Introduction

Visier is a globally recognized leader in people analytics, providing on-demand data-driven answers for people-powered businesses. Its mission is to reveal the human truth that helps companies and their employees win together. By leveraging innovative technology, great data connections, and fantastic user experiences, Visier transforms a nearly endless stream of raw data into clear and actionable answers. 

When their monolithic content management system (CMS) prevented the digital experience (DX) team from meeting the needs of Visier’s rapidly expanding business, they turned to Divelement for help.

The Pain Points

Inflexible content architectures curb scalability

Recent exponential growth has brought Visier new customers with new use cases to solve. The company rose to the challenge by innovating its product offerings and expanding solution capabilities. 

The marketing team was eager to tell the new stories behind new products and solutions, but as the business expanded, new stakeholders became part of the marketing and content management workflows. Visier needed the agility to scale content alongside business operations, but a traditional, monolithic CMS stymied that scalability. 

In a traditional CMS model, the back-end code, content, and database are tightly coupled with the front-end presentation layer that delivers content to site visitors. For Visier, this meant that updating a single website page required extensive back-end coding. Such a monolithic system prevented marketing teams from pushing out content fast enough to scale effectively. 

Pre-Migration Workflow

Product team sends request > Content team writes copy > Design team creates visual assets > Development team builds or modifies landing page > QA team tests new page > DX team deploys page to individual digital touchpoints one at a time.

Timeline: Up to 5 business days

Visier’s time-to-production for pushing a new landing page live took up to five business days. The process required input from different roles across multiple teams – from graphic designers and marketing operations managers to software engineers and quality assurance. The sheer number of variables – including everyone’s individual priorities and full workloads – strained production timelines to the point of significant publication delays.

Visier had two major pain points with its existing CMS.

• It offered no separation between the content and presentation layers, and attached page templates to specific content types. The restrictions of this model required senior engineers’ involvement for even minor content updates, which further contributed to serious setbacks in publication.

• The database-driven CMS resulted in sluggish page speeds and poor site performance. This was detrimental to SEO (search engine optimization) rankings and had a negative impact on the overall user experience (UX). 

Visier felt that migrating to a headless content management system was necessary to give its content team the flexibility and scalability that would be essential for meeting long-term digital strategy goals. 

The Solution

A composable content model with Contentful’s headless CMS

The Contentful platform seemed the obvious choice from the start. In contrast to traditional models, Contentful is a headless CMS, which decouples the presentation layer from back-end content management to avoid entanglement problems common in monolithic systems. A headless CMS allows teams to create content from one centralized cloud platform and use APIs to seamlessly deploy it anywhere. 

Contentful provides a composable architecture that breaks down content into small, modular components. The composable content model allows teams to deploy digital experiences in minutes by reusing text, images, videos, and other content. 

Creators can combine different components to create content tailored to multiple use cases, channels, and clients. Visier felt Contentful’s headless CMS solution provided the flexibility, openness, and self-service capabilities that its customers and content creators needed. 

Migration Challenges

Rebuilding content architectures without business disruption

Visier needed to move 100 templates, 1,500 unique web pages, and over 25,000 digital assets from a monolithic CMS to a headless CMS in 12 months – while simultaneously introducing a brand-new design system. In the meantime, teams still needed to push out content to support ongoing business objectives, so the move couldn’t affect day-to-day workflows. 

Visier’s Migration Stats

Visier needed to bring in an outsourcing partner who understood the migration’s complexity, followed modern development best practices, and, most crucially, showed the same obsessive attention to detail as their internal teams.

Engaging With Divelement

A trusted nearshoring partner with Contentful expertise

Divelement is a nearshore technology consulting company that has been using Contentful since it started in 2020. Visier shared its pain points and presented a clear outcome: a full migration to the Contentful platform within 12 months.

Divelement’s team worked backward from that outcome to create a project roadmap that divided the overall project into smaller chunks to meet Visier’s timeline and requirements. This modular strategy allowed Divelement experts to quickly assemble the right team that would help Visier meet its goals.

“Trust and thoroughness were the absolute drivers for this being a success, and Divelement delivered in spades on both fronts.” 

The Approach

Pairing development teams for a seamless migration

Although the complexity of this project was immediately apparent, Visier was extremely clear about its timelines and goals. Divelement handled the migration piece-by-piece to ensure all the different business units in a company that size retained the autonomy to meet their objectives quarter over quarter. 

In addition to business as usual, Visier also had multiple new product launches planned during the migration window that required support from new content and engaging user experiences. 

Divelement took a bimodal approach to the migration. Mode 1 involved supporting the existing CMS so Visier could continue publishing content and executing digital initiatives without interruption. Mode 2 involved building out the new Contentful system and migrating everything to an entirely new architecture. 

Bimodal Migrations

Divelement had experts on staff who were familiar with both the previous monolithic CMS and the headless Contentful architectures, which allowed them to create two separate working groups to handle Mode 1 and Mode 2 in tandem. The Mode 1 team supported day-to-day maintenance and built new site experiences and pages within the existing system. At the same time, the Mode 2 team developed the new architecture and planned the migration. 

