Structured Content Is An Investment in Agility

Imagine you lend 100 dollars to two friends. Both say they’ll pay you back double, but one promises to repay tomorrow and the other a year from now. On paper the return is the same. In reality, the timing changes everything. Money now gives you options. Money delayed carries risk.

That simple difference is a useful way to think about how we assess digital and content investments. For years, most organisations have relied on classic ROI logic: spend X, make some amount more than X back. But that logic assumes the environment around the investment remains stable and today the environment we’re operating in is anything but.

Accounting for Risk

In 2018, software engineer Dan North presented a perspective that changed how many in the project delivery world evaluate investments. He argued that traditional ROI calculations function as a "blunt instrument" because they overlook the critical dimension of timing i.e. when returns will materialize and how much can change during that waiting period. North borrowed the concept of Risk-Adjusted Return from finance, which considers not just the size of return but its timing and the amount of value that is exposed to uncertainty while waiting for results.

He explained that Waterfall projects produced appealing ROI projections because they promised one neat delivery and minimal overhead. The problem was that they carried high “value at risk”. You could go months without real customer feedback, only to discover late in the journey that you had built the wrong thing.

Agile delivery, by contrast, looked less efficient on paper. More iterations meant higher transaction cost. But because it reduced the chance of drifting too far in the wrong direction, it delivered a stronger risk adjusted return. You learned earlier, adapted sooner, and kept value at risk to a minimum.

That idea stayed with me because it applies far beyond software. It describes the moment we are in with content and digital experiences.

A New Value Equation for Content

For years, convenience was a sensible way to justify investment. Monolithic platforms bundled everything together and page-based content models felt familiar. What has changed is not that these tools suddenly stopped working, but that the pace around them has accelerated. AI is altering how people find and use information. Interfaces are shifting from pages to prompts, from websites to conversational tools. In a faster moving environment, the real cost of an inflexible foundation becomes more visible. Not because the old decisions were wrong, but because our measurement of value now needs a wider lens.

This is where risk adjusted return becomes a helpful way to think. A convenient platform may still deliver well on the first release, but if the content inside it is tightly coupled to templates, hard to reuse, or difficult to extract, the value at risk grows with every new channel, interface, or requirement. You gain efficiency at the start, but you limit your options later.

Agility, by contrast, creates the opposite profile. It asks you to think a little harder upfront. It asks for clearer models and more attention to how content fits together. On a simple ROI sheet, that can look like slower progress. But the risk adjusted return is higher because the choices you make early keep paying off. You reduce the cost of change. You reduce the risk of being locked in. You free your content to support new experiences without rewriting it each time.

Structured Content is Imperative

Structuring your content doesn’t just make it easier to reuse across teams, it makes it easier for machines to recognise, retrieve, and rely on what you know. In other words, agility at the content layer quietly improves your visibility in the channels that will matter most over the next decade.

An agile foundation treats content as something closer to a set of building blocks than a stack of finished pages. You are not rewriting the same idea for every new channel, you are assembling from pieces that can move with you. The reward is that every future channel, redesign, market, or AI interface becomes an incremental effort instead of a reinvention. The returns arrive sooner and with less risk along the way.

When content becomes truly agile, it transforms from a production cost to a strategic asset. Organizations that invest in structured, reusable content find that their knowledge compounds rather than depreciates. Each piece of content created becomes part of an interconnected system rather than a standalone artifact. This shift in perspective changes how teams collaborate, how budgets are allocated, and ultimately how quickly an organization can respond to new opportunities in the market.

Content as a Strategic Asset

This is the work we focus on at Therefore. We help organisations treat content as a system that holds its value through change. We model the things you know, define how they relate to one another, and build structures that let humans read easily and machines reuse confidently. The result is not just a better website, it's a more adaptable foundation for everything that comes after it.

The web is still here. Pages still matter. People still read. But the path between your content and your audience now shifts more often than it used to. In moments like this, agility is a source of advantage. It lets you move with the environment rather than lag behind it.

If you measure value through that lens, the case for an agile foundation becomes clear. It reduces your value at risk. It increases your ability to manoeuvre. And it delivers compounding returns in the face of continual change.