Does this sound familiar? Your team is creating amazing content. Your distribution strategy is solid. Your CMS, however, is not. Instead of millions of readers voraciously consuming your content across countries, languages and channels, your only readership is your IT department reviewing your minor change request from that still (inexplicably) open Jira ticket. In your world, CMS stands for Content Mismanagement System, and your site languishes as others regularly distribute fresh content.
While you may have conquered your fear of spiders, clowns and public speaking, the mere thought of replatforming brings on a bout of cold sweats. Your fear is justified; historically, launching or re-releasing a world-class site has been a 12-month-plus project, costing millions of dollars and requiring armies of consultants.
In comparison, those spiders don’t seem so bad.
Replatforming does not have to take 6-12 months
So why don’t more companies leave their existing CMS? The answer is vendors like Adobe Experience Manager have made the process unnecessarily difficult. As a result, people are (rightfully) afraid it will take forever, they don’t realize modern alternatives can turn a nine-month marathon into an eight-week sprint, and they believe the pain of change is worse than the impact of inaction.
Adobe has trained us to believe that a replatform should take longer than a season of Major League Baseball. A season of baseball from April to October is about 186 days from start to finish. As a long-suffering Mets fan, I can attest these seasons seem interminable, yet launching a website on AEM (and its equally antiquated competitors) takes even longer! And still this is deemed an acceptable time frame?
Adobe has us convinced: There is no alternative
Adobe’s greatest trick is convincing the market that the way to keep your job safe is to purchase its products. However, AEM was designed before the Content Distribution 2.0 era, during a time of single site, single language, single channel. While this approach worked for more than a decade, it is now archaic. Many vendors have Frankensteined their products to claim modernity, but this approach is the reason for those hefty consulting fees. It takes significant effort to fit a square peg into a round hole or, in the parlance of consultants, to ideate a solution for overcoming the size differential between the existing state (square) and the future state (round). Someone get an SME, quick!
These large vendors have built enough brand credibility that companies continue to choose them because they are the “safe” option, even if they cost more, take longer and provide an often confusing and antiquated UI. Once they're implemented, navigating the labyrinth of different software, various logins and capabilities makes publishing more, not less, complicated.
Inaction is the biggest risk
As a result, many companies retain their existing CMS even when it becomes abundantly clear it's insufficient and even detrimental to their business. But waiting has led (and will continue to lead) to frustration for your content creators, IT team and readers.
First, your content creators say the CMS is hard to use and find it nearly impossible to publish to diverse channels and audiences. Then, your IT team is besieged with bothersome requests that prevent them from addressing long-term strategic problems. And finally, your readers have limited content in their native language, can’t access content on the latest devices, and are left with 404 errors during breaking news.
While your content is in a queue, your competitors’ timely publications are delivered across the newest channels, and your readers are ditching you. Growth and retention become harder, requiring you to divert spend toward search engine marketing instead of content creation. As a result, some of your best content people are demotivated.
Meet Brightspot: the publisher-informed, publisher-focused platform
Brightspot's CMS, on the other hand, is built with an extensible architecture. It is flexible, fast and designed to help companies transform their business content and digital experiences by creating enterprise applications at scale with astonishing speed. Projects that used to take more than nine months to complete are launched in weeks at 50% of the cost you've come to expect.
Want to learn more? Request a demo today!
