Are you also finding it hard to believe that 2022 is almost over? Quite a year.
At the beginning of February all pandemic restrictions were lifted in Denmark and shortly after other countries followed, with a sense of normalcy returning. Little did we know that other world events would suddenly overshadow the pandemic.
Just a few weeks later our past conference speaker Marianne Kay found herself on BBC News, when she made it to the Polish/Ukrainian border trying to bring her mother to the UK in early March. It’s been touching to see how our members and friends around the world has stepped forward and made a positive difference. Aarhus-based digital agency Klean built a website, that also made it to the BBC so that Danes can donate used bikes to Ukrainian refugee children fleeing Russia’s war. Many raised funds, somehow found Ukrainian flags and did so many other good things that made a difference.
So, what did we learn this year? Personally, I’m really happy that in a year that started in lockdown, we were still able to get-together for some great hybrid and in-person learning & networking. I think it’s important that we keep travelling, in particular in these changing times, so that as human beings we can enjoy this wonderful planet and also learn from each others. Importantly, travelling opens the mind and makes us expand our definition of normal.
Read moreTo quote Chris Justice, VP Operations at BL.INK:
“Content management systems have evolved to allow us to organize information so elegantly but they still fail when it comes to simplification of data.”
According to Chris, QR codes and short links create the missing bridge between the consumer and the complex taxonomy of purchases, software errors, shipping instructions, restaurant menus and thousands of other use cases.
In a recent member call, Chris focused on links, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Web, essentially left untouched by innovation until recently, yet a crucial part of a modern digital experience.
Paraphrasing Web co-developer Tim Berners-Lee who back in 1998 famously wrote Cool URIs don’t change, Chris said: Short links will live forever, but as you probably know the Web of 2022 is unfortunately full of broken links. That probably also goes for many of your marketing campaigns.
Read moreHistory shows that hard times can lead to the greatest opportunities for renewal. The Purpose Upgrade, the latest book by UK-based Paul Skinner, supports readers in leading enterprises that thrive by solving our most important problems.
It shows how businesses can create more compelling benefits for customers, build meaningful livelihoods for colleagues, and unlock superior returns for investors by 'repurposing' and revitalising the activities they engage in.
The Purpose Upgrade is his second book. It builds on Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success, which argued that we have now reached a turning point in history from which creating Competitive Advantage may no longer be in the best interests of an organisation.
Read moreIf you think that going green on your website is just something for the few, you are not the only one. Still, while it might be a relatively new requirement for many, and we still have a long way to go, there’s change afoot.
According to Hannah Smith, who works as Operations and Training Manager for the Green Web Foundation, customers increasingly care about environmentally sustainable digital leadership and it’s no longer just a novelty to think about the green web.
In the UK, Hannah is seeing large and complex organisations integrating sustainability into their procurement for digital services. Joining us in a recent member call, Hannah shared case studies and examples on how her team is accelerating the transition to a fossil-free internet.
Read moreHaving multiple projects with similar specs often leads to duplicate implementations or code. Similarly having different vendors, but a wish to align can be challenging.
At Danish retailer Salling Group, Frontend Manager Martin Hobert and his team solved this by implementing Shared Modules that work in a composable fashion.
In a recent member call, Martin shared a deep dive into the thoughts that went into creating the solution that they work with today.
Read moreThe conversation around digital leadership tends to go from somewhere between tech fascination and pretending that the rules of gravity don’t apply.
I’ve often wondered, why after all these years of doing digital, with many books covering each individual aspect of what that means, we haven’t had a handbook for leaders leading digital teams.
This is what Christian Vandsø Andersen, VP Digital at the LEGO Group, set out to write and in a recent member call he talked about his new book appropriately titled Wonderful digital leadership.
Read moreDutch retailer Albert Heijn is probably the first company in the Netherlands to establish Content Engineering as a functional expertise.
In her role as Content Engineering Consultant at the retailer, Rafaela Ellensburg is the first and still only one working with this focus. This year she’s working hard to make the leap from content-as-a-liability to content-as-a-service, and she’s learned quite a bit along the way.
