CMS Kickoff 23

Thanks to everyone who joined us at The Don Cesar in St. Pete Beach on January 17 - 18

The conference was tailored for everyone working with content management systems, from beginners to experts, and featured 2 packed days with a carefully curated mixture of talks, workshops, activities and world class facilitators, thought-provokers, speakers and session leads.

Program

Tuesday, January 17

8:30 - 9:30: Breakfast and registration

9:30 - 9:45: Welcome & Opening

by our moderator Janus Boye, Boye & Co

There is so much more to a marketer's experience than the final published asset or web page you see online.

Behind the scenes, there's often a juggling act of people and process that might not be completely controlled or optimized.

Join this session to understand why we think every CMS user should be thinking about the content creation journey too and how we plan to build the new generation of content management systems.

10.30 - 11:00 Coffee & networking

Moving into Healthcare and Finance after creating content for apps & games, Danielle has seen all development styles (and lack thereof).

Too often, we see content creation as linear while narrowly focused on grammar and typos, ultimately hindering our ability to engage. Content workflows make it possible to create the quality content your audience deserves.

In this session, we’ll cover how to make content better in 2023. Danielle will share the essential tools and processes that has helped her migrate hundreds of hospital sites, produce thousands of partner-approved assets, and bring sanity to chaotic release schedules.

Bring your own experience and join the discussion on how we can give our users better content.

Service Design features five core steps:

1. Empathize with users—for instance, with those affected by a situation or in need

2. Define the problem to be solved

3. Ideate with target users to come up with possible “solves”

4. Craft and test quick and dirty prototypes of potential solutions

5. Iterate on and refine the prototypes based on testing outcomes

Based on her experience, Karolina will briefly share how she has used service design

• to democratize their platforms to help teams converse

• collaborate and easily navigate to find what they need

• empower teams to get creative

• don’t be afraid to experiment

• don’t focus on what cannot but on what can be done with what they have

• get inspired by others regardless of the division or department

After the mini case study, we’ll discuss as a group how service design might be used in our 2023 initiatives to move things forward.

12:30 - 13.30 Lunch

The story of an existential crisis turned team building exercise, but also with one of those timeless big questions for any CMS project.

While at SFMOMA, Jennifer and the internal team built a website and (shockingly) ignored customizing the Wordpress CMS. In large part due to the painful way in which content experts had to hack the CMS – in short order the entire digital team quit.

Over the course of the next two years, we restructured the entire website to be a storytelling platform and simultaneously redesigned the entire CMS. A CMS that only the web team will see.

Now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I have encountered the same issue. Should we suffer the slings and arrows of Drupal 9 or will a redesign – be fine?

14.30 - 15.00 Coffee & networking

One of the reasons why many organizations are replatforming to hybrid and composable CMS’s is the fact that every update of their existing (legacy) CMS is complex and expensive.

Clients started 10-15 years ago with a new fresh CMS: easy to use and easy to maintain. Over-time these implementations became an unmanageable and complex beast to tame.

The risk is that we will be in the same situation again in the next 10 years with hybrid and composable CMSs.

That’s why the market needs a paradigm shift where the adoption within organizations grows, but the usage and maintainability stays the same as at the start of the implementation. A task for both vendors and clients.

We represent open technology in more than one way. Open, in the sense of scalable, flexible and Best of breed. Open in the sense of, freedom of choice and Best for you. A business can assemble, architect and create the solution for their current and future digital business. But what if the promise of ‘future fit’ wasn’t only commercially motivated?

• Gender Equality

• LGBT

• D&I - Diversity and Inclusion

• Sustainable

Above pledges are essentially about being OPEN to BEING A MODERN and responsible BUSINESS, opposed to ‘just’ doing modern business.

Being a MODERN BUSINESS, while doing modern business, are key to talent attraction and a business’ ability to grow stronger through new generation, diverse and highly committed talent.

