Your customers have been dazzled by the customer experiences they see from firms like Google or Apple. How are you going to keep up? Do you have the right IT culture and people in place to deliver on this new imperative? Are your IT objectives based on deep customer understanding? Do you have strategic scenarios to achieve your goals that are cross-business and take into account important strategic elements like governance and change management? Do you have the right provisioning policies and technology tools in place?

Most firms we speak with still have application development and delivery (AD&D) pros focused on keeping systems stable and secure. That’s no longer enough. In our recently published Digital Experience Delivery Maturity Assessment, we outline more than 100 essential practices for organizations looking to act on their digital transformation strategies. Keep in mind this is an emerging space so no one has figured everything out, but our assessment outlines four major areas to begin with:

• People.  IT’s culture, leadership practices, collaboration methods, and skills and staffing are important factors that affect the delivery of digital customer experiences. Organizations strive to have IT groups with an agile, customer-first culture; collaborative organizational structures and metrics that foster collaboration between marketing, lines-of-business, and IT; and the appropriate skills and staffing that support both back-end development (e.g. mobile application developers, data-literate architects) and solution management (e.g. web content management specialists, digital asset managers).

Business’s drive for innovation and competitiveness continues unabated  

The role of today’s Infrastructure and Operations professionals (I&O pros) has changed.  The traditional role of surveying the technology market, predicting the future, selecting technologies to support the business and delivering those technologies efficiently and effectively was hard enough. Today’s I&O pros are being asked to improve the innovativeness and competitiveness of the business while creating an infrastructure that allows end-users to bring their own technologies within a secure, reliable, compliant, and manageable environment.  Communications and Collaboration Infrastructure (CCI) can be deployed to drive improvements in communication between employees, supporting innovation focused on driving business results.

An increasingly mobile and distributed workforce demands improved collaboration

As more employees work away from a ‘traditional’ office (27% of workers spend at least 2 days a week away from their primary office location according to the Q2 2013 Forrsights Workforce Survey) and use multiple devices (over half of information workers use three or more devices for work according to the Q2 2013 Forrsights Workforce Survey) complicates the I&O pros job of connecting them.  Traditional telephones and e-mail accounts aren't enough in today’s fast-paced business environment, new collaboration platforms from document repositories and web conferencing services to video conferencing and enterprise social software help to connect employees and partners to drive innovation by enabling the firm to tap the accumulated wisdom of all their assets

The call for change

I recently spoke with Tim Tuttle, the CEO of Expect Labs, a company that operates at the vanguard of two computing categories: Voice recognition (a field populated by established vendors like Nuance Communications, Apple, and Google) and what we can call the Intelligent Assistant space (which is probably most popularly demonstrated by IBM’s “Jeopardy”-winning Watson). In their own words, Expect Labs leverages “language understanding, speech analysis, and statistical search” technologies to create digital assistant solutions.

Expect Labs built the application MindMeld to make the conversations people have with one another "easier and more productive” by integrating voice recognition with an intelligent assistant on an intuitive tablet application. They have coined the term “Anticipatory Computing Engine” to describe their solution, which offers users a new kind of collaboration environment. (Expect Labs aims to provide an entire platform for this type of computing).

David Aponovich and I recently published a Forrester Wave™ on web content management for digital customer experience. In this videocast, David and I talk about how we did the research that went into the report, how the market has evolved since the last version of the report, the biggest surprises from our findings, and highlights (and lowlights) from customer references for the evaluated products.

Hello and welcome to my Forrester blog. I've spent the last 15 years as an eCommerce and marketing leader in a number of retail organizations, and throughout my career I've frequently consumed Forrester's content. Whether it was leveraging a Wave report on eCommerce platforms to build a business case for a capital investment, or benchmarking my business against the industry, Forrester played a key role in my success, as well as the success of my team and my company. So it's with great pleasure that I join Forrester with the goal of returning the favor and helping eBusinesses succeed in a rapidly evolving landscape.

As Principal Analyst within the eBusiness and Channel Strategy group, my primary coverage area will focus on the strategy, operations, and technology that power digital commerce in an agile commerce world. Being a marketer at heart, I'll strive to provide guidance and insight that can yield real benefits to your customers and your bottom line. If there is anything I can help you with, or if you'd like to recommend a topic to be covered, please reach out to me. I'd be happy to hear from you.

Regards,

Adam Silverman