#Introduction

Many of today’s content management systems (CMS) aren’t living up to the expectations that companies and customers have around digital experience. According to a survey of 400 technology leaders on the state of CMS, 84% feel like their CMS is keeping the organization from unlocking the full value of content (see Chapter 1), and 80% agree that they are concerned about how future-proof their existing CMS is.

The data dilemma

Companies want to bring more data into the experience, with 93% wanting to use more data sources to drive personalization and services (see Chapter 6). Over three-quarters of respondents think that making it easier to expose content and data could unlock revenue potential and reduce operational costs (see Chapter 4). 

However, bringing their existing data together is already challenging for most organizations. 91% of respondents are dealing with siloed content, and 92% said it’s challenging to deliver content from different sources to multiple channels (see Chapter 3).

80% of organizations are concerned about how future-proof their existing CMS is.

The next generation of CMS

The demand for data isn’t going to slow down, and companies need a content solution that makes it easy to combine data from all their sources and deliver it to any channel. That’s why the next generation of CMS, Content Federation, takes a novel approach to data integration to deliver frontend flexibility and remove backend barriers (see Chapter 6).

#1. CMS Challеnges

Over 8 in 10 respondents feel their current CMS is holding them back, saying that it prevents their organization from unlocking the value of content and data by “a lot” (40%) or “somewhat” (44%). 

Unutilized resources mean leaving a lot of potential profit on the table, and, if your CMS already can’t keep up with the demand for more data, more channels, and more content types, the gap between investment and return value will continue to grow. 

So what’s getting in the way of value? Across the board, the most commonly cited challenge with respondent’s CMS was that changes can only be made by a small number of people with the right skills.

84% of companies think their existing CMS is preventing them from unlocking the full value of data and content.

1.1 Making changes in the CMS is a challenge that scales with company size.

Figure 1: Percent of respondents that agreed it was a challenge in their organization that “changes can only be made by a small number of people with the right skills”.

Interestingly, this issue seemed to scale with the size of the company (see figure 1). Though which group is the limiting factor differs.

Larger organizations (5,000+ employees) were more likely than others (500 - 4,999 employees) to say that backend developers are gatekeepers to CMS architecture (82% vs 76%) and less likely to say that their technology was preventing the organization from empowering more content creators (61% vs 78%). 

1.2 CMS Challenges

1.2.1 Top CMS challenges by industry

Figure 2: What challenges, if any, does your organization currently face with its existing CMS?

These challenges were felt by at least 30% of respondents in every industry surveyed.

Overall, the top reported challenges were changes being limited by a small number of people (46%), difficulty adding new data and content types (40%), and difficulty integrating the CMS with other systems (36%). These three challenges were felt by at least 30% of respondents in each industry surveyed (see Figure 2). 

#2. Innovation Bottlenecks

When asked to rank their organization’s level of digital maturity, or the ability to respond quickly to developments and shifting trends in technology, 47% of respondents claimed to be digital leaders and 53% said they were maturing. No one labeled their organization as beginning or transitioning, the first two stages of digital maturity. 

Technology companies were the most likely to define themselves as digital leaders (81%) and healthcare was the least likely (22%). Yet even in the later stages of digital maturity, respondents still felt blocked by their CMS technology. 

Nearly 9 in 10 people said that managing integrations and middleware was an innovation bottleneck, and over half stated that their current CMS prevented them from bringing new services to market quickly (see Figure 3).

2.1 Middleware, integrations, and limited technical resources are slowing down content innovation

Figure 3: To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements - "Middleware, integrations, and limited technical resources are slowing down content innovation"?

While the majority of people surveyed agreed that their CMS was a limiting factor in speed to market, 17% went as far as saying that their existing CMS was ineffective in creating new and complex digital services. This differed slightly per industry, with retail and manufacturing having the most difficulty bringing new services to life (see Figure 4).

