**
An Opportunity to Evaluate Technology**
It’s a very exciting time within the world of Digital as we continue to stand up our own Elanco technologies, and exit more and more TSA’s. We have already seen this with The Spot and Workday, and our CMS is no exception!
CMS, short for Content Management System, powers all of Elanco’s websites from Elanco.com to product specific web pages. I want to share the CMS journey so far of how we got to the technology selection that we have made, and what will be happening next as we begin efforts to bring this technology into Elanco.
With our current CMS, Contentful, we are on an outdated version that Lilly use which means we do not have access to the latest features. There have been historic poor website implementations by technical vendors with this platform, and we identified that there was a lack of education in Elanco of how to use Contentful and best practices, meaning that many affiliates/marketers are unable to make content changes without raising a ticket. As a result of this, an opportunity was identified to evaluate whether this was the best technology to support our digital experiences today and in the future.
Our Approach
Over the course of several months, the team investigated various CMS solutions through external research, including Gartner, Forrester, G2 and external networks. We also identified both business and technical requirements by engaging not only with IT/technical users, but through speaking with people throughout the entire Elanco business, ensuring we got a good representation of needs and painpoints.
We ended up with quite a large list from exploring all of these solutions, so we were able to narrow down the selection to five, enabling us to continue further evaluation into these. Many CMS platforms offer similar functionality, so we selected a range to fit across a scale – from meeting business requirements to meeting technology requirements. The selected vendors were Adobe, Drupal, Kentico Kontent, Contentstack, Contentful (current provider).
This selection was further narrowed down in a workshop where we ended up selecting Contentstack and Kentico to take through to RFP (Request for Proposal) stage, to see how their solution can meet Elanco’s requirements, how they can partner with us, and how we can ensure we go forward using best practises. We felt like both of these technologies brought a good balance to both business and technical requirements, so that users could be empowered but also ensuring we met Elanco’s architecture principles.
CMS User Pilot
Alongside the RFP process, we came to the conclusion that both products could meet our technical needs, so we wanted to ensure that the business users could get the best experience – not just technical users. To asssit with this, we ran a user pilot for both of these CMS platforms where a test environment was made. A small selection of users were selected for this to represent various areas of the Elanco business. This allowed real users from around Elanco to get into the platforms and evaluate the user experience, as they performed various scenarios.
This shown that both platforms were neck and neck for user experience too, which shown we had narrowed down our selection to two good products. Following two other decision workshops, one including these business participants once again, we came to the final choice of Kentico Kontent as our preferred CMS vendor for Elanco.
Kentico Kontent – Elanco’s future CMS
Kentico has been around since 2004 and create CMS technologies – one being Kontent and the other being Kentico 12 – so it’s important to not get confused between the two platforms they offer as they’re quite different!
Kontent is focused on helping users create great content, collaborate with others, and deliver a consistent experience across channels – allowing it to enable a true omni-channel experience for Elanco in the future. It’s easy for non-technical users to utilise to create and edit content for their websites, and also great for technical users who are more interested in the development side of things.
Kentico Kontent adheres to our enterprise architecture principles. Kontent enables Elanco to have a headless CMS that is able to deliver content via an API, whilst also being accessible to business users. This is a cutting edge solution that most businesses could only dream of being able to have!
Business users, such as marketers, will be able to log into Kontent and update their websites, involve colleagues to collaborate, work through approval stages prior to promomats, and – once approved – set the content live.
There is also an editorial calendar which was extremely popular amongst pilot users, allowing you to see what scheduled content you have coming up on the website and content from the past. This is just a snippet of some of the things this new platform will enable us to do once we migrate our sites to this.
What next?
We are now in the process of standing up this solution, so that it is ready for both Stallion and Bison, and assess the effort required to migrate Elanco’s websites.
More information will be made available about Kentico Kontent as we continue to procure and stand up the service. If you want to learn more, you can read about the platform and watch videos at https://kontent.ai.
Elanco is in a position to define it’s future and it’s exciting to see us stand up this cutting-edge solution as our CMS!
Thanks for reading – hopefully you enjoyed this insight into the CMS project so far!