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Take Two Technology Roads To Digital Experience SuccessRoad Map: The Digital Experience Delivery Playbook

by Ted SchadlerFebruary 1, 2016 | Updated: February 10, 2015

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS

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Key TakeawaysPursue Two Paths: Quick-Win Extensions And An Experience PlatformYour road map consists of quick-win extensions to your existing platform and long-term investments in a digital experience platform.

The Digital Experience Platform Path: Lay The Foundations For AgilityFocus first on customer data. Consider content-rich experiences. Incorporate marketing, commerce, and service functionality. Use The Forrester Wave™ to evaluate your options.

Put Workflow, Optimization, And Agility On The Road Map, TooCustomer-obsessed firms will focus on fast rather than perfect. This means changing your operating model to take advantage of modern platforms to analyze to optimize, make changes rapidly, and assess and readjust every three months.

Why Read This ReportOnce you have a strategy to prioritize digital interactions and have assessed the business impact of each investment, it’s time to plan your technology road map. You must pursue two paths simultaneously: 1) Make urgent investments immediately with cloud or software extensions and 2) deliver important agility and long-term benefits with a modern digital experience platform. This report outlines the key milestones necessary for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals to execute on a digital experience delivery strategy.

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Table Of Contents

Your Technology Road Map Follows Your Customer Journey Priorities

Pursue Two Paths: Quick-Win Extensions And An Experience Platform

The Quick-Win Path: Build Capabilities Today, And Expect To Throw Much Of It Away

The Digital Experience Platform Path: Lay The Foundations For Agility

Putting It All Together: A Digital Experience Technology Planning Guide

Recommendations

Put Workflow, Optimization, And Agility On The Road Map, Too

Supplemental Material

Notes & Resources

Forrester interviewed 26 vendor and user companies, including Accenture, Acquia, Adobe, Backbase, Connective DX, Danfoss, EPAM Systems, EPiServer, Evergage, FCV Technologies, Hippo, IBM, KPMG, Liferay, Mainline Information Systems, Qubit, Reflektion, SDL, Sitecore, Tahzoo, Valtech, and Zmags.

Related Research Documents

The Business Impact Of Digital Experience Technology Is Profitable Growth

Digital Experience Technology Integration: Go Beyond Just A Basket Of Solutions

Your Digital Experience Technology Strategy Starts With A Customer Journey Map


Take Two Technology Roads To Digital Experience SuccessRoad Map: The Digital Experience Delivery Playbook

by Ted Schadlerwith Stephen Powers, Mark Grannan, Danielle Geoffroy, and Peter Harrison

February 1, 2016 | Updated: February 10, 2015

http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=RES130501






http://www.forrester.com/go?objectid=BIO1707




Take Two Technology Roads To Digital Experience SuccessFebruary 1, 2016 | Updated: February 10, 2015

© 2016 Forrester Research, Inc. Unauthorized copying or distributing is a violation of copyright law. [email protected] or +1 866-367-7378

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Road Map: The Digital Experience Delivery Playbook

Your Technology Road Map Follows Your Customer Journey Priorities

This is the third report in a planning sequence: strategy, business impact, and road map (see Figure 1). In the digital experience technology strategy report, we describe how to organize and fund a program to serve customers on every step of their journey.1 In the business impact report, we help AD&D professionals prioritize technology investments to drive profitable growth.2 After assessing the business impact of each digital interaction on your customers’ journeys, you will have a prioritized list of investments plotted on a cost-timeline matrix.

You’re now ready for the third step: Create a digital experience technology road map. Because each step builds on the others, you should use the planning and assessment toolkits we introduced in the strategy and business impact reports before building your road map. In this report, we pull tools from all three reports together into a single planning guide found in Figure 4.

FIGURE 1 Your Technology Road Map Fulfills Strategy With Priorities Set By Business Impact

Strategy Businessimpact

Road map

Start with a customerjourney map highlightingdigital interactions.

Prioritize investmentsfor customer bene�t andbusiness value.

Take two paths: quick-winextensions and platforminvestments.

Pursue Two Paths: Quick-Win Extensions And An Experience Platform

You’ve now finished the business impact analysis: You’ve prioritized your customers’ digital interactions and determined which technology capabilities you have and need only to turn on, what software or cloud extensions you can quickly add to your existing platform, and what long-term investments in a new digital experience platform you need. It’s now time to parse these investments into two paths (see Figure 2):

› Quick-win extensions to your existing platform. On this path, you will turn on functionality you aren’t using and extend your existing platform with new software. The cloud is your best way to layer in new functionality without rebuilding your existing platform.

