Application development and delivery (AD&D) groups must establish technical services and tools to enable marketing and business groups to deliver and optimize web and mobile customer experiences. But today, we’re falling well short of our goal. Forrester data reveals that 51% of marketing leaders believe that technology management groups don’t accelerate their path to success.

To help AD&D pros mature and better serve marketing, eBusiness, and other lines of business responsible for delivering customer experience, Forrester created a digital experience delivery maturity model based on interviews with senior AD&D leaders over the past 24 months. We found that success was tied to maturity not just in solutions deployed or development methodologies. Instead, success and maturity was based on four fundamental categories, many of which are technology agnostic:

  • Strategic planning. Digital experience delivery maturity is largely based on how well they have strategized, planned, and executed their digital experience delivery programs. This dimension will evolve from project-based work to a more comprehensive strategy that spans business, marketing, and technical teams.
  • People. Organizational support is a critical component to success for growing internal expertise and creating digital experience teams that are responsive to business needs. This isn't just limited to who you've hired to be on the team. Instead, people issues focus more broadly on organizational issues like organizational structure (e.g. do your developers sit in marketing? Within technology management?), collaboration, shared values, and services partner strategy.
  • Process. Effective digital experience delivery programs have flexible, yet defined, processes that guide creation, management, and delivery of digitally-enabled experiences. For AD&D pros in particular, this dimension describes areas such as governance and change management, as well as development methodologies.
  • Technology. Technology solutions and tools play an important role in managing, delivering, measuring, and optimizing digital customer experiences and the associated business processes. How your organization sources and integrates these platforms against reference architecture will determine success or failure of your organization. Organizations we spoke with that did not do this were riddled with mountains of technical debt.

If you’re a Forrester client, you can access our maturity model here and plot your results onto our five stages of maturity: rookies, sophomores, rising stars, veterans, and coaches. We’ve also provided advice on ways in which to move up from one phase of maturity to the next. In the meantime, if you have any advice or best practices on how your organization has matured its digital experience delivery capabilities, please leave a comment below.