Delivering seamless, consistent, and engaging experiences starts with a customer-centered digital strategy. This ongoing series explores the characteristics that make up a great digital strategy and how to deliver powerful brand moments that solidify customer loyalty and drive differentiation for your organization.

Earlier in this series, we revealed the importance of organizational alignment for your digital strategy. My colleague, David Stallsmith, summed it up nicely: “It is the core of your strategy, the backbone of your business, and an accelerator of what you hope to achieve.” But getting your teams and departments focused on the customer and digital mission is just the beginning. Once you have them rowing in the right direction, there is more to consider to get them working together to max out their digital potential.
Organizational alignment paves the way for lean transformation. Furthermore, lean transformation is uniquely important and relevant for driving customer centricity. To deliver customer-focused innovations, it’s important to understand the elements of lean transformation and how to overcome the foreseeable challenges.

What Is Lean Transformation? 

Lean methodology originated in manufacturing during the mid-twentieth century. It was the innovative idea that revolutionized Toyota’s production system, and modernized manufacturing and ultimately operational capabilities around the globe in every industry. The methodology defines value from the customer’s viewpoint, focuses on improving processes while eliminating waste, and ultimately boosts innovation.
Lean transformation builds on this methodology to lay out a blueprint of organizational tools and approaches. Fusing Design Thinking with Agile, we define lean transformation as an organizational change to how we design, build, and run digital, customer-centric systems.

Perficient Digital’s Design Thinking Methodology

Why Embrace Lean Transformation? 

There are a few good reasons to embrace Lean principles in your organization, regardless of whether or not you’re motivated by digital, or customer experience, or another reason to build operational excellence into your organization. But digital customer experience is an ideal place to adopt lean transformation for a couple of key reasons. 
First, digital projects focused on customers thrive when teams tap into the human elements that make digital solutions more useful, usable, and impactful. Technology projects have historically attempted to incorporate user requirements in various formats (and with typically painful outcomes). Lean organizations address this by incorporating customer empathy and a range of stakeholder inputs from a holistic team with diverse perspectives. 
Second, the expectations of IT and the CIO’s role in the organization have shifted. For years, IT teams have built and managed systems for scale and predictability. But in today’s customer-centered world, it’s not enough to keep the lights on. CIOs are now entrusted with helping their companies meet customers’ changing needs and react to competitive threats with the same systems (and funding) they’ve always had. Customer-centered organizations have adopted lean principles to augment scale and predictability with agility and speed.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]”Customer centricity is the permanent result of technology disrupting the relationship between consumers and brands.”[/perfectpullquote]

Six Elements of Lean Transformation (and Why They Matter)

1. Iterative delivery

Waterfall, big-bang efforts are fundamentally flawed because none of the risk is confirmed until the very end. Your team may wonder: “Are these the right features? Will this technology even work?” When the proverbial veil is lifted, it’s too late to make significant changes. 
Iterative projects solve many of these flaws. You create an environment to test and re-evaluate all aspects of the project early and often. Doing so allows you to expose the risks sooner, giving you time to react and adjust. Then, you can focus your limited time and budget on what matters most.

2. Continuous testing

Well-intended iterative projects simply turn into incremental projects when testing is not built into each iteration. Our best client projects have proven that testing different aspects – from the customer journey and basic user experience to tricky system integrations and the final, working solution – is the most effective way to derive feedback and uncover the right solution. 
Being test-driven goes beyond scheduling ample time for testing activities. You also must consider testing tools, data, content, methods, and participants.

3. Research-based decisions  

Customer centricity is the permanent result of technology disrupting the relationship between consumers and brands. The first rule of customer centricity is knowing your customers – who they are, what they want and need, and why they choose you. Observation, studies, and behavioral analytics are key tools for researching and understanding your customers. 
At the broadest, contextual level, basic customer insights are table stakes for a design thinking approach. If you have this insight, then large-scale research isn’t needed for every project. 
In a typical project where the customer is well known, user research still happens, but it’s essentially reduced to feedback and the results of your testing. When the problem domain is new or particularly unique, then smaller amounts of focused research may be necessary to lay the groundwork.

4. Prototyping

At the heart of Agile, iterative methodologies are the ability to test your work and run experiments so we can use those results and feedback to drive the product. But long before the product takes form, we use prototyping to create something to run our tests and experiments against. Simple, low-fidelity, pencil-and-paper prototypes are amazingly effective early in projects, and more comprehensive, high-fidelity prototyping tools (e.g., Adobe XD and InVision) are now more economical than ever. 
Strong design thinking teams think about prototyping tools and strategies at the start of their projects. Think outside the box with prototyping. Storyboards, animation, and video are also extremely effective ways to communicate the breadth of your project. More advanced product teams invest in platform stubs and virtualization to extend prototyping even further.

5. Cross-functional teams

Digital ecosystems can be complex with many interdependencies. At the same time, customers can be unpredictable and inconsistent. Combine these challenges, and your business faces compounded risk and uncertainty. 
That’s why strong digital teams should consist of holistic, cross-functional team members. You’ll want a team that brings a complete skillset but also a variety of perspectives, experiences, and objectives to balance the risk and complexity of digital projects. This includes customer-centered design, versatile engineering, and strong business input. We call this concept the Minimum Viable Team (MVT). When coupled with its product counterpart, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), these are two strong moves to adapt digital and non-digital teams.

6. Product-oriented development

In some organizations, a product-oriented approach to design, engineering, and servicing systems as distinct products can simplify the overall complexity. This approach also establishes focus for your business so that you organize processes and teams chartered with delivering these products. 
Product orientation encourages multiple teams to work independently and helps govern interdependencies and priorities through coordinated, release-driven planning. This approach requires advance thinking about an overall product architecture – usually defined by customer segments, channels, and features – and thinking through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) among product teams and constituents.

Conquering Obstacles for Lean Transformation

Organizational inertia

One of the toughest obstacles to becoming Lean is the simple resistance to change. We encourage small steps with adequate training, education, and leadership mandates to gain cooperation and buy-in across your organization. But most of all, you must prove that these elements will work for your organization. 
Overcoming this mindset can be addressed with an organizational change management (OCM) strategy adapted for your digital program. OCM should also be considered for ongoing governance and oversight activities. 
Another option is to create a Digital Center of Excellence (COE) or similar model to provide support, education, and shared services. With a design thinking team that’s starting from scratch, you’ll have to create a design system that enables a variety of tools – personas, customer journeys, low- or high-fidelity prototyping, or simulation tools. Your team will also have to build customer empathy and develop design standards. This pre-work must be done to lay the groundwork for lean transformation.

Scheduling woes

Scheduling and managing distributed resources from multiple teams can be nearly impossible, particularly when those resources are shared among other projects. The most effective response is to construct dedicated product teams, ideally in a co-located workspace dedicated to the product mission.
Establish a MVT that consists of a product owner, business owner, engineers, testers, and designers. Pulling them together and dedicating them to the project brings the combination of holistic perspectives, the chance to bond as a team, and the dedicated time to make progress. 
However, this solution may be radical for some organizations because it alters career planning, challenges centralized controls, and can appear expensive for part-time commitments. Rest assured, the payoff is much improved teamwork and communication with the lack of distractions and minimal wait times.

Maintaining diversity of thought

Diverse perspectives bring real value to designing digital products. Diversity encompasses individuals from different demographics or socioeconomic backgrounds, but it also includes bringing in resources from different industry categories, skill areas, or teams. 
Diversity of thought makes it possible to break the organizational inertia and build empathy with different audiences. Consider the airline industry for a moment and the apps developed for passengers. Do any of them stand out? There’s little differentiation between them. This exemplifies the need for diversity among a design thinking team. When you have a group of people with similar traits and backgrounds writing the software, the end result is undifferentiated products.

