The Rise Of The Digital Factory

The way businesses build websites and other digital goods is undergoing a tectonic upheaval. They must transition from project-focused iteration to innovation and continuous deployment in order to achieve a competitive edge.

What Is A Digital Factory?

In the past, it would have taken a long time to develop a monolithic system capable of particularly addressing the production of each new digital product. On the other side, the digital manufacturing model prioritizes flexibility and mobility, while also assisting businesses in remaining competitive. Teams may choose the appropriate tools for each task using solution stacks.

According to Will Hancock, senior technical delivery manager at AKQA, a stack of best-in-class services enables businesses to move quickly, experiment, and build new products: "One of the most critical factors in ensuring our clients' success is our ability to iterate, pivot, or even change direction entirely."

The digital factory offers a valuable framework for integrating digital teams' expertise with the new digital stack. Numerous teams and company divisions may use just what they need for their specific items. Continuous deployment is enabled by a modular, service-oriented design – by dividing everything down into little bits, you can move much more quickly and without destroying anything.

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How Is A Digital Factory Created? 

Every manufacturing requires electricity. However, what fuels a digital factory? At the heart of all digital encounters is content.  Regrettably, when businesses shifted away from monoliths toward a more curated stack of disparate services, the content was left behind.

Traditional content management systems (CMSes) are incompatible with the new digital factory model because they need an additional layer of development to allow content producers and designers to alter the material, negating the advantages of agile, in-parallel development. With a standard content management system, teams are compelled to stuff their material into rigid structures. Both migrating and reusing material is unpleasant – it gets locked behind the high walls of a monolithic system that combines content and code, making both almost hard to reuse in other settings.

Traditional content management systems (CMSs) allow content producers to readily alter the material, while developers wring their hair out since everything is either constantly malfunctioning or requires extensive customization. The bottom issue is that your current CMS is incompatible with stacks. It aspires to be a complete stack in and of itself.

Digital teams need a method for liberating themselves and their material. What is the solution? A content platform that decouples the content from the display layer and enables concurrent collaboration between developer and content teams. Contentful is purpose-built to address the shortcomings of conventional content management systems and simply integrates with an existing agile DXP.

The Way Forward

The digital factory should be at the center of every contemporary company's digital-first strategy, which aims to continually develop and iterate on digital goods such as websites, applications, and other experiences. This is a result of the adoption of customized services as part of the contemporary DXP, but the ramifications will be far-reaching in terms of organizational and cultural transformation as businesses transition to a more agile delivery model. 

Adopting a content platform as a critical enabler of the digital factory will allow individuals to produce, code, and publish content more quickly and with a higher degree of audience relevance. When innovation is supported and encouraged, the future offers more innovative, daring, and exciting digital goods.

Download Contentful's whitepaper to learn more about why enterprise teams are transforming to deliver digital products.