In most ways content management is very mature, but in one important way it is not: there is too much focus on new projects, new toys, and new buzzwords, and not enough on maintaining and managing content, technology, and process lifecycles – in other words, on operations.

This scenario is not unique to content management and is easy to fall into because new marketing or technology projects are both more exciting and good for the résumé. Unfortunately, the promise and hope of a new project can also serve as a way to come up with an easy answer to a demand from senior management, and to delay dealing with a frightening challenge while you figure out what you really need to do. After all, digital transformation in general is hard, and multichannel content management in particular remains largely aspirational.

It is not possible to get very far with large web initiatives without a certain level of operational planning for changes to content strategy and flow, infrastructure and application integration, new skills, and workflow practices, to name a few. But even with the best upfront effort it is extremely unlikely that operations post project completion can be sufficiently anticipated. This is one area where engaging with experienced service providers can be hugely advantageous.

The push and pull between new technology capabilities, evolving business models and requirements, user and customer feedback, and discovery of potential improvements to processes, guarantee that agility has to be ingrained and permanent. If there is one thing all multichannel content management projects, and all digital transformation efforts, have in common it is constant ongoing care and feeding. This is nowhere truer than where much of todays’ marketing, IT, and C-suite focus is: customer experience management (CX).

Whatever your definition of CX, if it doesn’t include the entire “customer journey” it is incomplete. And if you consider all of the customer lifecycle touchpoints, digital and analog, direct and indirect, you quickly see how far and deep in the organization the CX connections reach.

Most of the focus of CX is on the front end; “front” as in early in the customer journey, and also what is front and center in the customer’s face: the ad, the landing page, “native” content. This is surely a good place to start because it is low-hanging fruit, exposing many of the most irritating customer experiences, but also pointing where else to look among all the back-end operational systems to optimize the CX. Conflicting descriptions of a product could be a simple web editor error, or it could point to unsynchronized marketing and e-commerce databases, which in turn might be due to a product feature update communicated to customer support and marketing but not to the group running the e-commerce system – a flaw in ongoing operations.

With insufficiently smooth and consistent operations you are doomed to providing a janky digital and human customer experience, making you both unhip, and unfriendly to your customers.

At a company level a bad customer experience is not a technology problem, it is a human and organizational, hence leadership, problem. Software, hardware, design, and quality assurance are also still mostly human domains.

The way a product is presented on a screen or described by a customer service representative is a result of corporate messaging which is in turn influenced and interpreted by product managers, user experience designers, developers, salespeople, and researchers. These are different departments with their own perspectives and incentives. Yet they are all in the CX sausage. This is why you hear talk about a Gödel-like impossibility of managing a complete and consistent customer experience. But that is no reason not to try – perfect should not be the enemy of good. How effectively and rapidly these functions communicate and cooperate on an ongoing basis have a huge impact on the quality of operations and CX.

Integrating all relevant internal functions may be unrealistic because of organizational inertia. But every alignment of the internal digital experience, content flow, and communication between departments will increase the ability to respond to customers with the consistency and immediacy necessary for a good CX. And then there is the improvement in employee morale and productivity. After all, employees need a good CX too.

We see the natural tendency to focus on the front end all the time and it is reflected in the proposals we receive to speak at Gilbane conferences. But this year there was a noticeable increase in proposals addressing operational issues and we have included a number of them across tracks. Are organizations getting better at planning for ongoing operations? Is it because they are on their second or third or fourth large-scale digital effort? What are they doing differently? Join us at the Gilbane Digital Content Conference and find out.

Note: This article was first published in eContent Magazine in September 2016.

Main conference: November 29 – 30
Workshops: December 1
Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston, MA

Share your expertise and network with peers and digital content leaders…

Tracks include:

Content, Marketing, and Customer Experience

Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, social marketers, content strategists, web content managers, content marketers, content creators and designers, business and technology strategists focused on customer experience and digital marketing.

Focused on how to overcome challenges and implement successful strategies and practices to reach, engage, and retain customers with superior content and digital experiences.

Content, Collaboration, and Digital Workplace Experience

Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on intranets, enterprise search, social, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and internal, field, and backend content applications.

Focused on tools and practices for building agile, information rich, collaborative, and distributed digital workplaces to meet the demands of modern organizations and the changing workforce.

Technologies for Content, Marketing, and Digital Experience

Designed for technology strategists and executives focused on near-term and future software for creating, managing, and delivering compelling digital experiences across platforms, channels, and form factors.