Lean Transformation Bolsters Innovation

Innovation happens across a wide spectrum, from the truly disruptive to the quietly sustainable. 
Sustaining innovations tend to be internally focused, helping you work faster, exploit existing strengths, and build operational excellence. At the other end of the spectrum, disruptive innovations focus on growth, explore new territory, and tend to enhance the customer experience.
Disruption gets the attention, but sustainable innovations can be equally valuable in terms of competitive advantage. We’ve found that Lean teams bring the most balanced, holistic perspective to finding the right balance of innovation.

Start small, fail fast, prove success

The best innovative approaches embrace failure as a core value. While that may sound counterintuitive, the premise is really this: what can you learn from failure?
Creating an environment for continuous testing and learning is among the primary traits of highly-effective and innovative companies. Experimentation, testing, and learning are key to reducing risk and taking full advantage of the insights gained as you innovate. 
You can prove success by starting with a small project, run by a capable team that is committed to the process. Once you prove success with these methodologies, others in your company will want to do the same.

The Key Takeaway 

Why should your organization be Lean? Because change is the only constant. Customers and their preferences continue to evolve. The technology continues to change, and therefore, businesses must always be ready for change. By incorporating the elements of lean transformation, your business – the teams and technologies – can quickly adapt and respond to these realities.

Creating stand-out digital customer experiences that attract, engage, and retain customers is a tall order. Perhaps you’ve already done some of the foundational work, and you need help with the next step.

When working with clients, we help make sure you know your customers and understand their journeys. Through design-thinking tools, industry research, and pragmatic ideation to execute from end-to-end, you will have what it takes to deliver experiences that surprise and delight your customers.
Ready to get started with your digital strategy? Dive in for more resources.

Thrilling our clients with innovation and impact – it’s not just rhetoric. This belief is instrumental for our clients’ success. In 2018 we introduced our Chief Strategists, who provide vision and leadership to help our clients remain competitive. Get to know each of our strategists as they share their unique insights on their areas of expertise.

Big data has significantly impacted today’s leading enterprises “as it helps detect patterns, consumer trends, and enhance decision making.” In fact, the big data and analytics market is estimated to reach $49 billion this year with a CAGR of 11 percent.

However, big data is often too broad and complex for analysis by traditional processing application software. For businesses to get the most out of their data, they must deploy a strategy that transforms their data management and analytics practices.

We recently spoke with Bill Busch, Big Data Chief Strategist, to learn more about creating value with big data and developing a data strategy to achieve meaningful results.

What does your role as a Chief Strategist entail?

Bill Busch: Since joining Perficient, I have acted as an evangelist for big data, machine analytics, resource management, and the business development of those functions. My new role as Chief Strategist is a continuation of those efforts. This role allows me to be a resource for our clients and help them gain value from strategically using their data.

What do you hope to accomplish as a Chief Strategist?

BB: I want to help clients understand how to best use their own data with AI, machine learning, analytics, and cloud to inform their business decisions. To get there, business leaders must transform data collection platforms in a way that addresses the typical mistakes or challenges experienced.

Many of our implementations involve several areas of expertise, which provides an opportunity to collaborate with other Chief Strategists, whether they’re focused in a particular industry or a specific technology.

Collectively, we help clients change processes and train teams to approach their duties differently. By addressing technology, processes, and people, they can take full advantage of [data collection] platforms’ speed and still maintain the quality and visibility of data.

“The breadth and depth of the Chief Strategists’ expertise enables the creation of comprehensive solutions that resolve our clients’ most critical issues.”

Chief Strategists in Action

A recent example of our collaboration involved developing a unified data view using APIs. Typically, application data and API management were separated when companies sought to integrate data. Now, these two ecosystems are merging into one. This presents a challenge to create a single solution that enables application integration and the consolidation of different data sources. To conquer this challenge, we partnered with Erich Roch, Chief Strategist for IT Modernization and Integration, to create comprehensive solutions for our clients.

Strategically Speaking

Why does strategy matter for big data?

BB: Big data relies on a series of systems or platforms to gain meaningful insights, such as cloud data warehousing or cloud data lakes. Developing a strategy [around people and processes working with data] is what ultimately helps businesses align decision making and gain value from their data.

Why is it important for businesses to be strategic with their data?

BB: Data is the heartbeat of any modern organization. Having information readily available to make decisions doesn’t happen quickly or seamlessly. The most productive strategy to achieve speed-to-market value requires funneling your information into a database to generate high-level insights.

Data strategy also doesn’t have to end with the executive level. Businesses enable other departments for success when they make data accessible for broader analytics by following best practices, establishing predefined processes, and creating a strategy to integrate the data.

How does big data affect the ability to remain competitive?

BB: If you don’t have a data strategy in place, then you’re operating reactively and setting up your [business] for displacement. It’s easy for businesses to rely on low-quality data that is readily available to influence their decisions. However, the issue with that approach is the lack of depth of that information. Your enterprise may have the best AI in the world, but those AI models aren’t meaningful if you lack robust data for the technology to analyze.

To shift from a reactive to proactive stance, you should invest in a strategy and a data management infrastructure to manage the information. Investing in both yields deeper insights than surface-level information, provides greater context with existing knowledge, and identifies emerging trends to reveal unknown information.

When helping clients to create a strategy, we identify a scalable, analytical use case that could benefit from a data warehouse. Then, we help our clients establish a process with dedicated people and resources to assess existing data and develop ideas about the data they want to collect. From there, we create a road map to bridge the gap, so our clients are well-positioned to make strategic decisions relatively quickly.

Think Like a Chief Strategist

What trend(s) have you observed that influence how businesses manage big data?

BB: The open-source approach to data processing is new. Companies previously used on-premise data lakes for their processing, and then the trend shifted to cloud-driven data lakes. Now, we’re migrating data away from mainframes and high-dollar, appliance-based platforms to open source, cloud-based platforms.

For example, we’re currently working with a major healthcare payer to migrate its costly claims processing from a data lake mainframe to an open source, cloud-based platform. This project will enable our client to do more with its data – at a faster pace – while reducing costs. I think many companies realize the possibilities and are considering this model and similar solutions. It’s a sign of the times and underscores the need for digital transformation.

However, if your organization isn’t quite ready for data processing in the cloud, data lakes are a great intermediate step, allowing you to consolidate your data for the analytical use case. Using a cost-effective enterprise data warehouse (EDW), you can take advantage of the data lake and use the data for operational processing.

While I’m not saying that we’re moving away from data lakes, I think we’re seeing a need to build out the reliance of data lakes and enable more than one use case. By doing so, we’re architecturally enabling multiple areas of a business to take advantage of data that suits its goals or objectives.

When creating a big data strategy with clients, what are the top considerations?

BB: At the start of any client engagement, we identify the business drivers for a data strategy. Whether the use case is analytical or scientific, the supporting data architecture and data strategy must have some perspective to the [business] need. We also ensure the business need isn’t too tactical so future iterations aren’t limited.

Organizational culture is another major consideration for developing a big data strategy. Enabling self-service within the finance industry is a prime example. Industry regulations impact the level of self-service capabilities that a firm can offer. These limitations can greatly influence a financial organization’s culture, and its reception of a data-focused strategy.

Contrast this scenario to the life sciences industry that’s comprised of people who are hard-wired to interact with data in a more analytical way. Regardless of the industry or the culture, incorporating an organizational change management component helps ease the transition.

Using these insights, I try to establish a vision with clients. Many issues that businesses generally encounter when creating a data strategy and data lake platform isn’t related to the technology. Instead, it’s overcoming the mindset of the people involved. If you start with a universal outlook, develop agile concepts, and deploy lean processes, a data strategy can inform much analysis upfront. Then, the strategy establishes a data pipeline to begin moving information from the source to its destination in a relatively short timeframe.