Visier also separated its teams into Mode 1 and Mode 2, and paired them with the Divelement working groups. This approach allowed seamless collaboration between cohorts and provided complete transparency into Divelement’s processes. When necessary, Visier diverted Mode 2 resources to provide additional support to Mode 1 initiatives like new product launches. 

The Outcome

Shrinking time-to-production from five days to five minutes

A successful migration is a boring migration. As soon as Visier changed the CNAME record in DNS, the new Contentful site went live without a single hitch – and within the 12-month timeline. It was an anticlimactic ending for a huge project, which is every developer’s dream.

“It was the most uneventful migration we’ve ever had. It was literally like one minute we were on the old site, and the next minute, we were like, ‘Oh, well I guess that’s it, thanks for the last 12 months!’ But that’s music to developers’ ears.”

With its new composable content model, Visier’s time-to-production decreased by 99.9%, from five days to five minutes. This has completely changed the digital experience team's approach to requests. Instead of wondering how to get their monolithic CMS to achieve what they want, they can focus on maximizing the user experience. 

Post-Migration Workflow

Product team sends request > DX team dynamically generates page with Contently > DX team deploys page to multiple digital touchpoints simultaneously

Timeline: As fast as 5 minutes

In addition to productivity gains, this also improves the fulfillment that content teams feel in their work. Rather than spending all their time focusing on mundane technical problems, teams get to create innovative and dynamic digital experiences.

Visier recently published a new innovation catalog to showcase its latest product functionality and give visitors a preview of what’s on the horizon. The Contentful architecture gives the product team the power to manage this digital catalog directly without the need to involve other departments, which would have been unthinkable with the previous system. These experts can tell their stories the way they’re meant to be told and feel more invested in their programs, which improves their work and their overall quality of life.

The Benefits of Outsourcing With Divelement

Visier lacked the expertise to manage the migration with existing resources. Augmenting its existing development teams with outsourced experts provided numerous benefits, including:

1. Cost Savings

On average, outsourced developers cost less per hour than full-time employees. Companies pay reduced employment tax rates and aren’t responsible for the outsourced developer’s benefits, training, or medical leave. 

1. Specific Expertise

Visier needed resources with expertise in both their monolithic CMS and Contentful, but recruiting or training for these specific skills could take a significant amount of time and money. Divelement had staff on hand with the exact expertise required for the Visier migration, so they could hit the ground running immediately.

1. Accelerated Results

Augmenting internal teams with Divelement’s experts allowed Visier to complete the Contentful migration within the 12-month timeframe. Divelement’s team uses agile best practices like iterative development and continuous testing to reduce delivery cycles without lowering quality. 

About Divelement

Who we are

Divelement is a nearshore technology consulting company that helps businesses solve problems through technology and accelerate their digital transformations. Our approach starts by fully understanding what a client is trying to accomplish, determining if technology is the right way to achieve it, and then making sure there are clear outcomes we can work backward from to build a successful roadmap. 

Divelement’s team is based in Mexico. Their proximity to the U.S. provides numerous advantages over offshore teams, including:

• Developers have a high level of English fluency, reducing the risk of miscommunication.

• Mexico has a similar workplace culture, mitigating friction over faux pas and other misunderstandings.

• Overlapping time zones between U.S. offices and Divelement’s team facilitate real-time collaboration.

• Divelement’s team offers the same (or higher) expertise as onshore dev teams, but at a reduced cost.

Our track record

Divelement has a proven track record of successful projects and happy clients, and we provide complete transparency into our staffing and development practices.

Divelement has the expertise to handle every stage of the project lifecycle. We provide team augmentation to fill specific knowledge gaps, managed services for long-term maintenance and support, and full onshore consulting to enable close collaboration on mission-critical initiatives. We help our clients meet their goals faster without the expense or difficulties of hiring in-house experts.

Schedule a call today to find out how Divelement can accelerate your digital roadmap!

Key Terms and Additional Resources

Content Management System (CMS): Software used to create, edit, and publish content for the web and other digital touchpoints. 

Digital Experience (DX) Team: The business unit responsible for creating and managing customer (or end-user) experiences across company websites, applications, and other digital channels.

Monolithic CMS: A content management system that combines frontend and backend functionalities for one tightly coupled experience. Content is usually tied to a specific digital channel and cannot be easily repurposed for other touchpoints.

Headless CMS: A content management system that separates the front-end (or presentation layer) from the back-end (or content layer). This allows teams to easily deploy and reuse content across multiple digital channels from one cloud-based platform. 

Composable Architecture: A system that allows teams to build digital experiences with modular, reusable components including text, graphics, and video content. The composable content model streamlines the publishing process and significantly accelerates time-to-production. 

Check out our blog for more insights about software development outsourcing and the future of the tech industry.