The DXP Catalyst Update - May 2, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

Hard to believe it’s already May. It’s been a busy week at DXP Catalyst, with a couple active projects and an upcoming client workshop. While our core focus remains platform strategy and mar-tech ecosystem work for upper mid-market companies, small enterprises, and universities, we’ve recently been partnering with more small businesses to support their digital growth. This includes website and portal implementation using WordPress, HubSpot configuration and optimization, and general technology advisory.

We joined the Greenwich Village & Chelsea Chamber of Commerce on Monday - looking forward to connecting with more local businesses. A few events on the calendar for next week: the CMS Experts user group meets in NYC Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, and the Small Business Expo is happening Wednesday at the Javits Center.

This edition of the DXP Catalyst Update explores why CMS migrations often fail to reach full adoption. It looks at the organizational, structural, and technical factors that cause momentum to fade after launch and offers guidance on how to sustain progress through to long-term value realization.

Note: While this issue focuses on one-to-one CMS migrations, where a single platform is replaced with another, it does not address broader challenges related to managing multiple CMS platforms in parallel. For organizations operating in fragmented environments with several active CMS instances, I covered those scenarios in a previous issue on content orchestration and phased consolidation. That piece includes guidance on the role of composable DXPs, iPaaS, and long-term strategies for unifying distributed content operations.

LEADERSHIP GUIDANCE
The Unfinished Migration: Why CMS Projects Quietly Stall

CMS migrations are often framed as strategic leaps forward. They are positioned as opportunities to modernize digital infrastructure, improve marketing agility, and unify content operations. In theory, they represent a clean break from legacy limitations. In practice, however, many CMS migrations quietly stall before they achieve their intended outcomes.

Some initiatives lose momentum immediately after go-live. Others slow down during long-tail adoption, leaving teams trapped in hybrid environments where neither the old nor the new platform is fully embraced. These are not public failures. They are subtle breakdowns in continuity, planning, and governance that accumulate until the original goals are either forgotten or quietly deprioritized.

This newsletter edition explores the structural, organizational, and technical factors that commonly cause CMS migrations to lose momentum. It also offers practical strategies to keep replatforming efforts on track, beginning with upfront planning and extending through long-term platform ownership and governance.

The Planning and Discovery Gap

The most successful migrations begin well before development work starts. They require alignment on business goals, clarity around success metrics, and a deep understanding of the current platform’s content, structure, and dependencies. Unfortunately, many teams rush through planning or assume that a new CMS will solve underlying process and governance issues.

Without a thoughtful discovery phase, surprises are inevitable. Content inventories may be incomplete, functional requirements may be vaguely defined, and technical dependencies might be discovered late in the process. Teams may also lack consensus on what the replatforming effort is intended to achieve, which can cause significant friction when tradeoffs need to be made later.

The discovery phase should include a complete audit of the existing environment, agreement on the scope of migration, a roadmap for phased rollout, and a definition of what success looks like six to twelve months after launch. These foundational steps help reduce ambiguity and create accountability that extends beyond the initial go-live.

Where Migrations Stall: Structural and Cultural Factors

Even with strong planning, many CMS migrations lose momentum due to organizational issues. These challenges often emerge in the period immediately following launch, when attention shifts and resources begin to contract.

Organizational Fatigue

Replatforming is demanding. Teams typically spend months navigating stakeholder alignment, implementation cycles, content mapping, and testing. When the site launches, there is a natural tendency to exhale and shift focus elsewhere. However, the most important parts of the initiative often occur after go-live. These include content migration (in most cases), user enablement, platform optimization, and integration into day-to-day operations.

If leadership does not continue to support the effort, platform teams quickly lose the capacity and visibility needed to drive adoption. The migration stalls not because the technology is inadequate, but because energy and attention have moved elsewhere.

Stakeholder Turnover and Incomplete Documentation

CMS migrations often span multiple quarters. During that time, stakeholder roles may change. A new CMO, CTO, or head of digital may bring a different set of expectations or strategic priorities. Without clear documentation and communication of prior decisions, institutional memory is easily lost.