What if companies started to assemble their digital solution via softer priorities, i.e. Female founded or Carbon footprint? What if this indeed could co-exist with commercial strength? 

What would it mean to a brand that next-gen and inclusive talent are attracted to open tech, like MACH? Not for the growth opportunity it presents, but the openness it stands for.

What if companies could grow through their choices and commitments to these softer priorities? 

16.30 - 17.00 Coffee & networking

17.00 - 18.00 CMS Idol 2023

Help crown the “2023 CMS Idol” in a fast-paced, entertaining set of competitive demos. Selected contestants will present 6-minute demos competing for the “CMS Idol 2023” title. If you prefer succinct, comparative presentations to long-winded demonstrations, this is the session for you. An expert panel of judges will offer pithy commentary, but the best part is: you vote for the winner!

Contestants:

• Contenstack

• Magnolia

• Solodev

• Storyblok

• Umbraco

18.30 - 22:00 Social event

Everyone is invited to join us at Grand Hacienda on 4393 Gulf Blvd, St Pete Beach for an informal dinner

Wednesday, January 18

7:00 Morning Run

We meet in front of the Don Cesar for a relaxed 25 minute run

8:30 - 9:30 Breakfast and networking

9:30 - 9.35: Welcome by Janus Boye

Vinny is a founder of the Institute for Economic Evolution. A polymath and curious by nature, he is a pioneering advocate for the twenty-first-century economy that is disrupting society’s rigid institutions and beliefs. Vinny’s economic and foresight projects explore the societal and economic shifts being catalyzed by human culture as a result of technology, corporate personhood, and evolving human cognition.

He is the author of Corporate Empathy and Unlocking the Labor Cage.

A lot has changed in the last three years. Consumers want personalized content anytime, anywhere. Businesses are being told that composable solutions are the future for IT and organizations themselves. But much is still the same when it comes to the production, management, and delivery of content, despite the rise of new content technology. We’ve made some progress, but still have a long way to go.

Let’s talk about what we see in the market and how we can rise to the challenge with our platforms and our own content.

10.45 - 11.00 Coffee & networking

We’ve been seeing an increasing number of customers who were pushed to jump on the coolest ‘trend and buzzword’ positioned tools and ended up extremely unhappy. I’ll set the context for this presentation by telling you the story of one such case.

We, the vendors, and our implementation partners need to focus on customers real needs and pains, considering both technical and non-technical users and keeping the digital experience maturity of the customers’ teams in mind to ensure everyone comes away happy.

I’ll show you why we at Kentico believe that the hybrid approach is better for the majority of customers we target and explain how we are building our new hybrid SaaS platform Xperience by Kentico.

There is a lot of hype around composability - the analyst community is raving about this concept and predicting that this will be the single most important technological paradigm shift that will separate the winners from the losers.

In this session, Sana will discuss the challenges organizations face as they migrate from monolithic and legacy architectures towards composable technology ecosystems. She will also offer some ideas and approaches to overcome these challenges.

12.30 - 13.30 Lunch

Unlocking Creativity, Delivering Value, and Getting Things Done

This session goes beyond the technical nuts and bolts of content management and will focus on how to build a high-performing content team. 

Mike Spenceley will share his team’s multi-year transformation journey and key learnings, which he calls the 5 pillars, around what it takes to make significant impact with content.

This session will be an interactive, choose your own adventure, experience. You will select which pillars to discuss and have an opportunity to share your perspective and experience.

The Five Pillars:

• The why – Anchoring to your organization’s purpose

• Team structure and talent strategy – Building a future-ready team and thinking creatively about talent

• Core behaviors – Setting expectations and reinforcing team norms and behaviors

• Governance, process, and tech – Leveraging technology and AI to accelerate impact

• UX and conversational design – Keeping the user at the center

14.50 - 15:00 Goodbyes and see you next year!

An interactive wrap-up of the two days. Key lessons learned, big questions for 2023 and what happens next