30-second summary:
COVID-19 has drastically affected businesses that traditionally rely on physical interaction to drive revenue. There is more of a focus than ever on driving conversions, interactions and revenue through digital.
Because of this, the platforms that manage online experiences, Content Management Systems and Digital Experience Platforms, are mission-critical applications for many organizations.
For those that invest, manage and work in these platforms, they must reevaluate their platform requirements and ensure their CMS can support them through extended WFH periods, increased online traffic, and shifting marketing strategy.
A modern cloud-hosted CMS with purpose-built features around productivity, collaboration, performance, and security can ease the burden of heightening businesses requirements, tight deadlines and increased marketing needs due to COVID-19.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, nearly two-thirds of Americans are forced to work remotely. As some businesses begin to be reopen, others are still questioning whether they’ll ever return to an office in the same capacity ever again.
Employees have stepped up and proven to their leadership that they can complete projects just as effectively at home as they were in an office.
Now, business can ponder eliminating extra office space, allowing these savings to invest in other areas of the business. The stark reality for many is they will continue working from home which is considered the “new normal.”
Also, drastically affected are businesses that traditionally rely on physical interaction to drive revenue.
Unfortunately, these are the hardest hit and are running on limited capacity, or worse yet, still closed. In this “new normal,” it’s vital for businesses to engage personas and drive revenue by delivering tailored and compelling digital experiences.
This reprioritized shift to drive digital experiences introduces several implications needing consideration within your company’s infrastructure, including Content Management Systems (CMS) and Digital Experience Platforms (DXP).
If you’re in IT, it’s time to reevaluate whether your infrastructure is equipped to best support your team throughout unprecedented times and beyond.
Content management requirements are evolving
In a post-pandemic world, the push behind digital transformation is accelerating as companies almost exclusively conduct business and engage with customers online.
To respond to this rapidly changing business environment, organizations have shifted their content management requirements to support:
Enabling self-service for both customers, partners and employees
Automating and streamlining processes to reduce cost and meet the ever-growing customer demands for instant gratification
Engaging with customers in a cost-effective, personalized way through the channel of their choice
Ensuring agile innovation and always-on experience delivery
With these modern requirements, many platforms in place may not have the necessary features to support organizations in this new business environment.
It’s up to the IT teams to identify emerging content management requirements and evaluate whether their infrastructure is interoperable with the “new normal.” Otherwise, IT risks continuing to use a platform that is a hindrance to meeting key launch dates and KPIs.
So, how do you know if your CMS is built to withstand our foreseeable future? Here are the top 5 content management capabilities IT teams should ensure they’re meeting:
1) Cloud-hosted infrastructure
When business and marketing demands are sporadic and unpredictable, it can be difficult for development teams to keep a similar pace.
Constantly evolving business requirements imply greater technical costs, development hours and resources. Development needs continue to rise even as IT teams are more resource constrained as ever, leading to backlog and burnout.
For those who manage their own in-house web hosting, you experience an additional layer of responsibilities and complexity you address daily.
With a cloud-hosted infrastructure, IT teams spend less time managing the infrastructure and more time developing impactful digital experiences that are so critical in today’s market. The cloud allows teams to reallocate sunk costs and resources to backlogged or deprioritized projects.
2) Continuous integration, continuous deployment
There’s no doubt, engineering, developing and implementing digital experience capabilities is complex, especially with numerous people, processes and technologies involved.
Project requirements are becoming more elaborate and deadlines becoming tighter, resulting in technical teams needing their CMS to streamline the development processes as much as possible in order to support agile deployments.
CMSs with built-in Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) can be a developer’s greatest resource. CI/CD ensures development teams can confidently, safely and quickly push code across environments and workflows.
This helps automate standard processes while adhering to code quality and development best practices. CI/CD rapidly deploys new functionality and/or capabilities seamlessly – without any hiccups in the workflow.
3) Always-on performance & security features
With revenue, conversions and business success being so dependent on your digital interactions, potential downtime or security breaches can paralyze IT teams in achieving key goals.
Your CMS should deliver always-on performance and enterprise-grade security capabilities to prevent downtime and minimize the need to spend supporting and optimizing platform performance and security.
Elasticity for increasing customer and client demands while in quarantine, your CMS should include autoscaling features to meet varying demand across regions as well as optimized CDN for speedy page-load times.
On top of that, features like endpoint protection and Web Application Firewall can keep your site protected from nefarious threats and intrusions, which could sacrifice your online experience.
4) Cross-team collaboration tools
As business teams grow more sophisticated in technology, it undoubtedly gets harder to manage all of the requirements from an IT perspective.
Unneeded complexity limits your organization’s ability to work in an integrated, streamlined, easy-to-use interface; bogging down productivity and increasing the amount of inquiries and requests from business teams.
A modern CMS enables marketers to work within their teams while encouraging cross-team collaboration.
Features like automating content publishing, simplifying marketing tasks, shared collaboration space and workflows and permissions can enable marketing and IT focus on what matters the most – optimizing the digital experiences they deliver and driving cross-functional productivity without elevating costs and resources.
5) Automatic upgrades
Upgrading your CMS can be a large project to undertake – especially with other critical web projects in process at your organization.
However, it’s extremely important to keep your platform updated, so that you can take advantage of performance, security and capability enhancements to be able to meet rising customer and client expectations.
Automatic upgrades can make your life a lot easier. Modern CMSs enable you to streamline the upgrade processes and free up associated manual tasks.
Rest assured, organizations are always working in the latest and greatest platform, without having to expend excessive resources to make it happen.
Conclusion
Our “new normal” will push the limits of your companies’ technical capabilities. No matter where you are on the digital maturity model, there is no disputing the drastic pivot toward digital.
Having a modern foundation for IT teams to build their digital experience platforms on top of is more critical than ever. It all starts with a modern cloud-hosted CMS with purpose-built features to simply IT management and development resources.
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Source: ClickZ
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