IT leaders are under constant pressure to improve operations and stay on top of trends in the rapidly evolving world of modern business. In our guide, the ‘VP of IT’s Guide to Transforming Your Business’ we discussed the benefits of adopting a product-driven organization over a project-driven one. In our first blog in this series, ‘Product-Driven vs Project-Driven: What’s the Difference?’ we discussed the differences between these two approaches, explored the benefits of adopting a product-driven approach over a project-driven one, and why it’s essential to prioritize the creation and ongoing improvement of specific products.

Today, we will dive deeper into the topic and discuss key success factors that organizations must adopt when transitioning from a project-driven approach to a product-driven approach and provide practical tips on how to overcome challenges.

Establish a Product Vision and Roadmap

Instead of creating solutions just to keep busy, it’s essential to establish what problems the organization is trying to solve and what goals they’re trying to achieve. This helps everyone to be aligned with the same objectives and work together to achieve them.

Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) is one way to ensure that the organization is on the right track to achieving its goals. For example, the organization may want to deliver a new set of digital tools to customers for self-service to reduce call volume. The goal may be to have customers’ questions answered and their problems solved without the need for a call center agent, thereby reducing calls by 10%. This will not only help the organization achieve its goal of reducing call volume but will also lead to a better customer experience.

Other KPIs may include:

• Reduce call handle time
• Increase customer retention
• Increase ratings (whether it’s App Store or CMS Star rating, etc.)
• Increase market share
• Speed to market
• Feature adoption
• Product quality

It’s essential to keep the organization’s goals and KPIs in mind when developing the product vision and roadmap. The product vision should align with the organization’s mission and goals, and the roadmap should outline how the product will evolve over time to achieve those goals.

Remain Customer-Focused

In order to build successful products, it is crucial to focus on the customers and how they are interacting with your products. One of the key ways to do this is to gather feedback from your customers and use it to drive your product backlog for your team. Having a pulse on your customers’ needs and wants is essential to providing them with the best possible experience.

When gathering feedback, it is important to ask questions like:

• How do you rate the product?
• What do you like/dislike about the product?
• How easy or difficult is it to use the product?
• How frequently do you use the product?
• What features would you like to see added to the product?
• How does our product compare to competitors?

There are several places to gather feedback from customers, including ratings for a mobile app, ratings on sites like Trip Advisor or Yelp, and direct surveys that ask customers how you did today. In addition, focused outreach for more in-depth surveys can also be helpful. When analyzing this feedback, it is important to look at analytics on how your products are being used. With defined KPIs in place, you can remain metrics-driven to measure success when implementing your changes.

Embrace Agile Methodology

Agile methodology is a crucial factor to consider when transitioning from a project-driven approach to a product-driven approach. Agile is a development approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. It is a set of values and principles that prioritize individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change over rigid processes and documentation.

Continuous Delivery is an essential aspect of an Agile methodology. This means that the organization can adapt its work based on customer feedback and business needs, prioritizing its work to continue evolving and improving while delivering frequently. By continuously improving and adapting to customer feedback, organizations can build stickiness, loyalty, and trust with their customers.

For example, if a customer visits an app store and sees that an app hasn’t been updated in two years, they may hesitate to download it as it may not be perceived as valuable and won’t be able to use the latest features of modern mobile operating systems. Continuous delivery ensures that an organization’s products remain relevant and up to date, increasing customer trust and loyalty.

Reframe your Funding Model

When it comes to funding a product-driven approach for product development, it’s important to have a model that focuses on funding products rather than individual projects. This means assigning a team to work on the product and giving them the necessary resources and funding to see it through from start to finish. If an organization relies on a waterfall-like funding model with predetermined gates and milestones, they risk hindering the progress and agility of the product team. For example, giving only a small percentage of funding for the design phase will limit the ability of the team to pivot and make changes based on customer feedback.

By funding products instead of projects, teams can remain focused on the bigger picture and the overall product vision. This approach helps align team members with the goals and purpose of the product they’re building, allowing them to become more invested in the process. As a result, they’re more likely to be innovative and creative, looking for ways to improve the product and make it the best it can be.

Empower Product Ownership

To successfully implement a product-driven approach to product development, it’s important to establish clear ownership of the product. This means empowering product managers and owners to make decisions and drive the vision of the product. The product backlog should be constructed by the product owner in collaboration with stakeholders and the implementation team so that the team can build the product according to the desired outcomes.

If a product manager needs to go in front of a steering committee to get approval for every decision, it’s going to slow down the development process significantly. It’s much more efficient if someone is empowered to drive the product with the support of leadership so that product managers and owners can be trusted to make the right decisions for the product. Ultimately, a product owner who is able to effectively communicate the product vision and align the team with that vision will help ensure its success.

Next Steps

By establishing a clear product vision and roadmap, remaining customer-focused, embracing Agile methodology, adopting a funding model that supports product development, and empowering product owners to drive the vision of the product, you will have the essential components you need to successfully implement a product-driven approach. By implementing these practices, organizations can achieve faster time-to-market, increase customer satisfaction, and drive business outcomes through technology.

If you’re interested in learning more about driving innovation through technology, we suggest checking out the “VP of IT’s Guide to Transforming Your Business.” This guide offers insights and answers to the top questions IT leaders are asking about cloud strategy, data, DevOps, and product development. It provides a comprehensive look at the latest trends and best practices for driving business outcomes through technology.

