Six: Build systems that govern by default

Manual oversight doesn’t scale. If your team disappeared tomorrow, what would happen to compliance across your ecosystem? Most would say that it would deteriorate faster than anyone would like.

If governance depends on your team catching issues, it will eventually fail due to volume, not level of effort. Instead, shift governance into the system itself.

The five components of sustainable governance

A governed-by-default platform is more than a single product you buy. It’s a set of decisions you make about how you build your platform.

These five components work together, and missing any one of them leaves a gap that your team will eventually have to fill manually.

1. A unified or standardized platform: Reduces fragmentation enough to manage more effectively.

2. A flexible, scalable design system: Provide agencies with pre-built, accessible, brand-compliant components to reuse. Learn more about how to future-proof your design system.

3. Automated compliance scanning: Surface issues using a dashboard before they become real problems.

4. Centralized analytics: Provide agencies with visibility into their own site's performance that most don't currently have.

5. Governed workflows: Build governance into the publishing workflow rather than relying on policies that agencies have to remember.