Civil engineers typically work on projects that won’t be completed for several years. The $6 billion Pacific Park project in Brooklyn, for instance, isn’t scheduled to be completed until 2025. China has recently outlined an overhaul plan for Beijing that runs until 2030.

Such civil engineers also work hard at maintaining existing systems to accommodate swelling population growth, climate change and natural disasters. They know better than anyone when an aging system is no longer capable of adapting to future needs.

When it comes to content management, most of us are more in maintenance mode than planning mode. We spend a lot of energy maintaining systems that were designed for the web-based world that existed prior to 2010, but people now spend more time on mobile devices than on desktop, and it’s clear that in a few years, widespread computing made possible by the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will put us all in a post-mobile world.

So why are we still creating content primarily for the web?

The usual reasons — inertia, psychological investment in existing platforms and a focus on the day-to-day rather than the long term.

The inertia comes from doing what we’re used to doing. Because most companies have only authored web content over the past 10 years, their momentum keeps them in this mindset. The psychological investment comes in the form of “sunk costs.” Psychologists have found that the prospect of losses is a more powerful motivator than the promise of gains. This is true for time we have invested in training staff on old systems. We also tend to be more oriented towards daily activities than towards taking a long view that looks five years into the future.

As the Tech Lead for a company that builds content solutions for large companies to prepare for the future, part of my research and discovery process is to look at how they’ll be distributing content for the next five years. As a result, I know that the way we ingest and distribute content is already changing. It’s time to consider how things will change over the next 10 years.

The Changing Face Of “Content”