Nobody at head office could say who was able to post as the company.

This was not a company that lacked process. It was a company whose process stopped at the border of each market.

Eleven markets each ran their own social presence, which was the right call — a post about a new terminal in one country is not interesting in another, and the local teams knew their audiences. Each market picked its own scheduling tool, or used none. Each market held its own logins.

The central brand team in head office set guidelines, distributed a quarterly asset pack, and then found out what had been published by looking at the channels like any other member of the public. When a regional post needed correcting, the correction went out by email to a distribution list and was applied at whatever speed the market applied it.

The credentials were the part that made the security team uncomfortable. Access to a corporate channel was a username and a password in a spreadsheet on a shared drive, distributed to whoever needed it that quarter. Six such spreadsheets existed across the group. When someone left the company, their laptop was reclaimed and their email was disabled, and the password they knew stayed exactly as valid as it had been the week before.

The exposure was not hypothetical, and the reporting was six weeks stale by design.

An internal access audit was attempted and could not be completed. Three channels were found with no identifiable current owner — accounts created for a campaign years earlier, still live, still carrying the company's name, still reachable by anyone who had ever been handed the sheet. The audit could not establish how many people held working credentials, because the sheet recorded who had been given access, never who had lost it.

Governance had the same shape. Two of the eleven markets operate under regulatory constraints on how service claims are worded. Compliance review of social content happened by email, before publication, in principle. There was no record afterwards of what had been reviewed by whom, so demonstrating that it had happened relied on someone finding the right mail thread.

The global performance picture was assembled quarterly by two analysts over about three weeks: eleven exports, inconsistent date ranges, metrics that were not defined the same way in every tool. By the time the board saw the number it described a quarter that had ended six weeks earlier, and no one could drill into it without commissioning the work again.

Access stopped being something a person knows and became something a role has.

The eleven markets kept their autonomy over what to say. Head office gained a defensible answer to who can say it.

Useful whether or not you ever open NOWScale — these are the parts that generalise.