In today’s dynamic and competitive business landscape, IT Leaders are constantly seeking ways to optimize their operations and stay ahead of the competition. One crucial decision organizations must make is choosing between a project-driven or a product-driven approach for product development. A project-driven approach prioritizes the completion of individual projects, while a product-driven approach prioritizes the creation and ongoing improvement of one or more specific products.

In our “VP of ITs Guide to Transforming Your Business,” we highlighted the benefits of adopting a product-driven approach over a project-driven one. In this blog post, we will dive deeper into the topic using the chart below to explore the differences between these two approaches and discuss the benefits of being a product-driven organization.

Fund a Project vs. Defining Outcomes

Project-driven organizations usually start a software project with a defined need or goal. In this example, an IT leader might approach a project-driven organization and say, “We want to build a mobile app.” A project-driven organization usually asks follow-up questions like:

• What is this app going to do?
• What is it going to cost?
• What is the business case behind it?

Once established, companies often go to their steering committees for funding.

Alternatively, a product-driven organization approaches the problem differently by defining the outcomes they seek. For example, a product-driven organization might instead focus on defining outcomes, such as:

• Increased customer retention due to high customer turnover
• Increased customer satisfaction due to a high percentage of unsatisfied customers
• Increased overall digital self-service that we cannot currently comply with
• Decreased calls to the calls center because customer support is overwhelmed with calls
• Decreased manual processes like paperwork because it’s inefficient for customers and employees

One possible solution that addresses all these outcomes is a mobile app.

A project-driven approach primarily focuses on securing funding to address a single issue instead of a product-driven approach which first defines specific business objectives to prioritize what’s most important.

Build a Schedule vs. Prioritizing Business Objectives

In a project-driven approach, a schedule primarily focuses on completing tasks within a specified timeframe rather than aligning with the business goals. As there is no guarantee of funding for future phases, organizations may attempt to include as much in the initial project as possible to secure funding. This results in the schedule focusing on task completion rather than prioritizing business goals. This approach can lead to a situation where the business objectives are not given sufficient consideration and are instead added as an afterthought.

In contrast, a product-driven approach focuses on achieving desired business outcomes, not just completing tasks. In this approach, tasks are not just performed for completion but are tied to and prioritized in a way that directly supports achieving the desired business outcomes. The emphasis is on ensuring that the work being done contributes to achieving the desired business objectives and not just completing tasks without a clear connection to the bigger picture.

Assign a Team vs. Fund a Team

For a project-driven approach, organizations typically fund a project and bring together a team of developers, analysts, and Q&A specialists, sometimes from external sources. This approach can result in the team being dispersed to different projects when an urgent need arises. This is commonplace in nearly every industry.

Conversely, product-driven organizations fund a team and are committed to a long-term project, keeping the team intact. By keeping the team together, they can prioritize business objectives, measure results, and ultimately lead to a more successful product release. With a dedicated, funded and focused team on the same project, product-driven organizations can ensure timely completion and adherence to desired standards.

Furthermore, product-driven organizations benefit from their team’s specialized knowledge and expertise. The same team working on the same project can lead to the development of more comprehensive solutions that consider the needs of all stakeholders. In addition, product-driven organizations can better understand user needs and incorporate them into their development cycles, resulting in more efficient and effective releases.

Build and Release vs. Build, Release, Measure, and Iterate

The project-driven approach involves building and releasing the product after a single build. However, this approach can result in an incomplete product that does not meet business outcomes and may have extraneous features that require attention post-launch. It can lead to higher costs, lower customer satisfaction, and a tarnished reputation due to rushed development and testing.

On the other hand, product-driven organizations release their product in multiple builds, enabling them to receive prompt feedback, measure results, and make ongoing improvements. This approach allows them to prioritize business objectives and ensure their product meets user needs, leading to more successful releases. The key to this approach is iteration, which allows for continual refinement and user feedback to prioritize development and achieve desired outcomes.

Estimate CR/Next Project vs. Measure Results

In a project-driven approach, the focus is to deliver capabilities by a specific deadline. The process begins with defining the minimum viable product (MVP) and creating a plan to achieve it. The goal is to release the MVP as quickly as possible and move on to the next project without taking time to evaluate the success of the current project. This pattern repeats with every release.

On the other hand, a product-driven approach involves a significant change in the organization’s approach and operations. The focus is on defining and measuring business outcomes, such as increasing customer conversion rates, reducing conversion costs, and improving the rating of the mobile app. After the product is launched, the company assesses the results and prioritizes the backlog of features and capabilities based on these results, with the aim of achieving better business outcomes. This approach is more focused, requiring a clear understanding of the intended business goals and using results to drive future work. Companies that have already started to adopt a product mindset are less affected by this shift.

Negotiate Next Project Funding vs. Next Release

In a project-driven approach, each project is funded through negotiations, and once completed, the team may dissolve, and the knowledge gained during the project may be lost. The next project is negotiated for funding, and the cycle continues. This can result in losing continuity and needing to reassemble a new team for each project.

