I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that touch customers.

In talking with nearly 30 organizations, consulting companies, and solution vendors, I found that instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations are embracing business process methodologies — supported by process-centric IT platforms. They are striving to drive rapid process change, increased business engagement in IT projects, and achieve dramatic improvements in worker productivity.

In my new report, I define more than 30 best practices that organizations can use to support their transition to process-centric customer CRM. Here are few of them:

Software Is Not Code; It Creates Experiences

Ultimately, customers don't judge you based on how well you gather business requirements, choose development technologies, manage projects, or march through the development process — they judge you based on how they feel before, during, and after they use your software. This is the digital experience. If you get the customer experience wrong, then nothing else matters. And expectation inflation is sky-high thanks to the Apple-led smartphone revolution. To succeed in the new age of digital experience, application development professionals must collaborate with their business partners and customers to create experiences that customers love. You need a new approach represented by these five axioms:

1. Software is not code; it creates experience.
2. Development teams are not coders; they are experience creators.
3. Technical talent is table stakes; great developers must be design and domain experts.
4. Process is bankrupt without design; you get what you design, so you had better get the design right.
5. Software is a creative endeavor, not an industrial process like building automobiles. Structure your methodology to empower your creative talent.

Doable? Definitely. Forrester clients can read the full report to learn how: Digital Experience Strategy: Follow These Three Mega Rules To Beat The Competition In 2012.

Hi all,

My colleague and friend Mike Gualtieri wrote a really interesting blog the other day titled "Agile Software Is A Cop-Out; Here's What's Next." While I am not going to discuss the great conclusions and "next practices" of software (SW) development Mike suggests in that blog, I do want to focus on the assumption he makes about using working SW as a measurement of Agile.

I am currently researching that area and investigating how organizations actually measure the value of Agile SW development (business and IT value). And I am finding that, while organizations aim to deliver working SW, they also define value metrics to measure progress and much more:

• Cycle time (e.g., from concept to production);
• Business value (from number of times a feature is used by clients to impact on sales revenue, etc.);
• Productivity metrics (such as burndown velocity, number of features deployed versus estimated); and last but not least
• Quality metrics (such as defects per sprint/release, etc.).

Most Forrester readers certainly understand the importance of empowering their employees to contend with highly informed and increasingly demanding customers. But I’m often asked just how to overcome the process and data integrity challenges of apps or services that empower employees and/or drive continuity of experience for consumers across channels. With the rise of mobile as well as web and call center interactions and with a proliferation of new tools for managing distributed processes and data, most application development and delivery professionals as well as their business process and applications colleagues have to absorb all the arguments before they make decisions that could be critical to their firms’ futures – to say nothing of their own careers.

One pioneer whom I interviewed was immensely proud of his lightning rollout of a guerilla app to support his firm’s front office in advising clients on complex product choices. I asked him about future plans and sheepishly he admitted they would be starting again from scratch because the guerilla app was unable to leverage enterprise services exposing critical data about product offerings. He remarked ruefully that sometimes you do have to follow the IT standards “yellow brick road” rather than just head for the hills, but wouldn’t it be great to have the best of both worlds, with both agile deployment and full advantage taken of enterprise assets and data?

If you need a deeper understanding of the issues and options, then I’d like to invite you to join us at Forrester's Application Development & Delivery Forum, where my colleague Clay Richardson and I will discuss in practical terms how to deliver integrated experiences across multiple touchpoints.