The ROI of an AEM Audit

With just a handful of hours, a strategic audit of your Adobe Experience Manager implementation will give you and your team insights that can easily return the minimal investment by an order of magnitude. Here are just some of the findings from a skilled AEM Audit that drive ROI in the form of marketing impact, increased efficiency, cost reduction and loss prevention:

• Page performance improvements and other factors impacting lighthouse scores and search engine optimization (SEO)

• Opportunities for increased reuse across business units, brands and sites

• Cost-optimized paths to upgrade to AEM Cloud Service and/or latest features

• Non-standard patterns leading to high barrier of entry for new team members

• Poor authoring tools impacting content production quality and velocity

• Coding patterns leading to costly development and/or QA cycles

• Opportunities for consolidation and reduced maintenance

• Security threats that could result in loss of data and credibility, or worse

• Performance-intensive ops that can result in high infrastructure costs and outages

• Non-obvious bugs leading to user frustration and drop-off

Even when your technical team is highly skilled, seeking an outside perspective on your AEM platform is prudent. It allows you to leverage experience from a variety of industry implementations and expertise from individuals who have chosen to specialize in optimizing AEM platforms. These individuals bring a fresh perspective to your implementation, with no pre-existing pride in ownership or attachment to past decisions, but rather a focus on the business impact of the approaches taken within your platform.

Just because someone is a so-called AEM expert, however, doesn’t necessarily make them a good partner for an audit. Here are some things that make for a productive, ROI-driven audit:

• Confirmation of good patterns vs. only opportunities for improvement

• Meaningful insights on your implementation vs. a statement of best practices

• Consolidation of items by impact vs. a laundry list flexing expertise via quantity

• Direct team interaction to understand intent vs. prescribing textbook solutions

• Action plans for remediations vs. only problem statements

• Prioritization of actions based on business value vs. technical perfection

• Coming alongside the internal team vs. “calling out” the team

An ROI-driving AEM audit will be a partnership, not an interrogation, leaving your team optimistic on next steps to make your AEM platform better tomorrow than it is today.