Learn more about each of our Chief Strategists by following this series. 

In our previous blog post in this series, Tackling Security Concerns in Application Modernization, we focused on security. In this post, we’re going to go a step further and examine the operations of modern applications as a whole.

Why are operations of modern applications so important?

The advantages of modernizing your systems are well known. Continuing to run legacy systems is a business risk due to them being difficult to change and maintain, and running on aging hardware. There are also many benefits to moving to the cloud, some of which we have highlighted throughout this series. These benefits include:

• Turning data into insights
• Accelerating innovation
• Delivering exceptional customer experiences

However, moving your applications to the cloud isn’t enough – you need to optimize each application to run in the cloud. Not doing so results in excessive operational costs (both in people and infrastructure), extended outages, and performance problems.

Operational inefficiencies can occur with legacy “lift and shift” migrations to the cloud because these applications were not designed to best leverage cloud services. If new, native-cloud applications are not designed properly (for example, including automation and reusable services), then they will be operationally inefficient as well.

With many companies now having private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, each with their own platform services, environmental complexity is proving to be an operational burden. There is a need to better operationalize these cloud environments with operational design considerations, architecture consistency, and automation.

How are other companies tackling application modernization? Complete this brief survey to find out.

What does operationalizing modern applications mean?

We should consider the robustness and observability of applications when transitioning them to operations. Operationalizing modern applications should include security, monitoring, resiliency, and disaster recovery (DR) requirements, as well as the means to design, implement, and measure the applications run-time characteristics.

Your design goal is to ensure your applications are secure, resilient, and efficient, while also optimizing operational costs. This can also mean things like ensuring you’re not overspending on cloud resources or wasting people’s time. The goal is to be as efficient as possible with both your people and cloud resource consumption while maximizing your application performance and availability within your budget constraints.

First you need to design applications to meet operational requirements. Cloud vendors publish reference architectures for common application types, such as web apps and microservices, to help with this. You should follow these design guidelines and make adjustments for your operational requirements when you’re designing your applications.

Your reference architectures should address operational requirements and result in a more consistent run-time environment across applications. What you don’t want is a bunch of “snowflake” applications, each one different with their own operational requirements. This, of course, leads to increased complexity.

Instead, by automating the build of your infrastructure and the deployment of your applications, you can be more agile, consistent, save people costs, and at the same time implement the operational controls you need to be more efficient.

To fully optimize your applications, you need to consider operations in the following areas:

Resiliency

You need to ensure that the application platform is designed to meet performance and availability requirements. You want to be sure that the applications continue to function despite component failures within a system. The loss of individual components or instances within a system shouldn’t impact the entire application but just a single feature.

To do this, you need to start with good designs, such as those based on a reference architecture. You should build the application with operational requirements in mind and include ongoing monitoring, testing, and optimization. A DevOps culture helps here, as developers and operations have a shared understanding of how software is designed and built and also its run-time behavior.

Security

IT organizations see a significant shift in their security in the cloud, too. Traditionally, IT organizations deployed security controls along with the physical infrastructure in their data center. Conversely, you can, and should, automate native cloud virtual machines, containers, and application level security for modernized applications. Ideally, you want to automate vulnerability scanning and policy enforcement, too. IT organizations have an opportunity to improve security from what it was in legacy data centers, with consistency of architecture an added bonus.

Monitoring and logging

As modern applications are typically in the cloud or deployed on software-defined infrastructure, the way you monitor infrastructure changes dramatically. These newer systems are also typically highly distributed, bringing additional challenges. While you previously monitored a single monolithic application for capacity in legacy systems, modern systems often involve things like software-as-a-service applications and microservices in containers, each of which should have their own monitoring and logging capability.

Highly distributed systems are virtually impossible to monitor without the proper tooling and instrumentation. Tools and approaches like container orchestration and a service mesh can implement monitoring, logging and security in a consistent and automated way. For example, a service mesh can provide the software layer to control and monitor microservices and their interactions.

Disaster recovery

The DR concerns change dramatically in the cloud. The constraints of physical hardware and networks are gone, with inherent redundancy in the cloud ready to be leveraged. While legacy DR involved replicating data centers, the cloud allows you to have multiple instances of applications actively running and ready to take on the workloads of failed components.

In the cloud, you synchronize data in real-time across geographically dispersed application components. This approach puts the processing of transactions and data closer to the user, improving performance as a result. Modern application availability is not a question of DR but of designed resiliency in the cloud.

How does the required skillset change in a modern environment?

As the above requirements and processes show, everything changes when you modernize your applications. While the concepts are similar, things like the application designs, implementation, and tools are all different.

This is the greatest challenge facing IT – addressing the need to migrate legacy applications and the skills gaps that exist to do the work. Many businesses delay migrating because they don’t have the people to make the changes they need. This happens often despite these businesses having applications that are brittle and costly to maintain.

This is where a transformation roadmap is necessary to guide the process. You need a cloud staffing strategy. You need to optimize your applications for operations, else the complexities of the environment will make skills gaps overwhelming. And, you need to ensure your cloud teams are working together to adapt to new-technology challenges and that you are on a path to mature your people skills, alongside your processes and your technology. Then your business will benefit most from modern applications.

Learn more

Click here or fill out your details below to download our guide and learn more about how modernizing your applications can help your business.

In our previous blog post, Create Your Transformation Roadmap for Application Modernization, we looked at what a transformation roadmap typically includes with regard to app modernization. In this blog, we’ll examine the importance of transformation roadmaps, what they include, and the process of creating one.

Why is creating a transformation roadmap so important?

At its core, a roadmap ensures the organization is moving toward its goal while also hitting markers along the way. The roadmap provides direction – both on the work you will do and the budget needed to achieve your goal. You’re essentially looking to marry strategy and architecture and accomplish all of the steps needed along the way with your roadmap.

By design, this roadmap aims to help you fill skills gaps and mature three main areas – your people, processes, and technology. As such, the final goal you work toward is broken up into many smaller goals to help progress in these areas. For example, if your organization wants to increase the speed of the application lifecycle, you may have a goal of adopting a DevOps methodology to do so. This goal would then include teaching people like the development and operations teams new skills, implementing new processes to encourage an agile environment, and adopting new technology to bring automation to your work.

The budget is also important to consider, because you have to play within the rules of your business. A roadmap helps you identify where you need to spend your budget and lays out a timeline to do so. This especially helps in getting executive buy-in for your efforts, where budget is often the first thing to come to mind. You may need to consider laying out a roadmap over multiple years because of your budget, while ensuring your plans align with business priorities is a must.

Those that don’t plan and gain executive support can often see their projects fail. They may miss the mark on some key aims: namely, struggling to adopt the technology and failing to mature skills and processes for the technology. These failures result in significant losses of both time and money.

Gain insight into similar companies’ business goals for application modernization.                                               Take this quick survey to see how you compare.

Key components of a transformation roadmap

As highlighted in the previous blog in this series, a transformation roadmap typically includes:

• Your organization’s goals and barriers
• Journey maps for your customer experience
• Assessment and inventory of your technology
• Gap analysis and recommendations
• IT goals (e.g., cloud first, agile, DevOps)
• Technology options and reference architecture
• Application portfolio rationalization and migration options (e.g., build versus buy)
• Budgets, benefits, and timelines
• Change and communication plans
• Program governance (e.g., organization, roles and responsibilities, dashboard KPIs, accountability)
• Digital products and marketplace offerings
• Program execution in the context of goals (e.g., agility, innovation, DevOps)

The key behind the roadmap is showing why the business is investing in the application modernization efforts. How will your end goal benefit the business, and why did you choose the goals along the way as priorities?