› Long-term investments in a digital experience platform. On this parallel path, you will define, select, and implement a modern platform to deliver long-term agility and capabilities. The cloud is also your friend here: It’s the future of digital experience platforms.3




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FIGURE 2 Plot Quick Wins And Platform Investments On The Technology Road Map

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4

Implement new contentmanagement system

Integrate content andmarketing systems

Integrate contentand commerce

Unify customer andaudience data

Tie in the client portal forauthenticated experiences

Extend the platform withcustomer analytics

Extend with omnichannelcustomer service

Use the CMS forthe mobile app

BusinessFoundational Marketing

Deploy global sites withwork�ow and translation

Extend the platformwith content analytics

Mobile-enablethe home page.

Put contentmarketing toolsinto marketers’hands.

Track behavioron existing siteswith tagmanagement.

Personalizeexperiencesbased onclickstream data.

Quick-win capabilities using cloud and software extensions

Platform investments New capabilities

Empower local practitioners touse global content and assets.

Show inventory availabilityin local stores.

Implement in-store personali-zation using mobile wallet.

Personalize experiencesbased on dynamic pro�le.

Onboard new customersvia the mobile app.

Provide digital customerservice on new purchase.

Add loyalty into the mobileexperience.

Put insights dashboardsinto practitioners’ hands.

Deliver content-richcommerce experiences.

Run multichannel marketingcampaigns with online personas.

Personalize experiencesbased on full customer pro�le.

Mobile-enable the entire webexperience.

Deploy new commercesoftware

Redeploy web experiencesusing single-page apps

Implement a uni�edpersonalization strategy

Capabilities

Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4




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The Quick-Win Path: Build Capabilities Today, And Expect To Throw Much Of It Away

As the technology expert member of the digital experience program team, you as an AD&D professional can help rapidly respond to the most urgent needs by turning on features you already have or extending your capabilities with cloud services.

› Use the cloud to augment your existing platform with new capabilities . . . Many scenarios fall into this category: for example, cloud-based content marketing platforms from vendors like NewsCred, Opal Labs, or Percolate; cloud-based personalization from Evergage, Qubit, Reflektion, or Zmags; and cloud-based mobile enablement from Moovweb or Usablenet.4 These cloud services can pull information from your existing systems, create the new capability, and then embed it back into your web or mobile experience.

› . . . but be prepared to throw much of that software away. The advantage of the cloud is that you keep your existing platform in place. Just beware that you may have to replace this technology once you build out a digital experience platform. One senior vice president of technology at a major retailer told us that he expects to keep about “60% of the code” but almost all of the improved operating model. That’s OK; it’s what digital businesses do.

› Plan for more short-term wins as your platform comes online. At some point, you can’t just layer on more functionality. You’ll need to implement a digital experience platform with a solid foundation. But don’t just move down that path independently. Instead, let the urgent capabilities drive the sequence of delivery. For example, if you can’t do effective multichannel marketing without a new content and delivery architecture, then build the modern content management system so you can layer on new marketing channels.

The Digital Experience Platform Path: Lay The Foundations For Agility

At the same time as you’re delivering new capabilities with extensions, you have to fund and implement the foundations of your digital customer experience: customers, content, marketing, commerce, service, and insights. Start with The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015, and then drill down into the specific capabilities of each vendor (see Figure 3).5 If your preferred vendor isn’t on this list, then apply our Wave criteria to see how it compares against these 10 players. Keep the following in mind as you build the road map for these important platforms:

› Focus on the customer data. Your platform must support many views of your customer, from target to prospect to customer to loyalist. The best digital experience platforms help you with a robust customer data architecture that can assist along every phase of your customer life cycle. Adobe and Oracle excel here, primarily because of their audience management tools.

› Anchor experiences with content. Engagement comes to life with content-rich experiences. A modern web content management system can help. One investment bank is seeing the payoff of moving to Adobe Experience Manager: empowering practitioners to steadily improve customers’ digital experiences — at global scale. Many other vendors score well here, too.




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› Reach out and engage with marketing. As consumer digital marketing matures, many companies with business customers are finding that they can use the same techniques. So every firm — governments, too — will benefit from marketing software. Either buy a platform with strong marketing or layer in a marketing cloud from Adobe, IBM, Oracle, or Salesforce.