In a product-driven approach, funding is allocated to a dedicated team for ongoing innovation and delivery of value for a specific product. The team is funded, and priorities are set based on measuring outcomes and feedback. A product manager may oversee multiple products and make decisions on continued investment to drive better outcomes.

Next Steps

Being a product-driven organization offers numerous advantages over being a project-driven one. It allows for a focus on defining and tracking business outcomes, leads to better business results, and supports continuous improvement through iterative development.

As we move forward, our next blog delves into the critical success factors for transitioning from a project-driven approach to a product-driven one. We examine the steps necessary to make a successful transition and provide insights and best practices to help organizations achieve their goals.

Our “VP of IT’s Guide to Transforming Your Business” is an excellent resource for those seeking an even deeper dive. This guide answers IT leaders’ top questions about cloud strategy, data, DevOps, and product development. It comprehensively examines the latest trends and best practices for driving business outcomes through technology.

Every year IBM announces “5 in 5” technology predictions which will be important to the world within 5 years.  This year IBM researchers  reviewed them at at IBM Think 2019 on 2/13/2019.  The presenters were:

• Geraud Dubois, DGM Science to Solutions, IBM Research – Almaden
• Arvind Krishna, SVP, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM
• Jeannette M. Garcia, Global Lead for Quantam Applications in Quantum Chemestry & Science
• Donna N. Dillenberger, IBM Fellow, Enterprise Solutions
• Juliet Mutahi, Software Engineer IBM Research Africa
• Sriram Raghavan, VP IBM Research-India @ Singapore, CTO IBM India, IBM Research

Summary and background

This year’s 5 in 5 focuses on food.  The world’s food supply faces dire problems.

• The population is growing fast and the farming footprint is getting smaller.  The food supply must be sustained and increased.
• Climate events such as droughts, fires, floods etc affect the food supply chain in many ways.
• 45% of all food goes to waste today.  The USA alone wastes 150 tons per day.

Melissa King, Top Chef Finalist, introduced the five IBM reseachers.  The predictions follow:
Digital technologies in agriculture will contribute to feeding a growing population using fewer resources
Juliet Mutahi

• Farming’s digital doubles will help feed a growing population using less resources.  This is essentially a virtual model allowing farmers to socialize, share and act on data.
• Farmers band together to form cooperatives to share information today but technology can make that instantaneous and on a global scale.
• IoT can and will provide predictive fleet maintenance.
• Sensors on tractors can digitize a farm.
  • AI can analyze information from farm and crop data across the planet.
  • Example: a digital card is available that can analyze soil composition and then a mobile app reads the card and analyzes results.
  • AI can track and predict yields.
• Technology ultimately helps farmers make better decisions.

Blockchain will prevent more food from going to waste
Arvind Krishna

• 1/3 of all food and half of fruit and vegetables go to waste.
• 150 billion oranges are wasted every year.
• This isn’t just food waste: it wastes water, energy, land, effort etc.
• This happens because supply chain is complex and chaotic.
• Blockchain, IoT and AI within 5 years will drastically reduce food waste.
  • Blockchain – it visibility to distribution.
  • I0T will track the food.
  • AI will optimize food distribution and increase freshness.
• Example – Orange distributor in Florida
  • Today, mostly guesswork on quantity, amount and time of a shipment are used to determine what to send.
  • For example, what if oranges are flying off the shelves in Atlanta but not Chicago.  By the time this is known, it is too late to route shipments.
  • Blockchain can securely share distribution data points.
  • IoT can capture data everywhere, e.g. weather, traffic, consumption etc.
  • AI makes intelligent decisions.
• Sending the right food to the right place at the right time is the key to reducing waste.

Mapping the microbiome will protect us from bad bacteria
Geraud Dubois

• 2008 more than 50,000 babies in china were infected with an infant formula contaminated with Metaline .
• Microbes are everywhere – the human body has as many microbes as cells.  Some are good and some are bad.
• Food-borne illnesses cost $9 billion in medical expenses and  $75 billion in food loss each year.
• Many microbes are good.
• Microbes can be mapped with DNA and RNA sequencing and analyzed for changes
  • Sudden changes are signs of a problem
  • Big data is important to it.
  • Created a database containing all microbiomes the world produced in the last 10 years.
  • Team has generated 500 terabytes of data.
• This technology can detect outbreaks before they happen through data, AI and analytics

AI sensors will detect foodborne pathogens at home
Donna N Dillenberger

• In 2018 food made 76 million people sick from food and killed 5,000.
• What if there were a technology that could scan food and tell if it is ok?
• IBM Verifier
  • It is an optical device connected to a phone that captures wavelengths at the micron level such as detecting bacteria.
  • AI software can take the data and determine what is safe.
  • It can also detect counterfeit food products.
  • It can also authenticate drugs, labels, food, wines, oils, etc.
• The Verifier can be attached to other things such as cutting boards, containers cutlery, cooking utensils etc.
• It could be in trucks shipping food, conveyor belts moving food and in supermarket isles.
• Today it takes 2 days or more to test food.  Within 5 years testing for pathogens will take seconds instead of days.

