Recently in Governance Category

 

The Sunday Herald - Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper reports in a recent article entitled, How the US forgot to make Trident missiles, that the “US National Nuclear Security Administration lost knowledge of how to make a very hazardous material named Fogbank.  As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extras $69 million.”

.”…vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.”

This is a clear and very compelling case for knowledge management.  The NNSA says it will strengthen its “management procedures” but knowledge is an extraordinarily costly commodity as this fiasco demonstrates.

I have led a number of projects to build the governance structure for MOSS implementations and it always is a challenge.  Getting the right mix of business participation in the decisions about the information architecture, how the sites will be structured, and how to measure the business value of the implementation are key concerns.  This is an interesting little video from Michael Gannotti on SharePoint that provides a few good ideas about how to document the governance decisions that your company makes.