› Extend with commerce and service. You may need to sell online. You may need a customer portal. You may need to deliver digital service. The vendors that excel in commerce don’t always excel in service, and vice versa. If content-centric customer service is your high priority, consider IBM, Oracle, or SAP.

› Embed analytics everywhere. You are flying blind without instrumentation, analytics, and dashboards. Find a platform with engagement analytics, then layer in additional content and customer and predictive analytics to complete the picture.6 The goal is to continuously optimize experiences. Adobe, IBM, Salesforce, and SAP Hybris score best in analytics today.

› Keep mobile web and app experiences on equal footing. Every company must deliver a great, native-feeling web experience on mobile devices. But your best customers expect and deserve a mobile app, too. Mobile apps are a work in progress on digital experience platforms, but Adobe, IBM, and Oracle offer more native support than others today.

FIGURE 3 Choose Your Digital Experience Platform Anchor Tenants

Custom

er d

ata

Content

Mar

ketin

g

Comm

erce

Servic

e

Analyt

ics

Mobile

app

Acquia

Adobe

Demandware

EPiServer

IBM

Oracle

Salesforce

SAP Hybris

SDL

Sitecore

Note: In this chart, which is based on scores in the "The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015" Forrester report, dark green represents the highest score.




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Putting It All Together: A Digital Experience Technology Planning Guide

To summarize, you will succeed if your strategy focuses on digital interactions, you have high confidence in the growth and profit payoff of each investment, and you invest simultaneously in short-term improvements and a modern digital experience platform. We have combined the planning and assessment tools into a single guide for (see Figure 4):

› Strategy — start with a customer journey map highlighting digital interactions. The best organizations invest aggressively in the digital touchpoints and interactions that their customers need most. To align interests and drive funding and commitments for a three- to five-year program, start by creating a wall-sized map of your customers’ journeys, with a particular focus on digital interactions.

› Business impact — prioritize investments for customer benefit and business value. There’s no point in building something if customers won’t use it. While no investment has a guaranteed payoff, build your teams’ confidence in the business impact by estimating the uptake and value of each digital interaction. This is the most important step to keep technology investments focused on digital experience strategy.

› Road map — take two paths, quick-win extensions and a digital experience platform. The only way to run quickly while building the foundations for your digital business is to invest twice: first in rolling out new capabilities in months and again in long-term digital experience platforms, which can take years to implement. How can you afford it? Make a deal to use business and marketing budgets to develop this business asset.

One major retailer told us that it expects to keep about “60% of the code” but almost all of the improved operating model. That’s OK; it’s what digital businesses do.




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FIGURE 4 A Planning Guide For Digital Experience Technology

3. Road map. Take two paths: quick-win extensions and digital experience platform investments.

2. Business impact. Prioritize investments for customer bene�t and business value.

1. Strategy. Start with the customer journey map highlighting digital interactions.

Source: The images in steps 1 and 2 are from the “The Business Impact Of Digital Experience Technology IsPro�table Growth” Forrester report.




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Recommendations

Put Workflow, Optimization, And Agility On The Road Map, Too

Application development and delivery professionals are responsible for business success, not just technology. Your web and mobile investments are among the fastest-changing and most strategic in your company because they help you win, serve, and retain customers. Four factors work together to change how you operate:

1. Make workflow a lightweight process, not a rigid governance. To scale up to hundreds of thousands of practitioners and sites, you will need some workflow checks and balances. Modern web content management systems give you tremendous ability to lock down approvals and workflow. Resist the urge to overuse the tools. Instead, use a reasonable governance policy with only critical checks such as legal review for regulated content. Otherwise, grumpiness and bottlenecks will cripple empowered self-service.

2. Analyze to optimize your digital experience delivery. Analytics make results visible. Cloud-based analytics from Adobe, Google, and Webtrends are readily available to put dashboards into your hands. One payoff is stronger alignment between marketing and technology managers on what matters most. Knowing that mobile-ready pages get huge mobile traffic will drive unified investments in responsive design.

3. Adjust your road map every three months. Your priorities will change. To stay ahead of the changes and be ready at a moment’s notice to adapt, use an agile approach. In “The Mobile Mind Shift,” we introduced one agile technique we call the IDEA cycle: identify the engagement, design the experience, engineer the solution, and analyze to optimize results.7 Use this approach to revisit your road map with the program team every three months.