Where you’re categorizing apps as part of your roadmap, it’s important to consider both business and IT attributes. These include:

Business metrics:

• Business domain
• Strategic focus/investment themes
• Operational effectiveness
• Revenue generation
• Usage/user count
• Relative user experience

IT metrics:

• Support costs
• Data and integration quality
• Architecture alignment
• Code quality
• Reliability
• Agility
• Security

Who is involved in creating the transformation roadmap?

A roadmap requires buy in from several stakeholders throughout an organization, which means many people are involved in creating it. First, as previously mentioned, you need to align your goals with business goals, which means you need to take a top-down approach to figure out what you want to achieve. As such, you will need executive buy-in and final reviews when it comes to launching the plan.

When looking at specifics, you’re going to have to work with teams to know what progress needs to be made in their areas. Interviews with application teams are necessary for specific business domains. You also need to review architecture and processes such as testing and change management, as well as input from operations, compliance, and security. The goal of this is to essentially understand how IT aligns with the business and ensuring that it is an innovative team that works toward business goals.

Many organizations don’t have experience with creating a roadmap, and may look to a partner to assist. As an experienced partner, we have the people with the experience and skills to lead and participate as subject matter experts in any application modernization project, along with a methodology with reusable templates and reference architecture.

Learn more about app modernization

Click here or fill out your details below to download our guide and learn more about how modernizing your apps can help your business.

Thrilling our clients with innovation and impact – it’s not just rhetoric. This belief is instrumental for our clients’ success. In 2018, we introduced our Chief Strategists, who provide vision and leadership to help our clients remain competitive. Get to know each of our strategists as they share unique insights on their areas of expertise.

The current digital age has generated an exponential amount of data. From mobile devices and online activity to enterprise performance metrics and operational considerations, data is all around us. By 2025 worldwide data volumes are projected to grow to 175ZB, creating more opportunities for business leaders to develop informed strategies and make decisions based on their data.

We recently spoke with Arvind Murali, Data Governance Chief Strategist, to get his perspective on data governance, building data strategies to optimize business outcomes, and his life beyond the world of strategy.

What does your role as a Chief Strategist entail?

Arvind Murali: The AI and Digital technologies have launched the Fourth Industrial Revolution focused on machines supporting man and increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Companies across every industry are feeling the impact of digital and data transformation, and leaders are rethinking how technology and data can reshape their businesses.

As a Chief Strategist, I support my clients on thinking of Data as an Asset to use data in ways that they aren’t thinking about. I’m constantly listening to and learning from our clients about their business outcomes and opportunities. Then, I translate that feedback to help them build data strategy and governance to support and manage their data infrastructure.

By focusing on the business outcomes, we can build and implement data solutions that are broad enough to meet clients’ current needs and nimble enough to scale for future iterations.

What do you hope to accomplish as a Chief Strategist?

AM: Among my aspirations, I will continue supporting organizations with their digital and data transformation journeys. This support includes moving clients towards Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) models that directly creates bottom line opportunities. Some clients begin with a clean slate and want to capitalize on their legacy data assets. However, in that process, we determined that by marrying legacy data and enriching it with competitive and benchmarking data, it truly gives clients an edge. In the end, we’ve developed modern data platforms for them, allowing them to analyze their businesses, identify patterns, and adjust (as necessary) to compete in a digital market.

Above all, I always want to find purpose in my work by creating data solutions that make a difference for our clients and the customers and communities they serve. For instance, if our data-driven work provides a hospital with the ability to reduce a patient’s rate of readmission, that’s a meaningful end result. Or, if our manufacturing clients can simulate their components digitally and use analytics to enhance productivity, that increases their efficiency.

Strategically Speaking

Why does data governance matter for today’s enterprises?

AM: How often have you heard advertisements from Exxon, Best Buy, and Amazon stating that they use data and analytics for competitive advantage? Can you think of organizations making these statements five years ago? Technology has truly enabled data to become an asset that’s vital for any organization’s growth. It allows businesses to manage their supply chain, understand buying behavior, create personalized marketing, impact people’s lives, or streamline operations. If properly managed, businesses can use it to create a tangible return on their investments.

Data governance ultimately allows you to monitor, understand, measure, and own your data assets. This will lead to organizations creating competitive advantage based on their data assets.

How does implementing data governance impact businesses?

AM: Data governance [involves managing] data, culture, process, and technology. On one hand, companies rely on technology, such as AI and MDM, automation, and mastering customer data. However, the fundamental process of data ownership requires cultural acceptance [from the organization].

For example, some organizations have relied on employees to compile dense spreadsheet databases that contain massive amounts of data. The process of creating them is time consuming and mundane, but it’s a familiar process that executives have come to expect of their reports. When working with clients on data governance, we design and build a centralized, modern data platform to house and self-service their data. Once established, it’s a shift for employees because they’re now tasked to focus more on data analytics rather than building the database. Overall, the change will improve our clients’ productivity, but it’s upending long-held employee expectations.

By incorporating organizational change management with data governance, we can prepare workforces for the future and improve effectiveness and efficiency. If we’re working with industry-specific data assets like healthcare or financial services, we can also integrate our thought leadership in those areas to influence the process.

“Intelligent automation is already present in our daily lives, so it’s changing individuals’ perception about the technology. However, unifying an enterprise and shifting the business perception about intelligent automation [for data] is imperative for success.”

Why do businesses need a data strategy?

AM: By next year, businesses strategically using data will realize $430 billion in productivity benefits compared to competitors that aren’t using data. This translates into untapped potential of available data that can advance business growth, which is why developing a data strategy can mobilize those assets. Companies such as Facebook, Google, Salesforce, and Exxon have already implemented a strategy to convert data to information to insights, which has effectively differentiated their firms as dominant players in the digital space.

Setting a strategy for how you use data is essential because the technologies involved are constantly evolving. For most industries, impactful solutions will incorporate some form of automation, such as machine learning, AI, bots, or some other innovation. Being adaptable to the shifting landscape will only improve the final solution and future-proof your organization.

Think Like a Chief Strategist

Tell us about a recent project you’ve tackled. How did we help the client achieve success?

AM: We recently began work with a large hospital to build an end-to-end Data and AI platform. This work supports the client’s objective to become more patient-centric. Ultimately, we hope to improve patient outcomes, physician interaction, and overall efficiency.

A digital transformation journey for any organization takes time, and this situation is no different. A few months ago, the client had nothing established as far as a modern data platform or supporting processes. In fact, multiple departments established their own analytics and attempted to make decisions using data silos. Now, a centralized data platform allows for self-service, collaboration, and cross-departmental insights into knowledge that wasn’t previously possible. Although the project isn’t yet finished, the client is already realizing some significant benefits.

What questions do you ask a client when developing a data strategy?

AM: The top five questions every client needs to ask of their enterprise:

1. What data do we have?
2. What data do we need to have?
3. How do we use our data today?
4. How do we want to use it in the future?
5. How do we want to access our data?

These questions define our approach to creating data governance solutions that meet clients’ specific goals. Beyond that, these questions guide any enterprise that seek any form of digital transformation – they must embrace the startup mentality from the beginning.

How can businesses take a strategic approach to their data?

AM: A data strategy enables organizations to make informed decisions based on their data insights. Every data strategy focuses on three areas to optimize business outcomes:

1. Identifying which data sets are available for analysis and – more importantly – which are not
2. Building a modern data platform to host existing and targeted data
3. Developing data governance to make intelligent decisions based on data that’s been collected

This process should not revolve around departmental silos within an organization. Instead, developing a data strategy should start at the executive level and involve stewards from different business units. A strategy with visibility across the organization can help prioritize goals by identifying shared pain points, strategic objectives, and situations where overlaps exist.

“Always have a data strategy aligned to your business outcome. Data without outcomes is like a business without goals. It can be exciting to grow quickly at first, but it’s not a sustainable approach.”

Beyond the World of Strategy

What are your interests or hobbies when you’re not wearing the Chief Strategist hat?

