Collaboration Drives Customer Experiences

As part of a successful digital transformation, teams must collaborate to drive positive customer outcomes. That means marketers, developers and IT need to get on the same page.

The essence of digital transformation is built upon effective collaboration that drives positive customer experiences. This is a constant challenge that organizations face and struggle to manage each day—for marketers, developers and IT. Digital transformation is based on connecting the dots between people, processes and technology, which is why a collaborative approach is so important—internally and externally.

However, studies have shown a continued lack of collaboration among different teams, especially for larger enterprise organizations that must continuously and collectively scale their efforts across business lines, regions and customer bases.

The Industry Fallacy

With the proliferation of software-as-a-service (SaaS), marketing can now move forward and bypass IT. Great digital experiences no longer require extensive (if any) involvement with the development and IT teams.

The Simple Truth

Delivering compelling omni-channel customer engagements is a difficult task for most organizations. While SaaS offers more self-service capabilities, many “platforms” are designed primarily for the marketing persona when collaboration between key constituents is still a key for success.

Want to bypass development? That will just create more problems. Regardless of the minimal short-term gains, it’s not a sustainable or advisable decision. To create truly compelling customer experiences, all teams should be on the same digital page—developers, engineers, content providers, marketers, business analysts, DevOps and beyond.

Let’s consider the way things have generally worked. A great deal of historical tension has existed between technology and business teams, often tied to supply and demand. The business frequently wants and expects more than IT can deliver, based on competing agendas. IT has been a cost center focused on mitigating risks, reinforcing governance and standardization, and “keeping the lights on.” The business groups have been tasked with fueling revenue, growth and new market opportunities—which requires a degree of flexibility. While their tasks may be different, both really should again be connecting the dots between people, processes and technology to drive results and positive customer outcomes.

Enter DigitalFactory

Remember that study mentioned above? Did you know that 77 percent of decision makers say their IT and marketing teams could be better aligned to deliver on digital transformation efforts? DigitalFactory overcomes the infrastructure challenges IT faces and fosters the marketing and technology collaboration necessary to deliver digital experiences at the speed of the business.



How do we make this happen? We need to embrace best practices (highlighted in the digital ultimatum) to establish a holistic customer experience across all touch points that stems from organizational excellence. These include:

• Bringing business and IT together early in the digital transformation process
• Directing IT value beyond tactical execution to evolve into strategic business contributors/partners
• Facilitating collaboration by embracing solutions that enable business teams to participate in the development process through a GUI-based approach
• Sharing responsibilities for data and insight, since both are necessary—while IT owns the infrastructure and integration, business and IT should work together to understand data and turn it into actionable insight
• Empowering self-service for low value tech activities, freeing IT to focus on more strategic and complex tasks

To meet these needs, the chosen platform must be designed for both the business and developer teams. Marketers need sophistication and simplicity to create engaging customer journeys, while developers require control and “freedom-from-the-framework,” with an open development approach that allows the team to use the tools they prefer. This makes the company more self-sufficient without putting IT at risk.

Collaboration should be a building block approach, where each piece reinforces rather than competes with the others—just like IT and business should work together. Architected in a component-based fashion with open frameworks and repositories, your team can easily integrate DigitalFactory with line-of-business applications through powerful and simple-to-use APIs—while addressing both responsive AND native mobile needs.

Existing approaches force organizations to squander market opportunities, because they don't deliver fast enough. Progress DigitalFactory overcomes the infrastructure challenges IT faces and fosters the marketing and technology collaboration necessary to deliver digital experiences at the speed your business demands. With DigitalFactory, both digital and business agility can propel customer experiences and business results.