We’re excited to share that over 1,000 attendees joined us at our second virtual conference, which is a great success! Firstly, we would like to thank all of you who attended Kontent Horizons 2021. We realize that everyone is a bit tired of virtual events after nearly two years in the pandemic, which is why we broadcasted from our live studio and included several live panel discussions and Q&As. But even though we have received great feedback, we hope to meet you in person in 2022!

This article will take a closer look at this year’s event, highlighting some of the key themes that emerged from the inspiring speakers and panelists. Each speaker contributed to the event in their own unique way, sharing useful tips, best practices, and insights into how they have achieved success with their digital projects.

#1: 2022 is the year to adopt the composable approach

As Kontent’s Managing Director Bart Omlo mentioned in his keynote speech, many companies realized last year during the Covid pandemic that digital transformation was critical to their survival. According to analyst predictions, 80% of consumers will experience the world only digitally in the future. In fact, 63% of adults in the US last year completed at least one online activity such as attending a religious ceremony or an exercise class—that is, activities that people used to do offline. Furthermore, another prediction claims that organizations that have embraced a composable approach will outperform their competitors by 80% in terms of the speed with which new features are implemented. That’s some food for thought, right?

Speaking of food, if you’re new to the composable approach, we also had the pleasure of having Uniform’s Principal Developer Advocate Tim Benniks as one of our speakers, and he described the composable DXP using a “sandwich analogy.” We won’t spill anything else—you simply need to watch this talk. Just remember to choose your ingredients wisely!

#2: Successful organizations have a clear content vision and regularly evaluate their content

“A content strategy without content operations is just a nice idea,” said Colleen Jones, President at Content Science, as she was explaining how to turn great content ideas into reality. According to her, content operations matter because we live in a business era where everyone focuses on maintaining a relationship with the customer—in other words, delivering the right content at the right time regardless of channel. Colleen stresses that, in order to make their content operations successful, organizations have to define their content vision and evaluate content effectiveness. If you’d like to watch her entire Horizons presentation, visit horizons.kontent.ai; recordings from the event will be available in less than two weeks.

#3: The need to govern content operations is growing

“Enterprises in diverse sectors are discovering that they cannot become digital-centric organizations without proper content governance, and they cannot really succeed in the long term. They’re trying to invest in content governance, but that is quite challenging and difficult to master,” noted Martin Michalik, VP Product at Kontent by Kentico. With the proliferation of channels and growing amounts of digital content, it’s impossible for companies to create seamless and coherent experiences for their customers without content governance.

If you’d like to learn more about how to improve your content operations and the best way to govern them, check out our Content Maturity Explorer.

#4: Jamstack frees developers and large organizations

Jason Lengstorf, VP Developer Experience at Netlify, explained how fragile and complex systems slow down individuals, teams, and even entire companies and why you need to “make the right thing easy for yourself.” By choosing the right defaults, every team can get things shipped to production much faster than before. When developers start building their projects, they should keep the following defaults in mind: a fully decoupled front end that is precompiled when possible, deployed to a CDN, and uses serverless functions for dynamic functionality. These architectural choices have a name, and that is—yes, you guessed it—the Jamstack. We at Kontent were excited to hear Jason’s talk because we have been passionate advocates of the Jamstack for a long time 😊.

#5: People describe today’s content management as headless, flexible, but also messy

During the event, we ran a number of polls to find out what the attendees thought about the current state of digital content and digital experience trends. When asked to describe content management in 2021 using only one word, the respondents shared the following answers:

According to the poll results, it seems that the respondents would like to make their content more personalized and engaging and collaborate more efficiently in 2022:

Although the number of respondents who engaged in these polls was quite low, it’s interesting to see that nearly one-third admits they don’t have a long-term content strategy:

When asked what digital experience trends they’re excited about, 68% selected digital self-service and chatbots:

Thank you, and see you at Kontent Horizons 2022!

Last but not least, a special thanks goes out to our Sponsors and Kontent Partners who helped make the event possible, namely: ACTUM Digital, Luminary, Konabos, BizStream, UserCentric, MMT Digital, Just After Midnight, blueModus, Uniform, Bynder, Digital Detox, XTM International, Kyan, and Devotion 🧡. 

And what about you? Do you have any ambitious content plans for 2022, and did you enjoy the virtual conference? Let us know on Twitter or LinkedIn using #KontentHorizons ;). If you missed the event, don’t worry—recordings of all sessions and panel discussions will be available here in two weeks!