Siolon

The Wikipedia Manual of Style: A Study in Governance

Gov­er­nance is a fan­tas­tic idea. In fact, it is absolutely crit­i­cal to the con­tin­ued suc­cess of an appli­ca­tion. There are times that gov­er­nance, to me, seems to be a great idea on paper, but in prac­tice it’s very dif­fi­cult to imple­ment. I was talk­ing to some­one the other day on the topic of gov­er­nance, and I used the exam­ple of Wikipedia as a suc­cess­ful gov­er­nance plan and exe­cu­tion. I thought it would be worth­while to dig deeper into the topic as a great exam­ple to look to.

Of all places Wikipedia has a great out­line of gov­er­nance goals as applied to the IT arena.

The pri­mary goals for infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy gov­er­nance are to (1) assure that the invest­ments in IT gen­er­ate busi­ness value, and (2) mit­i­gate the risks that are asso­ci­ated with IT. This can be done by imple­ment­ing an orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture with well-defined roles for the respon­si­bil­ity of infor­ma­tion, busi­ness processes, appli­ca­tions, infra­struc­ture, etc.

The more and more I do true imple­men­ta­tions of IT whether it be Share­Point, Word­Press, or any sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy is the role of gov­er­nance. Items from con­trolled vocab­u­lar­ies to usage poli­cies are essen­tial the sus­tain­abil­ity of an IT ini­tia­tive espe­cially in terms of ensur­ing that IT invest­ments gen­er­ate true busi­ness value. A lack of gov­er­nance is always a pri­mary rea­son why IT projects fail.

The Wikipedia Man­ual of Style

Wikipedia has an exten­sive gov­er­nance model out­lined in their Man­ual of Style. Every­thing from abbre­vi­a­tions, punc­tu­a­tion, etc is included in this one of many oper­at­ing doc­u­ments for Wikipedia.  It is clear not only read­ing this doc­u­ment that it has been care­fully thought out, but the power of their guide­lines comes from adher­ence to the document.

In a pol­icy and guide­lines doc­u­ment it is noted on who is respon­si­ble for enforc­ing these policies.

You are a Wikipedia edi­tor. Since Wikipedia has no editor-in-chief or top-down arti­cle approval mech­a­nism, active par­tic­i­pants make copy­ed­its and cor­rec­tions to the for­mat and con­tent prob­lems they see. So the par­tic­i­pants are both writ­ers and editors.

Books such as Wiki­nomics probe how such a mass scale col­lab­o­ra­tive project doesn’t turn itself upside down, and it’s truly a site to behold.  It becomes appar­ent that Wikipedia edi­tors tend to enjoy adher­ing to the gov­er­nance model, because they under­stand it is cru­cial to the long-term sus­tain­abil­ity of the project. The edi­tor there­fore become stake­hold­ers in there edits, and they under­stand that if they want their work to not be lost is an adher­ence to the gov­er­nance documents.

That is of course not the whole story behind Wikipedia. The Wiki­me­dia foun­da­tion does have a small army of admin­is­tra­tor that con­stanty patrol the recent changes list, and ensure that the gov­er­nance model is actu­ally being uti­lized.  So actu­ally ensur­ing that cer­tain indi­vid­u­als are empow­ered to a spe­cial degree of admin­is­tra­tive rights also becomes a cru­cial fac­tor in its success.

Apply­ing a Best Prac­tice in Your Organization

Let’s face it, none of will ever be doing some­thing as wide-scale as Wikipedia (although never say never), and so the ques­tion becomes how can we apply the best prac­tice from Wikipedia gov­er­nance to our indi­vid­ual IT endeav­ors? Think­ing through this I came to this short list.

1. Gov­er­nance guides need to be thor­oughly thought through and documented.
2. Those who con­tribute infor­ma­tion need to be made aware of the gov­er­nance guidelines.
3. A gov­er­nance doc­u­ment should not be seen as a bar­rier to cre­ativ­ity and collaboration.
4. Cer­tain indi­vid­u­als should be wholly devoted to the task of enforc­ing governance.
5. Those who con­sume infor­ma­tion should have con­fi­dence that gov­er­nance is being enforced to main­tain find­abil­ity, accu­racy, etc.

I’d be inter­ested to know how these over­rid­ing prin­ci­ples are being used in other suc­cess­ful gov­er­nance imple­men­ta­tions. I’d ven­ture to bet that suc­cess­ful ini­tia­tives mimic much of the list above.  Whether Share­Point or Wikipedia the same gov­er­nance prin­ci­ples apply and are necessary.