How to successfully centralise your content platform
Poorly planned and implemented centralisation projects can result in platforms that alienate users, reduce business agility, and increase costs in a manner that is disproportionate to the business value added.
The advantages of centralised platforms
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You are struggling to provide a consistent brand experience across your digital channels
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You are looking to reduce total cost of ownership and complexity of managing your content operations
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Your are facing increasing challenges and complexity in relation to compliance
Brand consistency
A well designed centralised platform can enable you to provide a more consistent brand experience by reusing content and platform capabilities across your digital channels. In addition, changes to your visual identity can often be rolled out in one go, rather than requiring different sites to be individually updated. Finally, a centralised platform provides the opportunity to consolidate customer data and leverage it to provide a joined-up experience across channels.
Cost efficiency
A centralised platform can provide cost efficiency by enabling roll-out of capabilities to parts of your organisation that would not otherwise be able to afford them. Costs can also be reduced through the fact that you no longer need to host, maintain and upgrade multiple disparate systems. Finally, if you can consolidate knowledge and experience around a single technology stack it enables you to create more efficient and effective centers of excellence within your organisation.
Improved compliance
Understanding and implementing compliance requirements, from legal and data protection to security or accessibility will be much easier if the system and process footprint where they need to be applied is reduced. New initiatives can benefit from a faster time to market by onboarding onto a already compliant platform, avoiding compliance bottlenecks in procurement and go-live preparation. After go-live a centralised platform reduces the surface area for security vulnerabilities and other compliance issues, which can be more easily analysed and rapidly fixed.
After go-live a centralised platform reduces the surface area for security vulnerabilities and other compliance issues, which can be more easily analysed and rapidly fixed.
Pitfalls of centralisation
It is important to understand that a centralised platform is not a silver bullet for all organisational issues and inefficiencies.
High costs
High initial investment is often required in designing and implementing a centralised platform and this may take a number of years to pay off in terms of overall cost efficiency/saving.
If your company has an M&A strategy to acquire and divest over short periods of time then a centralised model may not be suitable, as the effort required to centralise and then decentralise will often outweigh any benefit.
Lack of flexibility
A one-size-fits-all approach may not be suited to a de-centralised organisation with many different brands, or a global company which operates in many different regions or markets with corresponding different requirements. A centralised platform will also increase your dependency on a smaller number of vendors, which makes choosing the right partners even more important.
Risk of bottlenecks
Finally, you should also be wary of the potential for bottlenecks in a centralised platform which may hinder business agility. With modern platforms architected to scale more effectively, bottlenecks these days are more likely to be procedural - for example slower time to market for new features due to managing conflicting priorities in a shared backlog - than platform related - like a bottleneck in content publishing queue.
How to ensure success
Have a solid business case
Start by making sure you have a sound business case. In order to do this you will need to do a thorough analysis of the current cost of ownership of your decentralised content operations and compare this to projected costs for setting up and operating a centralised platform.
There are lot of clear and hidden factors are at play when looking a the total cost of ownership of your content operations. When evaluating vendors for the new platform, be sure to establish how costs scale as you grow.
A centralised platform may not necessarily be cheaper at first sight. Taking into account less tangible factors that are introduced through improved brand consistency or more manageable compliance, can change that perception.
Think big, start small and learn as you grow
Make sure you do a thorough review of your digital estate and take into consideration longer term business strategy to create a future resilient platform vision and design. Engage your users and stakeholders early to ensure buy-in and that the platform is going to be designed to offer real value. Engage your users and stakeholders to ensure buy-in and that the platform is be designed to offer them real value.
Carefully select a first project or MVP to implement on your centralised platform. Good MVPs tend to have a limited feature set, and a suitable level of content complexity and business exposure to balance quickly demonstrating tangible progress with providing a good road test of your design decisions.
Learn from the experience and improve the platform and operational model iteratively as you onboard more projects.
Don't centralise everything, design for flexibility
Be selective. Not all aspects of the platform may be ripe or suitable for centralisation. A well thought out centralised platform should allow for different operational models and should have the possibility to replace capabilities and processes of the central platform with market or region-specific capabilities that might provide better business agility in the specific context.
A classic example is to manage your CMS centrally, but allow stakeholders to manage their own content, and give freedom to build their own digital front-ends with their own dev teams.
Additional considerations
Depending on your organisation's needs and strategy there are many additional considerations that will contribute to a successful outcome. Some further guidance can be found below:
- Ensure effective content governance is set up to ensure your content is managed effectively
- Designing good shared content models, which provides the right level of standardisation without being restrictive.
- Consider working with a common design system and/or a common UI component library to improve brand consistency, reduce your code base and decrease time to market for new sites and features.
- Leverage AI and automation to streamline and enhance content creation from standardising tone of voice, to improving SEO, in way that can be centrally governed and monitored.
