Sana Remekie: Content Orchestration for the Composable Web – Episode 164

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The emergence of modular web architectures and complex digital experiences has created a need for new content-management practices and for new enterprise tools.

One of the most pressing new needs is the ability to orchestrate the assembly of content elements, which may come from a variety of sources and be used in a variety of distribution channels.

Sana Remekie started her company, Conscia, to help large enterprises deal with these new challenges.

We talked about:

• her work at Conscia, where she is the CEO and co-founder
• the rise of digital experience platforms (DXPs) and the subsequent arrival of “best of breed” headless and decoupled microservices and the ensuing need to unify and connect them
• how content presentation is managed in a complex, multi-sourced, composable stack
• the emergence of “digital experience composition” (DXC), a way to gather content from different systems for display on a web front-end
• Conscia’s focus on digital experience orchestration (DXO) over DXP
• the unique needs for orchestration in large enterprises
• some of the organizational challenges in moving from monolithic legacy publishing systems to a composable architecture
• the need for education around these new ways of working with content
• opportunities in enterprise user experience design to address some of the problems introduced by decoupled systems
• the differences between content orchestration and experience orchestration

Sana’s bio

Sana Remekie is the CEO of a Canadian startup, Conscia.ai, industry’s first Digital Experience Orchestration (DXO) platform. Her groundbreaking platform empowers businesses to seamlessly integrate composable technologies within their existing digital stacks, propelling their digital evolution. As a graduate of System Design Engineering, she has spent over 15 years of experience designing, architecting and selling data-centric solutions for some of the largest ecommerce brands. Sana has a proven track record of championing customer success by designing solutions that drive collaboration between Marketing and IT, in efforts to empower business users to be in control of the digital experience. She is a speaker, author and a technology thought leader in the fields of digital experience, ecommerce search and data management. She was listed in ‘The 10 Most Influential Women in Technology’ by Analytics Insight.

Connect with Sana online:

• LinkedIn

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 164. To this point in the history of content management, most work has been done in systems where content authoring and the ultimate display of the content looked pretty similar. Now, with the arrival of decoupled systems that assemble content elements dynamically – often from a variety of sources – new practices are emerging to orchestrate these complex and abstract experiences. Sana Remekie started a company to help enterprises manage these new challenges.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey, everyone, welcome to episode number 164 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show, Sana Remekie. Sana is the CEO and co-founder at Conscia. Conscia is one of a new emerging brand of companies that helps us deal with this crazy new complex world we’re in. So welcome, Sana. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Conscia.

Sana:
Thank you so much, Larry, for having me. Pleasure to be here. So Conscia actually comes from the word consciousness, that’s kind of the origin of the name Conscia. And the reason why we named our company Conscia is that data and content in this complex landscape is coming from a whole bunch of different systems. And data and content is what constitutes knowledge at the end of the day. And knowledge is what you need to gain consciousness of what’s really happening in the outside world around you. So the idea behind Conscia was that we would allow content and marketing teams to be able to build experiences with data and content, and essentially the knowledge that is residing across various systems, and various APIs, and various backends. So that’s kind of how we named our company. That’s sort of the core to who we are.

Larry:
Nice. It’s a great name. And you have to explain how to pronounce it with just another chance to engage with people. So that’s a good thing too.

Sana:
Yeah. Conscia. Yes. I’ve heard lots of different pronunciations, Concia, and even Conseka, which doesn’t even actually spell that way. But it’s a little bit different name, so it is a little bit hard for people to figure out how to pronounce it. But if you think of the word consciousness, I think that’s the easiest way to think of the spelling at least.

Larry:
Yeah, I like the way you talk about getting the knowledge together that people need. And the reason that you need a company like yours to do this is that we live in this increasingly kind of decoupled, modular world of composable microservices. And right there, that just… Okay, so there’s a whole new batch of buzzwords. Can you talk maybe a little bit about the context for the need, or like maybe the founding story of your company?

Sana:
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So if you look at the world a few years back, maybe even a decade back, there was a rise of systems called digital experience platforms, or DXP is the three letter acronym for that you would hear about. So you think of players like Adobe, Salesforce, Acquia, et cetera, that marketers would use to essentially build and orchestrate experiences specifically on the web channel, that’s where the DXPs came from. And DXPs actually evolved from web CMSs.