AM: My two sons, a nine-year-old and a three-year-old, keep me busy outside of work between their activities and spending quality time with them. I often joke that I’ve played cricket since I was born. It’s something that’s in my blood. My sons have also grown to love cricket, so we enjoy playing together. I also really enjoy boxing, which is my favorite outlet for fitness.

Additionally, I’m an avid vlogger and discuss topics pertaining to technology, data, and being a “Smarchitect,” a term I’m hoping to trademark.

A Smarchitect is a smart-architect who doesn’t limit him/herself to one specialty and chooses to wear multiple architect hats. Being able to switch from one discipline to another at any point during a solution process, Smarchitects can define an end-to-end solution that prioritizes the business outcome by being agnostic on technology or capabilities needed to implement it.

Learn more about each of our Chief Strategists by following this series. 

This week I, along with other thought leaders, had a chance to sit down and talk with Gary Schoch, HCL’s global GTM head for their newly acquired Digital Commerce platform (formerly IBM’s WebSphere Commerce). Gary discussed HCL’s perspective on the product and why HCL acquired the platform. He also spent time discussing the philosophy HCL is adopting while it invests heavily in developing the next iteration of what is now HCL Commerce. It was encouraging to hear a distinct and coherent message coming from HCL after so many months of silence while the acquisition closed.

Continuing to Deliver Excellence

It was interesting that a conversation about HCL and its acquisition really started by talking about IBM. But it quickly made sense when Gary outlined that, not only was HCL interested in acquiring a platform that is core to generating revenue for its customers, but also that IBM wanted to ensure that it believed the acquiring company would succeed and do right by the existing customer base. After all, these customers are, in many cases, still heavily committed to IBM technology, and at the same time, the level of its customer’s digital commerce success is still vastly important to IBM. This, combined with HCL’s partnership with IBM and HCL’s desire to bring its philosophy of “value beyond the contract,” makes the transfer of the platform’s stewardship to HCL seem like a natural fit. This was not IBM abandoning the platform. This was a thoughtful transition, and one that IBM believed would be in the best interest of its customers. HCL is excited to invest in what will be a strategic growth offering for its enterprise software division.

Room to Grow

This also means that with HCL, the platform is not beholden to IBM technology. It is free from having to provide a “completely blue” offering that aligns with a larger corporate directive. HCL Commerce is WebSphere Commerce, unchained. HCL’s intention for its Commerce platform to become more open and flexible is clear in its roadmap. It has a more integration-first focus and the freedom to partner with true best-in-breed technology, innovative thought leaders, and researchers. The market can expect to see more agility and innovation in the future for the platform and customers can expect more capabilities sooner through a more streamlined delivery model. Gary stated clearly, “Our goal is to deliver as fast as or faster than our customers.”

Focusing on the Customer

It was also enlightening to hear that HCL’s philosophy for the platform is centered on the importance of collaboration with customers. “Those digital commerce vendors who have listened to customers have grown their market share, while those who have not have suffered,” said Gary. Many digital commerce vendors in the marketplace are currently trying to differentiate themselves by investing in the next set of features they hope can generate demand and attention in the industry. In an effort to ensure that the investment HCL makes in the platform aligns with more than simple feature requests, HCL’s approach takes customer opinions and needs into account when deciding the direction of the platform. HCL wants to deliver value by providing capabilities that align with its customer’s digital roadmap. That’s why HCL has outlined plans to deliver value by being both forward-thinking for its customers and providing capabilities that align with where its customers want to take their business. This plan makes HCL a partner in their customers’ success. It allows HCL to provide a core platform with capabilities aligned with customer roadmaps, which in turn enables customers to focus on building differentiating capabilities and customer experiences. Gary said it most clearly when he stated, “My competitor is not a vendor. It’s my customer’s competitor.” That’s something every customer wants to hear.
I have seen HCL’s philosophy first hand as it meets with customers. HCL shares its roadmap openly with customers, favoring taking notes over making presentations and listening over speaking. There is a sense of excitement in the HCL team, and it’s easy to see that they are committed to the platform and the success of its customers. They understand that there are issues that need to be addressed and technical debt that must be resolved. They also understand that customers expect them to be thought leaders and help keep pace with the ever-changing digital commerce industry. Gary is challenging his team to be forward-thinking by asking questions like, “What will 5G mean for commerce?”, “What is the next machine learning technology we should be adopting?” and “When will AR/VR be the way customers engage?” Clients like to hear there is a longer-term plan full of innovation and thought leadership.
Gary has also stressed the importance of partners like Perficient in the future. Perficient is glad to be part of helping create what HCL Commerce will become in the future and deliver new value to clients. The digital commerce landscape is at an inflection point, and the platform decisions businesses make now will have a lasting impact on its success or failure. Perficient and HCL both understand this and know that a digital commerce platform is a mission-critical aspect of a client’s business. We look forward to continuing to be a trusted partner of HCL and for many HCL Commerce customers in the future.
Learn more about HCL’s acquisition of WebSphere Commerce.

Delivering seamless, consistent, and engaging experiences starts with a customer-centered digital strategy. This ongoing series explores the characteristics that make up a great digital strategy and how to deliver powerful brand moments that solidify customer loyalty and drive differentiation for your organization.

Innovation is not just about technology

As we work with clients, we find a lot of correlation (and often some confusion) between their digital, innovation, and customer experience strategies. Many think innovation relates directly to digital, but technology is only one part of the equation.
It’s true that many of today’s up and coming business models are tightly coupled with new or emerging technology. Uber is a great example. The experience it provides would not be possible without mobile and geolocation technology. However, when you look past the digital component, you can see that Uber is really built on a sharing economy business model. By connecting riders directly with drivers who own vehicles, the company has disrupted traditional transportation services and changed consumer behavior and expectations. ‘
Not every organization needs to be like Uber, but we view emerging business models as a digital essential because it’s important to know what emerging models are made of and how they can be adapted to fit your organization. It also helps to understand and recognize a few of the emerging models prominent today.

What business models are emerging right now?

Sharing Economy and Fractional Ownership

Sharing economy and fractional ownership function differently, but both answer the growing consumer desire to bypass traditional ownership and only consume and pay for what’s actually needed. For example, some consumers have done the math and determined that if they can supplement walking to work with a ride-hailing service, then they can avoid the burden of purchasing, insuring, and maintaining their own vehicle.
Sharing or “access” economies entail connecting to another private individual, usually through a mobile app or website run by an intermediary organization, to gain temporary access to property, such as a car or living space, owned by that person. This is Uber, Airbnb, Neighbor, Rover, and other apps you’re using to connect with a trusted stranger in order to accomplish a task. Sharing economy-powered organizations have been shaking things up for a while now, and are continuing to grow in popularity and expand across industries.
Fractional ownership also enables individuals to save money by only paying for what they need, but (as the name implies) they share ownership of a property either with other individuals or with an organization. Think time-share but without the annoying pitch. For example, I recently spoke with a mortgage company that offers the option to concurrently rent and have a mortgage on a piece of property. Non-traditional options like this provide flexibility and customization for consumers and can have applications across industries, including other big-ticket items such as cars, vacation properties, and even private jets.

Data Monetization

I’ve already talked about Uber, but the ride-hailing pioneer provides a great example of expanding its business by monetizing its proprietary data to become profitable.
Every time someone uses Uber, which happens about 14 million times per day, Uber collects data about the rider, the driver, the pick-up and drop-off locations, traffic conditions, and more. With 10 billion individual trips under its belt (and counting), Uber has collected a lot of data, and it makes business sense that the company would capitalize on that asset by selling anonymized data to third parties, or, more importantly, use that data to provide value-added interpretations and insights based on the resulting data sets.
Uber’s not the only company selling the data it collects on users – not by a long shot. The big question, of course, is whether these companies can do so while also respecting and protecting users’ (and drivers’, in Uber’s case) data. As privacy regulations like GDPR and the California Privacy Protection Act roll into place, companies must prioritize ethical treatment of data or risk legal penalties and lost customer trust.

