Protecting an international gas and chemicals enterprise’s digital investment

Challenge

After a decade of scattered web sites, inconsistent branding, and little governance, the organization redesigned its web presence and assigned content publishing to the business units.

Yet, without policies in place to ensure digital integrity across its 50 markets, stakeholders feared the web presence they’d just invested so much it could go back to being an unruly mess or even get them into legal trouble.

Approach

In two weeks, I audited digital policies across the company’s 50 regulatory environments, identified legal and regulatory gaps, and flagged deviations from industry best practice.I spent another week working with the organization’s legal counsel, who also served as its digital policy steward, to prioritize the organization’s risks in light of:

• The relative few regulatory and legal requirements on the oil and gas industry.
• Joint ventures in many countries that could minimize risk to the parent company.
• The fact that the company doesn’t market or sell to consumers.
• Varying levels of digital savvy and capacity from country to country.

Outcomes

Together, we developed a comprehensive set of 23 policies that fit the organization globally and could be localized to individual markets.

They also chose to accept a handful of risks, but the business was aware of and prepared for them. For example, instead of spending money to meet accessibility requirements in the US, UK, and Israel, the B2B organization decided to save it for a potential fine or lawsuit. They also decided two countries’ small, less-technical teams only needed to follow a handful of key brand and content policies.

In just five weeks, the organization was left with a clear view of its risks around the globe; actionable, practical plans to mitigate them; and a framework to secure their digital investment for the future.

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