By Janus Boye
How are those who are leading digital thinking differently? From speaking to our community members in Europe and North America, it’s not the size of the technology stack, and it’s not about build vs. buy that matter. It’s more about content, tech and people.
IT analysts used to have rather similar opinions about the change in key digital trends, but times have changed. The future is now, and today we see a totally chaotic vendor marketplace, new categories coming up for software vendors and if you read updates from the analysts, they point in quite different directions. What does that mean to you as a customer? How do you get smarter about digital?
On stage in the charming art cinema in Båstad, where Pyramid hosted a Digital Day in July 2022
Swedish international B2B agency Pyramid kindly asked me to present the top of key trends at their Digital Day in July in Båstad, Sweden.
Below you’ll find both my slides and also my brief take on the trends as I see them.
The world has changed quickly in the past few years
Before jumping into the five trends, I opened with a polite reminder with the famous Einstein quote:
If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions
With all the confusing trends and the crowded marketplace for vendors each pushing in different directions, this is important to keep in mind: What’s the real problem you are trying to solve in your organisation? Keep that focus, avoid getting distracted by shiny things and you’ll be on a fast track to deliver something smarter.
While the past years have been dominated by the pandemic, 2019 was indeed a different time, also when it comes to digital. Here’s a just a few of the bullets I shared:
Business problems rarely had digital solutions
A time with servers, on premise and monoliths
Before headless really became a thing
Jamstack was IT development in another solar system
MACH was not invented yet
GDPR was being pushed from bureaucrats in Brussels and out to the member countries
Websites were slow, less secure, inaccessible and took a long time to develop
The Modern Web is built quite differently compared to back then and probably COVID has played some role in the substantial increase in investment into digital transformation. This in turn has helped catapult the pace of change even further.
To customers, selecting the right solution is more important than ever. Yet, the digital market (e.g. MarTech) is larger and more fragmented than in the past. Have a look at the 2022 Marketing Technology Landscape to take a look for yourself.
Enough said, let’s move onto the trends. I did in fact start with the tools and tried to be helpful.
#1: Tooling is so much better and faster
While things might seem confusing, it’s worth noting that using the tools to actually deliver value has become much easier. Today, you can take a tool of your choice and the barrier to go-to-market is much lower.
Many vendors have invested heavily in both onboarding new customers and in making sure that you get good usage without requiring expert certifications.
I shared a few examples from innovative vendors:
Ninetailed, which focuses on personalisation and allowing developers to rapidly deliver dynamic content. Personalisation is indeed moving from sales talk and marketing to actually being implemented
Squarespace, which has become a popular option to create websites with easy-to-edit website templates. Perhaps you don’t need clunky CMS?
Kontent.ai, which is now a rapid-growth stand-alone company spun out of Kentico. It’s about better content at scale
UiPath, which is frequently used in our automation & robotics peer groups and focuses on software robots, so that people don’t have to do manual and repetitive administrative tasks
Uniform, which focuses on end-to-end composable orchestration and helps you take control of your stack by being a composable DXP
Specifically to the world of content management, our CMS Expert group member Mark Demeny shared this tweet on how tooling has improved:
#2: Decision power is on the up
Sometimes I feel like it’s too easy to be critical of the vendors. Yes, the marketing can go a bit far, but to be fair, most technology in the hands of a customer unable to make decisions is not going to solve any problems.
Big decisions for your digital initiatives used to be hard to come by. If they also required substantial investment, it was likely that the initiative would get both delayed and underfunded. Very few managers were willing to make important decisions when it came to digital. It was as if they were trained not to make decisions regarding a topic they didn’t learn in school. Probably that both was and is the case for many senior managers.
Today that’s different though. We’re seeing decision power on the up. The course of action is not wait-and-see, but quite often, let’s go.
The process of going through choices, making recommendations and then deciding has been shortened and often moved into the hands of capable digital managers trusted to act.
#3: The Great Decoupling
This illustration shows how elements in red are focused on the experience, while the elements in black are Saas and the elements in green are services. As a customer you can then mix-and-match and interchange individual parts without having to change the entire ecosystem.
While it can be tricky to follow the industry vocabulary, the term decoupling has become an established part of many conversations and companies have started replacing the monoliths. So, what does that mean?
It means that where customers often in the past relied on a single vendor, say Adobe, IBM, Salesforce, they are now choosing multiple, often smaller, vendors to separately address parts of the bigger problem.
We’re not talking about monoliths as a geological feature consisting of a single massive stone, such as some mountains, but rather the talk is all about how elements like composability, headless, Jamstack and MACH are driving a different and smarter way to build and deliver value.
Read more on this blog in these related posts:
#4: Documentation & Experience is on the up
If you want a sophisticated LEGO model, it’s clearly helpful to have access to a detailed building plan. Similarly, for complex digital solutions, you need both good documentation and ideally experienced help.
In terms of documentation, many vendors have really upped their game. While you might think that’s a somewhat boring or an unsexy part of the equation, good documentation is actually both helpful to the customer, but also really good marketing as some vendors have learned.
As more and more customers have successfully launched their digital initiatives, there’s also a rapidly increasing pool of experienced peers, which you can connect with. I’ve found that most are actually friendly and happy to help, in particular when the question comes from a peer.
There’s also a growing amount of publicly available posts on how it’s done. I’ve written a few myself and always appreciate when customers, and agencies for that matter, openly share how they did it and what they learned along the way.
I took a closer look at a somewhat unusual, but also very interesting CMS selection in this piece: What can we learn from the W3C CMS selection process.
#5: Digital is becoming sustainable
It’s become less of a secret that the Internet industry has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry and that’s a good thing.
Using helpful tools like Ecograder, you can now measure how green your website is and get actionable advice on how to improve.
Also, digital leaders like Gerry McGovern have turned their attention to making digital more environmentally friendly and it’s helping raise awareness and making a difference.
UX expert Thorsten Jonas has also made a big difference in this area, both with the Sustainable UX Playbook and also for making the good point that:
It’s not enough to just focus on the user
Customers are also making progress, notably fashion company Organic Basics with their Low Impact Website and also in Denmark the City of Herning now has a climate friendly display option.
We still have plenty of work to do in this area, but making digital sustainable is definitely the smarter thing to do.
Learn more about digital trends
Before I left the stage, I also shared a 6th bonus trend that I feel strongly about: Diversity & inclusion. This is in my book too important to leave out of the agenda and it’s the conversation we need to keep going.
Making digital and all that it entails more diverse and inclusive has so many benefits. Turn to the great work done with diversity & inclusion at Telia as just one example.
Finally, why don’t you consider becoming a part of our growing community? Join one of our upcoming peer group meetings or conferences and expand your network. That’s a good way to keep the conversation going and learn from peers.
PS: You can naturally also download the slides (PDF) that I used in Båstad and even watch the recorded presentation below. Thanks once again to Cristoffer and Ulf for having me.