From Decoupled to Unified: Streamlining Content Publishing for Foundation Medicine

Less can be Much More

The previous Foundation Medicine (FMI) team built their marketing platform on a decoupled content management architecture. Oomph has used decoupled and micro-service architecture for projects such as Leica Geosystems and Wingspans. 

But decoupled is not right for every organization, and a decoupled approach can be architected in many different ways. FMI had found their implementation created more headaches than high-fives: 

• The flat hierarchy of Contentful created 158 content types, most of which were not useful for creating content.* Therefore, authors had to sift through long lists to find the actual content they needed to edit or create.
• Not everything in their front-end templates was accessible through the CMS. (That would have created even more content types!) So the team was beholden to an engineer to make text edits within some areas.
• Previewing new pages before publishing was not added to their implementation. Authors struggled to predict how content in the admin would display as the published page, and spent much time toggling back and forth.

In short, publishing new content or making content edits was too slow. Responding quickly to changing market conditions or new announcements in the cancer treatment space was not possible, eroding reliance and trust in what should be a cutting-edge brand.

* It should be noted that Contentful uses a “Content Type” for almost everything, from content to taxonomy to design components.

Moving away from Decoupled

Based on their current pain points, Oomph verified that switching to a traditional “monolithic” architecture would solve their problems and provide additional benefits: 

• Reduce cognitive overload and maintenance overhead by drastically reducing content types 
• Empower authors to update all content anywhere
• Accelerate content publishing with an accurate visual preview

Oomph completed an extensive audit and reduced content types from 158 down to 30. We created a tight, flexible system in Drupal of just 14 content types — news item, event page, product page, etc. —  and 16 design components — text blocks, accordions, etc. 

How did we achieve such a reduction? Our consolidation approach moved from fewer specific options (one thing for a small number of very specific pieces of content) to flexibility within general ones (one thing to support many pieces of content with specific options).

Retaining Key Functionality

Foundation Medicine exists to help people with cancer and those who treat them. To accomplish this, the website features intricate tools for providers to navigate essential cancer resources and patients to find a specialist. None of these tools were compromised by switching to Drupal. In fact, with efficiency gains and more timely content governance, these resources became more valuable.

Connecting Providers with Genomic Data and Patients with Personalized Care

The upgrade to Foundation Medicine’s digital platform has been invisible by design. The brand and the visuals were performing well for their business and were comfortable for their audience. The outward appearance didn’t need an update, but the internal workflows that support continued trust certainly did. 

The Foundation Medicine team now has the autonomy to make content updates quickly, the architecture and design components to confidently curate each page build, and the infrastructure to create clear and consistent content — a win for the team and for the many people who turn to Foundation Medicine in their time of need.