4. Adopt a new risk profile to run fast in service of customers. Customer-obsessed firms are adopting new operating principles, including being fast instead of perfect.8 In the words of John Mayfield of Nordstrom, when the company was sprinting to deliver a new mobile point-of-sale system, “Everything changed: people, culture, risk, process, tools, and technology. We changed our mindset: It’s OK to move faster and take more risk.”9




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Supplemental Material

Companies Interviewed For This Report

Accenture

Acquia

Adobe

Backbase

Connective DX

Danfoss

EPAM Systems

EPiServer

Evergage

FCV Technologies

Hippo

IBM

KPMG

Liferay

Mainline Information Systems

Qubit

Reflektion

SDL

Sitecore

Tahzoo

Valtech

Zmags

http://forr.com/1einFan

http://www.forrester.com/Analyst-Advisory/-/E-MPL172




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Endnotes1 As firms like Rewe Group and Schneider Electric have learned, digital experience strategy shapes the technology

you need — an investment that can take five years and cost between $20 million and $200 million. To help define the strategy, application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals should follow the lead of customer experience teams: 1) Start with a customer journey map; 2) apply cloud-hosted, mobile-first, and insights-driven thinking; and 3) implement a digital experience platform to serve customers along every step of their journey. See the “Your Digital Experience Technology Strategy Starts With A Customer Journey Map” Forrester report.

2 Armed with the methods in this report, application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals can help their companies link digital experience strategy to the technology road map. First, assess how digital interactions benefit customers and deliver value to the firm using metrics of profitable growth like increased basket value, percentage of service delivered digitally, and mobile onboarding. Then prioritize investments based on the total technology cost and time to deliver. Is it an extension or a new platform investment? See the “The Business Impact Of Digital Experience Technology Is Profitable Growth” Forrester report.

3 The digital experience (DX) platform market has been slow to move to the cloud. Fortunately, major digital experience platform vendors like Adobe and SAP Hybris are now embracing the cloud to deploy and operate their software, and service providers like Deloitte, Razorfish Global, and SapientNitro have repositioned their managed hosting options as more cloud-like DX platforms. But what cloud benefits do vendors and service providers actually deliver? This report for application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals clarifies cloud terminology for digital experience platforms, articulates the benefits that come from each cloud model, and prods vendors to simplify how they talk about their cloud services to accelerate purchasing and deployment. With this report, Forrester also announces its deeper investigation into how the cloud will disruptively improve digital experience platforms. See the “Make The Cloud A Foundation Of Your Digital Experience Platform Strategy” Forrester report.

4 In Forrester’s 60-criteria evaluation of content marketing platform (CMP) vendors, we identified the nine most significant software providers — Contently, DivvyHQ, Kapost, NewsCred, Oracle, Percolate, PublishThis, RebelMouse, and Skyword — in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This evaluation details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help B2C marketing professionals select the right partner for their content marketing platforms. See the “The Forrester Wave™: Content Marketing Platforms, Q2 2015” Forrester report.

5 In Forrester’s 40-criteria evaluation of digital experience platform vendors, we identified the 10 most significant software providers — Acquia, Adobe, Demandware, EPiServer, IBM, Oracle, SAP Hybris, Salesforce, SDL, and Sitecore — in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our criteria and where they stand in relation to each other to help application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals select the right partner for their digital experience platform needs. See the “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2015” Forrester report.

6 Companies must personalize digital experiences using all available insights — not just clickstream and thinly defined profiles. New technologies are coming online — including predictive analytics and machine learning — to make it possible to customize an experience in real time based on all the data. Target did this to generate incremental sales of $50 million to $100 million. Application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals are in a prime position to extend the digital experience platform with new systems of insight to accomplish the same. See the “Digital Insights Will Power Great Digital Experiences” Forrester report.

7 Source: Ted Schadler, Josh Bernoff, and Julie Ask, The Mobile Mind Shift, Groundswell Press, 2014.

8 We know and have proven that a better customer experience correlates with higher revenue growth. But what does it take to succeed in your quest for the level of customer obsession needed to drive these results? To find out, we analyzed the practices of over 30 companies at various stages in their customer-obsessed transformations. Through
















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in-depth discussions with C-level executives at each of these firms, we teased out the common core for success. This report details the fundamental reset of day-to-day operations required to drive customer obsession. See the “The Operating Model For Customer Obsession” Forrester report.

9 See page 150 in “The Mobile Mind Shift.” Source: Ted Schadler, Josh Bernoff, and Julie Ask, The Mobile Mind Shift, Groundswell Press, 2014.



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