Big companies have big websites. And leaders of those websites are focused more than ever on experience - how visitors move through the site to accomplish whatever they’re trying to do, and how those visitors feel as they do it. Experience is not just a buzzword; it’s a new(-ish) way of thinking about how to serve customers, and it’s top-of-mind with business leaders for many good reasons.
But seldom do I see the same level of care and attention paid to operations, and that’s a shame. Because the best experiences in the world can’t get that way - and certainly can’t stay that way - without top-quality operations.
Read moreWe still have a long way to go when it comes to diversity and inclusion and this has deep impact on corporate innovation as well.
In a recent member conference call with Nicolas Bry from Orange in Paris, we covered rapid innovation inside large organisations, specifically the term intrapreneurship - the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.
While there are a vast majority of documented intrapreneurship cases by men, in Nicolas Bry’s experience, there are as many active female intrapreneurs as male. One of the reasons he cited, was that it’s less risky compared to start-ups and usual entrepreneurship, as you still have corporate security in intrapreneurship programs.
Read moreLast week we held a breakfast briefing in London on the topic of Driving Digital Transformation with Legacy Technical Debt and culture change was mentioned several times as the biggest challenge, but can you fix culture?
Focusing on the business, creating trust in the teams via transparency and empowering teams to actively participate seemed to be the winning recipe in the two customer stories from Sovereign Housing and Vodafone. Co-founder of MMT Digital James Cannings highlighted the changes required and recommended building out your agile processes from the bottom up, but with support from the top.
Read moreSustainable leadership, like everything else, is part of a system, if one part of that system isn’t performing, or is missing a piece it performs sub-optimally.
With this in mind, how do we develop sustainable leadership qualities in ourselves, in others, and in our organisations?
Read moreThe usual trouble when it comes to digital projects tends to be around a slower than expected time-to-market for new projects, an unhealthy appetite for one-ring-to-rule-them-all monolithic vendors, and being locked-in on platforms you no longer or indeed never liked. Sound familiar?
San Francisco-based software firm Contentstack tries to tackle the problems coupled with the increasing demands from customers to deliver digital content experiences by taking a different approach than just going headless.
Read moreLife as a content professional is so much more than writing. It’s moved way beyond the words.
The words will always be a large part of what I do, whether that’s writing, editing, or reviewing. But increasingly, much more now needs to happen before the words are published, and again after.
Read moreTo really embrace the change in how we work that Teams offers, IT needs to hand over responsibility, or at least share ownership with the business.
The concept and function of teams (in the traditional sense) are a business thing. They are the smallest unit of work and they are what power all workplaces. Microsoft Teams is simply a place for teams to work.
It’s like thinking that clever office space will solve all of our problems….
Read moreTake a moment to reflect on this statement “What Got You Here Won't Get You There”. This was used by Marshall Goldsmith in his book with the same title . Think about it in relation to the various website and web application projects you have been involved with over the years, whether you have been on the technical or business side.
What was your latest web project and what were the objectives that guided you to where you are today? Will this project and those objectives still be relevant over the next couple of years?
Read moreYou’ve had a great week. Friday comes around and you are sitting in your office with a fresh cup of coffee, looking at the road map, quite satisfied that projects are moving along nicely, and milestones are being reached. In fact, you are relishing in the fact that this is the best team you’ve ever had – and then it happens.
The knock on the door. It’s your key team member (you know, the one that has the relationships with the vendor and puts out fires before they happen) and she looks distressed.
“You get a second?” she asks
And then the bombshell – she was not looking for a new opportunity, but a colleague reached out and it’s an incredible offer that could not be refused or matched. Sorry. You have two weeks.
How do you build a talent pipeline to prepare for this?
Read moreHow do we to turn New Year’s resolutions into sustainable habits?
BJ Fogg is the world’s leading expert on habit formation and he was our guest star for the 1st member conference call of 2020. According to BJ, we are doing resolutions the wrong way and we need to take a new approach to changing habits.
Read moreTechnology decisions have huge impact and with the seemingly never ending growth in tools to power the digital experience, it has not become easier for buyers to navigate a crowded marketplace.
At SFMOMA, one of the largest museums in the US, they needed an improved ticketing part of their website. Rather than the usual Swiss-army knife approach of “The One CMS To Rule Everything”, they went looking for a new solution where their editors could focus on content, while their developers could keep developing using familiar code.
Read moreOur top five articles from 2019 span from content operations, via data science, to Office 365, and even disruptive change making and a distributed future for CMS.
It’s been a productive year with 40 articles published, so it feels unfair to single out just five. I invite to go explore the many excellent posts from 2019, but as you probably know this is also the season of helpful lists, so here we go.
Read moreToo often, content models are developed with no consideration of the system in which they have to operate. This leads to a horrible editorial experience, which is one of the overlooked topics in today’s digital workplace.
In Real World Content Modelling, the new book by Deane Barker, he examines how content actually gets modeled inside a content management system.
Read moreIf you leave the corporate headquarter in any large, complex and global organisation, it’s not unusual to hear headquarters described using terms familiar from any love-hate relationship. Being at the receiving end of directives from HQ, while working hard to make sales goals in local markets can easily lead to despair and frustration.
As a part of the onboarding process at VELUX Group, Andreas Klinke Johannsen requires new team members to work locally as an embedded part of a local team. Might this be the key ingredient that can unlock better collaboration and higher performance?
Read moreIt's been said many times that delivering outstanding customer experience (CX) is the key to success.
Yet, with increasing expectations, and even after extensive investments in CX training and initiatives many organisations are struggling leaving disappointing customers behind and eroding loyalty.
In our recent member conference call, Stefan Kolle from the FutureLab in Belgium, shared his insights on the return-of-investment (ROI) of customer experience programs.
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