State digital teams are responsible for making government websites more consistent, accessible, and easier to manage. But even with centralized governance policies, style guides, and accessibility standards in place, agencies don't always follow them.
The problem isn't necessarily the policy. It's how much the policy depends on people remembering to follow it.
Building governance into the digital platform itself changes that. Instead of asking every agency to interpret and apply the same standards independently, states can make compliance part of how content gets created and published.
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Lowers the cost of every future hire. A shared publishing experience across agencies reduces onboarding time and training costs. Staff can move between agency sites or take on additional responsibilities without having to learn a different system.
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Greater trust with constituents. Consistent design and navigation help residents recognize official state websites and find what they need, regardless of which agency they're interacting with.
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Lower operational risk. Workflows and permissions help ensure the right people review and approve content before it goes live.
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Easier modernization. Shared standards and consistent architecture mean future teams can build on what's already there instead of starting over.
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Less work for agency staff. Built-in content structures, design components, and accessibility guardrails take some of the guesswork out of publishing.
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A platform that holds up through change. When governance is built into the platform, standards and institutional knowledge aren't lost every time someone leaves or leadership changes.
Iowa offers a concrete example. When the state partnered with Lullabot to build a unified digital platform, its accessibility goal was a score of 83. The resulting platform achieved scores in the high 90s across every site. Redundant content dropped by 30 to 90 percent, depending on the agency.
Those improvements didn't come from asking agency staff to work harder at following guidelines. They came from building the guidelines into the tools those staff use every day.
Manual governance asks agency staff to do a job that isn't theirs
Centralized digital groups are a relatively recent development in state government. Before groups like these existed, agencies often had no mandate to coordinate on content and design, accessibility, and security, so they didn't.
Now, many states are standing up centralized digital services teams. The team writes a style guide, adopts an accessibility standard, and publishes them—along with centralized governance guidelines—in which every agency can find them.
Fast forward, and things have typically improved to some extent. The agencies that were already invested have raised their standards, and the worst inconsistencies are gone.
But the results still aren't what anyone hoped for. Some agencies follow the guidance closely. Others follow the parts they find convenient. A few have simply worked around it, because nothing requires otherwise.
Governance policy sits outside the core responsibilities that agency teams are tasked with carrying out. Compliance becomes a choice made by busy team members. They have to know the documentation exists, understand how it applies to the page they're building, and choose to follow it. It's an easy step to skip when other priorities feel more urgent.
Even the teams that want to comply often can't. Writing good web content isn't the background or primary role of most agency staff who publish it. Some agencies run their entire web presence with a skeleton crew of one or two people. A manual policy asks them to skill up in a discipline they were never hired for in the first place.
It doesn't matter how clear or direct the documentation is. Governance that relies on manual compliance is followed unevenly.
Governance by design puts the rules where the work happens
States with a centralized digital group and a written policy already have two of the key components that successful governance requires. Lullabot's experience across state platform projects points to a third that has to arrive alongside them:
- A centralized group that owns and enforces the policy.
- A clearly written and documented content design and governance policy.
- A digital platform that carries part of the load by enforcing compliance through its architecture, including design standards and accessibility requirements.
That final element is where governance stops depending on memory or voluntary compliance.
In a platform with embedded governance, content types can encode what a piece of content is for, so an author picks the right structure by default instead of assembling one from scratch each time. Character counts and heading hierarchy can live in the authoring experience, so the constraint shows up automatically.
Content authoring permissions do similar work on a different axis. An agency with seven internal departments can scope access so people only touch content in their own division and can separate who authors, who reviews, and who publishes. That kind of granular control over what goes live is difficult to achieve on many platforms, but simple when planned early in a well-architected one.
Design systems help maintain consistency across agency sites. Shared headers and footers make sites recognizable as official state websites, while accessibility requirements, including WCAG 2.1 AA color contrast standards, are built into components so editors don't have to make those decisions themselves.
Keeping current with accessibility law is demanding work for a specialized team. Asking a two-person agency to do it creates unnecessary exposure.
What does architectural governance look like in practice?
Iowa's DOM DoIT inherited a fragmented ecosystem. Dozens of agency sites ran under siloed governance, with stale and redundant content that left constituents struggling to find what they needed.
The team's commitment to accessibility and plain language was already there. The question was where to start.
When Iowa partnered with Lullabot, our work began with research instead of design. We interviewed content authors and public information officers to sort through competing requirements. We then ran a comprehensive content audit across agencies.
That research informed the content types we built, making sure they reflected how editors actually worked.
The platform carries more than structure. Design and accessibility requirements are built into the authoring experience, so editors don't have to manage them separately. Character limits keep text within the space available in each component, and content types give editors a consistent structure for the different kinds of pages they need to publish.
Agency staff doesn't have to manage the guidelines and requirements on their own. They're built into the tools they open every morning.
Agencies expect to lose control over their site. What they actually lose is the guesswork and liability.
Understandably, state agencies aren't always enthusiastic when they learn about a unified platform. Many Iowa agencies assumed it meant giving up their unique branding, personality, and voice.
What they found was different. The platform lessened a burden they hadn't named. The endless decisions, the guesswork about structure, the stress of accessibility compliance before getting anywhere near the actual content.
They could trust that the platform provided a strong foundation for them to build on.
Editors found that a content type already existed for every asset they needed to publish, and that the taxonomies worked for them rather than against them.
In the end, the agencies that had resisted the hardest became the platform's loudest advocates.
Lullabot approaches the crucial process of gaining stakeholder support by showing rather than telling. That means:
- Providing demos of both the front end and the authoring experience early in the process.
- Creating documentation and onboarding videos in formats people would actually use.
- Nurturing a community of practice, where migrated agencies help the ones going next.
Building training into the replatforming process itself ensures agencies are prepared to jump in and willing to use the new system whose benefits they already understand.
What you build now decides what your successor inherits
Digital leaders arrive in the middle of a story. They’re faced with undocumented workarounds, decisions no one can explain, and institutional knowledge that left with former staff. Understanding and addressing those issues becomes part of the job, regardless of when or why they happened.
The same is true in the other direction.
The choices you make about where governance lives will determine how much your successor has to reconstruct. A policy document hands them a set of rules and hopes their agencies follow them. A platform with built-in governance gives them a system created to support those standards.
That's a decision available to you right now, and it's worth knowing where you stand before the next transition makes the answer for you.
Digital Ecosystem Maturity Assessment
How much of your platform's governance depends on people remembering to follow it?
Our Digital Ecosystem Maturity Assessment helps state digital teams see where their platform is today and what it would take to carry that consistency through the next transition.