by Janus Boye
What can we do to ensure that no persona gets left behind in content management, especially as we begin to discuss requirements surrounding digital experience management?
In a recent member conference call, Preston So from Oracle looked to fields as diverse as geology and motivational psychology and expanded our sights to dimensions beyond the static web to forge a new grand compromise between content editors and marketers and their engineering counterparts to foster a bright future for the CMS — and how we can create and contribute to initiatives to support it.
To quote Preston:
The holy grail of digital experience platforms is presentation management
The CMS market is changing
Referencing how Gartner recently retired the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management, Preston made the compelling point that while CMS has been around for more than 2 decades now, there’s big change happening.
Besides pointing to analysts, he also pointed to innovation happening on the vendor side, highligting companies like Contentful, Prismic and Sanity. He also mentioned German GraphCMS who just secured a new round of funding this week.
From the customer point of view, Preston arrived at the core conflict in content management today:
Traditional CMS today is geared towards marketers or content editors building websites. What about other personas and other use cases?
On the other hand, headless CMS today is geared toward developers and not toward marketers or content editors who are used to traditional CMS features.
In other words, customer wants to do much more, like conversational interfaces and digital signage, but they can’t afford it as it requires too much custom development.
Regrets from buying headless CMS
In recent years, headless has been all the hype. To quote Preston from a follow up conversation:
CMOs are absolutely not sold on the headless CMS model because, despite the interactivity, performance, and security benefits, it represents a surrender of must-have features that have been key to marketer and content editor experiences for well over a decade.
In our call, Preston made the point that money is not with IT at the moment. According to Preston, money is with Marketing at the moment and that might be part of the explanation behind the flatlining adoption curve of the headless vendors.
Still, there’s a debate going at the moment on whether headless actually solves more problems than it creates. Some marketers have certainly learned the hard way, that many headless vendors are not the answer to their marketing requirements.
Preston shared the below illustration on hypothetical marketer hierarchy of needs for a new headless CMS
Learn more
You can browse the slides from the call or view the entire recording below.
Deane Barker has a much praised and widely recognised industry newsletter called Squirrel Notes. It’s quite prestigious to get your articles mentioned in those and as one of the few, Deane has highlighted two of Preston’s articles:
Off to the digital experience races: The second CMS war is officially here (Feb 2020)
The distributed CMS: How the decoupled CMS endgame will impact your organization (June 2019)
The conversation is sure to also continue in the CMS Expert groups.
Finally, Preston is not the first to make the connection to Maslow:
In her Boye Aarhus 16 conference keynote, Claudia Urschbach from Süddeutsche Zeitung did it as well. Read more in Two Steps In Delivering Value To Your Customers.
Mark Demeny has also written about Maslow’s Hierarchy of (CMS) needs