DXP That More Than Pays for Itself—The Economic Value of Improved Efficiency for IT Architects

IT architects are one of a company's most precious resources. Learn how Sitefinity can make better, more optimal use of these valued IT professionals.

Forrester Research is known for credible, objective in-depth ROI analysis, and IT turns to its Total Economic Impact (TEI) reports to help choose technologies with the most benefit.

Forrester focused its insightful ROI lens on Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and analyzed the economic payoff from a leading DXP—Sitefinity from Progress. The data was not just guesswork and supposition but based on in-depth interviews with Sitefinity customers that detailed the economic returns.

At its highest level, The Total Economic Impact of Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Platform report found that Sitefinity offers a rather remarkable 245% Return on Investment with a 13-month payback. That is some serious payback. But in this blog, we focus on the specific value of integrations, and point to the overall report for a broader view.

First, let’s get our definitions in order. So, what is Sitefinity? Let’s let Forrester explain: “Sitefinity is a digital experience platform as a service (PaaS) that allows organizations to optimize their collection, management, and delivery of content through real-time metrics, improved collaboration, and streamlined, automated content creation and distribution features. With Sitefinity, enterprises can present measurable, effective content to improve engagement in a more efficient, collaborative manner,” the research house said.

Gain by Redeploying IT Architects

One of a company's most precious resources is its IT architects. But what if you could make better, more optimal use of these valued IT professionals? Sitefinity lets you do just that, Forrester found. Here are two Forrester findings:

• “Upon implementing Sitefinity, fewer IT architects were required to perform web-development-related tasks, and they were thereby reassigned to other IT-related posts in the organization.”
• “The out-of-the-box design of Sitefinity’s platform required less coding, enabling the organization to reduce its labor budget and save IT hours previously allocated to the web team. One interviewee commented, ‘That is one less thing that our IT security team has to worry about.’”

Sitefinity is proven to dramatically boost efficiencies in digital delivery. “The standardization and centralization of Sitefinity’s DXP solution provides organizations with the ability to create, populate, and deliver information to market in significantly less time than in their previous environments. The yearly efficiencies result in a three-year, risk-adjusted PV (present value) of $1.3 million,” Forrester determined.

Redeployment of Internal IT Architects

Some customers suffered with not having a continuous integration and delivery platform with standardized ways of creating and populating content. “Operational efficiencies were unattainable without a standardized process for content creation, management, and delivery. New or updated information took weeks to get to market, with multiple layers of internal review and approval. Content creation was often duplicated due to inadequate communication channels within the organizations,” Forrester said.

Fortunately, Forrester found deep productivity and efficiency gains with the Sitefinity DXP, literally changing how work is done. “Sitefinity’s streamlined, all-in-one platform allows organizations to reassign internal IT labor to higher value roles. The three-year, risk-adjusted PV of the associated savings totals $557,571,” Forrester found.

Here’s how Sitefinity changes the life of IT architects: “An IT architect oversees the management of the site and has an internal web team of approximately 15 technical marketing and content editing staff and 10 web developers. The number of content editors reflected in the composite organization does not represent the limitless number of content editors the organization could potentially engage. Sitefinity’s standardized, accessible approach allows organizations to permit content editors, outside of the traditional web team—and regardless of function or geography—to update, enhance, and deliver information.”

While the more efficient use and redeployment of IT architects saves money and allows them to work on more strategic projects, employees that contribute to the website are also far more efficient and enjoy an enhanced, fully collaborative experience. “Sitefinity’s cloud-based design enables employees to share content across the enterprise and accomplish higher level tasks faster with better functionality,” Forrest noted. One customer interviewed by the research house agrees. “The cloud enterprise solution offers full interaction with the cloud team for 24/7 monitoring and with the professional services team when customizations are needed to the core DXP,” the manager told Forrester.

Improved visibility was another plus. “With detailed insights into the customer, partner, or employee experiences, organizations can target and mitigate specific pain points effortlessly, thereby improving digital engagement,” the report noted.

This all results in enhanced collaboration and an increase in employee satisfaction. “The interviewed organizations previously managed content publishing in a less standardized, less strategic, and ad hoc manner that utilized homegrown, outdated, or decentralized tool sets from across the organization. Lacking a unified platform, web team managers had little visibility or control of what was being published and from which department, resulting in cross-organizational redundancies and an inefficient use of internal resources,” Forrester noted.

Before Sitefinity, these shops struggled with decentralized and inefficient control of content. “With several remote offices being responsible for their own content management, universal messaging for the organization was inconsistent. When information changed at headquarters, for example, web staff were responsible for tracking down all of the digital locations where the content was housed and ensuring it was updated,” Forrester explained.

With Sitefinity, the entire content creation, posting and review is utterly changed—for the better. “Manually distributing documents for review and approval was no longer required due to Sitefinity’s streamlined, automated process. Web teams were able to access and work on a project in one location,” Forrester learned.

One customer offered more detail. “With the integrated workflows, we can create content twice as fast,” the Sitefinity user noted.

Sitefinity’s content templates allowed the web team to realize additional efficiencies. Team members could access, view and update information without having to recreate entire documents.

Integrations Boost Staff Productivity

Integrations allow websites to include more functionality, giving them services unheard of in earlier days. At the same time, it increases the productivity all of those that feed content into the website. “Streamlining and centralizing the delivery of new internal, non-web content gave organizational teams a single, reliable location to upload, retrieve, and share content updates with all internal users with permissions,” Forrester noted.

One Sitefinity customer interviewed by Forrester agreed. “We now have one central place in the DXP interface where people can update information, and, with Sitefinity’s API integrations, that information is updated automatically throughout the entire organization,” commented a technical director.”

Get the Full Sitefinity ROI Skinny

The Forrester TEI report shows Sitefinity can deliver a 245% ROI and details an array of savings and business benefits enabled by the Sitefinity Digital Experience Platform.

Digital is the new directive for businesses across the globe. In fact, according to a survey conducted among business leaders, close to 80% said they had a top-down mandate to turn digital into a competitive differentiator, and 48% even called it an “urgent” priority. 

For any business under immense pressure to drive digital transformation, a digital experience platform (DXP) can be an invaluable asset. However, with many modern marketers forced to justify every expense, they also need to keep their budget in mind and choose a platform that provides a return on investment.

Progress Sitefinity offers the best of both worlds—a powerful, easy-to-use DXP that helps deliver measurable results. Forrester recently conducted a study into the total economic impact of Sitefinity and concluded that customers could see an ROI of 245%.

See how real-world businesses are using Sitefinity to drive their digital ambitions—and how you can do the same:

• Improve integration capacity with key external applications
• Drive digital delivery efficiency with a centralized platform approach
• Deliver an intuitive, marketer-friendly UI that frees IT for critical projects

Read The Total Economic Impact of Progress Sitefinity Digital Experience Platform report now.