---
title: "You Can’t Govern What You Can’t See: Visibility Challenges with State Government Websites"
url: "/articles/you-cant-govern-what-you-cant-see-visibility-challenges-state-government-websites"
type: article
date: 2026-04-15
updated: 2026-04-15
---

# You Can’t Govern What You Can’t See: Visibility Challenges with State Government Websites

Image

                ![Graphic with the headline “You Can’t Govern What You Can’t See” and subheading “Visibility Challenges with State Government Websites” on a blue background with a small “Article” label.](/sites/default/files/styles/promo_medium/public/2026-04/You%20Can%E2%80%99t%20Govern%20What%20You%20Can%E2%80%99t%20See%20.png.webp?itok=N3gB_RFk) 

##  [Andrew Berry](/about/andrew-berry) 

 ![Photo of Andrew Berry, white male wearing a blue button down oxford shirt in front of a gray background.](/sites/default/files/styles/square_120x120/public/2023-06/andrew-berry.jpg?itok=ybszTyFs)

VP of Technology

Andrew Berry is an architect and developer who works at the intersection of business and technology.

It’s a common scenario for state digital leaders: Constituents are trying to complete basic tasks, maybe renewing a license, applying for a benefit, or finding a tax form. But they're hitting dead ends. And now someone in the governor's office wants to know why the call center volume is up again.

While your team is accountable for the experiences that drive those calls, the real problem is agencies managing their own websites independently, with little consistency across platforms, content, or standards.

## How a state’s digital ecosystem becomes fragmented

Your lack of visibility into digital experiences across agencies happened the same way it does with most legacy infrastructure: one reasonable decision at a time, made by different people across multiple agencies over decades.

Agencies built their own sites or landing pages because they had to. A centralized platform either didn't exist or didn't meet their needs. Technology choices were made upstream, and agencies found themselves responsible for delivering services on architecture they didn't choose—all with staff whose skill sets were built around systems that are now 15 or 20 years old. In situations like these, modernization means retraining, restructuring workflows, and in some cases, reassessing jobs that may no longer exist in the new model.

Most agencies don't want things to stay the way they are. They want to maintain the ability to manage their own content, respond quickly to their audiences, and support the programs they’re responsible for. At the same time, they don’t want to lose that control by disappearing into a monolithic state platform that doesn’t reflect their needs. What they’re really looking for is a platform that evolves over time and a seat at the table when it does.

## The real cost of poor governance in government websites 

When issues arise within a web ecosystem, the impact shows up somewhere worse than a dashboard.

### Increased Calls

[Before our work with the State of Iowa](https://www.lullabot.com/our-work/state-iowa), the digital team tracked a direct line between hard-to-use agency websites and inbound call center volume. Constituents who couldn't complete tasks online, which often crossed multiple agencies, picked up the phone. That metric went all the way to the governor's office. Website usability failures, invisible to the digital director, had a very visible operational and political cost.

### Security Risks

Security exposure follows the same pattern. Fragmented platforms mean fragmented patch cycles and platform updates. When every agency manages its own infrastructure, each with different software versions, legacy third-party vendors, or stretched IT budgets, the likelihood of a security breach becomes more a question of “when” than “if.”

### Accessibility Complaints and Liabilities

Accessibility compliance is a legal requirement for your websites, and the risk of legal exposure remains a top concern for digital directors. The nightmare scenario is an agency launching a new site or feature without central review, allowing it to go undetected until a complaint arrives months later. At that point, the window for a quiet fix has already closed.

None of these failures announced themselves. They were invisible until they became urgent.

## Monitoring tools alone can't solve the visibility problem

Crawlers like Siteimprove can scan sites from the outside, flag accessibility issues, surface page changes, and deliver regular reports on what's shifted across your properties. In theory, that's visibility.

In practice, these tools offer at best a partial view. You may have these tools deployed against the highest-profile sites, but not your full ecosystem. And in areas with broader coverage, the sheer volume of reports outpaces anyone's ability to act.

Without a foundation of complete, normalized data, a dashboard can only show a selection of sites someone already knew to monitor. The details worth worrying about are the ones that aren't in the feed.

## How Georgia built a model for state digital visibility

The challenge was familiar when [we partnered with Digital Services Georgia](https://www.lullabot.com/our-work/govhub-building-georgias-digital-future): nearly 10 million residents, more than 80 agencies, and no clear mandate to centralize. Every agency had its own identity, its own constituents, and its own priorities. The goal was to build a platform flexible enough to support agency independence while giving the state a unified foundation for its digital experiences.

The result was [GovHub, Georgia’s shared publishing platform](https://digital.georgia.gov/services/govhub) that launched 75 agency sites across 12 rollout cycles. The [Analytics Dashboard](https://digital.georgia.gov/services/gap) provides the state with a public-facing view of performance and accessibility scores across agency sites, including those not on its central GovHub platform. The dashboard was built using outside-in scanning, which means that not everything needed to be modernized to generate valuable reports with actionable insights. As long as the scanning infrastructure is in place, the data is accessible.

Other states have noticed. Georgia's dashboard comes up regularly in conversations with digital leaders who want to replicate its success. However, most can't get the funding, which tells us something important: the visibility problem in state agencies is primarily a political and organizational challenge.

## What state governments can do with better visibility

When you have reliable, comprehensive data across your state’s entire digital ecosystem, you gain three advantages:

1. **Digital priorities become grounded in evidence**. Which agencies have the highest-risk properties? Which sites haven't been meaningfully updated in years? Right now, many digital leaders answer these questions based on intuition. When you have real visibility, you can use data to answer these questions and make a case accordingly.
2. **Reporting becomes credible**. Without visibility into the full ecosystem, regular briefs on a platform's health are educated guesses dressed up as status updates. You simply can't report accurately on what you can't see.
3. **Intervention becomes targeted**. When things feel out of control, a natural instinct is to tighten governance across the board. But blanket mandates can alienate the agencies you need as partners. With real visibility, you can identify specific problems and offer targeted support, which builds trust rather than burning it.

Visibility transforms website governance from being a fire drill into an informed practice.

### Map your digital ecosystem before trying to govern it

If you're like most digital leaders, you don't have a complete picture of what they're governing. The biggest reason for this challenge is that inherited platforms were never designed to be overseen in a clear, comprehensive way.

Getting a clear picture of your statewide ecosystem is the work that has to happen before anything else. Before you build a governance framework, before you make the case for platform consolidation, before you brief leadership on digital modernization progress, you need to know what you're actually dealing with.

Our [Digital Ecosystem Maturity Assessment](https://www.lullabot.com/digital-modernization-platform-development/digital-ecosystem-maturity-assessment) is designed to answer exactly that question. It maps what sites exist across your ecosystem, surfaces where compliance and security gaps are hiding, and identifies which agencies need support first. The assessment is the map before the route. Without it, even the best governance strategy is navigating blind.

[Get in touch with us](https://www.lullabot.com/contact) to learn more about the assessment.

[Digital & Content Strategy](/topics/content-strategy)

[Technical Architecture](/topics/technical-architecture)

Fragmented agency websites limit visibility, driving risk in accessibility, security, and governance. Learn how states can gain insight, reduce friction, and make better decisions.