Robust documentation is essential to ensure continuity when project ownership changes. This should include decision rationale, content governance policies, platform architecture diagrams, integration details, and clearly defined roles. Good documentation lowers the risk of rework, helps onboard new team members, and prevents key aspects of the migration from being abandoned midway through execution.

Underbudgeted Post-Launch Phases

Initial implementation often receives the bulk of the budget and leadership focus. In contrast, post-launch activities such as content migration, training, backlog grooming, and rollout of advanced features are left without sufficient funding. As a result, teams are forced to operate reactively, and important parts of the roadmap are delayed or never completed.

This is especially problematic when success depends on deprecating legacy systems, rolling out reusable design components, or scaling platform adoption across business units. Without budget for stabilization and optimization, the CMS remains in a transitional state and never matures into a fully realized platform.

Technical Gaps and Operational Risks

Replatforming exposes gaps in architecture, integration strategy, and technical readiness. These risks can block progress even when organizational alignment is strong.

Legacy Dependencies and Technical Debt

Legacy CMS platforms often support edge-case use cases or contain undocumented logic that is not easy to replicate. In some cases, critical functionality depends on third-party integrations that were tightly coupled to the old system. When these dependencies are not identified early, they force teams to keep parts of the old platform running indefinitely.

A thorough technical audit during discovery helps identify high-risk dependencies and uncovers hidden layers of complexity. From there, teams can isolate, retire, or modernize each dependency through a phased approach, reducing the likelihood of long-term hybrid environments that undermine the value of the new CMS.

Inadequate Testing and Quality Assurance

Post-launch confidence in the platform depends on more than uptime. It depends on whether core functionality works as intended and whether the content is presented accurately. A weak QA process can result in missed redirects, broken templates, poor formatting, and content inconsistencies. These issues collectively erode stakeholder trust and may lead teams to question the reliability of the new platform.

Testing should cover not only technical performance but also editorial workflows, user permissions, SEO health, and front-end rendering across all devices. Teams that invest in structured QA and content validation reduce rework and build trust in the new platform more quickly.

Human Factors: Change Management and Training

CMS migrations represent a major shift in how teams create, publish, and manage digital content. Without proper support, even the best platforms will fail to gain adoption.

Lack of Training and Change Support

If users do not understand the new CMS, they will avoid using it. Training should be role-specific, hands-on, and delivered in multiple formats. Documentation, how-to videos, and live support options help reinforce learning and accommodate different user preferences.

In addition, leadership must help reinforce the shift. When teams see the platform as central to their day-to-day work, rather than a temporary disruption, they are more likely to embrace it. Conversely, if the legacy CMS remains accessible and the new system is perceived as difficult or unfinished, users will continue to rely on the old system by default.

Sustaining Momentum: Governance and Ownership

CMS migrations should transition from project-based delivery to ongoing platform operations. This requires sustained ownership, a shared roadmap, and formal governance.

Lack of Governance Models

Without governance, platform consistency declines rapidly. New templates and components are built without oversight. Content quality varies across teams. Integrations are added ad hoc. The absence of a structured approach leads to fragmentation and loss of control.

A governance model should include platform ownership, cross-functional representation from marketing, IT, and product teams, regular backlog prioritization, and documented workflows for adding new features. Governance is what ensures that the platform evolves in line with business goals, rather than drifting as an unmanaged asset.

Final Thoughts

CMS migrations that stall are not always dramatic failures. In most cases, they are the quiet unraveling of momentum, strategy, and leadership support. They start with good intentions and often succeed in reaching initial deployment milestones. But they fail to complete the transformation, leaving teams with a system that is only partially adopted and ultimately unsustainable.

The organizations that succeed in completing their migrations treat the platform as a long-term investment. They plan beyond go-live, allocate resources to enablement and adoption, and assign ownership that extends beyond project delivery. They understand that digital experience infrastructure must evolve continuously, supported by clear governance and cross-functional commitment.

The migration itself is only the first phase. What comes after determines whether the platform delivers value or becomes another incomplete initiative.