Governance involves various aspects of business and technical management. When gathering requirements for a platform project, your organization should ensure the following portions of governance discuss and outline the following:

• Brand​ ​governance​: Ensures consistency in managing your brand promise across channels, encouraging user awareness, engagement, retention, and loyalty.
• Content​ ​governance​: Establishes standards for how your organization communicates with its audience across channels.
• Platform​ and feature​ ​governance: Establishes how your organization works across functional areas, brands, and markets to manage innovation on your platform.
• Code​ ​governance​: Establishes standards and processes for management of the software development life cycle on your platform.

Brand governance

You should consider the following aspects of brand governance when developing your policies:

• Brand ownership: Develop a brand strategy to establish consistency, identify the brand owner who will ensure consistency across channels, and establish brand stewards to provide advice and guidance.
• Brand standards: Create clear and available guidelines (such as a brand book for styling and assets) flexible enough to take into account the differing markets and objectives of the covered brands.
• Brand tools: Select a content management system to establish a consistent look and feel, define style guides and editorial guides for clear communication, and establish an asset management system (such as Acquia DAM ) to ensure consistent use of digital assets across properties.

You can use Drupal’s features, such as views and base themes, to enforce layout and styling.

Content governance

Consider the following aspects of content governance when developing your policies to ensure they engage, persuade, and remain consistent:

• Content ownership: Define roles for creating, maintaining, and approving content, and develop a content strategy with representatives of your marketing, legal, and product teams.
• Content standards: Create and maintain guidelines for the types of content your brands will produce, and their style, voice, and tone. Establish processes for auditing and reviewing the content during and after creation.
• Content tools: Configure your content management system to handle content approval workflows, ensure consistency, and measure audience engagement with your content.

Drupal’s workflows can help you enforce any legal, regulatory, or marketing approval processes needed for your content. Drupal’s taxonomy system allows you to organize, classify, and cross-reference related pieces of content.

Platform and feature governance

Consider the following aspects of platform and feature governance when developing your policies, which allows your platform to scale in an agile, effective, and cost-conscious manner:

• Platform ownership: Identify your platform owner, and your technical and marketing stakeholders. Support adoption, collaboration, and best practices by establishing committees for key areas.
• Platform standards: Develop resource models and processes for agile development, release management, and feature requests.
• Platform tools: Adopt tools for managing websites, content across brands and markets, sharing and re-purposing content, managing releases, and managing feature requests.

In Drupal, leveraging a common base distribution, enables you to build websites that inherit a shared, stable code base while layering theming unique to each brand or region. Site Factory can help you manage large numbers of related websites, and Content Hub can help you manage centralized, reusable content across websites.

Code governance

You should consider the following aspects of code governance when developing standards and processes for the software development life cycle of your platform:

• Code ownership: Identify the owner of your code, and establish teams who will own specific platform components.
• Code standards: Develop processes for feature requests, agile development, and release management. Enforce best practices of code management.
• Code tools: Identify and use industry-standard tools for work requests, project management, task prioritization, quality assurance, and unit testing. Automate code management steps to reduce the occurrences of human error.

Using Code Studio and a common base distribution of Drupal (such as Drupal Starter Kits) can help you streamline and simplify your code governance needs.

On the next page, you’ll learn about the different governance models available.

Types of governance