DevOps has been an absolute game-changer for several organizations. The process of combining development and operations teams into one unified force has allowed enterprise-level companies to reap the benefits of enhanced communication and collaboration, which ultimately translates into faster application development and happier customers. 

In fact, according to Statista, 80% of developers believe that DevOps is essential when it comes to scaling software development initiatives. However, despite DevOps’ success and continued growth, it fails to take content management and publishing into the equation, something critical for today’s content-rich modern digital experiences. 

DevOps alone isn’t enough for businesses that want to improve their content operations without losing the benefits already gained from unifying IT and operations. Instead, a new approach is necessary. 

What Is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of philosophies and cultural practices aimed at delivering software applications faster than traditional software development methods. By removing the silos that previously existed between development and operations teams, organizations can provide even more value to their customers.

DevOps unified people, processes, and technology, enabling them to coordinate, collaborate, and respond faster to customer needs. With DevOps, companies can enjoy a faster time to market, more easily adapt to changes in the market or front competitors.

Critical components of the DevOps approach are CI/CD - continuous integration and continuous delivery. By automating the software release cycle, developers can move from building to deploying products and features without the hindrances that might have occurred previously. 

Who DevOps Helps & Who It Doesn’t 

DevOps has been crucial to the improvement of IT and operations initiatives. By breaking down the silos that once existed, those teams can experiment and innovate much faster than they might have done before. Thus, DevOps helps to transform these departments from simple project executors to the ones driving positive business outcomes. 

However, while DevOps creates harmony and efficiency between IT and Operations, it can lead to challenges for others since it fails to consider content authors, marketers, and designers. With DevOps, building web applications and new customer experiences is a strictly technical undertaking that creates new silos and friction between software developers and content authors. 

When DevOps Falls Short

DevOps provides enormous benefits for the software development lifecycle, but the modern digital environment doesn’t only require this approach. Content-managed software applications (aka digital experiences), such as websites, mobile apps, video experiences, customer portals, intranets, and more are not fully supported by traditional DevOps processes and tools. 

Content is more critical than ever in today’s digital landscape, and content apps are proliferating in a number of different ways:

Omnichannel Experiences: Consumers are not only demanding that content be presented to them through all of these channels and applications. They want everything to be connected in one seamless experience that enables them to move from application to application without missing a beat. They expect their experience with the organizations providing these applications to be omnichannel. 

Content Publication at Scale: Facilitating content across so many platforms and mediums to create omnichannel experiences means that businesses need systems to produce content at scale and with consistency, not just on a few occasions. 

Personalization & Localization: Building content experiences that are one-size-fits-all is no longer enough. Consumers want the content to be tailored specifically to their needs and preferences. With large enterprises catering to audiences across various countries who speak different languages, localization is also required to serve an exceptional customer experience. 

With all of these applications, content needs to be managed by marketers in conjunction with developers to be truly effective and deliver the expected customer value. Content plays just as crucial a role as code, and the relationship between the two needs to be improved. 

Content authors and developers can no longer operate independently for companies hoping to create the ideal digital experience. To facilitate communication and collaboration between developers, content authors, marketers, designers, and more and successfully integrate a CMS, companies need a different approach; they need DevContentOps. 

The Solution is DevContentOps

DevContentOps brings content management into the DevOps cycle. It integrates content and the CMS into the CI/CD cycle, enabling seamless collaboration between content managers, developers, and IT operations. 

With DevContentOps, workflows, tools, and processes are aligned, shortening the software delivery lifecycle for content-based applications through a single data repository. By managing code, content, and configurations in one place, manual processes can be eliminated, allowing content authors to publish content continuously without worrying about slowing down release cycles or other issues that arise when working with traditional CMS platforms. 

Versioning and configuration management can prevent issues such as content and code freezes or duplicate content publication. DevContentOps also makes CI/CD and integrating other DevOps tools easier, allowing developers to automate processes since code, templates, scripts, and content are all in the same repository. 

What Enables DevContentOps Processes

To facilitate DevContentOps requires a distributed repository for content and code, such as a Git-based CMS, that integrates content and code CI/CD and continuous publishing (CP) processes. Essentially, allowing content and code to be migrated across multiple environments from development to production. 

For example, Crafter CMS includes a time-machine-like versioning system that syncs and enables code to be moved forward from development to testing and production environments; similarly, production content is moved back to lower environments easily. 

Ultimately, developers can spin up new environments without having to perform database migrations. With fewer content freezes disrupting work, developers, content authors, and operations can collaborate without getting in each other’s way. 

So what makes up this DevContentOps environment? Among other things, DevContentOps provides support for a traditional DevOps approach, allowing the easy integration of DevOps tools that developers and operations teams have relied on. It shortens the software delivery lifecycle, enables continuous publishing, creates a shared repository, and provides developers and content authors with more freedom to do their work. 

Content & DevOps Finally Come Together

DevOps had already eliminated the barriers that existed between developers and operations. However, when it came to content-driven applications, it routinely fell short. The reality is that today’s modern digital experiences require DevOps and content to come together in a new approach; they need DevContentOps.

As businesses look for new ways to eliminate friction between content authors and developers, DevContentOps can provide the answers to help them reach the next level.