Focused on what you need to know about evolving, and potentially disrupting, content and digital experience technologies for marketing and the workplace.

Re-imagining Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media

Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, strategists, and executives focused on digital transformation, new channels and business models, and managing digital assets.

Focused on the business and technical challenges facing information, publishing, and media organizations creating, managing, and delivering content across the growing number of competing platforms and channels.

About

The Gilbane Conference on Content Management, Marketing, and Digital Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior digital experiences for all stakeholders.

Call for Speakers

Well-designed content is the core ingredient of competitive digital experiences. And the accelerating pace of technology allows us to dramatically improve content creation, content management, content delivery, and ultimately the customer experience. But this is far from easy, and depending on your goals can require pulling together many components, including web content management / web experience management, new development frameworks, analytics, tag management, social media, and advertising tools, as well as ecommerce, CRM, and other system integrations. The Gilbane Digital Content Conference brings together content strategists and managers, marketers, technologists, IT and business executives, as well as external service providers to learn and share how to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders. Please review the conference and track topics below and submit your speaking proposal. Additionally, answers to the most common questions about speaking at the Gilbane Digital Content Conference can be found in the Speaker Guidelines.

Main Conference Tracks

The conference tracks are organized primarily by role/function as described below. The lists under each track are topic suggestions, and we encourage proposals on relevant topics not listed.

Track C: Content, Marketing, and Customer Experience
Focused on how to overcome challenges and implement successful strategies and practices to reach, engage, and retain customers with superior content and digital experiences.

Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, social marketers, content strategists, web content managers, content marketers, content creators and designers, business and technology strategists focused on customer experience and digital marketing.

• Customer experience management and engagement
• Content and the customer lifecycle
• Multichannel content management and marketing
• Content strategies
• Responsive design
• Adaptive and agnostic content
• Site optimization
• Matching content to channels
• Content marketing
• Marketing technology landscape, architectures, and platforms
• WCM and customer experience
• Marketing technologist roles and practices
• E-commerce and WCM / mobile app integration
• Measuring and analytics: Web, mobile, social, big data
• Social marketing
• Personalization – what works, what doesn’t
• Growth hacking strategies
• Localization & multilingual content management an practices
• What function / system owns customer profiles?
• Marketing transformation
• Omnichannel strategies
• Working with agencies
• Working with IT
• Third party data and service integration

Track E: Content, Collaboration, and Digital Workplace Experience
Focused on tools and practices for building agile, information rich, collaborative, and distributed digital workplaces to meet the demands of modern organizations and the changing workforce.

Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on intranets, enterprise search, social, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and internal, field, and backend content applications.

• Collaboration tools & social platforms
• Practices for successful collaboration
• Enterprise social metrics
• Employee experience management
• Community building & knowledge sharing
• Role of content management, intranets, portals, mobile apps
• Employees are customers
• Employees are part of the customer experience
• Content and information integration
• Enterprise search and information access
• Taxonomies, metadata, tagging

Track T: Technologies for Content, Marketing, and Digital Experience
Focused on what you need to know about evolving, and potentially disrupting, content and digital experience technologies for marketing and the workplace.

Designed for technology strategists and executives focused on near-term and future software for creating, managing, and delivering compelling digital experiences across platforms, channels, and form factors.

• APIs and customer experience stacks
• Mobile development frameworks and strategies
• Streaming apps and content
• HTML5
• Wearable computing and the web
• Hybrid cloud content management
• Natural language technologies
• Haptic and gesture interfaces
• Data platforms, tools, analytics
• Real time customer experiences & reality
• Visualization
• Open web vs. walled gardens
• Deep linking and no linking
• Future of mobile operating systems and platforms
• Distributed data, distributed apps – mixing up code and data
• Internet of things and customer experiences

Track P: Re-imagining Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media
Focused on the business and technical challenges facing information, publishing, and media organizations creating, managing, and delivering content across the growing number of competing platforms and channels.

Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, strategists, and executives focused on digital transformation, new channels and business models, and managing digital assets.

• Digital transformation
• Designing for digital products
• Business models and monetization
• Platforms, publishers, and distribution strategies
• Content marketing risks and benefits
• Mixing owned, earned, and sponsored content
• Ad technologies and strategies
• App development strategies
• Multichannel publishing
• Web pages vs cards
• Mobile publishing workflows
• Matching content to channels and devices

Submit your speaking proposal