How to Determine if a CMS Upgrade Is Right For You

Every few years, organizations with on-premise content management systems (CMS) confront a recurring quagmire: upgrade their CMS to the vendor’s latest release or stay on their current version. While an upgrade does indeed come with benefits, such as increased flexibility, improved functionality, enhanced business intelligence, and potential long-term cost reductions, an upgrade can also bring with it key drawbacks, like impact to IT infrastructure, business disruption, upgrade costs, and vendor lock-in. So how can you reach the right decision over doing an upgrade? To reach the right decision, Verndale suggests employing a decision framework that includes: laying out your options, understanding your organization’s fit against each option, and measuring the values for the options that are the best fit.

CMS Upgrades Stir Up Mixed Emotions

For nearly a decade, packaged CMS apps have aided businesses with improving line of business capabilities -- like marketing, sales, and customer service – as well as enhanced business and IT operations. As time passes, however, owners of on-premise CMS apps have had to face the recurring dilemma of upgrading their CMS apps at one time or another. And each time they’ve mulled over an upgrade, they’ve had to consider the benefits and drawbacks that are inherent with upgrades.

CMS Upgrades Yield Four Types of Benefits

CMS upgrades bring forth a set of key benefits that help businesses be more efficient, reach target markets quickly, and increase effectiveness of business and IT employees. Primarily, the benefits of upgrading CMS apps center on:

• Increased flexibility. Improvements in technology standards, such as web services oriented architecture (SOA) and web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and Flash, have enabled organizations to be more agile and flexible in addressing application integration requirements and supporting new business requirements. The faster technology can adapt to better support changing business needs, the more successful businesses can be in responding to customer and prospect demands.
• Improved business support. New CMS releases usually mean improved application functionality to support new and changing business requirements. Social web application integration, digital asset management, and improved admin consoles enable business and IT users to provide richer website experiences and reach their online business goals, whether marketing, sales, customer service, or operations related.  
• Enhanced business decision-making. Enhanced reporting and analytics capabilities are common areas of application improvements in new CMS releases. With enhanced reporting and analytics, businesses can utilize the CMS to collect online data, digest the information, understand what that information means, and make more intelligent decisions based on the data.
• Reduced costs. Staying current with CMS upgrades can reduce long-term costs, most notably in cases of customization, application integration, and perpetual support.  With new releases having greater ease and flexibility for integration, costs can ratchet lower for API development and custom integration of 3^rd party applications. Additionally, as CMS apps mature, CMS vendors often sunset prior application versions because older app versions become more expensive for vendors to support over time. In these circumstances, the burden of support falls onto the app owners, and as such, greater support costs can incur for maintaining the app going forward. For those who upgrade, they avert the increased support costs.

…But Beware That Benefits Can Be Disguised As a Trojan Horse

Although there are many benefits to upgrading, there are also several hazards that warrant consideration. The challenges that come with CMS app upgrades can cause organizations to seriously rethink their upgrade plans and possibly their IT and IT management strategies. Key hazards that CMS upgrades typically introduce include:

1. IT infrastructure impact. In organizations where there’s a high degree of integration between CMS and other back office applications, an upgrade to the next release of a CMS can threaten or even destabilize existing website integration and customization work. Sometimes, if you upgrade one application, you may need to update other integrated applications too. If you upgrade your CMS to the most current release, how will the upgrade affect your current CMS environment and related application ecosystem?
2. Business disruption. IT projects, in any form, bring change to the organization. And change, no matter what its form, can lead to confusion and disarray. A CMS app upgrade can disrupt business operations in the form of application outages and usability challenges. If users suddenly lack a technology tool to support their daily activities, or the new technology requires users to perform tasks in a different way or method, operational effectiveness can be compromised. To this end, if you upgrade your CMS to the most current release, how will the business be disrupted by the upgrade?
3. Upgrade costs. Typically, vendors don’t charge software fees to upgrade their CMS to the most recent release. However, organizations performing an upgrade have to absorb the labor costs for upgrade implementation. In environments where application integration is high and technology complex, organizations can incur a sizable labor bill for upgrade planning, risk mitigation, and implementation. In addition, beyond the implementation costs, upgrades lock-in a new cycle of annual maintenance fees that organizations must pay on an annual basis to the CMS vendor. If you upgrade your CMS to the most current release, how can you determine what the total cost of ownership will be for the short and long terms?
4. Vendor lock-in. Organizations that upgrade their CMS apps to the most recent version inevitably tie their fate to their CMS vendor and, as a result, have restricted ability to switch to an alternative CMS option in the near and (possibly) far terms. If you upgrade your CMS to the most current release, how can you minimize vendor lock-in and ensure you have flexibility for the future? 

Utilize a Three Pillar Framework to Guide Your CMS Upgrade Decision

Reaching a decision over upgrading your CMS is no simple task. The benefits and drawbacks of upgrades can make even the most astute decision-maker crawl into the fetal position. To unravel the complexities of the CMS upgrade issue and reach the right decision for your organization, follow a three pillar decision framework.

Lay out your options

Knowing your options is the first critical step in reaching a CMS app upgrade decision. Beyond the high level “upgrade” or “don’t upgrade” options, you can:

1. Do Nothing (stay on current release)
2. Upgrade (to vendor’s most current release)
3. Migrate to another on-premise product
4. Migrate to a SaaS product
5. Migrate to an Open Source product
6. Outsource your existing app to a 3^rd party service provider

Understand your organization’s fit against each option

Once it’s clear what the primary options are, assess and rate your organization’s fit for each option. Not every option is a strong fit for your organization to seriously consider. Your organization may have certain requirements or preferences for: business process support, application integration and flexibility, cost tolerance, software vendor viability, data security and control, and in-house resource availability. To assist in this step, utilize an options matrix that helps you determine when you should pursue an option and when you should not pursue an option. Utilize the sample matrices below (see figures 1-6) to profile yourself against each option and qualitatively assess whether an option is worth pursuing.  Rate your scores for each criterion with a “High” or “Low” rating, and compare your ratings to each matrix to illuminate which options are strong fits for your organization to seriously consider.

Measure the value of each option through an ROI analysis

Finally, once you’ve profiled your organization against each of the options, take the 2 or 3 options that best match your organization’s profile and quantitatively measure the values through an ROI analysis. Build an ROI model based on three components:

1. Assumptions
2. Costs and benefits
3. Risk 

Knowing the Total Cost of Ownership for each option can not only help determine the option’s value, but it can also assist with measuring the option’s risk and justifying (or refuting) the option.