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Transforming your AEM-based DXP for Peak Performance

AEM

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Jan Lemmens Solution Manager CXM

Jan Lemmens

Solution Manager CXM

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Is your organization struggling to produce impactful customer experiences at scale using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)? You’re certainly not alone.

As you grow your digital presence, more and more internal teams start onboarding onto your Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and require additional customer journeys to be implemented and continuously improved upon. On initial launch, such platforms are usually very lean. However, as they expand over time, they become harder to govern and to keep healthy in the long run.

When not managed properly, challenges tend to pop up in 3 key areas:

  • Cost & time to market: Solution complexity and developer friction increases, resulting in longer lead times and higher costs to go from idea to a stable solution in production.
  • Efficiency: As additional features are implemented, usability and productivity for business users (authors and marketers) erodes due to an overload of new features and the addition of numerous quick fixes and workarounds.
  • Customer Experience: Performance and stability issues cause your customers to suffer from a degraded digital experience.

In a highly volatile market, where customer needs and expectations are constantly evolving, an underperforming DXP can have a devastating impact on customer engagement and conversion rates. Web Content Management (WCM) tooling like AEM plays a vital role in this, being one of the core elements in an Enterprise DXP.

Therefore, your AEM ecosystem should be in absolute pristine condition to enable high-quality experiences for your customers.

Web Content Management challenges at large Enterprises

Like with most digital platforms, WCM systems are usually rolled out across an organization in phases. As departments get onboarded, additional business processes are implemented and more digital channels are connected, things get more complex.

Before looking into how you can manage this complexity, let’s first dive deeper into the struggles.

Working with numerous Enterprise AEM clients for the past 15 years, we have identified several key challenges that one can expect when scaling an AEM-based ecosystem:

  • Additional teams of authors and marketers come onboard, with an increasingly diverse skillset and background, each having specific requirements and expectations for how the system can support them in their content production and publication needs. A once clean set of standards and best practices become polluted as new (variations of) components and templates are developed to adhere to these specific business requirements. Over time, this results in increased maintenance costs due to duplicated functionality and fragmentation of the codebase.
  • Priority is shifted towards new feature development, with less or no attention to lower-level platform maintenance, resulting in technical debt. This shift can often be attributed to the organizational structure: an increased distance between developers and business results in a feature-driven approach, with more focus on outputs (e.g. stories delivered) instead of outcome (e.g. increased conversion rates).
  • As team members switch roles or leave the team, knowledge sharing is neglected. This causes technical debt to build up further. When no attention is given to paying off this technical debt, new developments systematically come with extra costs (“interest” on the debt), resulting in increased development cost and time-to-market and a poor return-on-investment (ROI). Moreover, system upgrades induce more risk, while major changes (e.g. transition to cloud) are deferred.
  • To speed up time-to-market, new developers are onboarded without proper training. This usually results in bad practices and anti-patterns slipping into the codebase.
  • At the same time, business users look for alternative systems to build and deliver the required digital experiences at a more rapid pace or to address a broader market. This results in the emergence of “shadow IT” as well as content silos, which give birth to inconsistencies in content, design and UX. 
  • Over time, structural issues pop up, impacting performance and stability for end-customers (front-end) and web authors (back-end). Worst case, your systems experience reduced availability due to unexpected downtimes.

These challenges block your organization from operating AEM efficiently and in the end prevent you to deliver a continuous stream of valuable services to your customers.

At AmeXio, we have detected these symptoms at numerous clients over the past decade. Therefore, we have designed a bite-sized approach to help organizations recover from these pain points and stabilize their AEM-based ecosystem. Our AEM Stabilize & Optimize service is based on a proven methodology applied successfully at multiple of our Enterprise clients.

What is AEM Stabilize & Optimize?

AEM Stabilize & Optimize is a specialized offering tailored at large Enterprises using AEM as the center of their DXP. It is aimed to address the typical pain points listed above and to dramatically improve the ability to manage and deliver high-impact digital experiences. Our goal with this offering is clear: to stabilize, professionalize & support your AEM-based ecosystem.

In practice, it consists of an incremental, 3-stage approach:

Stage 1: Initial discovery

Get a helicopter view of your AEM ecosystem and receive a tailored roadmap to improve performance and efficiency.

Since every organization is unique, we prefer a tailored approach to ensure the best outcome for your specific organization. Therefore, as a first step in our engagement, we perform an initial discovery phase, which gives a helicopter view of your AEM ecosystem.

Moreover, this initial stage allows us to familiarize with each other and provides us insights into the domain you are working in and get a thorough understanding of your organization’s unique needs, challenges, and goals. It also enables us to evaluate the fit between your organization and AmeXio and our ability to support you in the long term. 