Sana:
So the word “web” in the CMS means that the experience that you’re building was very much page-centric, right? It was web-centric. DXPs were really just the evolution of that, because what you needed was not just a CMS, but also the ability to personalize the experiences you wanted, analytics on what’s working, what’s not working. So these large all-in-one players either bought a bunch of capabilities from other smaller players or built their own capabilities, to provide an entire comprehensive suite for marketers and content editors to be able to build experiences in this comprehensive fashion.

Sana:
Now, what happened in the recent years, is this trend towards best-of-breed or best-of-need type of solutions, where, DXPs as good as they were, any monolithic application at some point gets too big and gets sort of unfocused, so to speak, on specific capability, right? So players like Contentful and Contentstack started to emerge as CMSs, that were best-of-breed, that were very much focused on structured content, without having to worry about where that content is going to be displayed at the end of the day. So they wanted to start to decouple the content itself from its presentation, and then the term “headless” came into play, right? So we’re decoupling content from presentation, so the same content could be delivered to the web, it could be delivered to mobile, it could be delivered to your TV, connected TV apps, et cetera, and IoT.

Sana:
So with that trend towards headless, a lot of other types of capabilities also started to emerge that also wanted to decouple themselves from the presentation, such as commerce. So then you start seeing commerce tools, Elastic Path, VTEX, et cetera, that now not only want to decouple the content, the core structured content for marketing, from the frontend, but also product information, also capabilities like checkout, et cetera. So with this trend towards headless and decoupling, essentially, what ended up happening is a whole bunch of new systems started to come on board. And you’ll see in the MarTech landscape now you have over 10,000 different applications, point solutions, that each do very specific things, but a lot of them, I would say about three quarters of them, are trying to do that in a very decoupled sort of fashion.

Sana:
So with this trend came the need to essentially unify all of these various technologies to create an experience that is not fragmented, that is continuous and connected across devices, across channels, but also something that connects to all of the various data and content sources coming from all of these different backgrounds. So that’s where we found Conscia. Conscia is essentially the brain, we call it the brain of the composable stack, right? So you’re composing your digital experience from a whole bunch of different backend services, and data and content. And what Conscia does is provide that one place where it all comes together, and so that marketing teams and content teams have one system to go to, to orchestrate an experience across any channel.

Larry:
Yeah, and as you say that, I probably shouldn’t go too far with this, but I’m picturing like the human body as a metaphor, just with the brain and then the various senses and then the activities that you’d… Anyhow, I won’t go down that rabbit hole –

Sana:
No, no, that’s exactly the point. The analogy works no matter which way you come at it.

Larry:
Yeah, and I love also that you talk about that it’s for composing experiences. I think a lot of people in content come from like publishing, and journalism, and media, where it’s been more about publications that like… And I mean, and a lot of us are now in content design and working with digital products and feel that, but I still think there’s a little bit of a vestige or legacy of the old, kind of WYSIWYG editors and that kind of thing. That doesn’t play in this world, right? We’re talking about-

Sana:
Not as easily, and not as simply. And I think that different vendors are trying to come at this problem in slightly different ways, in fact, I have my own webinar through digital experience community, to discuss all the different ways in which presentation is being controlled in a composable stack. And again, what a composable stack is, is when you have different capabilities that are required within the digital experience space, coming from a whole bunch of different systems, right? So you have a CMS, you have a PIM, you have a commerce engine, you have a loyalty platform, you have a CDP, so CDP, customer data platform. So all your data and contents everywhere.

Sana:
So who owns the frontend, right? Should it be the CMS, should it be the commerce engine with its own… Sometime they come with their own templates for product discovery and category landing pages, et cetera. So who actually owns where that experience comes together, right? CMSs, a lot of them, even the headless ones now, want to have the CMS be the center of the experience. A lot of the commerce engines believe that if you have an e-commerce website, then they should be the center of that. But the problem now is that we’re living in a composable world, right? And there isn’t really any center anywhere, because depending on where you come in at, the center changes essentially.

