I finally had the chance to see Joel "the godfather" Oleson in real life for the first time. Together with Brian Cook from Nintex he did a session about how to setup a proper governance model. While this may a bit simplistic, it is really the hardest part of a SharePoint environment. They covered each bit where governance can be used. From simple collaboration to published internet sites, you have to deal with governance to keep your environment manageable. It's really hard to give this post more body about this subject (maybe that's the question why it's so hard to create documentation and best practices about this subject)..
So I would recommend to check out the following posts by Joel :
Standardization and Consistency is the key - SharePoint Configurator Released to Codeplex
SharePoint Plastic
Pilots, Proof of Concepts, Test, and Pre Production Environments
And this Technet link
Governance Information for SharePoint Server 2007
And ofcourse check out my post about the V2 LifeCycleManagement announcement (I have to talk with Joel or Bill about this if they are willing to replace their code with my code ;)
Site Life Cycle Management V2 .. Why V2-