Rapid creation of click-and-collect shopping services shows the importance of IT teams’ role in providing seamless, relevant and personalised buying experiences: just think about the web sites, mobile apps and other services that work seamlessly together to complete a single online shopping transaction.
Yet IT teams’ experiences using the systems powering certain digital services can be less than stellar: just ask them what they think of your outdated in-house content management system (CMS). Custom CMSes may have been necessary in the past, but years of ad-hoc changes to them have left many IT teams wasting time and money wrestling with slow, complex systems.
This problem has become more challenging as consumers access content via an ever-expanding range of devices, including smartphones, smart watches, smart assistants and smart TVs.
Instead of helping businesses engage consumers more quickly and effectively, legacy CMSes slowed down development as each new content channel required new content formats and CMS extensions.
In a time of rapid digital change, warns Adobe APAC product manager and regional evangelist Mark Szulc, committing time and resources to this ageing technology is no longer feasible.
“With so much tech debt, IT has still got to keep the lights on,” Szulc explains, “yet there’s all this new innovation that they’ve been asked to support as well.”
“If they have to stand up another tech stack just for these new platforms, then manage them separately, that doubles the pain points. It becomes two times the number of systems that businesses have to support and manage.”
“It’s time to take a step back and think about what’s happening,” he concludes.
Content driving business strategy
As businesses have sped up digital modernisation and pushed more services online during the pandemic, their need for better content management has increased.
More than 80 percent of respondents to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) survey said content was a core business strategy during 2021 – up from 72 percent in 2020.
Companies need to think about content cohesively, including the customer experience in today’s omnichannel, multi-device world.
“When we start thinking about brand control, it’s important to make sure there’s a unified experience across these different touchpoints,” Szulc explains. “You want to make sure that the information they experience is consistent.”
Production workflows should also be considered, since they are getting more complicated as expectations increase: 45 percent of the CMI respondents cited issues with content production workflows – up from 27 percent the year before.
This indicates that legacy technology stacks and content processes are no longer fit for purpose.
“Executives are more convinced than ever that content is a strategic function in business,” notes CMI, “but they don’t quite have a feel for how it all works yet…. Content production workflow has become an even bigger bottleneck.”
Offload the heavy lifting
Nearly half of CMI respondents said they were focused on creating consistent experiences throughout the customer journey, compared with 39 percent in 2020.
“It’s not just about web properties anymore,” says Szulc. “People expect consistent experiences on their mobile devices, smart watches, home appliances, and more – and the way to build those experiences has changed as a result.”
This requires technology stacks that enable easy, effective content delivery.
And rather than embedding content in a highly customised CMS, best practice now favours a hybrid approach, built on ‘headless APIs’ that help developers quickly embrace new channels.
Headless APIs enable content to be personalised and formatted at the back end, then delivered to the consumer’s device – providing a consistent look and feel while accommodating the full range of end-user devices.
For example, the cloud-based Adobe Experience Manager is a fully hosted, full-featured hybrid content management platform that includes headless and digital asset management capabilities. This enables a high degree of personalisation, providing a far more time and cost-effective, modern content management platform that is always updated to support the latest customer experience technologies.
Shifting the heavy lifting to a cloud-based CMS spares IT staff from scrambling to customise their CMSes each time a new device is released or the business adopts a new content strategy.
“Cloud technology lets us take the pain back from managing a brand by helping promote a great experience with great performance,” says Szulc, “but we take responsibility for security, and version control, and other things that are normally all in a day’s work for an IT department.”
Adobe’s use of cloud architecture to deliver a cloud-native CMS also ensures customers always have access to the latest features. Organisations can deliver a continuous pipeline of new capabilities to support customer experiences.
This enables a staged transition to more efficient, agile content management platforms, by migrating content to the new environment one business unit at a time.
“If the pain is around a certain area in the business,” says Szulc, “you can focus on that area and move it to the new platform as a priority. Our approach is thinking about cloud technology, and taking the pain back from the business.”
“IT leaders and managers who recognise their role in enabling omnichannel customer experiences will be better positioned to deliver them.”
For more information on how Adobe is modernising the content tech stack, click here.
