Lori McDonald

- Many CMS vendors market how easy they will simplify your efforts, are only addressing a fraction of the overall digital experience, and expect you to solve other aspects of the experience with other tools or people. Make this decision with a holistic view. - Take a look at reports, like Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Content Management Platforms, Digital Experience Platforms, Personalization Engines, and for Digital Commerce to understand the viewpoint of an independent third party. - Some CMS platforms are great but require a lot of resources to enable. Consider the size of your team and how you can be the most successful.

- Look for statements around compliance for all of the above and ask your CMS vendor how they are investing in data privacy and simplifying your work to stay compliant. - If your CMS features also support your digital commerce efforts, look for how the tools support your PCI compliance. - When it comes to scalability and reliability, look at how the organization supports your development team in rolling out and rolling back changes, enabling your work to be efficient while also protecting security.

- Consider CMS solutions, like Optimizely, that incorporate a Content Marketing Platform, enabling your team to manage the entire content lifecycle in one place. - Look for CMS solutions that offer a suite of products that you can expand into over time, even if you don't leverage all of them today.

- Your CMS selection should be considered in terms of your overall digital strategy. Is your organization leveraging digital commerce or do you plan to? Look for how your CMS will support those efforts. Is your organization doing business globally or plans to, look for how your CMS will enable that. - Beyond looking only at how a CMS is responding to current, also look at their depth of history in this space and how they have responded over time. This can be a sign of how you can expect them to support innovation in the future.

- Experimentation is another feature you should look for in your CMS that will enable your team to create greater business value rapidly. - If you are choosing a pure-headless/CMS solution it will require the purchase of other tools and additional resources. It is important to know there are platforms that take a hybrid headless approach and enable you to simplify your tech stack. - Achieving WCAG 2.1 conformance will not be provided by your CMS. Your CMS can provide tools that make this easier, but there will always be additional work for your team to do. - Look for personalization capabilities that leverage AI to minimize the work for your marketing team.