Direct-to-Consumer

Direct-to-consumer sales has been around for quite a while, but this business model has grown exponentially through the consumerization of the internet and the advent of eCommerce. This model is influencing many organizations outside of traditional consumer goods, particularly with B2B brands that are connecting directly with their end users and owning more of the customer experience surrounding their product.

Online Only to Brick and Mortar

Just when the world was predicting the end of traditional brick-and-mortar stores, previously digital-only companies like Amazon and Warby Parker began investing in physical locations. Why is that? Roughly 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. That’s a lot of customers, really close together – a lot of customers who expect two-day shipping, easy returns, and for their favorite brands to make their lives easier.
Online-only brands also want to keep up with those expectations. This creates the need to have a strong distribution infrastructure in place, which might mean experimenting with localized experience centers like showrooms and return drop-off points.

Source: Kohl’s

Some brands partner with other organizations to fill this gap. Kohl’s, for example, recently announced that all of its brick-and-mortar stores nationwide would start accepting Amazon returns. This move will likely prove successful for both companies as Amazon customers enjoy returning items without the hassle and cost of shipping. And, Kohl’s benefits from the foot traffic those returns bring into its stores.

Inventory-Free Retail

As I just mentioned, many retailers recognize that their physical footprints provide a competitive advantage in an industry where everyone has an eCommerce site. Showrooming has been a trend in retail for several years, but some companies are experimenting further on the concept by completely removing inventory from the equation.
Nordstrom provided a perfect example of inventory-free retail in 2017 when it opened its first Nordstrom Local concept store. The purpose is to provide everything a customer could want from an in-store experience – except inventory, which they can purchase online. These service-oriented locations are much smaller than traditional Nordstrom department stores and serve as pick-up and drop-off points for online purchases and returns, personal styling and tailoring hubs, and venues for public and loyalty program member events.
The fact that Nordstrom recently announced the expansion of the Nordstrom Local footprint – adding two New York City locations to the three existing Los Angeles locations – shows that the company sees value in this new avenue of customer experience. Nordstrom stated that the expansion is, “part of its growth strategy and ongoing commitment to better serve customers no matter when, where, or how they shop.”

Subscription Services in New Sectors

Subscription services are everywhere – from streaming services replacing our cable TV to the monthly box of treats and toys for our dogs. Brands across the consumer goods sector (and consumables) are constantly looking for ways to turn a customer’s semi-frequent purchase or need into a committed relationship with a steady revenue stream. This trend is expanding into other areas of daily life.
In healthcare, for example, the concierge medicine model is becoming increasingly popular among physicians and patients. If an individual doesn’t want to deal with the burden of finding a doctor and scheduling appointments, they can subscribe and have those administrative tasks taken care of for them. As consumers see the benefit and convenience of outsourcing tedious tasks like scheduling medical appointments, service-focused subscriptions will become increasingly prevalent.

In the end, it’s about solving problems

These new business models have a common theme: invest in experiences and relationships centered around solving customers’ problems, rather than selling products or services.
While Uber strives to be the “Amazon of Transportation,” automotive manufacturers like Ford and Toyota are also expanding the scope of their services. They want to encompass the entire transportation experience – shopping, purchasing, financing, maintenance, repeat – and transition from manufacturers to mobility organizations. For example, Ford equips fleet vehicles with telematics capabilities and can provide purchasing organizations with data-driven insights on fleet activity and performance, which positions it as a solutions partner instead of just a manufacturer.
We’re seeing the same trend in telecom and utilities organizations. Rather than just selling phones and wireless service, AT&T wants to be customers’ partner in communication, connecting them with friends, family, work, and the rest of the world. Beyond just billing customers for monthly usage and receiving calls during outages, utilities companies want to help customers monitor their energy usage, find the right smart appliances, implement green energy practices, and accomplish other energy-savings goals.

So, what should you be doing about it?

Know your customers

As I explained earlier, be aware of what other organizations are doing, both within and outside your industry, and recognize how they may be impacting your customers’ expectations. Customer wants, needs, and behavior change all the time, and I’m often surprised how many companies don’t continually update their understanding of their audience. If you don’t understand your customers, you’re not going to be able to improve their experiences.

Look for ways to build on what you have

As you’re improving and expanding your digital experience and capabilities, look for ways to make the most out of the tools you have. Digitizing any interaction fundamentally creates a new source of data you can use to improve your customer experience and potentially expand into a new business model.

For example, if you’re using analytics to monitor what people are looking at on your website, maybe you can extend that to mobile. Now you can see where people are when searching for your products. Are they in your stores? Are they at a stadium? Are they tailgating out of town? Can we connect them with other fans and create a fan experience?

Adopt a design thinking approach

We love the phrase “Think big. Start small. Move fast.” If you want to innovate safely but also quickly, you need to adopt a Design Thinking approach. This means starting with an open mind and working in small, experimentally based phases in iterations.
This methodology allows you to try something out with a small audience, test, learn, and repeat until the best version of your new idea is ready. It also helps you recognize when an idea is just not going to work, which is an important part of the process. It’s okay to throw out a bad idea as long as you’re learning from it.

Balance your innovation portfolio

There may be times when you feel you need to dive into a new business model, maintain what you’re already doing, and play catch-up all at once. You’ll never have enough time or money to do everything you want, so developing a balanced innovation portfolio is a crucial step to narrow your focus.
We use an approach called Now/New/Next, which helps companies develop that balanced portfolio. In the Now/New/Next model, we organize the client’s experiences and capabilities into six categories across the spectrum of innovation, ranging from sustaining to disruptive. We can then define a strategic roadmap of short and long-term actions that will help the client expand and evolve, while also fortifying its strength areas.
Don’t get stuck in the trap of believing your organization is too conservative or too invested in your current strategy to change or leverage an emerging business model. There is always opportunity to improve your organization and the best way to start is to be open to new ideas.

Creating stand-out digital customer experiences that attract, engage, and retain customers is a tall order. Perhaps you’ve already done some of the foundational work, and you need help with the next step.
When working with clients, we help make sure you know your customers and understand their journeys. Through design-thinking tools, industry research, and pragmatic ideation to execute from end-to-end, you will have what it takes to deliver experiences that surprise and delight your customers.

Ready to get started with your digital strategy? Dive in for more resources.

Every company wants to create “lifetime” customers, which is the very essence of customer loyalty. Likewise, everyone has opinions on how to create customer loyalty. Including delivering a great customer experience, building a great digital experience, maintaining a loyalty program, providing comprehensive digital self service, and on and on.
When you hear about a digital transformation effort, you might associate that with creating a great digital customer experience that leads to a lifetime, loyal customer. Or you might hear that digital transformation is all about driving growth by becoming more agile and more responsive to customers. A recent study by Altimeter shows that over half the companies interviewed said their digital transformation goal was to “integrate all social, mobile, web, commerce, service efforts and investments to deliver an integrated, frictionless, and omnichannel customer experience”.

Frictionless Digital = Customer Loyalty?

Naturally, an integrated, frictionless digital customer experience should lead to more loyal customers. Is this really true?
According to Forrester’s Customer Experience research, presented at their recent Customer Experience Conference, the digital aspects of customer experience have now entered “table stakes” mode. Digital is a very important part of the overall customer experience picture, but digital is no longer the driver of customer loyalty. As with many other table stakes capabilities, digital done right is the minimum expectation for customers. We expect a company we deal with to have great digital experiences. We  expect their competitors will also have great digital experiences. So switching loyalty to a company with a great digital experience is no longer a driving factor for modern consumers.
But, as with all table stakes, when your digital experience is bad or doesn’t meet expectations, it becomes a detractor for your brand that will negatively affect customer loyalty.

