Status Quo

The web has constantly changed and improved since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented it in 1989¹. Unfortunately, the technology behind it has not. Web pages still load too slowly, responsiveness sometimes is just a promise, and weak security remains an ongoing issue. Content contributors still find themselves filling out complex forms in content management systems and clicking preview buttons to see the results, which is often far from how it looks to actual users.

Some reasons for this are that most popular CMSs are known for poor usability, lack of flexibility, ancient technologies, high maintenance costs – and they constantly face security threats. Enterprises use unscalable and inflexible tools, unsuitable for omnichannel use. Many commercial enterprise CMSs are simply too complex, diminishing the intended benefits through expensive, time-consuming projects that deliver inflexible, static results at a breathtaking TCO (total cost of ownership).

This situation has serious consequences – organizations annoy customers or employees, conversion rates are unsatisfactory, content isn’t regularly updated, SEO rankings decrease, the efficiency of content and IT teams decreases while the time and cost of delivering new digital projects skyrockets. New requirements derived from the organization’s digital transformation uncover limitations in the CMS infrastructure.

Enterprises need better solutions to face these challenges. In the future, organizations will need headless, decoupled CMSs to manage all kinds of digital assets, to edit and distribute them to customers, employees, and stakeholders in a compliant way on multiple channels. Today, content is much more than just the web. It is also the growing omnichannel experience with ecommerce, smart-edge devices, in-car information systems, voice search, machine learning automatons, and AR & VR development. Forecasts see worldwide technology spending on the Internet of Things surpassing $1 trillion in 2022² and many of those devices will need content.

Currently, the role of the website is changing from static publishing to interactive applications, from transferring a hierarchy of HTML files to web applications that provide content dynamically through a session as a browser-driven GUI. It’s more a software application than a publication. The content base needs to be established in the heart of the organization. This content hub should serve all the connected systems, not just a few of them. Updates not only need to be published at a defined point in time, on all related channels, but changes also need to be audited and documented in a compliant way.

A great central content hub serves editors, developers and the operations side of the business. The non-stop availability, scalability and consistency of content reduces operational and project costs and ensures quality with significantly better data protection and security. The CMS is no longer a delimiter, it becomes an accelerator for digital transformation and business.

The solution is actually simpler than ever and – more importantly – its success is measurable. As H. James Harrington pointed out: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.³

So far, success measurement as a basis of productivity in the area of CMSs have not been given much attention. With the increasing importance of content for organizations and thus the mission-critical importance of CMSs, this will change. The questions of availability, security, scalability, compliance, and performance can no longer be answered with “good enough”, because these parameters make the competitive difference in the digital age. A slow website simply does not sell. The importance of compliance will also increase for organizations that work internationally. The answer is the next-generation enterprise SaaS CMS, which addresses measurable success factors such as scalability, flexibility, speed, and intuitiveness, and is based on modern, innovative, proven and reliable technology.