Larry:
Yeah. You reminded me, like I remember 25 years ago when the web first came along, and I was doing some SEO, and I quickly realized that it was pre-Copernican, that we were all the center of our own universe. And we’ve come right back around to that with this. But I’m curious now about like, you obviously are doing something with your software, but it does kind of make sense that like if you’re a publisher that the CMSs might be the center of this universe, if you’re a merchant, the commerce platform.

Sana:
That’s right.

Larry:
Is that sort of how it’s sorting out or is it other considerations as well?

Sana:
There are. So one of the considerations is that why don’t we make nothing be the center, and why not have a tool that allows marketers and content teams to assemble content from all of these different places outside of the CMS, outside of the PIM, outside of the commerce engine altogether. So Gartner recently came up with this term called digital experience composition, and the idea was that if you’re building JavaScript-focused frontends, JavaScript-based frontends, then let’s say you want to build a landing page, and there’s a header banner that comes from a CMS and some products that you want to include, like featured products that come from a commerce engine, some offer that comes from a loyalty platform, why not give marketers almost a WYSIWYG way to compose pages essentially, by pulling content and data from all these different systems. So that’s definitely a concept that is playing out.

Sana:
There are platforms like Uniform that are in that space. You have Kajoo.ai, you have Stackbit, Netlify is coming. Well, Netlify actually just bought Stackbit for that reason. But if you look at the way all of these technologies are thinking about composition, it’s still very much web-centric, right? So it almost feels to me like we went out of the world of the web from the DXP to composable and headless, and now marketers realized, “Wait, how do we preview what we want to publish before we publish it? We need to be able to feel confident that what we’ve created is actually what the customer is going to see.” So Gartner then went back and created this new category, and a lot of these vendors started to align to that.

Sana:
Now, Conscia comes at this slightly differently. What we realize is that a lot of the larger organizations, and we play in the space of $1 billion plus revenue type of organizations, they have very strict standards when it comes to design, right? They know what their pages are going to look like, they know what the layouts are going to look like, what the branding is going to look like. And really the only thing that the marketers and content folks want to control is what fits into the slots of the page. And if it’s not a page, if it’s not web, if it’s mobile, what fits in these different designated spots. They’re not really going outside of what is allowed. The guardrails, essentially. So do they really need WYSIWYG, or do they just need a way to designate content contextually to specific parts of the experience?

Larry:
Yeah, that’s one thing that occurs to me as you’re saying all this, is that in cases like personalization, where you can’t really preview that. You can preview it-

Sana:
No.

Larry:
… abstractly and conceptually, and it’s sort of composed on the fly. Or do these composition tools, do they let you kind of preview generic, like-

Sana:
Yes. Yes. I completely agree. And so 90% of the time if you’re looking at especially e-commerce types of organizations, 90% of the pages or the experiences are very much structured. We know exactly what these experiences are going to look like, what are all the slots within the frame that the customer is looking at. And it’s only about 10% of the pages, like landing pages, campaign-level experiences, that may have some free-form, unstructured sort of allowance to them, right?

Sana:
So what Conscia is focusing on, and what digital experience orchestration as opposed to composition focuses on, is that 90, or let’s say even if we, worst-case scenario, 80% of the experiences that are out there, that are structured for the most part, and where the data and content needs to come from a whole bunch of different places to make it happen. And an example is something like a home page, something like a category landing page, right? Or product detail page.

Sana:
A product detail page is actually a perfect example where you cannot preview the page in advance. You have, let’s say a million products, you have the inventory coming in from different locations, so you have different databases holding onto locational inventory, you have pricing that is specific to the customer, let’s say in B2B scenario for instance. So how as a marketer, how do you preview that for every single customer before you roll it out, before you publish it? So that type of an experience is generated by stitching together content and data from a whole bunch of different places, in real time, right?

Larry:
Yeah, I’m wondering now as you talk, all of a sudden I’m thinking, because I’ve done all my work in this kind of thing has been in big enterprises, but as you’re talking, I’m like, is this down to where like SMBs and other smaller… Or is this still an enterprise thing? Or how far down the company size are we going here?