So what drives customer loyalty?

Forrester’s data says that Customer Service is the number one factor driving loyalty. It also shows that customer service agents correctly answering consumer questions is a key element of customer service. Customers always place higher value on the ability to get their problems solved by talking with someone.

Over the past 20 years, many companies have put great effort to “digitizing” customer service. Whether that’s by providing digital self service options or automating the answering systems, the goal has always been to reduce the cost of live customer service or improving the it’s efficiency.
Forrester’s CX research shows that this is now the wrong approach. Or maybe, we need to re-approach the idea of live customer service. In light of all the digitization that we’ve implemented over the years.

How can you re-implement live customer service on limited budgets?

Combining both physical and digital approaches leads to the best solutions. Forrester cited Whole Foods as an example. In stores that addressed  physical aspects of customer service, they had improvements in CX scores by 3.6 points, which is a lot. The stores that combined physical and digital approaches saw their CX index went up by 6 points, almost double.

So what do you need to do to improve customer loyalty?

• First, you absolutely have to digitally transform your business. Great digital experiences are now required and expected. If you don’t get your digital capabilities competitive, your customer will see that as a negative.
• Second, become innovative around live customer service. You should provide a way to provide answers for the mundane questions and free agents up for the tougher problems. Here AI can be a great help to screen a customer’s live call for common problems and provide the right solutions or move quickly to a live agent.
• Third, find ways to make your agents have frictionless, integrated experiences. Frustrated agents are not going to be as customer focused as happy agents. More and more research is pointing to employee experience as a critical piece of delivering great customer experiences.

When news broke that HCL had acquired several IBM products, including the infamous WebSphere Commerce, many were left wondering how the platform would change. However, the general focus of WebSphere Commerce Version 9 (V9) is not set to shift, but rather, HCL plans to enhance the features of V9 to enable commerce players to enhance digital channels and modernize eCommerce platforms faster and more efficiently.
For those who have yet to upgrade to V9, the time is now. New capabilities that will roll out once the acquisition is complete are crucial to delivering an elevated experience for customers and streamlining digital efforts. For retailers who are ready to move to V9, there are three key areas to evaluate and consider in your business.

1. Business and Technical Knowledge

Understand your business and identify where the gaps in content and technology lie. Most retailers know their business and their customers. They know who their target audience is and what they want. However, retailers don’t have the best data on the touchpoints with their customers, making it difficult for them to know how to market more effectively. There is a lot of competition in retail, and standing apart from the crowd can be challenging. Retailers often struggle with finding a way to create timely content quickly and consistently replace old content.
For instance, retailers that offer a variety of promotions during the holiday season need a way to create content advertising their offers and replace outdated digital ads daily. Many retailers struggle with processes like this, as the workflow and systems they push content through aren’t optimized for constant change. Retailers tend to be technically savvy and know that they need to provide these types of experiences, but don’t always know or have access to the technology to do so.

2. Business Strategy and Readiness

Once retailers identify their content gaps and agility deficiencies, they can move on to evaluating their business strategy. Generally speaking, retailers have well-defined business strategies. The problem lies in their readiness to change and evolve. Many retailers are bound by what they’ve done in the past, and struggle to truly transform themselves to be successful, timely, and innovative enough to be a differentiator in their industry and rise above the competition.
Once the strategy is clearly defined, retailers must tackle their readiness gaps. Think about what internal transformations need to take place. As many retailers have moved to eCommerce over the past decade, it’s not uncommon that there are just a few capabilities and tools missing from the technology stack that was implemented. Other possible issues could be that the system was not implemented properly initially, or that the platform is so antiquated that it creates a bottleneck in the stack as a whole. Adding to the technology stack, fixing initial implementation issues, and upgrading outdated systems will allow retailers to be more agile.
Though these seem like simple fixes, retailers often find that the systems causing the bottleneck are the ones that are the most fundamental to their operations. Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or outdated product information management (PIM) solutions can become significant barriers in expanding digitally as they are almost impossible to replace all at once while continuing business operations. It’s wise to build a plan to phase in or phase out technology rather than doing it all at once, both from an operations standpoint as well as for your IT team.

3. Existing Platform Footprint and Compatibility

Retailers tend to be better positioned than B2B entities because they usually aren’t operating on such antiquated platforms. Rather, they’ve been forced to evolve as the internet has advanced. While new implementations and upgrades may be necessary, retailers are now faced with keeping up with the experiential shift that’s occurring in the marketplace. There is a paradigm shift in technology so even if a retailer has up-to-date platforms and systems, there are new initiatives that must be addressed and incorporated in their stack.
Advanced technology such as headless commerce, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), voice assistance, and more are all creeping into the realm of customer experience. If retailers fail to provide experiences that incorporate new technologies such as these where necessary, they will be doing their customers a disservice and falling behind competitors who are making these shifts.
Beyond those experiences a retailer can provide directly to the consumer, there are now many third-party platforms where retailers can interact. Opportunities for application programming interface (API) connections can empower retailers to enable interactions even though they aren’t the author of that touchpoint. Examples include external marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon, social media platforms like Pinterest or Instagram, applications that are built to work on devices like smartwatches, and voice assistants such as Alexa and Google.
Creating those microservice interactions is important to not only expanding the touchpoints where you can connect with your customers, but also to improving the customer experience. Retailers are starting to embrace the mindset that they have both a compelling experience that they own and operate for touchpoints they control, as well as the ability to provide a superior integration for touchpoints they don’t control.
WebSphere Commerce V9 is an amazing opportunity for retailers to improve their agility and make more meaningful connections in commerce. You need to both understand and evaluate your current business and technical knowledge, and understand where your readiness deficits are. You need to know your tech stack and existing platforms inside and out, while understanding where improvements can be made and how your platforms will be affected by an upgrade. Strategically shifting to adopt new eCommerce trends and market more efficiently will develop stronger touchpoints and relationships with loyal customers in the long run.
To learn more about the process and preparations required before migrating, download our guide on Upgrading to WebSphere Commerce V9.

You’ve probably been reading and hearing about Personalization, since it garners over 50% popularity on Google Trends. It seems everyone is trying to understand it and figure out how to use it. We have many posts on our blog about the topic, including Essentials for your Digital Strategy-Smart Personalization and The Key Differences Between B2B and B2C Personalization. We often hear “personalization is needed for great customer experiences.”  Others say that “personalization leads to greater conversion rates.” Still others claim that “personalization promotes customer loyalty.” Of course we think all of those statements are true.
Rather than write again about the importance of personalization, I’d like to explore how marketers actually use personalization. Evergage recently published a report aptly named “2019 Trends in Personalization Report”, where they surveyed 314 marketing people to understand what’s going on with personalization.

Key Trends

Here are some key findings in their report:

• 78% of the marketers personalize eMails, which is good.
• 75% of the marketers personalized emails by including first and last name. To me this is an easy form of personalization, that while necessary, doesn’t lead to that much impact.  Only 56% tailored emails based on audience segments and only 21% personalized messaging at the individual level. This may be a reason that only 18% of marketers are very confident (15%) or extremely confident (3%) in their strategies. In addition, only 16% of marketers are very or extremely satisfied with the level of personalization in their efforts.
• Other channels for personalization include: Website 58%, In Person 42%, Online Ads 35%, Mobile app 28%.
• B2B companies are using personalization to drive customer experience at a higher rate than B2C. 89% of B2B marketers use personalization for better customer experiences, while 84% of B2C did the same.
• Marketers are finding data more available for personalization. In 2018, 45% of marketers felt their data was sufficient. In 2019 that number jumped to 55%.
• What parts of the message do marketers personalize?
  • In-line content (adding or inserting content):  50%
  • Banners: 47%
  • Call-out messages: 38%
  • Pop-ups: 31%
  • In page edits (modifying or replacing existing content): 30%
• Various aspects of an overall experience can be personalized separately. Here are some major parts of the experience that marketers personalize:
  • Email content: 73%
  • Home page: 49%
  • Landing pages: 41%
  • Interior pages: 36%
  • Online ads: 30%
  • Product detail pages: 23%
  • Search: 19%
• Marketers are using machine learning to personalize 50% more in 2019 (40%) vs 2018 (26%). Marketers are also more satisfied with machine learning approaches to personalization (30% ML vs 19% rules based).
• Rules-based targeted still dominates at 68% and has stayed steady year to year.

