Don’t Ditch Your DXP—Complement It
Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP) as “an integrated set of technologies designed to enable ... digital experiences across multiexperience customer journeys.”
Many businesses have invested in multiple DXPs, resulting in unnecessary redundancy and cost and causing what some call “IT chaos.” Composable technology enables organizations to impose order on this chaos while helping the organization overcome interdepartmental gridlock and achieve better business outcomes. VShift’s Dan Anderson and Eric Feige discuss.
Q: Eric, you’ve talked about “IT chaos,” particularly with respect to digital experience platforms. Why would a company overinvest in DXPs and create chaos for itself?
Eric: All DXPs are not created equal, and different power centers in an organization see themselves as having specific requirements. For example: A digital experience platform, by definition, is digital, so maybe IT sees the DXP as its product to lead. But marketing says DXPs enable customer experience and digital marketing, so they go out and buy a different, more marketing-friendly DXP. Organizations whose marketing and IT leaders are not well aligned can find themselves sowing confusion.
Dan: And then the CFO sees how much they’re spending on licenses so she pushes for Drupal, because CFOs think open-source equals low cost. (Spoiler alert: Not necessarily.) So now you’ve got three DXPs and voilà: chaos.
Q: OK, but assuming each group—IT, marketing, etc.—is getting what they need, then why is this a problem?
Eric: The functionality they need might technically exist, but the inherent waste means the company isn’t accomplishing all it could. They’re paying for redundant platforms and redundant skilled resources to develop on those platforms. So everything costs more and takes longer.
Dan: And these platforms are monoliths—they were designed to be all-in-one and self-sufficient. They were not intended to be interoperable with other platforms. So your content is locked into one of these platforms or another. Plus, a lot of these companies also have content tucked away in, like, old APIs or random external services. It’s a huge time suck having so many incompatible methods of accessing content. From the standpoint of scalability, performance and reliability, it’s a real challenge. How are you supposed to enable a coherent user experience?
Q: And this is a common situation, an organization having multiple DXPs?
Eric: In VShift’s experience, many large enterprises typically have multiple digital platforms that could be defined as DXPs. And not just DXPs. It could be multiple CMS (content management system) or ECM (enterprise content management) systems. Heck, it could be a bunch of single-purpose content repositories. The point is, if you were architecting digital experience from the ground up, you wouldn’t do it this way. But given the realities of business, with functional silos, misaligned priorities and interdepartmental rivalries, it almost seems inevitable.
Q: So the culprit is ... human nature. Can we fix that?
Dan: The machines will fix it. When they take over.
Eric: Composable will fix it.
Q: I had a hunch composable would save the day.
Eric: Think of composable tech—microservices, cloud-based platforms, headless content management—as “complementary” technology. It can replace your current tech but—this is the key point—it’s doesn’t have to. It can help you get more value from your existing tech. If we focus just on content for a moment ... The advantage of composable is it doesn’t require replacing any of your legacy systems. Because if those had to be replaced, you can see how that would conceivably cause a whole new set of issues: Whose CMS stays, whose gets sunsetted. So composable is enabling you to get more use—more ROI—from those expensive DXPs you’ve already invested in.
Dan: Composable is creating its own efficiency because you’re abstracting to a new layer. I’m sure “new layer” sounds the opposite of efficient, but what this new layer is doing is, it's enabling you to use composable to create a single way of accessing content, managing content, granting permissions and so on. It’s scalable, it’s reliable, you know what performance to expect. The legacy systems, you can think of those as places that store content.
Q: Eric, when you say composable tech is not a replacement ...
Eric: Composable doesn’t have to replace a legacy system. Of course, if you were starting with a clean sheet of paper today, you could build an entire digital experience using only composable tech, none of the monoliths.
Dan: We know because we’ve done it.
Eric: But for most of our clients, where they are today in terms of adoption, they’re just happy to have a better way to handle content, to get around the multi-DXP, multi-CMS insanity we’ve talked about. Down the road, clients can decide whether and when to EOL [end-of-life] those legacy systems.
Q: So the obvious question ... Why isn’t everyone doing this? That is, using composable to create order from the chaos they live in.
Dan: I’m not sure businesses necessarily realize that what they’ve got is chaos. We can see it because we deal with lots of clients, and it’s obvious when you’re outside looking in that these systems are redundant and processes are cumbersome. But if you’re inside, particularly if the multiple DXPs have kind of grown up around you, then you don’t necessarily see the forest—you’re seeing a bunch of trees, and they’re different kinds of trees, but each tree was planted for a purpose—providing shade, bearing fruit, turning into wood for construction ...
Q: I’m just sitting back watching how far you can take the tree metaphor.
Dan: ... The point being, you’re seeing a bunch of systems, each of which has a valid reason for existing. So you’re probably not thinking “I need to fix this.” As far as you’re concerned, it “ain’t broke.”
Eric: And one related point: Legacy systems aren’t the bad guys in this story. There are no bad guys. Think of your legacy system as being yet another content repository. And composable tech is the best way to get the content you need out of those sources and in front of users. I’m not saying you’ll hang onto your old platforms forever. Just that you can make them work better for you and your customers today.
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