Ten years ago, architecting content “systems” involved software solutioning and scaling the infrastructure to handle more traffic. DevOps meant “add Jenkins.” Enterprise-level development work generally required a week or two of architectural deliverables, even when third-party services were involved.

Today, the emerging content systems landscape requires a systems approach. As Head of Content Platform for The Economist, Dom and his team built a reactive microservices platform, between the original Drupal site and the new React front end. Then continued to evolve the multi-platform architecture as a whole, with a canonical content model at the center.

The difference between legacy and modern content systems is as conceptual as it is technical. Architecting emergent systems requires an evolution from strategic planning to collaborative strategic thinking — everyone seeing the parts through the lens of the whole.

What are the critical components of designing for emergence?  In this talk we will share some approaches for building modern content systems, from concept to implementation strategies, and the role that technology leaders play in this process.

Attendees will likely have enough familiarity with content systems to benefit from this talk. They will leave with conceptual tools for collective design of emergent systems that integrate multiple platforms and purposes.