Content chaos is costing more than you think.
Content management processes and tools are essential for organizations of all sizes, but too often, they’re treated as future investments that never quite arrive. In the meantime, organizational and innovation debt quietly accumulates. Company sites are full of useful, high-value content: articles, podcasts, infographics, videos, data, reviews, publications, interactive tools, and so on. But much of it is hidden behind dated information architecture, inconsistent structure, and weak search experiences. When users or staff can’t find what they need, frustration builds and perceived value plummets. This isn’t just about picking a content management system or creating more content; it’s about delivering on the value it already has.
CMS Benefits for your Customers
From a customer’s perspective, the impact is immediate. Trying to locate a help article or track down a quote from a podcast shouldn’t feel like detective work. When customers can’t find what they’re looking for through a site’s search, they don’t keep trying; they jump to Google. Depending on SEO performance, that often means landing on a competitor instead. Only about half of users find what they’re searching for through internal search, and users who fail are far more likely to bounce; 68% won’t return after a poor search experience. Highland’s research shows that members of professional associations are often unaware of many valuable resources and resource channels available to them. When relevant content and resources are hard to discover, engagement drops, and revenue is put at risk.
CMS Wins for your Team
The same pattern shows up internally. Most of us have experienced the frustration of searching through Confluence or SharePoint and coming up empty, until we resort to asking the one burdened colleague who “just knows where everything is.” In a survey of more than 500 IT professionals, 37% said employees saving content on shared or personal drives posed the most significant challenge to effective content management. Without formal processes to support content creation, organization, and evolution, efficiency starts to leak, and institutional knowledge becomes an Achilles' heel. Teams become dependent on individuals rather than systems, and success hinges on a leader’s ability to advocate for more resources instead of addressing root-level process gaps found across the organization.
Over time, this imbalance creates compounding debt. Content debt shows up as outdated, duplicated, or contradictory information from a lack of governance infrastructure. Technology debt emerges when off-the-shelf or bespoke tools are stretched beyond their intended purpose to bridge gaps. Innovation debt accrues when teams are stuck fixing these issues instead of implementing new initiatives. Process debt appears as workarounds, competing “standard” procedures, and unclear ownership. None of this happens all at once, but left unchecked, it slows everything down.
The Power of Tools and Process
The good news (sort of) is that most organizations are in the same position. Internal search success rates remain low, and the user experience of B2B site search is consistently poor across industries. This common gap presents a meaningful opportunity. Organizations that invest intentionally in content management processes and tooling can turn a common weakness into a competitive advantage.
But tools alone won’t solve the problem. Tools are only as effective as the processes that support them. Clear approval paths and governance models are essential, particularly in larger organizations where content ownership is distributed across many teams. Working closely with UX and CX to establish a shared taxonomy that spans functions, user personas, and domains is a critical investment. Tagging and taxonomy aren’t one-time exercises; they require ownership, decision rights, and enforceable standards that scale. When done well, they will create the foundation that allows content to be discoverable, current, and trusted.
Find Content Organization Clarity from your Users
The place to start isn’t a platform overhaul or an overly ambitious roadmap:it’s clarity. Identify where users struggle to or can’t find content, where experiences feel inconsistent across channels or sub-domains, and where teams rely on workarounds. From there, shared standards and ownership models help close the gaps. With those guardrails in place, organizations are better positioned to take advantage of emerging capabilities, including AI and language models. Maturity grows incrementally, but each step builds alignment and confidence across the organization.
CMS tool selection should follow (not lead) this work. For small and medium-sized organizations, the right tool is one that supports current complexity, helps define processes, reduces manual handoffs, and enforces consistency. Automation matters here, not to replace human expertise, but to reduce human error and ensure the right content reaches the right audience at the right time. The goal isn’t to over-engineer the solution, but to choose a platform that reinforces good process and makes the right way of working the easiest way to work. We often use a Product Value Matrix in our work to thoroughly evaluate each tool's features. This allows us to guide our clients toward their best-fit tools.
That brings us to the elephant in the room: AI. AI and language models can be powerful additions to a content management ecosystem, but only when applied with clear intent. “Just use AI” isn’t a strategy. Organizations need to define specific, repeatable tasks such as summarization, tagging, segmentation, metadata enrichment, or consistency checks. Without that clarity, AI simply amplifies existing messes faster. With clearly defined tasks and goals, the team will avoid hammering in a nail with a screwdriver.
Ultimately, content management maturity isn’t a technical milestone; it’s a signal of organizational readiness. Organizations that treat content as strategic infrastructure are better equipped to scale, adapt, and innovate. The work isn’t glamorous, and it won’t deliver overnight wins, but it pays dividends in clarity, efficiency, and trust for both customers and staff. When content can be found, managed, reused, and evolved with intent, teams spend less time compensating for broken systems and more time creating real value. In a landscape where experience is a key differentiator, investing in content management maturity is a strategic advantage.