A radical new recycling process will breathe new life into old plastic
Jeanette M. Garcia

• The US recycles less than 10% of plastic waste.
• We have produced over 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic.
• 1/2 of all manufactured plastics wind up trash.
• Projections that by 2050 predict the ocean will contain more plastic than fish.
• IBM just announced a breakthrough called VolCat
  • Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET)  is the core product in virtually every plastic.
  • PET can be 100% recyclable using a process called VolCat(volatile Catalyst)
  • The Volcat process can extract the PET from plastics and use it to remake the same material or something completely different.
  • Cleaning plastics prior to the VolCat process is not needed because of filtering.
• Breakthroughs like VolCat will create a true plastic circular technology.

IBM has published the full predictions here.

IBM Think 2019 got its official kickoff yesterday. IBM’s Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty delivered the conference keynote welcoming prominent CEOs and company leaders while discussing transforming into Cognitive Enterprises.
Dear Tech… The address started with a video of individuals writing an open letter to the tech industry. Security, cloud, scale, safety, AI-ending bias, understanding each other, business, etc.  It starts with people, who then use tech to make the world better – together.

Five customer speakers joined Ginni Rometty during the address:

• Greg Kalinsky, Geico
• Ted Chung, Hyundai Card Co., Ltd
• Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat
• Bernard Tyson, Kaiser Permanente
• John Donovan, AT&T Communications

Key messages and insights from each speaker are below (you can also view the replay).

Ginni Rometty, President and CEO, IBM

Shared with the audience that there are 120 countries and 22 industries in attendance at IBM Think 2019.
The second chapter of digital and AI is beginning, and these dimensions include:

• Scaling
• Hybrid cloud
• Mission critical apps
• Trust and responsible stewardship

Five lessons learned when it comes to scaling digital and AI:

1. Outside in – CX apps
2. Inside out – workflow and data driving change
3. Business platform to connect CX and data, AI infused in a workflow
4. Going to need an AI platform
5. Will never have AI without information architecture (IA) because you spend 80% of the time getting data

Announcements

• Watson Anywhere – Support any cloud variation including private, public, on premises, etc.  Most open scalable AI solution available today.
• IBM Business Automation with Watson – Workflow with moments of intelligence built-in
• IBM End to End services – 22 offerings
• IBM Cloud Integration Platform – Connect data from anyone’s platform
• IBM Hyper Protect – Highest level of security today

Greg Kalinsky, EVP and CIO, Geico

Shared journey of digitization at Geico:

• Recent contest by replaying commercials and people vote (1.5m voted for the “Hump Day” commercial)
• Geico is a commoditized industry – nobody wants to buy insurance, has to and hopes to not use it
• Distinguishes themselves via customer service and price
• Internet removed manual processes
• Moving to mobile, couldn’t quite get there in terms of intuitive and dynamic but 8,000,000 use the mobile app
• Nervous that consumers were not ready for AI and would alienate people

Phases of transformation

Phase 1

• Do no harm – Initial stage was a PoC
• Would review verbatim transcripts to see how customers reacted with Watson because they didn’t know it was Watson

Phase 2

• Now investing time and effort to value-add phase – go beyond “do no harm” and increase sales
• Started with auto, got some improvement but not up to max goals
• Decided to try it on renters policy instead.  Were able to reconfigure it to simplify flow and got a 40% increase rate in closure on those policies.
• Now, figuring out how can the same lift be brought back to auto

Takeaways and Leadership Lesson

• To get the value of AI, you can’t just layer it on your existing processes – Not just outside in but go inside out
• Opportunity may appear obvious but people do not like change. Must work together to distinguish yourself and leverage tech to change the way things are done.

Ted Chung, CEO, Hyundai Card Co., Ltd

Scaling AI and digital – Hyundai Card’s strategy and transformation journey started 15 years ago with branding and marketing. 4 years ago started digital transformation – AI and blockchain.
Plan to put AI at the center of customer service.

• 50% of calls went unresolved
• Poor customer service cost $65 billion
• 30% turnover in the US

Pain points:

• Almost impossible to memorize benefits, terms, conditions from a financial product
• Training cost is high

Looked to AI to help:

• Turnover rate is now 10% – a 20% decrease
• The younger generation wants to interact with text and mobile devices
• Developed a Watson conversation based customer service app with 2 personas – one serious and one fun

Now building a large data lake to allow super customizations.

• Market segmentation
• Takes raw info, maps to service info and then to insights
• For example, there can be 10 addresses – home, work, shopping, eating, etc. Marry that with identified preferred shopping times as an example to determine when to market.

Biggest lesson learned

Have a lot of data but don’t know how to use it. If you find your data is a mess, you have taken the first step. Understand AI is evolving. Lastly, project management must understand both AI and the business.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat

Shared his viewpoint on the technology landscape and open source:

• 3.5 billion in revenue with no IP
• The growth of user-driven innovation
• For a subset of problems enterprises need, software is out there in open source – By-products of large companies is open source
• Many open source products are not meant to have long term use
• Puts life-cycle security around open source so enterprises can use them
• E.g. RedHat helped update Kubernetes so it can run legacy stateful apps
• Open source can get you 90% of the way there, RedHat can help with the other 10%
• That is good but getting at enterprise data is what is important.
• Linux, containers, and Kubernetes is where most innovation is happening

