The new approach in a typical "Hybrid" IT Environment is to Mix Legacy web presence with new Web and SaaS Systems. The new Digital Marketing Era and with the rise of digital marketing the web platform needs to be agile and be able to deal with multitude of changing landscape.
Consumers are increasingly turning to digital channels to shop, consume their favourite web content, and connect with family and friends through multitude of social media platforms as well as traditional website tools with the marketers have followed them online. Today, a large and increasing share of the overall marketing budget in most organizations is devoted to digital marketing.
This trend, is driving increased spend on digital experience technologies such as WCMS (web content management systems. The market is now requiring new approach to deliver best solutions for this ever faster evolving landscape.
What sets modern Web content management solutions apart from the legacy systems that were designed for a simpler time is ability to adapt and to be able to combat the challenges facing the industry with changes overnight. For example recently most CMS owner suddenly woke up one morning with a realization that their user base has been compromised with 100s of fake users signing up without proper authorization. In the Next-generation Web content management era the system administrators need to be able to react quickly and efficiently to combat the inefficiencies and provide quick solutions to enable marketers to create relevant, personalized, and engaging experiences without the worry of the security issues surrounding this fast changing web world on all of the digital touch points - Web, mobile, and social - that customers use to interact with their brands.
Marketing and IT executives are dealing with the real world issues presented by a the chaotic combination of legacy, custom and new applications, infrastructure and custom tools developed or purchased over the last 10 years. This is very different from the homogenous modern enterprise depicted by analysts and marketers who describe a neat and glossy cloud-based environment that promises to alleviate the myriad operational challenges of "old IT." According to most recent research on the subject, the "hybrid" IT environment appears to be a fact of life that is not going away any time soon:
For a long time all the system administrator had to do was to monitored the CPU and bandwidth. Now that healthy server could be tied to a web service or a simple software bug that is taking all the CPU power away. There are more moving parts that we don't own within our applications. And with virtualization it's even harder to tell where the problem is.
Managing the complexities of the new world Hybrid Mobile, Desktop, Tablet, smartphone, wearable web technology is constantly increasing complexity that requires immediate and fast reactivity
Despite investments in tools and processes to deliver high service levels via proactive and preventative support, CTO's day-to-day mode can still be crisis-driven and reactive. Additional layers of anecdotal or incidental feedback as well as "optical" or subjective input contribute to the reactivity.
More times now days applications fail and nobody knew that they have. When they realize the damage is done. With more complexities and more layers to deal with on top of all the layers to manage in the enterprise the customer sometimes says 'what's going on?' Can anyone help? As a customer it's becoming very scary." Managing "Hybrid IT" Increases Complexity - and Reactivity
Despite investments in tools and processes to deliver high service levels via proactive and preventative support, IT executives' day-to-day mode can still be crisis-driven and reactive. Additional layers of anecdotal or incidental feedback as well as "optical" or subjective input contribute to the reactivity.
"Applications were failing and nobody knew. When they did know, 20 people sat in a room passing the buck pointing fingers. Just everyone looking at their own bit and saying 'it looks OK to me."
"It's more complicated now; there are more layers. First it was just desktop, then server, and then shared resources, now all these layers. The customer is saying 'what's going on?' No one knew what was going on. As a customer it's very scary."
We need to think about how newer technology can affect our new marketing efforts
We are currently in the midst of a long-term and definitive shift in the way organizations interact with their end users. This is being driven by five trends that are transforming the IT world: cloud, mobility, social, and big data and to some extend the emergence of micro and nanotechnology in the form of intelligent wearables.
Currently, 40% of the worldwide population (and 80-90% of the population in developed economies) uses the Internet; by 2018, 3.7 billion people will be online. Today, almost half of Internet users access the internet using a mobile device; by 2018, nearly three-quarters will. The number of mobile Internet users will more than double from 1.3 billion today to 2.7 billion by 2018.
On the other side of the coin, the typical IT environment is comprised of hundreds of applications leveraging hundreds of platforms and networks, an emerging new generation of Application Management software that is application- and platform-agnostic will become increasingly valuable.
According to IDC "Facebook and Twitter have just over 1 billion users and 500 million users, respectively, and dozens of other social networks around the world have attracted millions of members. Forty percent of Internet users in the developed world will buy products online this year and by 2018, more than half are likely to do so. We are indeed approaching the 2.0 billion mark for the numbers of online shoppers. Also, B2C and B2B ecommerce transactions is likely to total $15 trillion this year and $25 trillion in 2018."
Leveraging the CMS Application layer against the Component Layer
Typical CMS application can be broken down into the individual components/modules/extentions (i.e. processes) that run and provide the services that make the Content Management System work: OS, database, application server, web server layers as well as the components, Modules and UI layers. One needs to monitor each of these processes with an understanding of how they impact the end result or the overall performance of the application. Typically your WCMS uses a web server: Apache or IIS actually running on your server or on the cloud? This is actually serving up your chosen content? Same thing for the database: Is MySQL or MS MSQL actually running? Can you read and write to the database?
Application Process Components are the common building blocks by which applications are built and function, regardless of environment. This common framework provides the hooks that the Application Management software will leverage to achieve its cross-platform, application-agnostic functionality.
Through support of these universal technical building blocks, applications running on various, but common operating systems, databases, and application frameworks can be readily supported within the next generation of Application Management software.
