When ownership of digital assets is worth the effort

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Ownership of digital assets is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

When it is worth it

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Get it in writing before work starts. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about ownership of digital assets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.