Industry standards, such as accessibility (published by the World Wide Web Consortium" or Web Services Security (published by OASIS) are excellent ones to adopt and follow within your organization. This way, you can use the work someone has already done, which leaves you free to focus on other standards that are unique to your organization.

But how do you incorporate these existing standards into your own set and how do you reference them from a requirements perspective? While it can be tempting to copy these standards into your repository and link to them as resources for staff working in digital, this approach has many pitfalls. Not only will you be on the hook for keeping external standards in sync with the copy you have made available to workers inside of the organization, you will also miss out on examples of standards implementation and best practices that tend to be published alongside standards statements.

Instead of copying these resources into your repository, create a reference to the external standard and point to it from your repository. Make certain that the reference you are creating is appropriately tagged for any checklist generation (if you are using them) and search capability. If you automate policy and standards repository feeds to procurement for vendor contract inclusion, this will also ensure that the standards are up-to-date by requiring your vendor partners to implement the latest industry thinking on a particular aspect of digital.