How to reduce IT dependency in managing product information

IT and business have long been sparring partners. Traditionally, IT managed not only software but also tasks that weren’t strictly technical, simply because others couldn’t handle them. That dynamic is changing. Today’s tools are more user-friendly, and teams are more tech-savvy. The key is to empower people with the proper setup, enabling them to work independently without hand-holding.

In this article, we’ll break down the issue of IT dependency in product information management. You’ll learn what you can do to reduce reliance on IT and set a flywheel in motion for managing product data efficiently, while delivering the kind of customer experience you’ll be proud to share.

#How much is too much?

It’s completely normal for IT to be involved in setting up platforms like a PIM or CMS, handling integrations, and helping colleagues get up to speed. But here’s the question many quietly ask themselves: At what point does helpful support turn into dependency that slows everyone down?

If every update, new product entry, or content change requires a ticket to IT, it’s a sign that your organization may be overly reliant on technical teams for something that should be part of your everyday operations. And if you suspect that this drain on resources is already costing you revenue, that’s a red flag you can’t afford to ignore.

#Why IT dependency is holding you back

In many manufacturing organizations, IT teams are caught in a reactive loop: while running critical long-term projects, they're regularly pulled away to address urgent issues from business teams struggling to manage product data. Each request derails their roadmap, forcing them to patch problems with short-term fixes rather than building scalable systems. This constant firefighting not only drains IT capacity but also prevents them from focusing on innovation.

Even worse, that assumes companies have internal IT resources to begin with. Many manufacturers rely on external agencies to manage their websites. In these cases, even simple updates like changing product specs or publishing a new page require time-consuming back-and-forth and additional costs. As a result, high IT dependency directly drives up operational costs.

When the Marketing team wanted to upload a video, they had to send it to the agency. They would upload it to a platform and send it back with an ID for insertion into the previous CMS. It was very time-consuming.

This growing dependency on IT has become a major organizational bottleneck, one that’s backed by industry benchmarks. In our State of Content Management:

• 48% of manufacturers stated that the biggest challenge they face is that changes can only be made by a small number of people with the right skills.
• 78% of manufacturers strongly agree that by exposing more data and content in the digital services, they will be able to significantly reduce operational costs.

Compromised information consistency

Juggling multiple systems like CMS, PIM, and DAM is common in managing product catalogs. But when content has to pass through several teams, such as IT and editorial, before it can be published, the risk of errors increases significantly. Without a single source of truth or clear ownership, inconsistencies in product details, outdated assets, or even contradictory information can easily slip through. The more handoffs and manual steps involved, the harder it becomes to ensure accuracy, version control, and a consistent customer experience across touchpoints.

Time-to-market delays

For manufacturers, especially those managing large or frequently changing catalogs, relying on siloed data, manual processes, or IT-driven workflows makes product launches slow and inefficient. Companies in this position are often “primed for delays” in getting products to market. Komax, a manufacturer of machinery and equipment, saw its time-to-market improve threefold after enabling non-technical users to manage product data directly.

Keeps development costs high

The more your organization depends on developers to manage product data updates, the more expensive and fragile your systems become. Instead of focusing on building scalable features, IT teams are burdened with maintaining workflows that should be owned by business teams. This leads to higher development costs, slower technical progress, and more complex architecture over time. As Markus Schulz, Product Owner and CMS Expert at Turbine Kreuzberg, aptly puts it:

Reduction of IT dependencies is one of the crucial topics in any IT project. It reduces development costs and complexity, ensures transparency and availability, and makes your architecture resilient and future-proof.

Modern tools like headless CMSs and structured content can put more control in the hands of content and product teams, without adding technical debt.

#It’s all about breaking down the silos

Earlier, we identified legacy systems as a key barrier to product catalog innovation. These systems were never designed to handle complex product data, omnichannel delivery, or agile content updates. As a result, they often create bottlenecks instead of enabling growth. That’s why more manufacturers are rethinking their tech stack and headless CMS is emerging as a powerful alternative.

In the following section, we’ll break down how a headless CMS can help reduce IT dependency and enable a more scalable, flexible content workflow.

Before diving into the how-tos, you should first consider a few fundamental questions, suggested by Schulz.

• Does your architecture meet your requirements?
• How is your current product data management working?
• Which tools and departments are involved?
• How can relevant processes be optimized and automated?
• How can system dependencies within your architecture be minimized and aligned with your strategic goals?

Answering these questions helps uncover where your current setup is holding you back, and where breaking down silos can unlock real business value. Whether it’s reducing friction between teams, giving non-technical users more autonomy, or simplifying how product data flows across systems, these are the first steps toward a more agile, future-ready architecture.

From here, let’s walk through how you can begin reducing IT dependency in practice without disrupting your entire stack.

1. Go headless to decouple systems and avoid breakages

Traditional CMSs are tightly coupled, so even small changes (e.g., adjusting layout or adding fields) can break something on the frontend. As Elastic Path noted, brands may have creative ideas for new product experiences or richer product descriptions. However, legacy systems often require “complicated and expensive hacks” by IT just to support these unique requirements.

A headless architecture separates this concern, enabling teams to make updates or restructure content without involving IT every time.

Here, we will share the example of our customer, Komax.

Previously, Komax relied on Sitecore, an on-premise, monolithic system that had become a behemoth at the center of their tech stack.

As maintaining and building on Sitecore became increasingly difficult, teams started adopting alternative CMSs like Typo3 for microsites and acquired brands. This led to a fragmented architecture and rising operational costs.

