This week, I had a great time at The Digital Leadership Conference in Denmark organized by Boye & Company.
Some quick highlights & takeaways:
👉 Comms needs to be bold, courageous, authentic while remaining planned & strategic (from Philip Lewin session about A.P. Moller - Maersk comm approach).
Read more“Making sustainable digital services is not a tool or code problem - it requires us to human better”
With this thought-provoking quote, Hannah Smith set the stage in her highly rated talk at the HE Connect 22 conference in Manchester.
Hannah is the Operations and Training Manager for the Green Web Foundation, a non-profit with a clear mission: to make the internet fossil free by 2030. Her role is to ensure operations within the organisation are running smoothly, especially as they grow beyond start-up phase. Previously she was a freelance WordPress developer and speaker.
She’s based in Porlock, a coastal village in Somerset, England and also our expert of the month.
Read moreWhat comes after headless CMS? A composable CMS marks the next natural step in the evolution of content management systems, and offers several benefits.
A composable architecture consists of API-driven components that are pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and that can be continuously improved. When building digital experiences, and websites in particular, using a headless CMS just like any other stack component has turned out to be complex.
Read moreWhile most consider data protection very important, one of problems with the current technologies, is that third parties are collecting your user data, storing it, aggregating and often also sharing it.
To be blunt: Digital advertising pays for large parts of the Web, but relies on cookies and other tracking mechanisms. Tracking mechanisms that were invented a long time ago and not designed with data ethics in mind.
This is the big problem that Google is proposing to solve with the emerging Privacy Sandbox. The Privacy Sandbox is a series of proposals to satisfy cross-site use cases without third-party cookies or other tracking mechanisms.
Read moreBack in April, Lisa Borchert started her part-time role as Diversity & Inclusion Officer at software firm Haiilo based in Hamburg, Germany.
Her goal is to make sure that Haiilo is a diverse and inclusive place to work with equal rights and opportunities for all. A place with 300+ colleagues spread out over 5 locations in Europe and North America, where everyone feels safe and enjoys the work they do. No matter their gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, beliefs or background.
In a recent member call, Lisa Borchert shared her story and her progress during the initial 6 months. Like most stories, this one started at the beginning.
Read moreIf you’ve been working in CMS in the past decade, you’ve probably heard of Kentico, the Czech-based software vendor that initially released their product back in 2004, but since then has been rapidly growing and winning customers and partners around the world.
As we’ve covered in this blog, most of the attention around Kentico in the past years have been on their newer Kontent product, which was initially called Draft, while the older, and also to be fair, more mature Xperience product, lived a bit more quiet life.
Having multiple and somewhat overlapping product streams can be challenging for any vendor, also those bigger than Kentico. It easily creates confusion externally and the internal focus can be a struggle. Back in 2019, I called it an ambitious and bold dual product strategy.
Fast forward to this summer - and a big and somewhat unusual decision became public back: Kentico split in two, creating Kontent.ai as a stand-alone company and leaving Kentico to refocus on the Xperience product and what they call flexible DXP as a service.
Newly appointed Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter hosted a recent member call to introduce us to the new Kentico, including a talk about where Kentico stands today and he also shared a bit about the ambitious plans for the future. Let’s start by getting to know the new Kentico a bit better.
Read moreBrandwatch, like many others, is a sales-led software organisation where customers are acquired by marketing and sales and later onboarded.
Lately, they've been moving more and more into the product-led domain, having free trials, letting people onboard themselves. This requires the product team to think very differently than before.
In a recent member call, Product Director Andrius Knispelis dived into product-led growth, advised on when to do free trials, how you can better use onboarding and shared quite a few helpful examples. Let’s start with the promise of a product that sells itself.
Read more“Where you are based in the organisation matters much less today”
Do you need more why or are you ready for the how? Adam Feldt is Senior Manager, Digital Communications, Global Marketing and Communications at Topsoe, but as Adam says, titles in digital are of dwindling importance these days. What matters is how you can make an impact, in particular when it comes to sustainability.
