How can modern content platforms accelerate your digital business?

Content underpins both employee and customer experiences. All successful organizations know this, and it’s why Enterprise Architecture (EA) professionals are tasked with the responsibility of choosing content platforms that will help them streamline and automate content creation, collaboration, governance and delivery. 

Forrester's latest Now Tech: Content Platforms, Q1 2021 report highlights the latest trends to watch out for when building enterprise use cases that enable businesses to be resilient and agile for the future. The capabilities and features in this space are enormous, and it can very easily become a complex task to prioritize and build a roadmap for content platform technology adoption. In this blog we present a simple checklist for EA pros to align and be successful in their selection process of the content platform technology that's right for their current and future organizational needs. 

What should I look out for in a content platform?

Here’s a checklist for content platforms that will fast-track your digital business: 

• Choose a content platform that allows working with a strong information architecture. Imagine designing a house without a blueprint. Content platforms need a content blueprint that is scalable and agile, and an information architecture that allows them to do so in a structured manner. Using industry-based taxonomy further streamlines how they can ingest and manage the growing volume of content and be able to distribute it at the right time.
• Build a future-proof content platform foundation. Content automation, chatbots and other emerging technologies work best with high-quality content and well-defined workflows. Most content platforms don’t look into creating content for modern business applications such as chatbots, voice agents or AR/VR. This causes a lot of work and expense down the line for organizations to retrofit the content for the new use cases. Choose a content platform that can help you build authoritative content and knowledge for your organization.
• Choose a platform that is purposefully designed for architects, app designers, and developers and help these technical roles deliver applications and content-rich processes to serve all information consumers seamlessly. A strong developer community support is a good barometer to check if the content technology provider is actively supporting developers and listening to their technical audience. 
• Choose a platform with integrations to business applications and the ability to do so in a simple manner. Business applications keep growing at an enormous rate, being able to go with the flow and adopt them as and when needed into your ecosystem is wiser than locking yourself out. Look for easy to integrate options other than just existing business application integrations when choosing the content platform for your business. 
• End-to-end governance is essential, particularly for regulated industries and information-heavy sectors. Capabilities to protect, manage, and dispose of or preserve content within policies are must-haves. Digital processes, documents, and communication are mission-critical and will continue to be essential for those enterprises with elevated levels of at-home and remote workers into 2021 and beyond. Protection of this information in secure, resilient, and backed-up corporate apps — not self-provisioned consumer tools — will continue to be a post-pandemic priority. 
• Investigate licensing models – cloud everything sounds very modern and enticing for the seemingly low cost of getting started. What looks like a low cost option and highly scalable can quickly turn out to be extremely expensive when not investigated properly, especially when external participants are in scope. Interest in extending content-rich processes to the extended enterprise — customers, partners, suppliers, and contractors — has risen year over year. Ensure that these B2B or B2C use cases are on the table during vendor evaluation and costing exercises.
• Multi-tenant vs hosted content platforms is an interesting discussion point. Multi-tenant SaaS content platforms are often associated with being innovative and keeping up with the times. What many miss out on is that if a content platform has a decoupled architecture, and can deliver to any number of digital touchpoints without rework, doesn’t that hit the nail on its head? Go for goal over trends, your business needs over trends always. 

Why choose Tridion - the intelligent content platform

Tridion has time and again been recognized by analysts as well as our enterprise customer base for its superior content management capabilities. Be it customer experience or employee productivity, the features that make us stand apart from other vendors are as follows:

• Personalization services
• Granular repository services
• Structured approach to content authoring
• Information architecture
• Developer support
• Mature use of AI
• Internal and external-focused digital experience

“Firms should consider Tridion when the Intranet serves global, often complex, lines of business and requires rigorous content modelling.” – The Forrester Wave™: Intranet Platforms, Q2 2020 

The critical capabilities of Tridion are a good match for large global enterprises whose offerings are information or content-heavy and require heavy due diligence around quality. The quality aspect around our offering include several rigorous checks, ranging from content creation and review, to governance for qualified access, through to audits by several individuals across the business (and sometimes even by third party organizations). The reputation of enterprises is tied to the information they provide along with their offerings. That's why Tridion is a perfect match for their needs. Examples of such organizations from our customer base include SASB, Philips, HPE, California Casualty, Big 4 Audit firm, to name a few. 

Click here if you’d like to learn more about Tridion, and how it can support your business.