I spent yesterday morning with a series of grande green teas in a number of governance sessions.  The first was put on by a pair of experts associated with SharePointGovernance.org -- curiously a site co-sponsored by our friends at AIIM.  The second was presented by the Burton Group analyst who did Microsoft's internal governance planning back in 2004.  If you’ve been working in this field or working with us here in the Concurrency ECM practice for these last two years, there wasn't a whole lot here that you didn't already know, but I took away some observations that will be worth keeping in mind as we continue to provide governance solutions to our clients.
 
How to properly plan and execute SharePoint governance is no longer a secret.  Sites and blogs have been launched, and books published around this topic.  There's not a whole lot of new stuff, at an intellectual level anyway, that can be brought to the table at this point.  Everybody and his uncle is slowly beginning to realize—or has already realized—that SharePoint governance is not (and in fact has only a precious little akin to) traditional IT governance.  This is Organizational Change Management, really.  Communication and Training, all the fun stuff of user adoption has to be included on top of defining Policies, Taxonomy, supporting processes and organizational structures, security frameworks, etc.
 
That said, actually executing on the advice that's out there is an entirely different matter.  This is where we at Concurrency provide value to our clients.  The full-blown governance and user adoption planning endorsed by Burton and the others came with a very telling caveat: only the largest organizations will have the resources and financial wherewithal (never mind the foresight) to devote even one full-time resource to SharePoint strategy.  Obviously, there are only a handful of such organizations within the local market.  We at Concurrency have the expertise and experience to help those clients without enterprise-level resources assemble, and execute on, an enterprise-level Governance Plan for SharePoint 2010.
 
The role of strategic governance and planning will only expand with upgrade projects to 2010.  The use and application of metadata (particularly taxonomies, folksonomies, enterprise content types, and the pervasive use of all the above through Office integration), as well as the planning aspect of how and where to take advantage of all the new Office features (Visio Web Services, friendlier workflow assembly, etc) makes governance essential.