He states this explicitly in the sample governance plan that he did for Microsoft and I agree wholeheartedly on this notion. The sober reality is that documents like MSWord documents are not overly conducive to this ideal. The paradox is that the bigger and more comprehensive the governance plan is initially, the harder it can be to maintain and manage over time, and therefore, the greater the likelihood that it can go out of date or fall into disrepair over time.

Answer? Use DebateGraph for exploring the issue and develop a webpart to embed that exploration inside SharePoint sites.

DebateGraph is a free online service. It allows the global community to collaboratively build maps of complex debates that accurately present all sides of the debate from a neutral standpoint, free of repetitive clutter and ‘noise’. Like a wiki, all aspects of the debate maps, both their content and structure, are continuously open to revision, refinement, comment, and evaluation by anyone who wants to join the community of thought. Each map is a cumulative work in progress. Readers and editors of the maps can explore the top-level structure of debates and delve into specific strands or sub-structures of a debate.

You will find that DebateGraph covers a diverse range of topics, from what President Obama should do next to whether the Ajax is better than flash. Below, however, you can find a debate on the topic of SharePoint governance.

My company, Seven Sigma, has developed a web part that allows you to take DebateGraph debates and embed them into any enterprise SharePoint portal. Any DebateGraph map can be used, so usage examples might be a government department that deals with sustainability challenges wanting to embed maps on that topic on their portal or a transport organisation wanting to know the latest thinking on managing road congestion. Both would benefit from installing the webpart and surfacing truly global debate into the enterprise. The default debate is the SharePoint Governance debate shown above, but you can view any of the many DebateGraph maps via the web part properties.

I have recorded a couple of webcasts, covering the installation and usage of the web part which can be viewed below. Otherwise, click here to download this free web part from the Seven Sigma web site.

Thanks for reading