By Janus Boye
In late 2020, IT analyst firm Gartner made the blunt prediction that ‘The Future of Business Is Composable’. A few months later, at the beginning of 2021, Gartner then also introduced the term ‘composable’ to the CMS marketplace with a splash in their annual Market Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
To Gartner, a “composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks” and many in our industry translated this to moving away from the large software suites or what’s also known as the monoliths.
This is largely a response to increased customers expectations, demands on shortening project cycles, increased technical debt and finally a growing demand to fit into the existing tech stack. In other words, composability has become a big thing, and many vendors have seized the momentum to also talk about how composability is key for commerce, but what about content?
As we look towards 2022, composable content management is likely to become a key requirement and we already see vendors picking up on the emerging trend. Let’s start by understanding better what’s actually happening.
What’s composable content management all about?
In particular, large and complex organisations need composable content management, to deliver a better, more focused and simpler experience for their content contributors.
Rather than the usual one-size-fits-all approach, which has been the answer delivered by many vendors during the past decades of digital solutions, the idea is to provide people with an interface that is more tailored to their needs.
An example could be Tony who is working with translations and needs to easily work with translated versions of content in different languages. Or Irene in investor relations, who sees additional content and content types when working with the annual report. Or Steven who works with SEO and digital marketing and needs to use extra fields for search marketing.
A simple way to illustrate the options offered by composable content management. Illustration provided by Kontent by Kentico.
As Michael Andrews from Kontent by Kentico says:
“I hear from many content strategists that their CMS is too complex and requires too much training. That’s the case because content workers get exposed to all the functionality of their CMS, even if most people will never use it all.”
A composable architecture can empower content workers. It allows them to choose the best solution for their team or their role, without burdening them with the functionality they neither need nor want.
Having worked in the marketplace for longer than most, Michael also said what happens if you don’t offer composable content management:
“When CMSs get too complex, content workers start to use standalone apps that aren’t connected to their CMS. This is a short-term solution, which effectively hinders efficiency and governance.”
Sounds familiar? Composable content management rather provides teams with the tools they need while coordinating various streams of work
It’s not just about content
Composable content management is more than just tailoring the editorial interface to best fit your content creation needs.
Composable content management is also a part of the larger stack, made from several composable elements, e.g. composable commerce or adding personalization so that editors can easily provide content for personalized experiences or content that helps tell the story about the product that goes beyond the SKU from the commerce system.
In connection with the rest of the stack, all the composable elements become the digital experience platform (DXP) which powers the digital experience across channels.
Composability is about giving brands the “power of choice” as they say at composable DXP vendor Uniform. Empowering business users to build, launch and iterate with no-code composition tools that leverage all content sources while removing complexity and giving developers choice to select front-end frameworks best suited for the task.
Uniform co-founder Lars Birkholm Petersen also offered his take on the problem that composable content management sets out to address:
“For the past decade, brands have been locked to a certain paradigm of developing sites and apps, where they first selected a DXP or CMS vendor. Based on that choice, brands had limited options for agencies, who have vendor expertise to implement, and based on the vendor choice, the developers has to follow certain rigid paradigms for the development.
Often in the process, the initial great vision for a new site gets lost along the way, as most vendors of the past decade have monolith architectures that take longer to develop on - and at the end of the day brands are locked into the vendor's roadmap and expensive upgrades.”
The move towards composability, often based on MACH architecture, provides brands with the power of choice. Now, you can choose exactly the best fit for your needs. The table turns: From platform-first to value-first.
This means you can start developing your solution straight away and let developers choose the best framework, then add the composable parts, like headless CMS or commerce
This in turn provides access to more agencies, as they don’t have to be experts on older monolithic systems. Instead you, as a customer, can select those that are amazing at creating compelling front-end experiences.
To quote Lars:
“Having a composable platform, where composable content management is a core part of, adds speed to market and more importantly, it’s delivering on the MACH Alliance promise of being the end of re-platforming. Brands can now add the composable parts, when they need it and can change the parts along the way, keeping other parts intact.”
Unifying content operations
Perhaps the bigger picture here is not so much technology innovation, but rather that composable content management finally enables organisations to unify their content operations.
You are no longer required to force your digital team into using the exact same functionality. This puts an end to “rogue tools” that aren’t connected and as a content team, you can use different tools and capabilities with confidence that these all support each other.
Angus Edwardson, co-founder of GatherContent, states that this is all about tearing down unnecessary silos:
“One of the most exciting things about composable content management from my perspective is simply the end of content silos. There will always be different groups of people in an organisation with different technical needs when it comes to content, and the composable approach fully embraces that. This should allow organisations to finally achieve a connected - content silo free - content operations workflow, from ideation to multi-channel delivery and governance. That’s an extremely powerful premise.”
With more and more people involved in content creation, and digital transformation having been accelerated so rapidly over the past two years, you can see why composable content management is gaining such momentum in the market.
Angus also points out the impact this can have on speed to market, largely due to training:
“Another aspect to consider is just the huge reduction in training costs that occur when you adopt a composable approach. By only having people use the part of the stack they really need to use, I’ve seen organisations save ridiculous amounts of time and money that were previously spent on training everyone in the organisation on how to use complex monolithic content management systems. Now people simply learn the part of the workflow that they interact with. That’s also a real user experience improvement and increases speed to market.”
Our take on composable content management
If the strong endorsement by several vendors is any indication, we can expect to hear much more about composable content management in the future. A quick search on Google, is also a good test of both marketing strategies and things to come. As of writing these lines, DXP vendors like Acquia, Contentful and Sitecore are also ranking high on the term.
While some might find that this industry keeps coming up with new terms to solve the same old problems, our take is rather a more positive and constructive one: We are innovating towards a better understanding of how to reap the benefits of digital transformation. Incremental progress towards better solutions and words, including new industry terms, help shape our understanding of the underlying problems we are trying to solve.
As the different vendor statements in this article clearly show, composable content management both solves a real problem and is not just a new way to call something. In particular, the promise to improve the working conditions for both content editors and digital builders has huge untapped potential.
We’ll certainly keep watching and look forward to continuing the conversation in our expert groups.
Learn more about key CMS trends
Earlier this year, we’ve written about the MACH Alliance and in another post, we took a closer look at what’s going on with content.
In the beginning of 2020, now already almost 2 years ago, Lars Birkholm Petersen from Uniform, also wrote a very popular post on the factors we need to consider today that we didn't consider yesterday. Read: What got you here won’t get you there.