Topsoe is a global leader in decarbonization technology, a complex B2B firm based just outside Copenhagen.
Topsoe has just executed a brand refresh to sharpen the focus on how the company is ready to do decarbonization at scale. Actually a brand refresh is some understatement; I would rather label it an award-winning global rebrand, including a complete overhaul of the digital channels. Adam was closely involved in this project as a digital leader and also has a fresh take on what comes next.
Adam is our expert of the month.
Read more“We are stuck in a bad chain of unproductive behaviors”
Coming up on 6 years at Telia in various HR roles, Chris Hovde knows a thing or two about change, culture, productivity and leadership development. Working currently out of his apartment in Oslo as Global People Movement Lead, Chris is now in a global role focusing on building the future leadership and culture of Telia Company.
Previously he has worked on everything from on- and offboarding, employer branding, leadership and development, sustainability, diversity and inclusion. He has a big heart for regenerative workplaces and focuses a lot on healthy work environments, psychological safety and how to live thriving lives. He is a role model for change and a self-proclaimed Urban monk on a mission to create a regenerative world.
Chris is our expert of the month.
Read moreWhat are the common mistakes that content teams make when developing their content measurement strategy and how can you fix them?
In a recent member call, Noz Urbina shared how to position content in a way that resonates with the organisation that funded it, and the users who consume it, by focusing measurements on customer journeys and top user tasks.
Looking back on two decades of project experience, Noz Urbina has become a little obsessed with measurement. Despite having more raw data than ever on content and user experience, content teams still measure their output with metrics like simple hits, likes, clicks, and shares.
Instead, we should be measuring whether it fulfilled its reason for being.
Read moreThe real problem in most organisations is that they are dealing with busy developers and a marketing team that are finding it too complex to design, develop and deliver experiences that look and feel great.
It doesn’t help that the content management systems of the past have not really been designed for content collaboration, so you need to look elsewhere to sort out that problem. Also, while headless CMS has become the defacto standard, it further complicates the picture with more pieces in the puzzle.
Untangling this complexity and addressing the big challenges faced by large, complex organisations, is what Kontent.ai is focused on. They call their next level CMS a modular content platform.
Read moreHow 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. It’s more about content, tech and people.
When asked about the key digital trends, it used to be easy to answer by just citing analysts, who would usually all point in more or less the same direction. The direction of travel so to speak would be the same across most analyst reports.
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, it points in quite different directions. What does that mean to you as a customer?
Read moreFirst came the Web CMS, then came Headless, and now it’s time for composable
When Sana Remekie talks about the need for marketing to lead the Web or how to navigate the seemingly never ending vendor chaos when building your digital platform, she does so from a strong foundation of understanding how enterprises approach digital and how digital have evolved in the past twenty years.
Sana is the co-founder of Conscia, a Toronto-based enterprise software-as-a-service company that empowers marketers to activate personalized experiences on every channel. They refer to it as connecting the dots with the digital experience graph or to put it another way: Connecting the dots between customer and content in every context.
She’s also recognised as among Canada’s Top 10 Influential Women in Tech and recently became a MACH Ambassador. Sana is our expert of the month.
Read moreWhen you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams that in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?
These good questions set the stage for the popular book 'The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation' which came out in 2014 and has since changed how we collaborate and innovate.
Carsten G. Lützen works as a playful agile coach at the LEGO Group and has been working on liberating structures for the last few years and also recently created a collection of liberating structures agenda items which you can pick and choose from
Read moreReducing and mitigating the impact of climate change is the key challenge of our time and designers have a vital role to play in reducing emissions and mitigating their impact. According to the UK Design Council around 80% of the environmental impact of today’s products, services and infrastructures are determined at the design stage.
In a recent member call, Val Mitchell introduced the work of the Thriving Planet team at Snook and how they are beginning to use the principles and practice of Service Design to consider the needs of our planet alongside the needs of organisations and users.
Read moreAbout | Blog | Contact | Impact | Newsletter