Bernard Tyson, Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Permanente

Pioneered preventative vs reactive healthcare – started with a vision. Now in a great place in healthcare, but it didn’t change much until the late 20th century. People used to die early so healthcare wasn’t an issue – sanitation and food changed that.
At KP, previously created a system called a “fix-it” system, where the organization tailored everything so patients must come to KP. This has changed drastically – it is being flipped upside down because of the thought, “why focus on sickness only?”
Realization this is healthcare, not sickcare – early detection, diagnosis, etc. are all things needed to help a person thrive. KP is helping people understand their health.
Cloud – what it’s enabled and the journey:

• KP has always used technology, always collected data, lots of it
• Built up physical data centers
• Worried about data security with cloud
• Now over half of the data is stored in IBM cloud
• This has helped enable affordability coverage and care and accessibility

Social determinants – factors that influence health:

• Healthcare contributes about 10%
• Behaviors are about 40% (exercise, eating, etc)
• Rest are social determinants, e.g. environment, shelter, pollution, crime
• Data and AI: a way to innovate and act on social determinants

Leadership lesson

It is a journey and the reality needs to be embraced.  Technology has opened up possibilities and we cannot let history stop that.

John Donovan, CEO, AT&T Communications

John Donavan has taken AT&T Communications through end-to-end digital transformation journey.
Phase 1

• Started in 2013 – had a million CPU cores
• Decided to visualize the environment – 80k VMs

Now, figuring out:

• How to move it to the cloud
• Micro-services
• How to virtualize network functions
• Move from micro-services to functions

Phase 2
Move inside out with mission-critical apps.

• Tried to move 40-year-old systems just to gain experiences moving
• Used learning to move more complex and critical systems in a repeatable capacity

AI example:

• 70k trucks dispatched every day
• Dealing with a dispatch system that is old, but people know the system and the process
• Data can be used to make decisions, e.g. because of weather or traffic, dispatch a truck an hour away instead of one 15 minutes away
• AI is most powerful when a device can make local decisions combined with macro decisions in a cloud

He wrapped up by sharing that 5G technology will be a big pendulum swing coming which will maximize hybrid cloud.
If you were unable to make it to Think this year, I highly recommend checking out the recording of this keynote session – lots of great insights from leaders who are making huge strides with AI.

Liferay launched Liferay University in early August, 2018 and it is now live.  Liferay University offers self paced online training on a number of topics for Liferay DXP 7.1 and some of Liferay’s other products.  Some of the introductory courses are free and the more in depth courses can either be purchased a la carte or a University Passport can be purchased for access to all classes.  The classes contain video classrooms where you can watch lessons and see exercises completed in real time.  Hands-on exercises provide real application and practice of presented concepts, techniques and principals.  Delivering it all are the same Liferay experts who teach in person classes.
Free classes include:

• Building Engaging Websites
• Digital Asset Management
• Mobile Development
• OSGI Basics
• Fully Customize your Search Experience
• Gain Insight into the Customer Journey – Liferay Analytics Cloud

Full paid classes include:

• Liferay Fundamentals
• Content management
• Front-end Developer
• Back-end Developer

If you are a Liferay customer or considering becoming one, this certainly worth a look especially since some of the introductory content is free.

Liferay DXP 7.1

Want to know what’s new in Liferay’s DXP 7.1? Here is your sneak peak. Perficient has been delivering digital experience platform and portal solutions using Liferay since 2011 and became a formal partner in 2013.  We recently attended Liferay’s 2018 Partner Summit and received a preview at what is coming in Liferay DXP 7.1.  Liferay DXP has already been named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms and with with the release of DXP 7.1, they are well positioned to improve their standing.  Here is an overview of some of the new and innovative capabilities you will see when DXP 7.1 ships.
First, here are a few important notes:

1. This is pre-release information.  It is subject to change.
2. Liferay DXP 7.1 is scheduled to release in July.
3. What is known as Liferay DXP today will be refered to as Liferay DXP 7.0 going forward to eliminate any confusion between Liferay DXP and Liferay DXP 7.1.

Now, on to the “what’s new” material.

What’s new in Liferay DXP 7.1

Search

“I can’t find what I’m looking for” is one of the most common complaints employees, customers and partners have when using websites.  Knowing search is critical, DXP 7.1 will use Elasticsearch 6 for its default search engine.  Previously DXP 7.0 used version 2.4.  Elasticsearch has become the leading open source enterprise search solution and the inclusion of version 6 into DXP 7.1.  On top of this a new administrative control panel will be included to configure, monitor and manage easier than ever before.

Content

One of the biggest improvements you will see in Liferay DXP is around delivering content and page creation.  Here is a summary:
Content Pages
Users can now easily create and add unstructured content to pages.    This is especially valuable for quick one-off pages such as for a marketing campaign.  Users can chose either new content pages or widget pages (the traditional method) when creating new pages.
Fragments
This is a new way to create and implement content designs.  Page sections can be saved as fragments and reused across a Liferay site.  This allows developing a library of designed components that can quickly be reused without ever having to touch code.  The fragments themselves can be edited in a fragment editor right within the browser and include HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Page Editor
Fragments themselves are not much use but that is where the page editor comes in.  This allows creating a page and choosing Fragments and then simply changing the content within those fragments and publishing a page.  Business users can quickly deliver new content without any HTML knowledge nor need developer involvement with the page editor.
Menus
Lastly, menus are now separated from page navigation.  Business now can create custom menus without being coupled to overall site navigation.

