Who set up your website, domain and email system? Are they still part of your organisation? Do you have the login details?
Many organisations don’t know the answers to these questions, and that’s what’s known as a single point of failure.
When it becomes a problem
While everything keeps working, there’s no obvious issue. It surfaces when something changes – a staff member or volunteer moves on, a renewal doesn’t get paid, or a relationship with a developer turns difficult. At that point, a minor administrative gap becomes leverage someone else holds over your organisation.
Well-run organisations end up here too. It’s the result of technology decisions made incrementally, by different people, at different times, with nobody stepping back to document who should hold ultimate control. A website, a domain and an email system typically get set up separately by whoever was handling each one at the time.
What to check
Closing this gap is a matter of knowing the answers to a short list of questions and documenting them somewhere accessible.
Closing this gap doesn’t require a large project. It requires knowing the answers to a short set of questions, and making sure the answers live somewhere other than one person’s memory.
- Who is the domain name registered to, and who can access that account?
- Who holds the primary login for hosting, and is there a documented backup contact?
- If your current web developer or IT provider became unavailable tomorrow, could someone else pick up where they left off without starting again?
- Is any of this dependent on a personal email address rather than an organisational one?
None of these questions require deep technical knowledge to ask, and the answers are usually easy enough to find once someone takes responsibility for finding them.
Where this fits in a broader review
Access control and single points of failure are one part of what we look at in a Technology Governance review, alongside whether your organisation’s technology decisions connect to its goals. For a fuller picture, an IT Current State Assessment covers this alongside six other areas, from infrastructure to data management.
The organisations that handle this well aren’t the ones with the most technical staff – they’re the ones that treat ownership and access as something to document deliberately rather than sort out later.
Get in touch if you’d like a hand finding these gaps in your own organisation.
