Centralised governance puts the authority to publish, and most of the work of producing content, in one place. A single team, usually in communications, marketing or digital, owns the website and the other main channels. Colleagues elsewhere bring requests, information and approvals, and the central team plans, writes, edits and publishes. In a small organisation that team might be one person with an inbox; in a large one it can run like an in-house agency, with editors, designers and specialists in different formats.
It sits at one end of a spectrum, with decentralised governance at the other and hub and spoke in between. Centralisation can also be partial: an organisation may centralise its platform, its standards or its sign-off without centralising who writes. The UK government’s move to GOV.UK in the early 2010s, which closed hundreds of departmental and agency websites, is often cited as centralisation on a grand scale. Yet most of the pages on the new site are still written and maintained by other departments, while the central team looks after the few thousand that most citizens and businesses need.
Why it matters for content
The appeal is coherence. When one team sees the whole estate, it can spot duplication, keep one voice and make sure every page meets the same standards for accessibility, accuracy and structure. Accountability is easy to trace: when something is wrong, everyone knows whose job it is to fix it. Specialists get colleagues who share their craft, people to review their work and a career path that doesn’t depend on being the only content person in a department.
The costs come from distance and volume. Every request joins a queue, so a small correction can wait behind a campaign, and colleagues who want something published quickly learn to route round the team with a separate microsite, a PDF on a shared drive or a social account nobody mentioned. The central team also knows less about each subject than the people who work on it, so drafts travel back and forth for checking, and content comes to be treated as the final polish rather than part of how a service is designed. Lisa Welchman makes the case against a web team that decides and runs everything: it becomes a production silo, cut off from the business it’s meant to serve and hard to size properly.
Centralisation tends to suit organisations with a modest volume of content, serious legal or reputational risk or an estate that has grown beyond anyone’s control. Many centralise for a period to restore order after years of uncoordinated publishing, then hand more work back to other teams once standards and ownership are settled.
How AI changes the picture
AI tools ease the central team’s oldest problem, which is capacity. Drafting from a structured brief, summarising a subject expert’s notes, checking a page against the style guide and flagging pages due for review all shorten the time each request takes, so a small team can handle more without lowering its standards. The bottleneck moves rather than disappears. Someone still has to decide what’s worth publishing, confirm the facts with the people who know them and answer for the result.
They also make the central team easier to bypass. When anyone in the organisation can produce a plausible page, briefing or chatbot answer in minutes, requests that once came to the team can go round it altogether. The team’s authority comes to depend less on being the only people able to write and more on what it provides to everyone else: approved sources, tested instructions and a publishing route that colleagues trust.
Questions people ask
- Does centralisation mean nobody else can publish?
Usually it means nobody else publishes without the central team. Some organisations give a few trusted colleagues editing rights for news or events, while the central team keeps control of structure, navigation and the most visited pages. What matters is where the final decisions sit.
- How do you stop a central team becoming a bottleneck?
Triage requests by value and risk, publish the criteria and say no clearly when something doesn’t need a page. Templates, self-service routes for routine updates and a named contact for each part of the organisation all help. If the queue keeps growing anyway, the organisation may have outgrown the model.
- When does it make sense to centralise?
When content has sprawled beyond repair, when mistakes carry legal or safety consequences or when the volume is small enough for one team to manage well. It’s a harder case for organisations with many specialist services that change often.
- What does the rest of the organisation do?
It stays responsible for what’s true. Subject experts supply knowledge, check accuracy and tell the central team when something changes. Centralisation works badly when colleagues assume that handing over the writing also hands over responsibility for the facts.
Learn more
- 300+ websites to just 1 in 15 months – Mark Hazelby’s 2014 account of moving more than 300 government organisations onto one website; the comments add a pointed critique and a reply explaining that most of the 150,000 pages stayed with the teams that wrote them.
- Managing Chaos: frequently asked questions – short answers from Lisa Welchman’s book on digital governance, including why letting one web team decide and run everything creates a production silo.