Pick Any Two: Governance | Information Architecture | Project Management

Governance is one that cannot be given up. Even if forced to only pick one (for now) that would be it. Governance potentially has many tentacles that can sprawl out have on effect for other areas. Ironically there are ways in which good governance can have effects on both project management and information architecture.

New wonderful features in SharePoint 2010, allow the users to get involved such as Managed Metadata, Keywords, and Records Management etc. that even if is done well with information architecture not doing governance can mess-up.

As per Ruven Gotz :-

Governance – sets the rules of the game. What can happen, when and by whom?

If you want the thing you build to maintain value over time, you have to ensure governance is inplace or it will devolve to chaos.

Information Architecture – builds a rational structure for your information. This lets you know where to put stuff and, very importantly, how to get it back again when you need it. We work with information; we need to know how we’re structuring it to be able to make good use of it.

Project Management – Make sure the right stuff happens in the right order and make sure things get finished on-time and on-budget.

Dropping information architecture will result in a system that is hard to navigate and useless for finding your valuable content. Dropping governance will impact the long-term value of your investment, as everyone does their own thing and the system becomes fragmented and unreliable.