There is a storm coming.

For those of you reading this who have experienced a severe weather event know all too well the sequence of events leading up to it. First, there is a warning – either through the media, verbally, or from the old woman in town who can feel it in her bones. Then, there is the sense of it coming, and that can take minutes, hours or days. Either way, there is a feeling of calm before the havoc. Battening down the hatches, preparing your self, property, business and family. Preparation is important in surviving something potentially catastrophic.

I read a post today from the Karen Mcgrane called Responsive Design Won’t Fix your Content Problem. It was nicely validating for me reading what mirrored so many of Mark Boulton Design’s clients, especially over the last eighteen months. The post describes the difficulty organisations are with adapting to their digital content being published across a variety of channels. Reconciling that against existing business and technology structures is hard for big organisations but, in my experience, that’s what’s been happening for the past years.

Responsive design is our storm. Acknowledging the way the web really is, and reconciling it against the plethora of new devices and reading behaviours has been a seismic shift in the creation and reading of digital content. Organisations have been spending the last couple of years coming to terms with it.

Quoting Karen’s article from a recent project she was working on:

Our executives assume that since they made the decision to go responsive, every other decision would just be tactical details. In fact, implementing responsive web design raises issues that strike right at the heart of our business and the way we work. We need to fix our review and approval processes, our content management system, our asset management system, our design standards and governance. We need to clean up our outdated, useless content. But it’s hard to get people to step up to solve these bigger problems, because they don’t think they’re part of “responsive design.”

This exactly mirrors my experience.

What starts out as desire to change for the better, to make a web product responsive, is the start of problem escalation. Before you know it, organisations are talking about needing structured content, but to do that they need a new CMS, but to do that, they have to procure a new CMS and migrate content. Now, that’s not all bad. Organisations have been doing this. Preparing solid foundations on which to create digital experiences for wherever the user may be.

The storm. The critical mass of creating content for an increasingly broad digital space is just around the corner. Are you prepared?