During the WWP development conference in New Orleans I recently attended, companies in the group had one shared experience: they were increasingly being asked by their clients to recommend enterprise level Content Management Systems (CMS) that worked.
10 years ago businesses bought into these CMS systems. They were incredibly complex and required a lot of I.T integration effort and training. But the problem was, instead of Content Management, you got redundant ways of building sites, and you were tied in to using experts in that particular technology. So, instead of having a group of content experts, you had web managers.
Nowadays, the old systems simply aren’t up to the job, what with the advent of multi channel sites responding to devices, personalisation and customisation. Actually, this was recently cited by Unilever, who are setting up a customer panel to target the future of the brand in line with demand.
From a company and individual’s perspective, everyone is talking about the new wave of content management: Sitecore, CQ5, Sharepoint and Druppl: just to name a few.
Although the separation between middleware and legacy needs to be distinct where it’s been hard coded in the past, they have indeed become blurred. A proper slice is starting to occur with the new Content Management Systems like Druppl and Sitecore though, which are designed to enable responsiveness. And I could probably discuss this in more details in another post! One for the techies:-)
The future of development lies in being able to serve different content to different user profiles via, you guessed it, different devices. In the mix behind all of this, we have consumers who are participating across channels, like HMV, who are offering digital equivalents to what they’re selling in store at point of sale. It’s responding to increased competitiveness from online retailers at the cost of exacerbating its decline in physical sales. The reality is, consumers are expecting businesses to do this stuff.
According to a recent Stibo Systems study, “retailers reported lack of budget (58%) and legacy technology systems (37%) as the biggest barriers to investment in these mobile strategies.”
And we know that the excuse for legacy systems getting in the way of this evolution, will no longer be tolerated. It’s either adapt or die.
Davenport Face 