Copy
View this email in your browser
Word on the Future
June 2020 | ~ 3 min read
Welcome to the 20th edition of Word on the Future. Thank you for being here with us.
Keywords: total cost of ownership (TCO); digital transformation; WordPress
Across all industries, companies struggle to achieve desired product outcomes at speed. Faced with legacy technology, talent shortages, and redundant or duplicated collaboration efforts across multiple tools and formats, the total cost of ownership for enterprise software can end up significantly higher than its original price tag.

In the fast-paced digital marketing landscape, a lack of transparency on TCO  and the sunk cost fallacy often results in teams being stuck on an outdated platform. This slows down the pace of innovation, but can also have serious effects on employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention.

Training and onboarding can be one of the biggest hurdles organizations face when using a new system. No matter what a vendor may promise you, if you have a workforce who don’t know how to use your new tool, there will be additional hidden costs to consider – and to be added to the total cost of ownership.

Total cost of ownership isn’t just about cash, though. Employees spend 30 minutes a week trying to fix technology issues or helping a coworker. Helping a colleague out is great, but if it happens because of mismatched or outdated technology, it can quickly start feeling like a waste of time and productivity.

Consequently, if those issues persist and a team feels ‘trapped’ in them, frustration can build up and people may start questioning why they are being held hostage with useless tech. Digital transformation is more about talent than technology, but if outdated or mismatched software continues to get in their way, one in eight people leave.
Open source software like WordPress incurs zero licensing fees. The cost of using it is inherently low, even at an enterprise scale. This makes a big factor in any sunk cost fallacy irrelevant: contrary to all proprietary software, WordPress doesn’t lock you into a long and inflexible contract. If it stops serving your needs at any point later down the line, it’ll be much easier to justify migrating elsewhere.

Enabling real human experiences with digital content is a complex process. The ability to adapt to new market insights fast while reducing the operational costs of doing so can quite literally tip the scales for a business.

WordPress’ popularity as a digital marketing tool makes it a familiar tool for new employees more than any other content management system. This can significantly reduce TCO. WordPress has taken the estimated effort of 382 person-years (excluding translations) to get it to where it is today and provide an extraordinarily high starting point to manage digital experiences, from its world-class Block Editor to its powerful extensibility.

For the last decade, thousands of public and private organizations, including national governments and Fortune 500 companies, have used WordPress to manage their online presence. Today, these organizations continue to rely on WordPress to deliver global digital experiences, benefiting from its usability, scalability and rapid evolution into the world’s most popular CMS.
QUOTE
“Using open source software like WordPress is like having a global development team as an extension of your internal team, working globally in mutual interest to continuously improve it. You can focus on building exactly what you need, contributing back to the project where it makes sense.
So why not embrace the benefits and use more of it?”


David LockieDavid Lockie
CEO at Pragmatic
HEADS UP

Take our survey: The emergence of the DXP has played a major part in Gartner’s recent retirement of their WCM Magic Quadrant. How do you see DXPs driving digital transformation? Take our survey!

Preview: We’re about to release Altis 4 with the long-awaited Experience Blocks module enabling content personalization directly in the WordPress Block Editor. Check it out here!

Noel Tock
 
Until next time!
 
Noel Tock
Partner and CGO at Human Made
Forward to a friend
LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
humanmade.com
June 2020 contributions from: Ana Silva, Caspar Hübinger, Barbara Marcantonio (photo)


Copyright © 2020 Human Made Limited. All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
81 Dale Road, Matlock, Derbyshire, DE4 3LU

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.