It’s no secret: the digital world is moving to composable. Moving from the traditional monolithic CMS model to composable does allow you to pick and choose “best in breed” products, but it can lead to confusion and uncertainty. How do you determine what the ideal mix is? When do you start to migrate to these tools? Here are three steps to establish a composable roadmap in your organization.
Step 1: Evaluate
The first step is to truly understand the state of the digital state in your organization. What tools do you have, what do they cost, and what data points do they output. Just because a tool can accomplish something for your organization doesn’t necessarily mean you should keep it around.
- Take an inventory of your current tools, their cost, what they are currently doing for you, and what data they serve up. Rank them in order of largest to smallest spend so that you can determine potential ROI for consolidation. Ensure that you don’t have multiple tools giving you the same data or functionality. If you do, that is a big potential for savings.
- Determine which tools are mandatory for your organization. Maybe your CMO has mandated that Salesforce will be your source of truth, or your org utilizes a certain healthcare software. If there are tools that definitely aren’t going anywhere, make a note of those.
- Determine the integration capabilities of your tools. Can they export data in a nice format, like CSV or JSON? Do they have well-documented APIs and support open-source standards? If a tool is truly a good neighbor, it’s a good candidate to keep.
- Determine the longevity and supportability of your tools. SaaS products are good candidates to keep because they won’t require frequent and expensive upgrades. More good candidates are tools that have a strong community of developer support and a wide user base. If a tool is based on an older programming language that will soon reach end-of-life or that you will have a hard time supporting or hiring for, it should be on its way out.
Step 2: Assess
Now that you know more about the tools that are available to you, the next step is to assess the largest inefficiencies that a composable strategy could solve. You will need to identify inefficient internal processes and churn. Where do those inefficiencies lie and where are they costing you the most money? It could be managing assets across departments, deployment processes, content creation/publishing lifecycle, etc. These are key metrics in determining which products will yield the largest ROI. More examples:
- Excessive spend on web hosting
- Suffering from poor website performance
- Too many data-tracking tools or integrations
- Lost revenue due to an outdated commerce solution
- Low ROI and/or no data from email marketing campaigns
Step 3: Prioritize
After you have identified which inefficiencies are the most critical to solve, you should compare the level of effort to implement vs. value gained. For example, implementing a new SaaS CMS will be a relatively high effort, but it will also be high value – especially if your biggest needs lie in web hosting and performance. Implementing a CDP will be a medium effort, but it will yield a high value for your organization.
Consider the best time to implement some of these products based on your business priorities. For example, if a rebrand or redesign is an upcoming priority, consider rolling headless CMS modernization into that project.
Going Composable with Sitecore
Sitecore continues to lean into the composable model, adding new products to their stack and enhancing the originals. These composable offerings have proven to solve many of the challenges I laid out above and are worth considering as “good neighbors” to your non-negotiables. Here are some examples of common challenges and the composable Sitecore solutions that can solve them:
| Business Challenge | Sitecore Solution(s) |
|---|---|
| High hosting costs | XM Cloud |
| Poor website performance | Content Hub, XM Cloud |
| High cost for search tool | Sitecore Search |
| Disjointed asset and/or campaign management | Content Hub |
| Too many data-tracking tools or integrations | Sitecore CDP |
| High level of spend/churn between marketing & developers due to lack of admin visibility or control in search tool |
Sitecore Search |
| Lost revenue due to outdated commerce solution | Order Cloud |
| Low ROI or lack of data from email campaigns | Sitecore Send |
These are only some examples. In the age of composable, it’s time to put in the work and lean into what is working and get rid of what isn’t. Some good news – Sitecore will often give customers a deal when purchasing multiple SaaS products simultaneously. Sitecore also announced XM Cloud Plus at DX in Minneapolis. XM Cloud Plus bundles products that make sense to implement together, which can give you a good starting point.
Perficient can help with every step of this process. Our Sitecore team is certified in these products, and we are ready to listen to your unique situation and design a solution that is best for you. Contact our team to get started with the composable roadmap for your organization. Read more about this topic from David San Filippo on CMSWire.