The Evergage report includes more information than I could outline in this post.

With HCL’s acquisition of several IBM products, including Websphere Commerce, many are wondering how those platforms will be affected. HCL has asserted that they are not setting out to change the strategic direction of WebSphere Commerce, but rather they aspire to add to it. This acquisition isn’t going to fundamentally change the architectural direction that Websphere Commerce Version 9 (V9) introduces, but rather it will expand upon it to deliver more features, faster.
Version 9 is more than a typical software update, it is a refresh of the platform that has evolved over the past 20 years. It’s a fresh look on how eCommerce systems are developed, deployed, and maintained. When upgrading your B2B eCommerce platform to WebSphere Commerce V9, there are three key areas that require evaluation.

1. Business and Technical Knowledge

Start by understanding your current business and technology environment. It’s important to maintain a deep knowledge of the latest best practices for your industry. In this case, B2B organizations are seeing a shift in the digital and technology expectations of their customers.
The modern buyer is no longer exclusively using a telephone to place orders or a desktop to do research. Mobile devices are changing the way business is being conducted, and this new model is forcing many B2B organizations to evaluate their strategies and be more proactive in their digital evolution. Another trend that B2B businesses are observing is minimizing their distribution network. More and more, these businesses are wanting to directly reach their end consumer rather than relying solely on the middlemen and distributors to survive.
In addition, B2B best practices are transitioning to emphasize differentiated experiences. Providing great digital commerce experiences is becoming the rule rather than the exception, and B2B organizations are recognizing the need to provide experiences that are unique rather than similar to the competition. If you and your competitors are all operating on the same systems with the same capabilities, how can you possibly create an experience that stands out? Knowing what capabilities you require to do that is crucial when upgrading. Even though B2B businesses aren’t selling directly to their customers, it’s still important to create a more compelling value proposition than their competitors have.

2. Business Strategy and Readiness

Once you have clearly identified the gaps in your knowledge and determined areas that require attention, you need to assess your B2B business’ ability and readiness to adopt a new system. Take a look at your capacity across marketing, merchandising, digital content, branding, and other critical aspects. You should assess the maturity of your customer experience, branding, digital marketing, and content creation, as well as your ability to react to change and growth.
Historically, B2B organizations lack a sense of urgency when it comes to evolving technology. As a result, they often start to feel pressure to evolve their digital experiences only when those who are more technically enabled arrive on the scene. But adopting a mobile-centric strategy or expanding your selling channels beyond your distribution network will only enable you to catch up when you’re already falling behind your competition. It’s far more effective to use your eCommerce platform to stay ahead of these trends and know where your shortcomings are.
Another common issue B2B businesses face when evolving their eCommerce strategy and platform is a lack of marketing experience. Due to their maturity, many B2B entities have failed to dig deep into the world of marketing and content creation. Knowing how to effectively create content, manage it, and perform other functions such as automating campaigns is an area that V9 can help with.

3. Existing Platform Footprint and Compatibility

As digital commerce platforms evolve to meet the needs of businesses and the digital commerce landscape, it’s imperative that B2B organizations understand how to best embrace the newest iterations of these platforms. Know how the existing and mature platform has served your business over the years.
Many B2B entities that have implemented the WebSphere Commerce platform have failed to stay up to date on the latest features, fixes, and capabilities as IBM rolled them out. These systems have been built, deployed on the back-end, and left to run for years without continual maintenance and upgrades. A significant number of retrofit migrations, outdated paradigms, obsolete code, and archaic processes (aka, “technical debt”) have made these systems more of a burden to these businesses and their budgets than a resource.
The problem arises when failure to make these enhancements comes to a head. Billions of dollars in revenue are flowing through these systems and all of a sudden, one day it’s announced that the current system version is progressing to end of life and will no longer be a supported platform. At this point, upgrading is no longer a choice, but rather a requirement. Changing, replacing, or upgrading a system is not a process for the faint of heart. When billions of dollars in revenue stream are flowing through this system, it’s risky to implement changes without proper technical knowledge and strategic planning. Those B2B businesses that haven’t upgraded their WebSphere Commerce platform for an extended period of time will also likely face issues when it comes to legacy hardware and data storage migration moving to the cloud.
WebSphere Commerce V9 is an exceptional opportunity for B2B businesses to assess their technical debt and plans to eliminate such debt, all the while embracing more modern and agile solutions. You need to assess your current business and technical knowledge, and understand how your business strategy and readiness plays into your upgrade plan. You must know your existing platform and what areas will be affected by your upgrade. While you need to consider the state of your existing solution before your migration, it’s also important to note the benefits that this type of migration will provide. The features on the new V9 architecture will change the way you approach eCommerce, and will ultimately deliver a better, faster, and more dynamic customer experience.
To learn more about the process and preparations required before migrating, download our guide on Upgrading to WebSphere Commerce V9.

What It’s Like Working at Perficient

Have you ever gotten off a team conference call and felt so powerful and inspired you were convinced your team could conquer the world?

It feels good, right?

Admittedly, while not every single call is like that (and a second cup of coffee by the declarer of that first sentence didn’t hurt), on the Salesforce team at Perficient, many are actually that good.

As we grow our team, it is important for us to share that along with the hard work, there is an incredible camaraderie that fosters the inspiration and motivation that allows us to bring the best possible solutions and noteworthy work to our clients.

We polled a couple of the Salesforce team members across Perficient to share why they like being part of this team.

David Wickland, Solution Architect, UI/UX Designer

Before Perficient, my role was primarily focused on the UI/UX side of delivery and services. Now, after working with such a talented and helpful team, I have learned so much about the declarative and business analysis side of the consulting practice. The opportunity to help in delivering big logo projects such as AMEX, GoPro, Nokia, Trend Micro, and OpenTable in incredible. Plus, I’m honored by the recognition our projects have received from Salesforce, social media, and the entire cloud ecosystem.

I work at Perficient because of the incredible opportunity to learn while on the job, flexible schedule, and diverse client portfolio. The best part about my job at Perficient is working with such a well-rounded and collaborative team who, not only helps resolve seemingly insurmountable issues, but also fosters a fun and innovative culture.

See David’s articles here

Andrew Smith, Solution Architect, UI/UX Designer

Before I started Perficient, I didn’t have a great team with a vast array of knowledge to tap into to help myself learn or help create successful products. I’m the proudest when my coworkers are happy to show off the work I’ve created, and that they’ve helped me create. By far the best part is the people I work with. Not only on a practical level (their abilities fill in the gaps in my knowledge, etc.), but their personal support and partnership help make every day that much better!

See Andrew’s articles here

Join the Perficient Team

Do you think you would like to be a part of our team? As we grow, so do the opportunities to work with us. Whether you are a recent graduate or a seasoned professional, we have careers at all levels open and in development.

READY TO GROW YOUR CAREER?

At Perficient, we continually look for ways to champion and challenge our talented workforce with interesting projects for high-profile clients, encourage personal and professional growth through training and mentoring, and celebrate our people-oriented culture and the innovative ways they serve Perficient and the community.

Learn more about what it’s like to work at Perficient at our Careers page. 

Go inside Life at Perficient and connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.