Improve collaboration with the Agile CMS

Over the last few years, organisations have experienced an accelerated rate of change within the digital landscape and have seen a significant increase in the number of ways that users want to interact with them. The complexity of managing relationships with users across a growing number of touch points has resulted in a need to adopt an Agile mindset when developing digital solutions. The ability to collaborate efficiently, iterate quickly, and orchestrate the right tools and technology has become the cornerstone capabilities of today’s delivery teams.

Monolithic Platform vs Technology Stack

In response, some large technology providers have chosen the path of trying to address the complexity by developing everything within a single monolithic platform. This approach offers the seductive idea of all you could possibly need in one cohesive experience. But the reality is that these solutions come with a steep price tag, a lack of flexibility, and often provide a wide range of features of which only some are actually relevant for the organisation that buys the solution. With the growing demand for technical agility, organisations that adopt these platforms can find themselves locked in without a guarantee that there will be a commensurate return on investment.

Many fast-growing organisations have chosen to turn their backs on large all-in-one platforms. Instead, they are choosing to adopt a best-of-breed technology approach. This means an organisation has the ability to customise a stack of cloud-based solutions that closely align with their agile development practices, and provide specific functionality that matches their organisation's particular needs. A best-of-breed approach provides these organisations with the ability to react quickly to change, manage costs, and avoid vendor lock-in. At the centre of these best-of-breed stacks is the Agile CMS.

It’s Agile first at SilverStripe

As an open source software development company, SilverStripe has long been Agile focused, with Agile development methodologies at the core of CMS and Cloud Platform releases and updates. It’s the same case with the professional services work we do, where we work in lock-step with our clients to discover, iterate, learn, and repeat. We understand the importance of using the right tool for the right job, which is why we use a technology stack of cloud-based solutions to increase productivity within our own organisation and champion the idea of adopting a best-of-breed technology stack approach to our clients.

Introducing the Agile CMS

Forrester Wave (2018) believes that the new pillar of the Digital Experience Stack (DXS) will be the Agile CMS which can be defined as:

a solution for collaboratively curating, creating, and delivering content across channels and campaigns via iterative development and deployment processes

Ever since the SilverStripe CMS was open sourced, it’s been an Agile CMS at its heart. With strong API endpoints that allow for decoupled content delivery across a myriad of channels, and the ability to integrate with best-of-breed cloud tools, the principles that drive Agile fit hand-in-glove with the SilverStripe CMS.

SilverStripe CMS facilitates collaboration between developers and content authors by providing the tools to deliver iterative updates and experiments, on the fly, while also allowing for developers to build and deploy in short, incremental bursts. These Agile capabilities are what makes SilverStripe so popular with content authors, developers, marketers, and enterprise clients.

SilverStripe Cloud Platform: The best home for an Agile CMS

All the hard work Agile delivery teams put into creating a website or application is only effective if they have the ability to utilise the development tooling that lets them do their best work. The ecosystem that an Agile CMS is developed in must also share the Agile principles, otherwise, it's like trying to pull a wagon with square wheels. For a CMS to live up to the Agile moniker, it needs to work in harmony with developer favourites like Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, CircleCI, and Travis so delivery teams can achieve Continuous Development and Continuous Integration (CICD).  The SilverStripe Cloud Platform (SCP) is an example of an ecosystem that enables the Agile CMS by providing SilverStripe CMS developers with the power of high-performance AWS infrastructure, integrated development tools and dedicated support from the DevOps team at SilverStripe.

If you are interested in learning more about Agile, Headless, or best-of-breed marketing stacks, have a look at some of the handy resources we have available. Otherwise, get in touch with us to talk about how we can help your organisation leverage the power of the Agile CMS.