Build vs. Buy: Crafting Scalable Enterprise Content Ecosystem
Optimize content management with tailored ecosystems and platforms. Modernize your approach for scalable, future-ready success.
Enterprise content is critical to business growth. Does your content infrastructure support your enterprise content strategy, and is it scalable? Martin Owen, CEO of Quark, looks at how to take a modern platform and ecosystem approach to optimize global content strategy success.
Every organization is digitally transforming at some level of velocity to meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders and give them a competitive market advantage. It’s undisputed that digitization supports your ability to optimize processes and deliver even more value to customers and provides the foundation necessary for long-term business success.
Many organizations are at different stages of digital transformation using several technology strategies, with some industries further ahead on this journey than others. E-commerce companies, for example, have been using analytics and AI to understand customer behavior to fuel sales. Financial institutions have tapped into opportunities of cloud computing and advanced technologies to strengthen their security footprint while increasing customer transparency. And healthcare companies long ago digitized to improve patient care.
Although companies are on different digital maturity paths, one constant is they understand that data-driven insights fuel business growth. Content is the consumable form of data, and organizations are creating exorbitant amounts to engage with customers and win in markets. With content’s role in business growth, modernizing your organization’s content operations infrastructure must be a top priority within the digital transformation journey. Herein lies the question most organizations ask themselves: how do I build a content operations infrastructure that supports my needs today and can scale to support future growth?
Before we answer that, let’s talk about what a content lifecycle looks like across the business. It refers to an interconnected network of technologies, processes, and people involved with each phase of the enterprise content journey – from creation to publishing and everything in between. Most importantly, these teams are responsible for creating content that’s high value, aligns with business objectives, meets the needs of intended audiences, and is accessible via the desired device for optimal consumption. A manual or haphazard approach will not result in content strategy success.
Back to the core question of creating a content operations infrastructure that supports your organization’s content strategy. It is no longer a question of buy vs. build or in-house vs. commercial off-the-shelf (COTS). Organizations need a combined mindset for enterprise content lifecycle success—a modern approach to anchoring and customizing the ideal system. Let’s take a closer look.
In-house Development: Build Your Own
Larger organizations build their software to support specific internal business needs. Your IT team typically makes it so they can control how to modify and manage it to support an organization’s existing business processes, applications, and technology stack. It also gives you control to ensure software capabilities closely align with business priorities and address the specific needs of your people or particular teams. This level of control is undoubtedly positive but comes with multiple risks that cannot be overlooked.
First, it can be resource-intensive, requiring an unforeseen added cost of hiring additional personnel with a technology-specialty skillset to help develop the applications and infrastructure to deliver on the project brief. Insufficient solution support and no product innovation roadmap will cloud your organization’s future. Secondly, a home-grown content infrastructure requires ongoing maintenance, support, and updates that can strain your wallet and people. It can divert people from what they were hired to do.
For example, subject-matter experts get bogged down trying to learn new technologies or how to transform a 1,000-page document into a digital output instead of focusing on what they were hired to do: impart knowledge. Additionally, security parameters must always be top of mind. With today’s emerging and sophisticated threat landscape, a custom-built content infrastructure created with proprietary technologies restricts your ability to scale to reach a global audience. It poses a security risk, lacking standard connectivity and interoperability capabilities with critical business systems and software.
Although building an in-house content operation infrastructure from the ground up can be tailored to support unique business outcomes, the long-term complexity associated with customization, people resources, and ability to scale as your business scales proves to be more of a choice to avoid.
COTS: Tap Technology Industry Experts
The enterprise content ecosystem is complex but doesn’t have to be. It’s no small feat for your business to try and keep pace with your customers’ content needs and digital preferences. When building a homegrown offering, you may not know what content your customers will want: 12 months, two years, or five years from inception. The thought process for features such as component reuse, content analytics, and omnichannel distribution may not have been put into the equation.
The good news is you can take a ‘custom approach’ that augments your built-in infrastructure with Commercial Off Shelf (COTS) single vendor technologies that have been tested and trusted and help you keep pace with technological change so you can deliver even more value to customers through content. A Forrester Research Trend Report noted that ‘digitization at scale is necessary for true resilience and converting manual business and tools into flexible software applications is crucial – which means custom development on the underlying platform.”
So, the key to unlocking the value of the custom approach is what lies at the core. The platform. This powerful engine makes everything around it operate like clockwork. It provides APIs, developer portals, and configuration tools to allow organizations to build an ecosystem and customize the solution to meet their nuanced needs. The handoffs between existing applications in the organization can escalate quickly and need to be considered. Think data sources, collaboration tools, editing tools, workflow engines, distribution portals, and reporting tools. Platforms handle this complexity with tested and trusted technology, and the costs attributed to continuously improving, maintaining, and securing the central platform is primarily shared across the platform vendor’s customer base.
The emergence of low-code development platforms takes this to the next level and now includes scalability, security, governance, and collaboration features. Low-code platforms allow organizations to focus on building custom solutions with minimum hand-coding, reducing the need for extensive developer skills and expensive hires while fostering stakeholder contribution across departments. Internal IT operations teams can easily connect low-code platforms with other systems and data sources and add the salient touches required to support specific business objectives.
Vendor platform technologies are designed to address a specific content management challenge your organization faces from the inside out, such as driving the benefits of structured content creation, omnichannel publishing, and access to analytics to understand how your content is being consumed (if at all) and make smarter decisions as to when to reuse content or retire it. These tools are available on-premises or in the cloud, supporting many organizations’ hybrid approaches. Importantly, these tools are customized to keep your existing technology investments, help your content strategy so you can deliver tailored content to meet specific customer needs, and scale to support future growth.
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Future-Ready Content Management
An operations infrastructure with a vendor platform at the core of a customized ecosystem is the modern way to execute a successful enterprise content strategy. It allows your organization to leverage your existing technology investments and augment new technologies to support existing applications and interact with existing tools, data sources, and workflows. This significantly improves content team efficiencies and can scale to support future needs. Ultimately, leveraging both approaches will get you on the right path to modernizing your content management approach and ensure you keep pace with audience content expectations, see the ROI of content strategies, and help you win in your market.
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