In practice, one of our principal AEM consultants comes in the field and joins your organization for a period of 3-5 weeks, in which the following items are assessed:

  • AEM architecture and the way the system is set up and used in your organization. This includes the presence of delivery channels, enterprise integrations and the use of (Adobe) best-practices.
  • Infrastructure setup (we can support on-premises installations, instances run by Adobe Managed Services or SaaS setups with AEM as a Cloud Service)
  • Server-side as well as client-side performance and caching strategy
  • Future-proofness and cloud-readiness
  • Application lifecycle and DevOps maturity (developer experience, quality assurance, support, deployment and delivery, etc.)
  • The different teams and profiles working within the AEM ecosystem and how these are aligned. This can be marketers, authors, system administrators, DevOps teams, project teams, etc. Specific attention is given to the way knowledge is built and shared within and across the teams.
  • CXM-related responsibilities across your organization, your decision-making process for developing your CXM platform, how your backlog is composed and curated, etc.
  • The cost and timeframe to get from idea to production (time-to-market)
  • The effort it takes to roll out design changes across channels
  • The way content is modeled (page-based with the AEM visual editor vs. component-based using Content Fragments)

6-8 weeks after our consultant onboarded your organization, you will receive a detailed assessment report with a holistic overview of your AEM ecosystem: its strengths, weaknesses, and roadmap to improve. Moreover, we also include a list of the low-hanging fruits, indicating short-term improvements which can be made with relatively low effort that have a reasonable impact. The assessment report also lists a number of KPI’s and their current status. These KPIs can be used in future roadmap execution as a baseline for optimizations and to measure success. The report will be presented to key stakeholders by one of our consultants at your premises.

After this first stage, you are free to go forward with the proposed optimizations and changes internally. However, if you don’t have the necessary expertise or you are looking for a team to take the lead in executing the proposed stabilization and optimizations, we are able to support you with further steps by delivering expertise tailored to the roadmap. This is where stage 2 comes in. 

Stage 2: Onboarding AmeXio expertise

Stabilize your AEM ecosystem and transform it to an Elite CXM-platform

Depending on the roadmap included in the assessment report, we propose a team of seasoned AmeXio consultants to start tackling your challenges. Whether it’s performance optimizations, security enhancements, DevOps streamlining, user adoption support, change management, improving governance & monitoring, working on cloud-readiness, or improving quality assurance, we provide the necessary skills and expertise.

To make sure we have substantial impact, we believe it’s crucial for our people to integrate well in your organization and to compose a single multidisciplinary “Fusion” team. This means colleagues from AmeXio will augment (not replace) your team and frequently come on-site. They collaborate closely with your internal teams, attending meetings, workshops, and stand-ups. This immersion fosters knowledge transfer and builds trust.

Depending on the expertise required, a tailored offer will be made based on the profiles involved, day rates and the duration of the involvement.

Stage 2 is really focused on the mid-term operational and executional level. In this stage, we aim to drastically improve your AEM ecosystem by paying back technical debt, increase reliability, performance, and time-to-market. To measure success and set priorities, we look at the KPIs as discussed during stage 1. In the end we aim to build out an AEM Platform Team in your organization. This team will be responsible to deliver high-quality experience management capabilities to your internal value streams.

Do you have broader needs, are you looking for long-term strategy support or are you in need to evaluate your AEM investment and look for alternative solutions? That’s were stage 3 comes in.

Stage 3: Strategic consultancy

Where do you want to go tomorrow?

As the market is evolving and customer expectations are changing, it is a good idea to evaluate your DXP once and awhile and make sure it is not holding your organization back as it grows and scales. This is exactly what stage 3 is for.

Stage 3 is focused on building a long-term roadmap, aligned with your business goals. Follow-up actions include support in roadmap execution, capability mapping, technology selection and frequent check-ins with your executives to discuss status and next actions. Over time, this collaboration can evolve into a long-term strategic partnership.

This stage is kicked off by a “Benefits Mapping” exercise: together with executive stakeholders at your organization, we identify business goals, subgoals and key enablers required to meet those goals. As a next step, we map these enablers to specific technology solutions and an architecture fitting your organization. Pricing is available on demand and depends on the size and complexity of your organization.

Take the next step in professionalizing your DXP

Does your organization struggle with any of the challenges mentioned above? Do you feel we can help you to grow and advance your AEM ecosystem? Let’s get in contact 😊

After you reach out to us, we will contact you within a few days to schedule a first introductory meeting (non-committal).