Managing a single website is different from managing several websites. Uncomplicated decisions with a single website can become hopelessly complicated when the overlapping and conflicting needs of various website properties are managed as a group. As a result, organizations have chosen to standardize their digital properties on a common platform, but struggle with the process of designing and building the platform to meet their needs, migrating disparate properties to the platform, and maintaining the platform after the build completion.
Platform governance can help speed the development of your platform, streamline its management, and ensure its success after launch. Acquia defines governance as a decision-making framework enabling an organization to assign ownership, set priorities, and define shared guidelines, standards, and processes for all platform users.
Note
For more governance information specific to Site Factory, see Governance on Site Factory.
Properly implemented, platform governance can provide the following benefits to your organization:
Improve strategy and ownership: Establishing roles and responsibilities leads to clear lines of communication for enterprise-wide goals
Define policies and standards: Reduce risk and improve consistency by establishing enterprise-wide standards for corporate branding, data collection, storage, and content standards
Streamline business and technical processes: Deliver digital experiences more consistently and efficiently by establishing agile development processes to support both enterprise-wide priorities and brand-specific priorities
Develop a platform to meet your needs: Establish a content management platform that can scale to support enterprise-wide goals, including a common feature set and reusable components
In the series, we discuss the types of governance your properties may need, governance implementation, and how to use governance to architect, build, migrate to, and maintain the platform to meet your organization’s unique needs.
Organizations with insufficient or ineffective platform governance over their online properties can see various problems develop in their online presence, ranging from organizational challenges, delivery challenges, and user experience challenges.
Enterprise-wide initiatives and goals are often unclear in organizations without enough governance. Situations without appropriate governance create difficulties for employees and teams to work together, causing an unequal allocation of available resources. There may not be a clear definition of roles or responsibilities across the enterprise, nor visibility into what digital solutions exist to improve how teams work together.
In organizations without appropriate governance, a lack of mature delivery processes can lead to development teams inconsistently or inefficiently delivering projects. Solutions chosen may be too inflexible to meet the needs of different brands or markets. Since teams look busy, and every issue gets top priority, measuring work or goals becomes difficult.
Organizations lacking governance see internal problems begin to affect their end users. A lack of governance can lead to inconsistent branding experiences, including different messaging across different touch points in the customer journey, making a more difficult experience for users to connect to your brand.
Avoiding some of the most common mistakes and misperceptions of platform building will increase the likelihood of your project’s success. Some of the possible mistakes include the following:
Insufficient planning or no planning
Agile development frameworks do not take the place of adequate
planning to ensure an effective project achieves the prescribed
business goals.
Not building a demo
Building a live website and then launching, before initially
building a demo website or profile, may not include features
needed by other websites on the platform.
Building a website instead of a platform
Building websites before gaining alignment on shared features
among platform users increases complexity later in the project,
and increases the likelihood of project failure.
Not following minimum viable product (MVP) approaches
Starting from the minimum viable product for your demo website or
profile enables you to build broad agreement for platform
features. The MVP allows teams to refine and adjust features before
broadly deploying the demo, which can result in lower development costs.
Not seeking sign-offs for demos
Proceeding with website development before getting agreement from
all stakeholders about the platform’s baseline can mean missing critical
features. The result can affect project complexity in the short term, and
adoption and use of the finished platform in the long term.
Not establishing rules for inclusion
Recognizing certain websites (such as standalone microsites)
may not belong on your platform can save you significant development
costs, instead of attempting to develop a platform to meet 100% of
every website’s needs, regardless of the websites’ requirements.
Establishing an effective governance model requires you to understand and document key aspects of your business and operations, including the following:
Your technical personnel: The groups involved in planning your platform. Know your platform’s users and maintainers. Will your development or maintenance require access to third parties, such as contractors or agencies?
Your business personnel: How will your technical personnel interact with other business groups, such as marketers? Technical personnel will own what aspects of your platform? Who else will own other aspects? What level of support should you expect from all groups?
Your goals: Goals easy to measure with a single website can be more challenging to measure on a platform. Understanding your definition of success, and how to measure success, will help you architect a platform to enable success.
Your governance policy should provide clear guidance on all aspects of building, maintaining, and expanding your platform. Although no two governance policies are the same, some common topics in governance policies include, but are not limited to the following:
Governance structure
Committee responsibilities
Legal and security compliance guidelines
Accessibility
Request and appeal processes
Roles and permissions
Editorial workflow
Training and education
Branding and messaging guidelines
Guidelines for visual content (such as videos)
Social media use
Mobile applications
Measurement and analytics
Change management
On the next page in the governance series, you’ll learn more about the Types of governance needed in your platform.
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