Digital Challenges 2020

By now, it has become somewhat of a tradition that we interview our partner Janus Boye, digital pioneer and founder of the digital professional network Boye & Co, at the end of every year. This time, we will ask him about the developments of the past year and the digital challenges that we will need to face in the upcoming year: headless, AI, data ethics and so much more.

Janus, the first question I ask you in every end of the year interview: to what extent have your predictions of the past year been true? What changes did you notice in the market in 2019?

What a year! Content was king last year and remains on the throne, but I’ve never experienced such a combination of buzz, investment and exciting digital projects when it comes to 2019. It’s really a fun time to work at the intersection of content, digital and innovation. 

AI is becoming a part of everyday life and I’m also happy to experience an increased awareness and understanding about data ethics. Do we need to collect so much data? It’s not just tougher legislation, but actually consumers demanding change, which I expect will lead to more innovation and ultimately improvements in society. 

In the marketplace, the explosion of content tech vendors is continuing and existing vendors, like Umbraco, are stepping up the pace, now also with a headless approach. 

Headless content management is one of the latest trends in the industry. With “Heartcore”, Umbraco has launched a headless CMS earlier this month. What can we expect from Headless in 2020?

Headless offers a flexible way to work with content as a service. Competing vendors like Contentful and Kentico have offered headless solutions for longer and I find that the more mature buyers enjoy the content-first approach. There’s still plenty of work to be done to lower the learning curve, while making websites fast and secure.  

As you said, Umbraco launched “Heartcore” in 2019, a headless CMS. In what form will headless and classic content management systems coexist?

For the foreseeable future, there’s going to be a big market for the CMS classic approach where you have everything so to speak in the box. Many customers will start new projects using this approach and migrate from one to another. I see headless more at the edges or for those with expert skills building microservices and finetuning their digital experience. 

Which topics will be the focus of our daily work in 2020? What challenges do we need to face?

From the perspective of the customer, I find a resurgence of open source really interesting. Similar to privacy, it’s actually an area where Germany is leading the pack in the EU. Yet we also have many commercial vendors or commercial open source like Umbraco. I expect that customers will increasingly demand open source as it becomes a business need to use reusable and shareable components to drive down cost and increase the pace of innovation. 

We still haven’t solved the problem of content at scale. ContentOps is the new buzz word that tries to bridge the gap between strategy and execution and I remain optimistic that this will help drive emerging best practices for content managers.

Finally, what are the students learning in school? Websites are becoming increasingly complex and the traditional monolithic CMS is being torn apart by different forces. We are yet to see the full impact of rising expectations, the rise of cloud-first solutions, API-driven headless CMS and modern frontend development. Stay tuned. 2020 promises to be a very interesting journey!

We are also very excited about the coming year and we wish our readers a healthy and happy 2020! Janus, thank you for the interesting talk!

Read how rapidly the digital world has developed in recent years – in the past end of the year interviews with Janus Boye: 2017/2018 and 2018/2019.