To regain control, Komax adopted Hygraph’s headless CMS. Their frontend is now fully decoupled from content management and data delivery, making it easier to integrate additional data sources and services. All digital interfaces route through a single entry point, paired with custom identity management, enabling a unified and scalable experience across brands.

Previously, content editors had to manually copy information from the PIM and DAM into the CMS, resulting in significant overhead. Hygraph now manages all of Komax’s content across brands and microsites, centralizing a high volume of structured content at scale. Business systems are now fully integrated. Data from systems like PIM can now be sourced directly, eliminating the need for manual updates.

The setup draws on MACH principles—what Komax refers to as a “data-oriented architecture.” By eliminating opinionated page design, it focuses on delivering efficient data. What does reduced IT dependency translate into? Website updates are published 2–3x faster, and microsites can now be launched in weeks instead of months.

Catch more insights from their migration in the full webinar.

2. Integrate instead of rebuilding

Tightly related to the previous point, this approach only works if you've already moved away from a monolithic setup. Instead of rebuilding content from scratch, focus on integrating with systems such as PIMs, ERPs, eCommerce platforms, and analytics tools via APIs. A modular, API-first architecture allows new tools to be connected through the API, without hardcoded logic. This reduces the need for IT to custom-build integrations, giving your teams more flexibility to adapt and scale.

These are the most important questions about integration reliability and planning:

• How reliable are these APIs for both internal teams and external systems consuming product information?
• How do you monitor and ensure the consistent uptime and performance of these APIs for critical integrations?
• How predictable and easy is it to estimate the development effort and timelines required?
• What factors, such as API documentation quality, data model complexity, or the availability of reusable API components, make integration planning challenging or straightforward?

For cost control during integration, Schulz recommends:

• Good planning reduces cost: the right choice of platforms and interface, already at the start
• Clearly define benefits with KPIs and implement in phases, proving ROI early

3. Maintain a single source of truth for product information

You don’t want your product information scattered across spreadsheets, legacy systems, PDFs, and emails. Consistency and integrity across systems are non-negotiable for any Product Owner.

The first step is to define a single source of truth—a centralized, authoritative system where all product data lives. From there, implement real-time sharing and updates to ensure every connected tool pulls from the same accurate dataset. As seen in Komax’s example, an API-first architecture makes this possible by decoupling systems while still keeping them in sync. It not only gives you greater control over data flows but also reduces dependency on IT for managing fragmented sources, helping you stay agile and future-proof.

4. Empower editors with the right tools and permissions

A major reason for IT bottlenecks is that non-technical teams lack the tools to manage content confidently.

A headless CMS like Hygraph provides:

• A user-friendly interface for adding, editing, and organizing content
• Granular user permissions so only the right people can make changes
• Workflows and approvals to align with your governance model

This way, editors and product teams gain autonomy, and IT can focus on high-impact development work.

Schulz emphasizes the importance of self-service capabilities:

"By providing intuitive self-service tools for data enrichment, publishing, and potentially basic integration tasks, the CMS shifts ownership to business users. This reduces the volume of IT support tickets and the need for custom IT development for routine product data management and distribution needs, leading to lower operational costs.

When working with enterprise clients, product information management consistently presents the same challenge: attribute structures that need constant modification.

We've seen countless projects where every attribute change, whether adding new fields, modifying existing ones, or removing outdated structures, requires developer resources. This creates unnecessary bottlenecks in our clients' workflows, delaying product launches and inflating operational costs.

That's why we architect modern CMS solutions differently. Our implementations empower content creators and product managers to handle these modifications independently through user-friendly interfaces. Taking back control and liberating the content from barriers. We integrate these capabilities directly into existing QA workflows, maintaining quality standards without technical dependencies.

For clients requiring maximum automation, we design fully synchronized systems where PIM attribute structures flow directly into the content management platform. This approach eliminates manual effort entirely while ensuring real-time data consistency across all touchpoints.

As a result, our clients achieve the flexibility they need without the traditional technical overhead.”

5. Embrace structured content from the start

A traditional setup fails you by tying you to templated frontend. As a result, whenever the content team wants to create a page that fits a unique content type, they request assistance from the IT team.

Structured content means creating your own content models, relationships, and reusable components. With a headless CMS, you can build a custom schema that fits your needs from the very start, defining page types and content relations exactly the way you want. What’s even better, structured content is easier to search, filter, and syndicate.

This makes your content system flexible and future-proof. There’s no need to create new templates or data fields for every new product type or layout variation. Instead of asking IT to build something new, your teams can simply populate and combine existing components.

#How Hygraph helps you reduce IT dependency

Hygraph is a headless CMS built with structured content and an API-first philosophy at its core. Here’s how it directly supports the goal of minimizing IT dependency in product catalog management:

• Flexible content modeling: Define content structures once and reuse them across product types, pages, and campaigns—no developer is needed.

• GraphQL-native API: Easily pull product data from other systems (like a PIM or ERP) into Hygraph, and push it to any frontend.

• User-friendly UI: Non-technical users can confidently manage content, create new pages, and update product info without code.

• Collaboration features: Workflows, versioning, and permissions ensure smooth teamwork without breaking things or involving IT.

• Composable architecture: Easily integrate with your existing systems and scale your catalog experience over time without vendor lock-in.

Hygraph has allowed the marketing team to make constant edits and adjustments and launch new pages on our website. After the initial launch of new pages, the engineering team is not involved in the day to day work, allowing them to work on more challenging projects outside of just maintaining the website. It ensures that resources are being used in the best way possible, helping the business grow overall.

Ready to reduce IT bottlenecks and empower your content team? Contact us to see how Hygraph can help.