“Hey Alex, we have a Black Friday campaign coming up. Gotta update the content on a couple of product pages and create two marketing pages with promo content from the CMS.”
As a software engineer, you’ve probably been or will soon be Alex. Business practitioners, especially marketers, are insatiable with content requests to fulfill the never-ending demands for updating and enhancing the business strategies at play.
Those requests can be frustrating for us engineers. Even though the rise of Jamstack, headless, and microservice architectures afford us so-called “software soup” for interacting with valuable tools and technologies, each tool comes with domain-specific, mind-boggling complexities.
Ultimately, business users and engineers must agree on what to build and how and when to build it. Seamless team dynamics, however, hinges on how efficiently the players can implement the agreed-upon changes.
Here comes DXC, yet another cutting-edge, next-gen, fire-spitting buzz acronym. We skipped the adjective “blazing-fast” on purpose.
What is DXC?
With digital experience composition (DXC), cross-functional teams can build scalable applications with a focus on what the teams are tasked with. That is, engineers would stick to developing software, and content practitioners would do their job in a content-oriented environment. Other business folks can directly influence all the teams without diminishing overall productivity.
A disclaimer: The DXC-driven scenario has negligible impact on small applications or demos. For scalable applications, DXC makes a huge difference by abstracting content and data from multiple sources into a layer. Business users can then present the result in whatever form or channel they desire, hence the term composition.
Think of what an easier life you’d have as an engineer if all you had to do was create the presentation layer for structured content, whose schema maintains a specific format. The underlying content comprises data and content from CMSes, headless commerce systems, analytics tools, customer-data platforms, product information management (PIM) systems, search services, etc.
Simply put, once you’ve defined the page components for the website, other teams can determine the pages to present and their structure—without touching a line of code. For instance, they can identify the text and image sources, the transformations for the images, and the audiences for the various pages. They can personalize content on multiple facets, hold experiments, and update the presentation without help from engineers. Now that’s efficiency.
Separately, in addition to writing impactful code, engineers have time to explore innovative techniques that promise to optimize the user experience and deliver value faster. Also available is bandwidth to research modern application-rendering models, edge computing, and the techniques for scaling teams with more effective design systems.
How does DXC differ from Jamstack and headless technologies?
DXC is built on existing Jamstack and headless-development paradigms to raise cross-team productivity. However, leveraging them at scale risks generating what Tim Benniks calls a Mach Monolith. A case in point: Three Jamstack tools in one Next.js-based front end work perfectly fine. However, 10 services later, each communicating with the other, a monolith of headless services emerges. Thus, as much as Jamstack and headless tools are ideal for smaller applications, using them at scale is problem-prone and painstaking.
DXC is a remarkable workaround: You still use your favorite Jamstack tools, headless services, or even your own home-grown connectors without being locked into any of them. Business users can pick, choose, and swap content any time while engineers focus on building software.
What’s next?
DXC offers relief for engineers, who can bask in the newfound efficiency. Not to mention being able to ensure lateral stability across the application while solidifying the foundation for vertical growth.
A caveat with DXC solutions is that content orchestration from multiple sources is crucial but not universally available. Here, I unapologetically plug Uniform, where I work, a solution pioneer in this space. For a demo, sign up for a free account, pick data sources from the suite of integrations, create new components, and watch the orchestration magic unfold.
“Hey, Sam, how long will it take you to switch our legacy CMS from 2008 to a modern, open-source one?”
You’re probably not Sam but might be soon, and you need to think about how to handle questions like that.
For now, Alex is much happier. We are all Alex.
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