Migrating to Microsoft 365 sounds straightforward. Microsoft provides the tools, the documentation is extensive, and thousands of organizations have done it before.
Government migrations are different.
Why Government M365 is Different
Provincial agencies operate under privacy legislation that creates real constraints on how data can be stored, shared, and managed. FOIPPA in BC, LAFOIP in Saskatchewan — these aren’t abstract compliance requirements. They determine which M365 features you can actually use.
At BC Pensions Corporation, we ran collaborative workshops with eight diverse business areas to understand not just what content needed to move, but what governance structures needed to exist before any content moved.
The Content Problem
Government organizations have decades of institutional knowledge trapped in network drives, legacy content management systems, and individual email archives. The temptation is to lift-and-shift everything into SharePoint and sort it out later.
This approach fails every time. Without a taxonomy, without retention policies, without clear ownership, you just end up with the same mess in a more expensive container.
We developed a SharePoint governance model that aligned short-term migration goals with long-term enterprise taxonomy — ensuring that content was properly classified, retained, and discoverable from day one.
Change Management is the Real Project
The technical migration is maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is change management. People have workflows built around their current tools. Changing those workflows requires training, communication, and patience.
We conducted walkthroughs and demos with each business area, building understanding of M365 capabilities while respecting the fact that people had real work to do and couldn’t spend weeks in training sessions.
Security and Co-Pilot Readiness
One unexpected outcome of our governance work was readiness for AI tools. When Microsoft Co-Pilot became available, organizations with proper information governance were ready to deploy it safely. Those without governance faced the risk of AI tools exposing sensitive information.
We led a reporting program using Purview and Power BI to identify and mitigate security and privacy risks specifically for the Co-Pilot rollout — turning a governance investment into an AI enablement strategy.