Sana:
So that is a big part of the decision-making process, like which way you go. I actually believe that if you are a very small business or even a mid-size business, WYSIWYG type of capabilities are, they become a little bit more important, because there is less rigor in terms of how the content and data needs to come together. There’s a lot more, I would say, autonomy given to the marketing teams and the day-to-day operational teams, to build these experiences together.

Sana:
Whereas in larger enterprises, that’s all predetermined and premeditated, right? There’s teams that just work on your design systems. There’s teams that just look at structured content. There’s content engineering, content operations, content design. There’s all these teams that have their own jobs and they’re all figuring out their own end of the world, so really orchestration should be a lot more streamlined in that case.

Sana:
Whereas when you don’t have all of that and you just give the marketer the ability to just go freehand, build a page, they have a lot more power. And that only really happens in small to mid-size businesses. And I believe that I may get in trouble with folks on the other side, with the composition side of the world, but I do believe that that capability is for up to mid-size businesses, or for that 10% of the pages or experiences within larger enterprises, where you’re not dealing with structured content anymore and structured pages anymore.

Larry:
Yeah, because I know that’s always going to be… I’ve seen a lot of very clever and creative things being done to permit the kind of creativity that like marketers want, but they’ll always be figuring out something that can’t be structured or automated, which, great on them.

Larry:
But hey, I wondered, you’ve talked a couple of times about experience orchestration. And I think a lot of, especially as we’re making the transition from like monolithic CMSs that just spit out pages, which is still a lot of people’s experiences, to this notion of experience orchestration. Have you had to help people across that sort of, that there’s some new like mindsets and skills that come with that? Have you helped people with that?

Sana:
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a ton of organizations at this point that are moving from the DXP world to getting them basically future-ready, right? Everybody’s trying to go composable, but not a lot of organizations, I would say, know what’s the right path. And what I’ve seen done a lot of times is kind of the opposite of what should be done. When you’re going from legacy or monolith to composable, the idea is to really decouple the experience, right? From your frontend to the CMS essentially. But what I’ve seen done a lot of times within organizations is that they’ve recreated that monolith in the headless world, right?

Sana:
So they’ve started to create HTML and CSS, like include all of that, the code essentially, right in the content structures themselves. So now what you have is this content type in let’s say contextual, which is one thing called “the blob,” the HTML blob, and now your whole page is designed inside that HTML or CSS, right? What’s the point of that really? So we’ve seen that happen a lot, and I think that organizations are realizing that they went down the wrong path, and now they’re trying to figure out how to decouple everything that they’ve done even in the decoupled CMS.

Larry:
Exactly. Well, that’s exact reason I asked about that earlier was that that’s like the classic thing, the classic WYSIWYG legacy, and human beings will always hack any system to do what they want to do. And so, I mean, you could just prevent them from putting HTML in fields. And I know that some… One thing about that, I have seen, this kind of gets into like more education for authors in particular, about semantically meaningful information in a CMS versus like presentation level. Have you had experience with that?

Sana:
Yes. I have. But I think that we’re at the very beginning of realization at the enterprise level, that there is a problem, that they’ve created a problem. And it is all about education, right? What I see a lot of times, when I post something, or when you post something very, or others within the field, other thought leaders in the field, they’re starting to talk about the mistakes that we’ve made and how to reverse those mistakes. The leaders within the digital teams, they look at this education that is happening, and you’ve done a good job, like over 160 different episodes already, of all the knowledge that is in your head and in your guest’s head, that’s kind of going out there. That is what it’s going to take to really turn the tide and help digital leaders see what’s the right way forward.

Sana:
Because I think a lot of us have gotten ourselves stuck in this bind. We’ve done things the wrong way. We, of course, as humans also don’t want to admit that we’ve done things the wrong way. We think that we’ve bought technology that is headless, so our experiences should be headless, right? Because that’s what we did, right?

Sana:
It’s almost like when you buy a treadmill, right? And you have all the plans to work out and become healthy, and you go buy yourself Peloton or some treadmill, and you think that just because now you’ve bought this new equipment you’re well on your way to becoming healthy, right? And that’s actually not the case at all. In fact, I think you don’t need any of those things initially, to get on the right path to be healthy. There’s just these incremental steps and it’s the mentality that needs to change.

