IDC Opinion

An organization’s online digital presence is a mission-critical component of the resilient digital enterprise that requires flexibility in delivering content and services at scale. From its inception, the content management system (CMS) was designed to create and manage web, mobile web, and other HTML browser-based experiences. Since then, content management systems have evolved to publish content into app experiences on mobile, IoT, and other connected devices. The shift to accommodate a variety of content owners, web developers, modular cloud-based architectures, and content services has expanded the software options beyond traditional web content management (WCM) platforms to include new headless and open source alternatives.

In its simplest form, a CMS is used to manage and deploy content. Users can create, edit, delete and, most importantly, publish content (e.g., images, videos, forms, templates, pages, component, product assets) to various endpoints. For many organizations, a basic set of CMS capabilities and a straightforward approach for publishing information to a website is all they need. In other cases, a more robust digital experience platform that incorporates add-ons of ecommerce, marketing campaign tools, or customer data platforms is on the table. In either case, content is the core to reimagining what it means to exist within the digital economy.

Content for persuasive digital experiences, especially on brand and consumer websites, varies widely from product information and support installation guides to corporate information across investor relations, legal, HR, and other departments. The traditional waterfall method to “create then publish” content has morphed into an iterative process that empowers marketing teams to build, test, and publish content in shorter cycles and at their own pace. That additional speed is measured by the responsiveness of the organization’s website and the amount of time it takes to launch a new online initiative.

Digital Experiences Require a Modern CMS at Its Core

Rising customer expectations and the economic challenges of the pandemic had organizations pivoting their business to a fully digital system practically overnight. As consumers turned to the online version of their favorite brands, people sought a holistic digital experience that was highly personalized, completely connected, and based on empathetic relationships. The website became more than just an informational landing page or a shopping site. From retailers to restaurants, educational institutions, and government offices, every organization relied on its online presence to communicate, educate, and fulfill requests on an unprecedented scale across a hyperconnected digital environment.

During this evaluation, IDC interviewed various companies, creative agencies, and systems integrators that shared some of their common challenges in dealing with antiquated systems:

• “Making changes, or creating new templates was prohibitively resource intensive, and frustrating for business users, feeling locking into mediocre web experiences. Our CMS really held us back from doing anything creative, or innovative.”
• “We needed a CMS that was easier to develop on and simpler for our associates to use to create content in many different markets and languages.”
• “The overall business goals were (and still are) to remove inefficiencies when working across teams within the organization. Today, teams are unable to leverage resources from other teams because processes, tools, and code are different. We need a central CMS platform that will enable all users to work in the same way, so moving across teams is seamless.”
• “We want to improve the content author experience by finding a CMS that can be configured and customized around marketing needs — bring our websites to a modern technology, improve page speed and efficiency of being able to update pages quickly.”
• ” Anything from web copy to images to promos, we should not have to waste developer cycles on changes that could easily be done with a CMS.”
• “We want to find a system that does not dictate our tech stack so we can deliver a first-in-class user experience and performance based on technology and vendor choices we’ve already made as a company. Maximize the value of the tech stack with integrations that share data and create consistent customer experiences across all touch points.”

As businesses head into recovery, forward-looking organizations are reviewing the investments and changes made during the pandemic era. They are codifying any changes that will endure and making sure that they can not only ensure business resiliency but also lay a foundation for future growth, innovation, and agility. There is a renewed focus on customer experience, which is improved with the adoption of personalized, automated, and transformed digital experiences. Other trends of note include:

• Content value streams: Content is a core element of the digital customer experience. The modern CMS will orchestrate the content value stream across the various stakeholders in a seamless fluid motion. Fundamental to the engaged customers is gaining an understanding of what they value in products, services, experiences, and interactions with a business. Also important is identifying the streams that provide an opportunity for the business and its customers to exchange value tied to the process by which data and information flows through an organization and along the way accumulates context and form to become enriched content elements. With each iterative touch point of activity along the customer data journey, content strengthens its value.
• First-party data: Driven by data trust and the impacts of evolving regulatory demands, there is a reduction in the utility of third-party data and cookie-based customer insight. Users are demanding greater privacy — including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used — and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands. As a result, businesses must take ownership in understanding and responding to user behavior and expectations.
• Design systems: As organizations manage an increasingly broad range of digital touch points with their audiences, more of them are investing in fully digital design systems that can accelerate development and improve brand consistency at the edge. Creative designers are teaming up with web developers to build engaging digital experiences that leverage the back-end content engine of the CMS.

Types of Content Management Systems

Each CMS category can be characterized by the level of control and technical skill needed at the content, design, and administration layers. Small to midsize businesses or independent departments wanting to outsource website operations will find that SaaS-templated website builders require little to no technical skills and provide simplicity in creating a page quickly. Hosted website solutions cater to the open source community, offering ease of operations in the cloud by applying controls across three tiers (web operations, web development, and content management) for better resource and data isolation, utilization, and optimization. Large enterprises with heavy transactional activities or multiple data sources will find that a traditional WCM platform offers the broadest set of capabilities and integrations to other applications. Finally, the most developer-intensive solution, headless CMS, is a good fit for organizations that need a fully customized front-end delivery and have strong development skills in place.

Architectural Considerations

Modern CMSs orient toward a content powerhouse that offers codeless content creation (drag-and-drop authoring and administration, intelligent content recommendations, roles/usage-based templates), presentation design freedom, automated decision-driven workflow, and scalable edge delivery. Architectural elements of consideration include:

• Smart data structures: Content relationships require a data structure that supports an object-level atomic design to prevent layered or circular content referencing. Every element needs to be independently assembled, allowing for reuse without dependency on the presentation, and machine driven (e.g., automation, insight and recommendations) to drive kinetic outcomes (e.g., engagement, conversion, learning).
• Diverse content types: The data layer must handle a diverse set of content formats (e.g., atomic fragments of content, text, images, videos, augmented reality [AR]/VR, and audio).
• Accessibility support: Accessibility checkers quickly scan a website for on-page and technical accessibility issues and errors in readability or navigation based on recognized standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). With better content enrichment and presentation design, accessible websites provide an inclusive experience for everyone, optimized across device (desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone browser, automobile displays) or operational constraints (noisy surroundings, limited lighting, hands-free driving environments).
• Microservices and API frameworks: Offering a set of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API, such as REST or GraphQL, microservices are built around business capabilities that can be scaled independently by distributing the services across servers and replicating as needed with explicit remote call mechanisms.

Methodology