At IA Summit earlier this year, @brownorama mentioned in passing that more and more projects are about unifying tangled archipelagos of sites for institutions w/governance problems. We’re seeing the same.
One of the things we see in these projects is that many traditional design approaches (even design systems) are a poor match, because the systems must adapt to worst-case scenarios on “rogue” sites inside of an org.
Even worse, we see these orgs getting downright bizarre advice from many vendors, because the aggregate contract-value of the whole platform is in the “juicy, tempting target” zone, even though many of the individual sites are managed like Squarespace on speed.
(An exception is editorial product — news, pure entertainment, etc — they seem to be going DIY or heavily customized FLOSS, since CMS is seen as core product rather than an it/marketing/comms expense)
For these archipelago platforms, SOME content has strong single-source req’s, other content is basically site specific ephemera. Per-site staffing is shoestring thin, sometimes volunteer/intern only. Nav/brand/IA needs unity for decent UX but per-site structure is idiosyncratic.
I don’t think there are any silver bullets, but this kind of scenario really is the frontier for the next year or two IMO.