2.2 A quarter of retail companies have an ineffective CMS for digital service creation

Figure 4: Respondents that answered “not very effective” or “not effective at all” to the question “How effective or ineffective is your organization’s CMS at underpinning the creation of new or complex digital services at scale?”

#3. The Impact of Siloed Content

9 out of 10 respondents considered their organization’s content to be siloed. In over a third of all companies (38%) and in more than half of companies in the technology (56%) and finance (51%) sectors, the content was said to be “very siloed”. 

When content is fragmented, it doesn’t get used to its full potential. When asked to estimate how effectively their organization used content and data sources, among respondents with siloed content only 14% felt they were using more than half of content effectively. No one with content silos reported using more than 70% of sources effectively (see Figure 5).

91% of respondents say their organization’s content is siloed.

86% of companies with siloed content use less than half of it effectively.  

Figure 5 : Responses from participants who considered their organization’s data to be “somewhat siloed” or “very siloed”. 

3.1 Silos make it hard to keep content and data types consistent. 

Figure 6: Comparison of responses to “How siloed do you consider your organization’s content and data to be?” and “How challenging, if at all, is it for your organization to keep different data and content types consistent?”

3.2 Inconsistent experience

It’s hard to keep siloed sources consistent. This was an issue for nearly everyone surveyed, with 92% of respondents saying that it was a challenge to keep different data and content types consistent. Notably, when looking at answers by industry, there was a correlation between how many people considered their content to be “very siloed” and for consistency to be “very challenging” (see Figure 6).

3.3 Barrier to omnichannel 

An omnichannel strategy requires the ability to adapt content to all different situations and siloed, inconsistent data is rarely up to the task. As the vast majority of companies surveyed struggled with content silos, it’s unsurprising that 92% of respondents said it was a challenge for their organization to easily serve data and content from multiple sources to multiple devices or channels. 

Without consistent and connected content, it’s also hard to repurpose the resources you have, and 64% of respondents said it was difficult to reuse the content that lives in their CMS. This keeps organizations from being able to use content efficiently enough to scale the experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. 

#4. Maximizing the Content Opportunity

77% of all respondents agreed that the difficulty of exposing data and content restricted the revenue opportunity of their organization. The industries that were most likely to agree were healthcare (83%), life sciences (82%), and technology (81%).

74% of respondents agreed that improving the ability to expose data and content would significantly reduce operational costs. This was felt strongest in healthcare, with 84% of respondents in that sector agreeing. 

4.1 Larger organizations find more opportunity in reducing costs than increasing revenue

Figure 7: Comparison of responses to questions on revenue opportunity and operational costs, by company size

#5. The power of content federation

As the scope of digital experience grows, and as organizations adopt more tools and services to deliver it, figuring out how to bring data and content together in the right way gets more complex. According to the survey: 

97% of companies have needed to build and manage custom middleware to connect content and data to their existing CMS from sources like their PIM, DAM, and other SaaS tools. 

92% of companies find it challenging to manage the number of different APIs, standards, and interfaces needed for CMS development. 

88% of respondents agree that building custom middleware and maintaining integrations to expose data and content is an innovation bottleneck. 

Maintaining all this custom middleware is no simple task. 8 in 10 development teams spend more than a quarter of their time on custom middleware, and 1 in 4 spend more than half their time on it (see Figure 8).

5.1 8 in 10 development teams spend more than a quarter of their time on custom middleware

Figure 8: Cumulatively, approximately what proportion of your development team's time do they spend designing, building and maintaining custom middleware (including testing new integrations) that connects content and data to your existing CMS?

For companies trying to compete with digital, it doesn’t make sense to devote such a large amount of time to backend integrations that drive zero differentiation to the customer experience. Teams need a way to quickly unlock the full value of content and data that doesn’t require clunky middleware, expensive content migration, or data duplication. 

Content Federation is Hygraph’s novel approach to fetching remote data from all the services in your architecture and exposing it from one fully managed, secure, and unified GraphQL API. When information is requested, Hygraph grabs it directly from the source so data is always consistent and up-to-date.