Forms

DXP 7.1 introduces extensive enhancements to forms making creating and publishing forms not only even easier for business users but they also are more usable for  end users to interact with them.  They are divided into several categories:
Usability
The biggest noticeable enhancement to forms are usability improvements.  This includes the following:
Form Creation

• Autocomplete
• Drag and drop interface for fields
• Multi-page forms
• Configured success page
• Duplicate fields
• Clone forms
• Autosaving
• Import/export data provider definitions
• Localization

Form Management

• Improved process for publishing and previewing forms
• Shareable form URLs
• Redirect after form submission
• Validation logic with regular expressions
• Custom messages for validation errors
• Workflow integration
• Email notification
• Versioning
• Reusable element sets for quickly creating new forms

Authentication

• CAPTCHA enablement
• User authentication

Conditional Rules
Advanced forms can dynamically build and adapt based on information a user supplies in real time.  Additionally a rules API is available to create custom conditions not supplied out of the box.
Fields and Properties
New fields and properties include options like a file upload, passwords and autocomplete.  An API is available to extend properties if needed.

User Experience

Adaptive Media
Adaption Media is an application that comes with Liferay DXP that dynamically adjusts images to fit the screen of the consuming device.  Administrators can control how images are loaded and displayed to account for custom needs for  organizations’ specific network requirements.
Blogs and Message Boards
Blogs and message boards now include new capabilities.  These iare the ability to create friendly URLs, displaying estimated reading times, opt out of email notifications, new cards design and integration with external video sources.  Message boards now support drag and drop for attachments, section renaming, category and thread grouping, notification management and an enhanced commenting design.

General Data Protection Regulation (GPDR)

GPDR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy that went into effect on 5/25/2018.  GPDR aims to give control of personal data to individuals while imposing rules on those hosting and processing data.   As part of DXP 7.1 there are new data protection tools to help address these regulations.  The ability to erase and export a user’s data upon request and administrator tools and APIs for third party apps are available.  It is important to note that Liferay DXP does not automatically make your application deployed to Liferay GPDR compliant but instead provides tools to make achieving compliance easier.

For Developers

Many improvements have been made to make development easier and allowing developers to focus on delivering business value instead of some of the more technical plumbing.  Some of these key improvements are:

• Modern JavaScript frameworks are supported “out of the box.”  These include Angular, React and Vue.js.
• Hybrid mobile application development leverages Liferay Screens 3.0 to build cross-platform apps from a single codebase using Apache Cordova or Xamarin.
• Modularity updates include new search applications such as search results, search bar and category facets.  These have been decomposed from the previous search application making it easier to use in page construction.  Message boards have also been modularized in a similar capacity.

This summary of new features in DXP 7.1 is not 100% comprehensive but it does cover the majority of them at a glance.  Remember, these features could be subject to change before DXP 7.1 is officially released.

Mark Perterson, VP, Building and Asset Optimization and Stephan Marguet, Executive Director, Real Estate Business Services Citizens’ Services in British Columbia presented an informative session at IBM Think 2018, “Building a Blueprint to Smart Buildings / How to Plan and Prepare for the Future.”

Mark began the session with background and important reasons why smart buildings are important.

There has been a transformation in the last 5 years to make buildings more fit for purpose.  Ultimately buildings need to become more conducive to their purposes and improve occupant experience.  An example of increasing the occupant experience is a sensor that conveys the length of cafeteria lines and makes it available to building occupants, allowing them to know when lines are long to avoid peak waiting periods.  Additional highlights include:

Five Core Challenges

• Grow in a low growth, digitally disrupted world
• Seek innovation and data leverage as a basis for new growth
• Take-out structural costs for competitiveness and to fund investment in growth
• Win the war for talent to access intelligence and innovation
• Transform enterprise processes and systems to enable growth and competitiveness

Transformer focus is key to achieving exponential improvements in building performance

• Optimizing – Drive outcomes through productivity, efficiency and effectiveness
• Re-engineering – Reduce work steps by adopting new operating procedures and processes
• Transformation – Use insights from data to change how enterprises operate and functions

Building Optimization with IoT – Analytics, sensors and existing systems can improve occupant experience and reduce operations

• Enhance occupant workspace environment and engagement
• Optimize building maintenance and improve services
• Reduce costs and increase operational efficiency

Advanced technology speeds the transformation of building experience

• Foundational – Single source of record to support real estate life cycle
• Developing – Risk reduction, health, safety and automated services with IoT
• Advanced – Deliver cognitive services, e.g. AR/VR

Operational efficiency examples

• Data for heating/cooling
• Automatic surveillance and security
• Streamlined elevators
• Analytics to prevent energy waste
• Secure check-in
• Control water waste

Steve then took over and spoke about how the Ministry of Citizens’ Services in British Columbia manages smart building initiatives.

Smart building investments are in 2 streams which lead to capturing data analytics for continuous recommissioning and fault detection.

• Improving Data
  • Automation
  • Technology (sensors, zoning)
  • Real time energy metering
• IT infrastructure

Example initiatives and ROI were provided

• Infrastructure upgrades and automation to a courthouse built in 1985 lead to a 25% energy savings in 2016
• Proof of concept using WiFi enabled controls allows adjusting HVAC based on detection data

Mark wrapped up the session wrapped up with best practices in building transformation.

