When establishing governance requirements and policies, you must examine your organization’s existing policies, workflows, and internal structures for potential challenges and opportunities. Although your governance policy will be unique to your organization’s structure and needs, ensure you review the following common topics:

• Approvals and reviews
• Feature requests and management
• Website groups and profiles

Approvals and reviews

Examine your organization for lines of approval about content or features. Must a brand marketing team, a legal team, or a security team approve new content? Do new technical tools require approval from your organization’s Information Technology team before employees may use them?

You must also investigate if approvals vary depending on location. Does your organization have a central office, satellite offices, or franchises? Do different local, state, federal, or international laws affect the approval or rollout of content?

As part of your investigation, for future improvements you must document the issues identified with processes.

Feature requests and management

Identifying the management, and prioritization of new feature requests is also useful during self-examination. When your organization undertakes a campaign requiring the new feature development, how are the features requested, approved, and funded? Are there other stakeholders to include, but who are not? Feature requests require how much time for approval, scope, build, and launch?

To establish initial guidelines, create a feature matrix like the following example. Identify your brands, your proposed features, and their intersections to establish a baseline feature set for your platform, and to confirm whether an individual website or property fits your proposed platform.

Website groups and profiles

Organizations with a large number of properties to manage must identify functional groupings of properties sharing features, theme, purpose, or other characteristics. Organizations with a large number of websites may choose to develop an installation profile for each group to balance flexibility and cost.

When identifying groups of properties, look for common points of similarity, such as similar editorial workflows, media needs, or approval processes.

In the following documentation, you will learn more about using the information you have gathered, and the architecture you have designed to plan your migration strategy.

Building governance policies