5.2 With Content Federation, companies are able to: 

5.2.1 Leverage all sources

Flexible data models, an intuitive schema builder, and the ability to programmatically add content from remote sources lets teams efficiently access and deliver data without custom middleware.  

5.2.2 Build high-performance applications

GraphQL’s ability to fetch just the data needed enables fast delivery of content-rich applications that combine data from multiple sources. 

5.2.3 Accelerate innovation

Engineers are freed up to focus on end-user features, and content teams are empowered to create experiences that combine multiple sources without writing code.

Diagram 1: Deliver content from anywhere to everywhere. Content Federation eliminates the need for custom middleware by using a single GraphQL API to fetch just what’s needed at just the right time. 

#6. CMS Evolution

Traditional CMS platforms were designed to provide the content authoring environment and also to render the website. This means that content storage is tightly linked to frontend presentation. Which can be very efficient for creating static websites, but very limiting for organizations that want to go beyond a web-only experience. 

Headless CMS rose up as a solution to the need for multichannel content delivery. Headless content is frontend agnostic, meaning that content and data are stored in a structured way so that they can be delivered to any frontend via APIs. This flexibility has caused headless to gain a lot of traction. Nearly half (44%) of respondents said their organization has a headless CMS, with adoption higher in companies under 5,000 employees (see Figure 9).

6.1 Larger organizations are slower to adopt headless CMS

Figure 9: How would you describe your organisation's current CMS

6.2 Demand for more data 

Figure 10: To what extent would your organization like to expose more data and content from internal and external sources to deliver personalized and feature-rich services?

Headless offers a lot of freedom in how content is presented, but companies need more than just frontend flexibility to compete with digital experience. It must also be easy to source and combine backend data to power unique services and personalization (Figure 10).

Headless alone isn’t enough to solve the data challenge that many companies are facing. The API-first design means that, technically, any data source can be connected to a headless CMS. Practically, however, integration often takes too much development work to be done at scale. As 88% of survey respondents agree, maintaining custom middleware and integrations is a barrier to innovation (see Figure 3). 

6.3 The next generation of CMS

To innovate with content, companies need a CMS that makes it easy to deliver to any frontend and to connect with any backend system. One that supports a composable approach to technology, where businesses are free to compose their own unique tech stack with best-fit tools, data sources, and channels.  

Hygraph’s Content Federation capability solves the data challenge of composable tech stacks. It offers a low-code solution to API configuration that eliminates the need for custom middleware. Companies can quickly connect backend and external APIs, choose the data points to source, and fetch all data in a single query with a universal GraphQL API. 

Content Federation puts data in one place so teams can scale the digital experience. Developers get all the flexibility of headless without having to build, host, secure, and ensure the performance of custom middleware. Meanwhile, content creators are able to combine copy, products, images, and live data from multiple systems to create new experiences without having to code. 

6.4 Future proof

Content Federation makes it easy to evolve the digital experience. Headless delivery of content means that it can be continuously adapted to meet the needs of new channels and applications. The simplification of backend integrations allows companies to add, and remove data sources without having to rewire the whole system. Allowing companies to create a composable, future-proof content strategy.

Diagram 2: The next evolution in content platforms drives composition

#Methodology

This survey was commissioned by Hygraph and conducted by Coleman Parkes Research between July and August 2023. It evaluates the opinions of 400 professionals in product and engineering roles. Further information on the demographics of survey participants can be found in the following tables. 

#About Hygraph

Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native Headless Content Platform, enabling teams across the world to rapidly build and deliver tomorrow’s multi-channel digital experiences at scale.

It was designed for removing traditional content management pain points by using the power of GraphQL, and take the idea of a Headless CMS to the next level. Hygraph integrates with any frontend technology, such as React, Vue and Svelte.

Get started with Hygraph by creating a free account, learn how our customers are solving real-world problems, gather information about next-generation CMS from our resources or academy, or learn more about the applications of Hygraph.

To discuss how Hygraph can help you transform your digital projects, reach out to us.