What does Microsoft 365 governance mean to you?

When thinking about Microsoft 365 governance, we sometimes use the word “governance” very loosely. What is it exactly? At ESPC 2024 in Stockholm, we asked Microsoft MVPs “What does Microsoft 365 governance mean to you?” Check out their answers in the compilation video below and their extended answers in this blog post.

Microsoft 365 governance is more about efficiency and effectiveness – Richard Harbridge

I think Microsoft 365 governance is a means to drive efficiency and effective outcomes. So too often we use governance as a term like it’s risk mitigation and we’re using it to mitigate risks. And it’s true the output of good governance is policies and things that help us with reallocation of risk. But the real reason you do it, the reason you get a bunch of people to talk about Microsoft 365 operational patterns in a room is because they’re going to come up with ideas to improve it. And I think when you look at it from that perspective, it’s more about efficiency and effectiveness.

If you look at governance that way, you start to think about adoption and how that’s part of governance. You start to think about extensions and how we build on top of these platforms as part of governance, not just more traditional things like data storage and security and things like that.

I think we need to broaden the perspective of Microsoft 365 governance, about how do we work as a team? How do we come up with plays and playbooks? Kind of like the football analogy. So instead of running around a ball and chasing a ball, what if we have plays and an offensive line, a defensive line, and special teams? Again, good governance is about effective teamwork and it’s about the outcomes that you get from emphasizing and investing in those teams.

Define the sandbox that people can play with – Vlad Catrinescu

I would say Microsoft 365 governance is about defining the sandbox that people can play with, because governance is about achieving the balance between user productivity and the admin actually sleeping at night and not worrying about too much stuff. So what are the things we can lock down that give the bigger risk? But how do we lock things down while keeping people productive and kind of creating defenses around what a user can do? What is the sandbox they can change settings in, while still making sure that nothing they do will actually harm the business?

So to give an example, enable external sharing, but only allow it with 3 or 4 domains of trusted partners. You enable the user to be productive, but you also know they’re not going to share with a random company or a random competitor.

Microsoft 365 governance is about understanding what people need – Emily Mancini

Governance to me is about understanding what people need and getting situations in place to support them to complete those different needs and tasks. Having a group of people around it who are part of a committee, working with those end user needs, and making sure that they’re connecting directly. Microsoft 365 governance isn’t something we do to an organization. It’s something we do with the organization.

Security is one of the most important aspects of Microsoft 365 governance – Thomas Vochten

I’m an IT pro. I’ve always been an IT pro. So I like to be in control. For me, governance mainly boils down to not just having control, but making sure that your employees, your partners, whoever you’re working with together in your tenant, that they stay within the defined security boundaries. For me, security is one of the most important aspects of Microsoft 365 governance.

Microsoft 365 governance to me is really just a set of guidelines and rules – Marc D Anderson

Microsoft 365 governance to me has always been, you know, Sue Hanley always calls it the “G word”, nobody wants to hear about it, but everybody wants it to happen to other people. They want everyone to follow governance, whether or not they follow it themselves. IT is one of the worst offenders, by the way. They don’t believe that governance applies to them. Generally, Microsoft 365 governance to me is really just a set of guidelines and rules that explain how you’re supposed to use it.

I assume that you’re thinking primarily of Microsoft 365 but you know what? How would you like people to be using these technologies? What should they be doing in order to protect the data that’s there? How should they think about sharing things? How should they think about storing things? How should they write content in pages so that it’s in the voice of the organization? It can be broad. It can be narrow, and some of it is very qualitative.

In other words, it’s hard to say, you know, score the content. For example, you know, does this meet the voice? Well, that’s a very subjective thing. Other things are very clearly measurable and correctable, permissions being something that is like that. You can run reports, find out where reports are. You can use tools to discover where things are being exposed and where they shouldn’t, and then take action on that pretty easily.

So I think Microsoft 365 governance means a different thing to every organization, and it should, because each organization has a different culture, has a different set of rules, and has a different way of working. You know, somebody in insurance is not going to be doing the same thing as somebody at a creative organization, for example. So, you have to decide what guidelines, what rules, what procedures, what practices you want people to follow that are going to make sense for your organization. That makes and keeps people safe in a sense, you know, make sure that content and practices are safe. But also does not remove any barriers to productivity and innovation.

Governance is having rules on how to handle and organize documents – Martin Rovekamp

From my perspective, Microsoft 365 governance is having rules on how to handle and organize documents, when and how to share, and with whom to share. For me, it’s like labeling and all this metadata. As I’m in the internet business, we need to search data, and if you haven’t given proper information to the document, then you won’t find it.

Microsoft 365 governance is equal to control – Knut Relbe-Moe

Governance for me in some ways is control. We need to have control over your environment. So we want to know who are the owners, who are the editors, who has permission to do the different things. So for me, governance is equal to control.

Would you like to hear more?

It was great hearing what Microsoft MVPs had to say about what Microsoft 365 governance means to them. You can also check out other MVP videos about:

• Microsoft 365 in 2025: What will be the most transformative feature?
• Whether Copilot agents will help increase the adoption of Microsoft Copilot
• What is the most underrated feature of Microsoft Copilot?

Thank you to all the Microsoft MVPs for their insights!