Top Five Articles From 2021

by Janus Boye

Happy New Year! The answers are out there, also in 2022. Let’s start the year, with a quick refresher of what we learned in 2021.

Personally, I found that what was the tried and tested age-old recipe now no longer holds up. This means that we even more than before need to listen carefully. We have to observe, be open to trying things out and foremost learn with an open mind.

As a community, we once again grew our member base and while doing meetings in person, hybrid and a few virtual, we also managed to publish 40 blog posts during the year. Thanks to everyone who shared their story.

Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.

There’s still nothing like a real How-To Guide. Before Anne Frost embarked on her entertaining story on how to ruin it all, she also shared a brief summary of how she sees employee advocacy today.

What if senior management is too busy to engage and be a part of the employee advocacy program? Anne also had a blunt answer to this:

If top management doesn’t have time for employee advocacy, then they are busy with the wrong things

Her final advice was around corporate communication. In another memorable one-liner she said:

Corporate communication is where authenticity goes to die

Christina Mumm on stage at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference. She joined LEGO as an agile coach during the summer of 2021.

According to Christina Mumm, the entire industry around agile is too overly optimistic and idealistic - almost even naive. How often have we heard consultants or internal evangelists proclaim: “go Agile, do Scrum, perhaps sprinkle it with a bit of Google Design Sprint - I’m telling you, all your problems will be solved!” 

Could there be different reasons behind all the hype? Is it just about cashing in on the trend as long as it lasts, selling certifications and massive re-organisation projects under the pretext of becoming more efficient and improving the bottom line?

In this popular and thought-provoking post, Christina listed 3 central prerequisites for succeeding with an agile transformation.

Petr Palas presenting at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference. Photo: Ib Sørensen

Headless CMS has seen a growing popularity in the past years, mostly driven by developers and customers unsatisfied with their existing digital platforms.

While it is often sold on the premise of many advantages to developers, business users tend to struggle to make the shift to a new paradigm. In a recent CMS Expert session, Petr Palas from Kentico took a look at the most common reasons why headless CMS adoption fails and how to overcome them.

Spoiler: Here’s the list with my brief take on each:

  1. Not involving your content team early on. Involving the editors too late is a recipe for trouble.

  2. Ignoring your content lifecycle. Many fall in the trap of being overly focused on content creation and not the other proper steps for content management like analysing, optimising and having a content calendar

  3. Skipping proper content modelling. This is in particular important in headless as you are beyond the page metaphor

  4. Trying to be 100% channel-agnostic. You can take this too far and it will bring you a few additional benefits at a high cost

  5. Reliance on developers. As always: Start small, be pragmatic and avoid over-engineering.

Angus Edwardson attending a peer group meeting in Brooklyn and hosting a session all about content with the catchy title: What Happens in the Shadows of the CMS.

Just to clarify, given the huge rise in content, much of it written by machines, all content on our site is actually written by a human. This popular post was based on a collaboration led by Angus Edwardson from GatherContent and several of our peer group members who work with content and content creators every day. 

As you’ll learn by reading the post, content is not just content and while this specific piece of content might look timeless on your screen (you didn’t print it, did you?), much is changing when it comes to how we work with content and how we consume content.

Content is multi-channel storytelling, content is workflow and perhaps content is not enough anymore?

Casper Aagaard Rasmussen from Valtech introduced the MACH Alliance to our community

In October, Casper Aagaard Rasmussen from Valtech hosted a popular member conference call on the MACH Alliance. MACH stands for:

  • Microservices

  • API-first

  • Cloud-native SaaS

  • Headless

When Casper called the MACH Alliance ‘your last replatform’ it clearly sparked a reaction in our member call.

This is the real pain that many large, complex and global organizations have been facing, in particular with monoliths. Whether you are upgrading from a legacy CMS, a DXP suite or whatever, replatforming is expensive, risky and a lengthy exercise.

While the MACH Alliance is rapidly gaining traction from clients, and several in the call confirmed this, awareness remains low, and so does the understanding among clients. Also, the textbook for implementations doesn't exist yet, so keep that in mind when you start going MACH!

12 experts of the month

Every month since way back when before the pandemic, we share the story of someone in our community. It’s about a human touch, but also a way to connect and expand your network beyond your usual circles.

Each expert is worth knowing, but again, similar to the unfair spirit of this post, here are the 3 experts who made the biggest impact in 2021:

Curious to get to know some more experts? Browse all experts of the month.

Learn more about what matters to our community

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