Building a Content Governance and Quality Audit Program

THE BACKGROUND
As Highmark's digital experiences expanded, content was being produced across many teams and workflows with no structured review process in place.

THE PROBLEM

Without a structured review process, content risks compound quietly. They go unnoticed until placeholder text ships, or two experiences use different terms for the same thing, or an accessibility gap shows up in an audit of content that was meant to be reviewed weeks ago. Ad hoc reviews aren’t sustainable at scale, and I knew I needed to build a way of finding problems that the team could keep using over and over, independent of myself or another writer.

COMPLICATIONS

No shared process. Content was being reviewed, if at all, by whoever happened to be closest to a given screen. There was no consistent set of standards being applied.

Risk at scale. The issues weren't isolated — they included placeholder content, terminology inconsistencies, style-guide violations, and accessibility concerns spread across a growing number of features.

Building something repeatable, not just fixing what existed. A one-time cleanup wouldn't have solved anything in the long term. The methodology needed to outlast the specific issues it was built to catch.

THE PROCESS

Rather than reviewing screens one at a time, I treated the audit as a governance problem. I built a repeatable methodology that categorized findings, prioritized them by risk, tied each issue back to a specific standard, and produced an actionable remediation path. I used AI tools to speed up the review and triage stages, which made it possible to cover far more content than a fully manual audit would have allowed.

THE IMPACT

The audit turned content review from subjective, ad hoc feedback into a structured, repeatable operational practice. It gave leadership visibility into quality issues, a prioritized remediation plan, shared review criteria, and a measurable improvement in content consistency across experiences.