• In context – Personable and consumable experiences
• Real-time – Respond dynamically to time sensitive problems
• Intelligent – Adaptable and machine learning
• Instrumented and interconnected – Combine structured and unstructured data

The information in the session was very enlightening to help understand the importance and value of IoT and data in smart buildings.

IBM Watson Content Hub (WCH) is a cloud-based content management system (CMS) which allows you to manage and publish full website experiences or deliver headless content to your web and mobile experiences. In November, I published 5 reasons you should use Watson Content Hub.  As promised, here are 5 more reasons you should use Watson Content Hub.

1. WCH integrates with IBM Watson Campaign Automation.  This provides plugins directly into Watson Campaign Automation to insert digital assets directly from WCH which allows easy integration of digital assets across multiple customer touch-points.  A short video demonstration is available here.
2. Continuous feature delivery.  Since WCH is a cloud based solution and IBM is heavily investing in it, new features are delivered frequently so you receive all the benefits of this innovation without having to execute long and complex software upgrades as you would with an on premise CMS.  New features are published on the blog here.
3. Workflow is now available.  Review and approval features are now available which lets authors and approvers review and share the review process with their collaborative teams.  This allows for comments and the ability to monitor the review process.
4. Many samples and developer tools are available.  IBM publishes many samples and tools which can help jumpstart your website.  This includes components such as the Oslo starter site, command line tools, video how-to tutorials, samples and more.
5. Multi-lingual tagging support. WCH automatically tags images uploaded but now multi-lingual tagging is supported.

Want to learn more?  Contact Perficient and we can tell you more as well as provide information about our quick-start offering that can get you up and running with a usable site in production in a couple of weeks.

IBM Watson Content Hub (WCH) is a cloud-based content management system (CMS) which allows you to manage and publish full website experiences or deliver headless content to your web and mobile experiences.  The initial product was launched in December, 2016 and in less than a year has positioned itself as a leading cloud based CMS.  Here are 5 reasons you should consider using WCH.

1. Cognitive tagging of images using Watson.  WCH will automatically tag images uploaded using Watson APIs.  This significantly reduces manually tagging and makes searching images much quicker and easier, especially for very large libraries of digital assets.  The image below shows an example of the tags WCH automatically applied to the image of a sports car on a racetrack.
   

   Watson Content Hub Auto Tagging Example

2. Cloud based solution.  WCH is completely cloud based.  Content can be securely authored, digital assets can be managed and content can be delivered all from the cloud.  WCH uses Akamai Content Distribution Network (CDN) to deliver content globally with redundancy and a 99.9% uptime SLA.
3. Deliver full websites. In September 2017, IBM released a new Standard Edition offering which allows you to create and manage full web experiences complete with your own host name.  An example of Perficient’s implementation of the Oslo reference application is here.
4. Rich APIs.  Technology agnostic APIs are available to deliver content to any solution which can call REST APIs and consume JSON.   This includes script based web applications using your favorite language or framework such as Angular or React, consumption by mobile applications, integration with commerce solutions such as IBM Watson Commerce or delivery to thick clients or applications written in Java or .NET.  The key is the APIs are flexible and are continuously being extended.
5. It is inexpensive.  WCH is pay as you go software as a service.  You can get started with a FREE trial and if you choose to buy, plans start at as little as $250 per month.  Contact sales@perficient.com to learn more.

Want to learn more?  Contact Perficient and we can tell you more as well as provide information about our quick-start offering that can get you up and running with a usable site in production in a couple of weeks.

Stay tuned for “5 More  Reasons You Should Be Using Watson Content Hub.“

Ed Chung, VP Product Management, presented the product road map at the 2017 Liferay Symposium. There are three pillars of the road map that Liferay considers in their approach:

• Unify customer experiences
• Transform business operations
• Evolve your digital strategy

Unify Customer Experiences

Liferay Product Roadmap

• Understand what customers are doing on multi-channel activity
• Understand profile data
• Understand behavioral data
• Understand the customer journey

Currently Liferay wants to continue focusing on the customer through the following capabilities and products

• Modern sites – Deliver customer experience with modern tools, techniques and architectures
• Liferay Commerce – Upcoming full commerce including services like product catalog, shopping cart, checkout, fulfillment etc.
• Liferay screens – quickly create native mobile applications for iOs and Android devices
• Single Customer View – Future product that will integrate customer data from multiple sources in a single data view
• Journey manager – Orchestrate the right content to the right audience through the best channels

Transform Business Operations

• Digital transformation reality statistics
  • 47% of companies have not started digital transformation
  • 33% are developing plans
  • 85% of all companies realize digital transformation must be addressed
• Liferay’s approach is connecting digital operations to the customer journey

Digital workplace today for employees

• Challenges for the digital workplace worker
  • Average worker is interrupted 87 times per day
  • Can take 23 minutes to get back on task
  • 65 interruptions are caused by self
• Want to focus on delivering productivity tools which will include
  • Central location for content
  • Effective communications, digests/filters, notification, curated content
  • Better productivity tools

Evolve Your Digital Strategy

Three key solutions will allow customers to evolve the digital strategy.  These include:

• Testing and optimization
  • AB Testing will be coming to select different page elements and provided tracking and reporting
  • Long term goal is to be able to test everything, e.g. publication schedules, forms, workflows, etc not just visual assets
• Daisy Chain Analytics – link analytics from one touchpoint to the next and see the overall goal completion
• Headless platform – Services and content are provided to clients from APIs.  It abstracts content from the delivery form

Like any product road map presentation, these are subject to change; however, Liferay painted a solid and clear picture on how they are evolving and innovating to help enterprises digitally transform.