Whilst consumers have migrated online so have the enterprises from small to large. Marketers have followed them because they had no choice or get their P45. Small and big brands, retailers, media and entertainment companies, and organizations in every part of the globe have had to invest heavily in their online presence, establishing the old fashion email system because there is nothing better as well as newer ecommerce, digital marketing, digital media, and other teams chartered with creating and delivering the amazing digital customer experience delivered to all types of devices from old fashion PCs to smartphones and wearables.
Applications need to be aware of their inherent performance and how they deliver to end users.
Content Management Systems that are built to high specifications and able to have in application-centric monitoring tools will be aware of how an application is behaving, whether it is up, down, or partially impaired, including what parts of an application are impacted and reach the owners when they are needed.
In modern CMS where the size of the application is extremely large, understanding the individual processes or different modules and extensions is a difficult challenge for most system administrators. There are lots and lot of extensions and custom modules out there that help to build a capable WCMS, but often each of the extensions are very specific and require detailed knowledge to interpret what they do or how to ensure security.
At a glance most popular cms systems like DNN platform, Joomla, WordPress Drupal just installed seem to do the work well. However, as time goes on, when you're trying to establish the health of the system, there is such a thing as "too much data or too many variables that can cause issues not so easy to fix.
WCMS the other aspects of digital marketing is claiming a steadily growing share of the overall marketing budget. On average, about a quarter of the marketing budget is devoted to digital today and spending on digital marketing is growing in the double digits. (In high-tech companies, digital marketing already claims more than one-third of the total marketing budget and will account for half of it two years from now.) We increasingly hear marketers speak of "digital first" and "mobile first" initiatives as they formulate strategies for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers - customers who, increasingly, came of age in the Internet era.
Need for a Modern Advanced Adaptable Content Management System.
The ever more advanced SEO techniques that has recently given hackers a renewed income stream by attacking respectable sites for their customers SEO gains, is shifting to digital marketing methods to more proprietary techniques. Total reliance on web applications may not be a good thing anymore. Spreading the burden on mixture of native mobile Apps combined with HTML5 fluid responsive websites is helping to bring marketing force and IT together to face the challenging environments.
Historically, organizations embracing the web have used to old style marketing techniques combined with automated of the line-of-business functions. This shift, however, requires a high level of automation applied to WCMS to sense and react in real time and predict the next best action.
Organizations are starting to adopt a variety of point solutions for different marketing roles to address specific each of the new challenges facing the new media efforts. However, the old approach is an impediment to the effective delivery of cross-channel smart end user experiences. Recent research shows how web savvy companies are targeting an ever-growing list of digital channels, and new newer ,more advanced and challenging methods will no doubt emerge in the future.
Lightweight, Secure, Policy driven and user-friendly WCMS is the practical and cost effective way to deploy and use.
The next generation of WCMS is likely to be managed by configurable business rules, in conjunction with operational context of the given state and use methods of an application. This ensures that the software will only drive the appropriate and prescribed steps in order to get an application to a defined "best-state" in the face of virtually any issue, or combination of issues. This ensures that an organization's best practices will be uniformly and systematically applied to recover from application issues, negating the likelihood of human error. And that can only be done in parallel tracks with defined teams to deal with Mobile platform, Legacy Desktops, and newer Wearables.
Smart Content is the heart of advanced Content Management System
Just as importantly as the elegant software engineering an advanced Content Management System that goes into this application-centric tool is its ability to be deployed quickly and made immediately available to all users without weeks of training, an army of consultants and hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in customization. In other words, can I do it quickly, can I do it cheaply and will my staff actually be able to use it intuitively?
The essence of an advanced agile Web Content Management System like DNN Platform is that the application should:
- Easily enforce and/or automate an organizations' best practices, in the context of the situation with smart content
- Incorporate an understanding of the technically correct approach for all channels - whether it is desktops, tablets, smartphones or wearables
- Have full awareness on an app, or multiple modules that reside inside the WCMS
- Build in the model of "what would your organization needs to do" in this situation and that scenario
Advanced WCMS is at the core of these end user's digital experiences and it plays a central role in the delivery of cross-channel experiences to all devices out there. Sadly most organizations and their end users are still struggling with the challenges facing the modern web.
IDC quotes "Sixty percent of companies say they need to be able to create new content more quickly and economically, while 58% say they need to be able to more easily reuse/repurpose content across all of the digital channels to maximize their investments in content and deliver a consistent brand experience. More than half saythey need to make better use of analytics to optimize content strategy and placement across all of the digital channels they are serving."
Since 2008 with the last recession the organizations have become more cost conscious looking to vendors to provide cost-effective solutions that are easy to use, quick to deploy, extensible, and easy to integrate with other systems and yet be able to reach out to all devices delivering good ecommerce solutions, and enterprise applications.
Advanced CMS like DNN Platform can be setup with a combination of out of the box functionalities combined with well supported third party modules to support for multichannel publishing and integrated digital marketing tools to target multiple devices with advanced personalization. More can be done with external tools that integrate nicely to deliver analytics, campaigns, social marketing, and so on. WCMS ability to add community features such as commenting, rating, discussions, forums, and user-generated content whilst have the means to support for rich media video, animation etc to all devices.
Supporting multisite Multilanguage capabilities that let them manage sites globally while providing for regional flexibility and localization. Is absolutely essential in the global market as most of us in Europe have real needs to support multiple languages prevalent in the European market.
