Web Content Management

Chapter 15. Where Content Management Is Going

Web content management is constantly in a state of flux. As a discipline, it rides on the back of the Internet itself, and as the Internet landscape changes, content management changes with it.

In writing this book, I’ve had to navigate the blurry line between what aspects of content management are foundational and unlikely to change (content modeling, for example) and what aspects are still being defined by the marketplace (marketing automation and personalization, to name but two). In five years, parts of this book will still be wholly relevant, other parts will be showing their age, and a half-dozen new chapters will need to be added.

As a preemptive strike, I’d like to look forward a bit and consider where content management might be headed in the future. This is a practical exercise in that I’d like you to be ready for what might be around the corner, but it’s also an exercise in perspective, as I want you to understand the axes and inflection points along which this industry might expand, to give you some sense of the elasticity of content management—the industry, the software, and the discipline.

Chapters like this are difficult to write because they’re always a combination of legitimate prediction, documenting the obvious, and unavoidably spinning the conversation in the direction the author would like something to go. While I think evidence exists for all of the following predictions, only time will tell how accurate they ...