There are multiple challenges and pressures that have been introduced to organizations due to changes shaping today’s business environment.
Increased consumer expectations for personalized, multichannel, always-on experiences.
The pervasiveness of digital experience in all areas of life.
The need to augment in-person processes with online processes.
Increased dependencies on IT teams while their resources become more constrained.
Increased need for agile time to market for campaigns, content and programs.
Now more than ever, organizations are realizing they need to adapt, revamp or migrate their digital solutions to platforms that allow them to be much more streamlined in their day-to-day processes. Otherwise, they will not be able to keep up with the increasing demands.
The terms WCM, CMS and DXP are are used to describe platforms organizations use to create, manage and edit digital content. However, there are important distinctions between these terms as we use them to describe digital experience.
Firstly, WCM (Web Content Management) is actually the process, not the system or platform itself. WCM describes systems that create, manage and maintain digital content. This is typically for website presentation, although other channels may be served as well. Web Content Management systems generally include management tools and a core repository for storage of content.
A CMS (Content Management System) enables marketing teams to manage a myriad of digital content including text, audio, video, documents, and images, and then publish that content. Traditionally, this is presented through a website, but modern systems will necessarily serve multiple channels and offer some integration capabilities. With a CMS, reliance on IT is greatly reduced as marketers and business users are enabled to independently upload and manage images and documents as well as amend, modify, edit and publish information with no coding knowledge.
Advisory firm, Gartner, tells us “Content management systems comprise a set of templates, procedures and standard format software that enables marketers and their proxies (e.g., webmasters) to produce and manage text, graphics, pictures, audio and video for use in Web landing pages, blogs, document repositories, campaigns or any marketing activity requiring single or multimedia content.”
A DXP (Digital Experience Platform) allows organizations not only to manage web content but also further streamline internal processes, consolidate data, apply data-driven insights, integrate critical MarTech systems and deploy content across devices beyond web and mobile. Newer DXP solutions offer the flexibility to add components to the platform as needs arise. This partly describes the concept of composability, which is trending away from the monolithic architecture of earlier DXP solutions.
Whether a CMS or a DXP is an ideal fit for your organization depends on your current business challenges, strategic goals and requirements for a digital transformation project.
Although a DXP is the usual goal for digitally mature organizations, a CMS is often a good fit for organizations that are just beginning their digital transformation journey. These platforms act as steppingstones into the digital landscape, enabling marketers to create and publish content and web pages with limited reliance on developers or IT. This offers more productivity as well as resource and time-savings for companies that need to establish their online presence quickly and effectively.
A DXP is the best fit for organizations that have achieved a level of digital maturity and who are looking to further scale and grow their business through digital channels. These platforms allow organizations to take that next step in their digital transformation roadmap – from automating cross-functional workflows, to delivering omnichannel experiences, to consolidating data silos. Progress offers this ebook with data to guide you on how to find the DXP that’s the right-fit for your organization.