Sana:
You have to start thinking from a people, from a process standpoint, that this is the future that I want to build for my company. I want to structure all my content. I want to structure my experiences so I can reuse that structure everywhere. So once you start to think that way, you’re well on your way already, and then you can bring in the right tool to help you be more effective at that.

Larry:
Yeah. You’re reminding me as you talk now about there’s also the tailless CMS, is kind of how I think about it. Like that there’s this opportunity at the other end, but I think to this point, like authoring has just been considered like a data entry thing in the CMS. Whereas I’ve done some enterprise content work where there’s, and this is really common in a lot of places, mostly in HR and stuff at this point, but the enterprise user experience design has kind of taken hold in helping people like content authors have a better experience with their job as well. Has that come up in your work, or in your systems, or world?

Sana:
Yeah. And I think some of those tools to help content authors understand what that final experience is going to look like, is what was missing in some of these headless platforms that came about. It’s very abstract, essentially, right? You have to get used to this abstract way of thinking, almost use your imagination a little bit, to design content structures that are going to fit within an experience that you’re hoping to create, right? And as I said earlier, DXC was one way to do that, but it only solves the problem for smaller organizations, where you don’t have that type of rigor and experience, or orchestration, is in my mind a way to help these marketing teams and user experience design teams to think in that abstract way, by creating these constructs that are experience oriented, right?

Sana:
So we have a header banner. You don’t need to look at what it’s exactly going to look like in every single scenario, but you know that this header banner is going to get its content from a specific CMS, but you could change which CMS it gets that content from in the future as well. So that layer of abstraction. But also tooling around it to help people think in that abstract way, without becoming too rigid and becoming too concrete in the way they think of every single page and every single experience. That I think is going to be the future.

Larry:
We definitely have our work cut out for us there, I think.
Hey, Sana, I can’t believe it. We’re already coming up close to time.

Sana:
Oh my gosh. Wow.

Larry:
I know. It always goes way too fast. But hey, before we wrap, I want to just give you a chance. Is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that you just want to make sure we talk about before we wrap up?

Sana:
I mean, nothing is too big, I guess in particular, but one of the ideas that has been circulating is when you think about content, we talked about content and data coming from a whole bunch of different places, is there a reason to essentially combine and unify that data and content before it is published to the frontend? So for marketers to be able to see all of it in one place. Or should they just leave it where it is and then completely think in the abstract way to build that experience? So there are two different, I guess, lines of thinking.

Sana:
You’re from the knowledge graph world. And so just to tie things back to the idea of knowledge graphs, the idea is that you want to connect and relate all of this content and data in this graph, and then that graph could then be exposed essentially to the frontend, to get all of the content to be displayed on the frontend.

Sana:
And the other way of thinking is, you know what? In some cases it actually doesn’t make sense to put everything into a graph. An example would be what I spoke about earlier, where inventory for different locations is different depending on who you are, where you’re coming in from. The inventory of a specific product is going to be different.

Sana:
So when your experience is very contextual and dynamic, and decisions have to be made to show something to someone based on who they are or where they’re coming from, in that case a knowledge graph may not be the right place to pull all that information, right? I think it can literally take an entire new podcast to just talk about knowledge graphs versus API orchestration types.

Larry:
Yeah. No. And I just did a talk last month where I talked about, and I would love to talk to you more about this actually, because I was talking about content orchestration versus experience orchestration. I think that’s one way you could label that thing you were just talking about.

Sana:
That’s exactly it. Exactly. Experience orchestration is contextual, right? There are decisions to be made in real time about what to show to who, when, and where. Whereas content orchestration can be done offline, right? Because you already know the rules by which content is related to other content in other places, right? So I think that idea is actually quite fascinating and needs to be teased out a little bit more, because a lot of people confuse content orchestration with experience orchestration, for sure.

Larry:
Fun times. We’re right at the start of this. Hey, one very last thing, Sana. What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch if they want to follow you online or connect?

Sana:
I think LinkedIn is my friend. That’s the best way to get ahold of me. DM me, or comment on one of the posts or podcasts that I’m on, and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so I’d definitely be happy to get in touch.

Larry:
Great. Well, thank you so much, Sana. Really fun conversation.

Sana:
Thank you so much, Larry, for having me again.