Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Refining product offerings, leaning into integrations, and finding creative solutions to the developer skills shortage

By Hyoo Lim, Chief Technology Officer of Brightspot

As Chief Technology Officer of Brightspot, a leading content management system (CMS) provider, Hyoo Lim has deep experience leading developers to support digital transformation for some of the world's most well-known companies. Looking ahead to 2022, he talks to VMblog about trends in content management led by the rise of headless CMS, how to make developers' jobs easier, and challenges that CTOs across industries face with hiring and the pandemic. 

• When it comes to the ‘next big thing' for developers, I don't think it will be something like a completely new framework that upends everything. It's more likely that, for instance, there is a next version of GraphQL. For the next few years, I think organizations' technology stacks will be more stable, and developers will be asking how they can make all these things work together and be more efficient.

• When it comes to development today, I see a cycle where there's a new product and it's not quite as mature, so people build tools on top. For instance, headless CMS is currently going through this refinement phase. At the beginning, developers were figuring it out and looking at how it fit with their technical infrastructure. Now people are building tools around it to make it more efficient. Customers know what headless CMS is, and now they are asking what they can do with it.

• Another trend I see is that the way that a CMS fits into an organization's wider tech stack is changing. A few years ago, people began using terms like ‘digital experience platform' (DXP) to describe a CMS. The naming was almost too early, but I think that over the next couple years we will see people start to view the CMS as a central repository where you store all sorts of data that propagates out to different parts of the business. There will also be more integrations with systems such as CRM and ERP. This in turn can improve segmentation and other marketing practices.

• Something that I am excited about for my organization and our customers is our new JavaScript customization infrastructure, which allows the front end engineers to work on the back end. It is often the case that back end developers work on customizing the CMS and front end developers work on the website or mobile app. It certainly makes hiring and talent acquisition easier when you don't have to shop for a specific skill set. It also is good for people's careers when you have engineers who have a wider array of skills.

• The topic of increasing developers' skill sets to help with staffing is important to me, as one of the biggest challenges I see for fellow CTOs in 2022 will be the personnel shortages. We hear often about a shortage of workers in industries like retail and food, but the tech industry doesn't really get into the conversation. It is especially hard to hire for smaller tech companies that have to compete against larger companies with deeper pockets. The demand for technology workers is going to continue to increase--pretty much every field is going to need developers and others with technical knowledge. It will be an obstacle for a lot of CTOs to figure out how to staff their team to deliver products. In the next few years, CTOs will also be focused on how to retrain their existing staff to meet technology needs. For instance, they might have devops engineers that don't know how to program. But the industry is moving towards needing everybody to be familiar with development. Once you determine your technology stack, you need to help people learn what they need to actually execute.

I am optimistic about what's next for developers, such as getting to work on refining what they have instead of reinventing the wheel, getting to do more through powerful integrations, and broadening their skillset to bolster their organization and their own career trajectory. Despite challenges on the horizon, such as being able to hire the right people amid the shortages that have beset the tech industry, I see a new year of expansion and success for developers. 

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