Vendor marketing for headless CMS technology has been confusing and poorly messaged, resulting in cognitive overload for content buyers who are only looking to solve their content problems and future-fit their content strategies.
Let鈥檚 be honest: Do you really understand what a headless content management system (CMS) is, and why it would be best for your needs?
By the same token, if we put you on the spot, are you totally confident you could define a decoupled architecture and say how it鈥檚 different than headless?
If you鈥檙e getting a sinking feeling right now 鈥� you鈥檙e not alone.
In what might be one of the most important customer webinars we鈥檝e run so far, respected IT advisory group Forrester Consulting cautioned vendors against pushing concepts onto customers without proper explanations of their specific advantages and disadvantages.
In fact, warns Joe Cicman, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, 鈥淰endor marketing for headless CMS technology has been confusing and poorly messaged, resulting in cognitive overload for content buyers who are only looking to solve their content problems and future-fit their content strategies.鈥�
He says headless and decoupled CMS technologies are poorly understood and poorly marketed and that too many firms may have rushed into purchases without first considering which CMS approach is best for their actual people, workflows, goals and existing technology.
- Nearly two-thirds of respondents told us they were currently using a headless CMS, yet 69% of these headless users indicated their next CMS is likely to be a decoupled system. This indicates that many of these organizations are reevaluating their choice of headless implementation once they were able to fully see whether that approach was actually the best fit for their situation.
The same issues and bottlenecks plague most content and digital producers
Brightspot commissioned Joe鈥檚 team to research the state of CMS implementations at U.S. brands in order to understand how they鈥檙e impacting the company's overall success. The study covers 400 content decision makers at mostly U.S. organizations with at least $100 million in annual revenue in technology financial services, real estate and professional sports.
If you don't go into your CMS decision with your eyes wide open, you could end up burning your project time and money and leaving the practitioner experience unaddressed.
In a walkthrough of Forrester Research鈥檚 findings, Joe says, respondents in marketing, IT, product, digital and corporate communications roles all highlighted the same problem. 鈥淚t's not about choosing headless or decoupled," he explains. "It鈥檚 about understanding which implementation is best for your organization's content needs.鈥�
He says content is becoming more complicated to create, deliver and measure, and companies are facing content demands that are difficult to deliver.
Clearly, technology should be there to take this pain away, but not enough companies really get the difference between the two main approaches to CMS right now.
Spelling out the difference, Joe says: 鈥淎 headless content management system is a back-end-only content management system that acts primarily as a content repository and enables the 'write once/publish anywhere' strategies that omnichannel experiences require. It does this by making content available via an API for display on any device out of built-in front end or presentation layer."
鈥淚n contrast, a decoupled CMS lets brands seamlessly perform content authoring refinement, management and distribution in a way that both the front-end experience management and the back-end content management act together as a content repository/creation/editing and publishing suite.鈥�
It's more than a name: Know exactly what you鈥檙e buying with your CMS architecture choice
The problem, as the webinar lays out, is that if you make the wrong choice here, you risk a CMS implementation that鈥檚 a poor fit for your actual needs.
In fact, the research found that many organizations are re-evaluating their choice of headless implementation now that they鈥檙e better able to see whether that approach is actually the best fit for their situation.
To be a good partner, a CMS vendor must be good at understanding the actual business problem you're trying to solve and focus on that.
So, what鈥檚 the solution? Forrester Research鈥檚 guidance is that there鈥檚 simply no substitute for really exploring the market. The report states: "The right choice of CMS can only be determined by carefully examining which implementation makes the most sense for an individual organization."
Brightspot shares these concerns. During the webinar, Brightspot Founder and President David Gang added: 鈥淭he decisions you make going forward should focus on what enables you to build the right workflow to bring your business to life and to deal with integrations in a very sophisticated way鈥攊n a way that's most appropriate for your company. This means choosing the right technology to run your content business most effectively and deliver the right message to your customers, whether they're partners, employees or end users.鈥�
There鈥檚 a lot more thought leadership guidance in the session, so why not watch the full webinar now? To get the full findings from the Forrester study, download the report here.
