The world of large-scale digital comms and publishing is weird right now. Individual products are increasingly nailing down their conceptual models for “compositional” content — letting editors and creators build things from chunks of pre-designed and often reusable content.
Those products span lots of categories — CMS, campaign management, DAM, engagement tracking and general metrics/testing, etc… Each with a different relationship to the act of composition. Increasingly they offer robust APIs and sometimes even pre-built connectors for each other.
There are also companies attempting to build “all in one” products, but generally they’re assembled via acquisition and under the hood it’s just different product suites wired together using those same APIs and connectors.
The problem that increasingly trips up orgs trying to integrate things at scale is that despite the technical ability to wire everything together, the conceptual models the systems each bake into their workflows and architectural assumptions are not as simple to synchronize.
Usually that can be overcome with customization and careful configuration — making sure that what you’re trying to do with each piece of the puzzle is in sync with the others.
But that, in turn, reveals a new problem. For many, many years a lot of orgs relied on the out-of-box (or easy to set up) approaches offered by each system as a substitute for careful, meticulous planning of their content architecture, workflow processes, metrics strategies, etc.
If you’re using silo’d tools that don’t talk to each other, to perform operationally distinct functions, that’s fine. But as you start to wire them all up, the conceptual seams in the ways they each approach problems become problematic, despite very robust interconnection APIs.
This is a brilliant way of putting it: the solutions to these challenges are currently “professionalized but not standardized.” There are various practitioners solving the problems using elbow grease and experience but no textbook solution.