Bryan Cheung, CEO of Liferay, kicked off the Liferay Symposium 2017 keynote in Austin, TX. At a high level, the messaging was that Liferay has been listening to customers and transforming with the industry to modernize their products and stay relevant as digital transformation continues across all customers. During the past five years, customers have many common questions:  What are you doing with cloud? How about the Internet of Things? What about continuous deployment? Bryan did a great job painting the picture as to how Liferay is listening and evolving with the industry.
With the user experience expectations higher than ever, over the past two years, Liferay has invested heavily in several key areas:

1. Modularity.  “Modularity makes apps easier to evolve and services easier to re-use.”
2. APIs – APIs designed to evolve and Headless Usage.”
3. Modernize frontend technologies and put UX first.
4. Ready for Cloud Deployment.

Liferay’s vision for the platform evolution includes:

• Rich set of back-end services through evolvable APIs.
• Be able to build websites and through heterogeneous front ends.
• Cloud ready.
• Liferay will help assemble apps from pre-built services and build more usable, friendlier interfaces.

Some areas of ongoing investment and key features are:

• Web Content Management is currently being heavily invested in. WCM has been very portlet based in the past 10 years. Now, websites are developed completely different. Liferay is looking at at a full revamp of WCM.
• Forms are getting much attention.
• WebDeploy is Liferay’s new cloud offering to deploy the platform in seconds.
• In 2018 Liferay will be adding a digital commerce server to their portfolio.

This was a good overview of what is here today and on deck in the near future. Stay tuned for more news and announcements from the Liferay Symposium North American 2017.

Ed Han, lead consultant from Liferay, Inc., presented a session at the 2017 Liferay Symposium on best practices for upgrading to Liferay DXP. There are essentially four broad questions that should be asked when planning and starting an upgrade:

• Why upgrade?
• What is an upgrade?
• What are the risks?
• What is the plan?

Why upgrade?

There are many reasons why you should upgrade to Liferay DXP. First, there are many new features available such as modern web experiences, e.g. audience targeting, updated UX, forms and mobility and a modern architecture with true modularity with OSGI. Also, system components may require upgrading such as operating systems, databases or perhaps migrating to cloud.  Probably most importantly Liferay 6.1 and 6.2 will soon be out of support. For specific support dates, visit here.

What is in an upgrade project?

• Analysis – What is being upgraded and what are the risks?
• Planning – How will it be done?
• Development – Make it happen.
• QA – Make sure everything works and performs.
• Go Live – Launch!

Upgrading Liferay includes:

• Functionality and code – marketplace plugins, utilized features, customization and configuration
• Database upgrade

Upgrading system components includes:

• Operating system may need to be updated.
• Java 8
• Search server – Migrate to Elastic but Solr is still supported.
• Check the support matrix to make sure your hardware/software combination is supported.

What are the risks?

• Accept that problems will happen
• Always have a fallback
  • Always have a plan for a rollback
  • An untested backup is not a backup
• Identify new risks from development
• Go live is often the riskiest
• Customizations are a big risk area. Identify them in analysis, verify they are still needed and additional testing will be required.
  • New features may be able to replace customizations
  • Decide on plugin upgrade path
  • Service builder plugins must be regenerated
  • Themes will require near-rewrites
  • Freemarker preferred over Velocity
• Developer learning curve is also a risk. Training and documentation help minimize this.
• Configurations
  • Some configurations have moved
  • There is a new configuration admin
  • Some behaviors have changed
• Database upgrade is a high risk area
  • Bad data requires remediation
  • The upgrade can take time
  • If you are on 6.0.11 or earlier, you need to upgrade to 6.2 first
  • Do dry runs multiple times
• Go-Live
  • The database upgrade is the highest risk area.  Test the database upgrade tool against production data first
  • Code deployment
  • Quality – Heavy functional and performance testing is required
  • Search index – don’t under estimate how long it may take.

Notes for the plugin upgrade path, the following considerations are important:

• Plugins SDK is deprecated but still supported
• OSGi modules are new to Liferay
• Consult the 7.0 documentation
• The code upgrade tool can help identify and remediate problems

Go Live Strategy

• Do an upgrade during a maintenance window with a scheduled outage
  • No chance of data loss
  • No extra infrastructure is needed
  • Downtime could be long
  • Rollback strategy is complex
• Cutover
  • Minimal impact to end users
  • Rollback scenarios are easier and do not impact end users
  • Near instant launch
  • Requires additional infrastructure
  • New user data could be lost
• Backups and rollbacks
  • Ensure all data is backed up
  • Test restoration of backed up data
  • If possible, snapshot the server

Long story short, a DXP upgrade is complex but for most customers, the new features and capabilities are well worth the effort as DXP will allow you to deliver engaging and modern customer experiences in an open and extensible platform.