The Agile Enterprise: Automation and Workflow
Agility, flexibility and adaptability are all aspirational traits for a "modern" business. They are, in part at least, the intended outcomes from digital transformation. They are however, a very difficult and complex set of capabilities to achieve. Some of that difficulty is cultural of course, in general people resist change. Beyond the cultural though, getting underlying technologies that enable the ability to be agile, flexible and adapt to changing market conditions is a challenge for most businesses (and systems). Many business technology systems in use today are still built in ways that inhibit the ability too rapidly adapt business strategy and operations to changing market conditions. System constraints often create impediments to a successful transformation.
Building the Best Digital Experiences
With the rapid move online for businesses and consumers over the past 18+ months of the pandemic, "digital experience" has surfaced as one of the most critical factors for business success. Digital experience (DX) is a broad term and can apply to many aspects of managing a business' online presence. In the broadest sense DX encompasses employee or workforce experience (EX), customer experience (CX) and depending on the business, partner experience as well as any other stakeholder interactions. You could also package all that up as user experience (UX), which covers all online business interactions. Cloud communications platforms, automation, intelligent virtual assistants, and any systems that deliver end-to-end business processes are all a part of delivering the desired UX.
Why Context Matters in Software Selection
Analyst firms love to produce reports that compare technology solutions, businesses love to use those reports to support software selection and software suppliers in general love to hate them. Well, maybe that's too harsh, suppliers actually hate the process and only love the reports when it makes them look better than competitors. As a solution buyer, what do these comparison reports really tell you?
A Digital First Strategy
The behaviors and expectations of customers changed to meet the changing conditions of the past 18+ months. Those behaviors are, in my opinion, irrevocably different. That means that in this aspect anyway, you have to ensure the new workflows, processes and employee behaviors put in place during the pandemic response continue to be improved and remain in place. Intentional digital transformation projects historically proved themselves as complex, difficult and often did not deliver the intended results. According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study from October 2020, 70% of digital transformation projects fall short of their objectives. BCG also found that digital leaders see earnings growth of 1.8 times higher than digital laggards. There are a lot of reasons from a customer and business perspective then, to assess your progress and work to improve all the changes you've already implemented. From a workforce perspective the transformation efforts need to continue as well, no matter what direction your post pandemic remote work policies take.
Delivering a "Good" Subscriber Experience
I've written quite a bit about subscriber experience already, so I won't go back through the definition. If you want to read more background you can check out this post I wrote for subscription management supplier Zuora. I will focus more on the why and how in this post. It may seem obvious, but providing a good subscriber experience has many benefits to your company. What does providing a good subscriber experience do for your business?
Why I Broke Up with Evernote After 13 Years
As subscription business models continue to expand I believe it’s time to pay more attention to the subscriber’s experience. Buyer behavior has changed and continues to evolve, but one of the consistent areas that buyers look for is advice on purchase decisions from peers. Since you as a subscription business don’t control that peer channel at all, you have to think through how you can try to leverage that influence channel. A successful subscription business survives long term on renewals, not just new business. Create experiences that encourage customers to advocate for you, or at least have a positive opinion of your brand. Or, said another way, the way you treat your subscribers has a direct impact on your business, positive or negative.
Walmart Chases Amazon...again
The retail business, especially in the world of massive eCommerce and brick and mortar giants, is hard. Margins are thin and competing on price, in addition to selection and convenience, makes growing those margins a challenge. In fact, it's not really any easier for the giants to grow margins either. Amazon's most profitable business isn't retail, it's technology. Building the world's largest eCommerce site required cloud based commerce and supply chain services that did not exist at the time Amazon was scaling, so they built them.
Digital Experiences: Cloud Communication
Most communication tools and access to channels show up in the business’ existing business applications like customer service, marketing automation, etc. The problem with that though, is that in general the communications are siloed to the specific function of the application and can’t be extended across the business. Silo’ed applications with silo’ed commutation capabilities hinder or prevent consistent messaging, consistent channel availability and internal collaboration around a specific issue. The same is true of single communication channel tools as well. When it comes to communications with customers, silos are inherently “bad”.
AI Enabled Analytics? - Zoho Announces New Version of Its BI Platform
Zoho has provided a self-serve analytics solution since 2009, making incremental improvements and enhancements along the way. Yesterday they announced a new version of the BI platform that adds some significant new and enhanced capabilities. The platform is made up of four elements:
Self-Serve data preparation and management
Augmented analytics
Data stories
Marketplace apps
Digital Experiences: 3D eCommerce
The intersection of two hot technologies is creating an exciting new category of solution and experience for online shoppers (which after nearly 18 months of Covid lockdown is a great percentage of the population, in the developed world anyway). Both trends, 3D modeling and augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR), have been around for some time. 3D modeling is used across product design, architecture, engineering and construction, building management, game design and animation very successfully. AR is seeing a broad range of business applications in warehouse management / logistics and other areas. VR is somewhat less widely used, mostly seen in video gaming, although other applications are starting to emerge as well.
Agile Software Implementations
Complex software implementations have always been a challenge for most businesses. The systems are complicated, they touch people, processes and other systems across the company and have a low rate of success. There are many reports published on implementation failure rates, for example the 2020 Standish Group Chaos Report shows only 31% of the studied projects were successful, while 50% were challenged and 19% outright failed. This is not a new topic, the low success rates have plagued implementations for years. The numbers do seem to be improving though. One of the reasons for that improvement is the growing use of agile methodologies for complex implementations.
Finding the "Right" Digital Solutions
Last year businesses realized that digital transformation wasn’t just a tech industry buzzword but something necessary for them to rapidly respond to the growing Covid-19 crisis. For companies that could do business with a remote workforce, getting the tools, systems and processes in place to enable work from home, eCommerce and digital customer connections was chaos, at least for those that were not already properly outfitted. Looking back now, it's easy to spot three distinct phases of the transformation. Phase one was basically reactionary, get anything in place that will keep the business operating, particularly focused on the newly remote workforce and in communicating with customers and prospects. Phase two was focused on eCommerce (for businesses that had that opportunity), cleanup of work processes and tools, and a growing concern over digital experiences for customers. Phase three, which seems to have started late last year, is broader, and focused on optimizing tools, processes and experiences. This phase will likely continue for the next 18-24 months as workforce policies and new ways to be competitive are explored and implemented.
Back to the office?
Fifteen months and a pandemic later and the US economy is reopening to varying degrees. The pandemic isn’t over though, and the next few months will be critical in finally getting to the point that it is controllable around the world. In a global economy no country stands alone, and as long as there are out of control hot spots there’s risk for us all. This is particularly true as more variants of the virus emerge. The point of course, is that the schedule and scope of recovery is still relatively fluid.
Digital Innovation
Digital innovation is the differentiator in the post-pandemic economy. For many years in the tech community we have talked about something called “digital transformation” (DX) or as some call it, the fourth industrial revolution. At its simplest the concept is about shifting your business to use new digital technologies and strategies to modernize business models, business strategies, business operations, customer experience, and workforce experience. On one hand there are disruptive companies that emerged over the past 10+ years as “digital native”, having built their business strategy, model and operations from the ground up on digital platforms. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Stripe, Robinhood and Doordash created a new business opportunity by melding a digital platform with a business platform to solve problems and deliver product/service in a novel way. But the digital natives, as disruptive as they are, are only a tiny part of the business landscape.