In a recent member call, Rafaela shared her lessons learned, her holistic view on content and why structured content is the basis for scalable digital customer experiences.
Read moreLean has been the need of the hour as more and more organisations are adopting robotics process automation (RPA) and maturing in their respective space.
By Lean RPA we mean, optimal utilization of all available resources whether they are licenses or VDI/VM or application maintenance teams or monitoring resources and visualization tools. Eventually the expectations is less of operating cost, resilient setup, lower response time, transparency and governance.
While many organisations have historically spent quite some time developing internal resources which can help them attaining Lean RPA for long some major players in the market have gone ahead and provided COTS (Commercial Of The Shelf) solutions which can be easily adopted and deployed for enhancing operations and helping in driving efficient and effective Lean Operations.
The next question comes is what does these tools have to offer in general, now some have them out of the box and some are in the process of enhancing these tools in their current and future version upgrades and roadmaps.
Read moreWhen it comes to digital, the museum community has repeatedly delivered engaging initiatives at the very forefront of innovation.
Still, when you go explore in the big sea of arts, history and culture and plan how to communicate and deliver a new exhibition, you can easily find yourself in seemingly uncharted territory, also when it comes to the use of emerging consumer technology.
Jennifer Snyder is Chief Digital Officer at Detroit Institute of Arts and has over a decade of experience in digital leadership roles in the museum world, including at SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s one of many accomplished museum visionaries that are making museums an unexpected place for early indicators of what’s next.
Jennifer is also our expert of the month.
Read moreUnreliable websites is a real problem. Whether it is a slow site, forms that doesn’t do the trick, or just broken links, it all influences the perception of your organisation.
Behind the scenes it might be editors struggling with a content model or developers constantly bug fixing. This could leave the editors feeling incompetent being unable to do simple tasks without help and the good developer probably won’t stay long if just faced with the routine of maintenance tasks.
Like Ondřej Polesný from Kontent.ai said back the Web Summer Camp, when he gave a presentation on the topic:
“Everybody knows it is not ideal, but nobody deals with it”
Read moreQR codes unite brands and consumers while providing usage analytics, inventory management, energy consumption statistics and much more.
Imagine proposing a sustainability program and profit center from a single QR imprint that requires an investment of 1/1000th of a cent per unit.
By linking sustainability and marketing, we open new avenues for innovation, decision making and product planning.
This is why I joined Bl.ink.
Read moreWe’ve been going through a huge shift in martech.
There’s no longer the need to pick between siloed best of breed (multiple platforms that need heavy configuration to work together) or a suite with all-in one capabilities. As Chief Martech Scott Brinker, said in a recent member call, it used to be an ‘x or y’ decision, but that’s now changing.
To quote:
The 2nd Age of Martech has arrived, and it’s all about convergence in ecosystems.
Read moreHope is the most important value of the future.
Hope will not only make us survive in the future as humans but will also inspire us to make clever decisions and find sustainable solutions to the world’s problems.
Why? Let me try to explain.
HOPE. I guess we all know instinctively that hope is important. Hope is a part of our souls DNA so to speak.
But we need to put a lot more emphasis on hope to get to the point where we begin to make the clever decisions. We need hope now more than ever.
Read moreIn the past year Marli Mesibov has done significant research into chatbots, conversational interfaces, and voice UI. What she has found shows racism and bias in many areas of automated content. The reason is clear: an algorithm is only as strong as the strategy, taxonomy, and user testing that creates it.
In order to develop AI that is delightful, it must first be unbiased. We can do that in the people we hire to develop our products, and the ways in which we test and create the initial content.
In a recent member call, Marli reviewed concrete tactics for developing unbiased AI. Marli is Content Strategy Lead at Verily Life Sciences in Cambridge, MA and also a past Boye conference speaker.
Read moreAlthough most of us have to fill in too many forms, we rarely have a chance to look at the forms that our own organisation offers to users in a thorough way to find suggestions for improvements.
In a recent member call, Caroline Jarrett took us through her process for expert reviews of forms, with some of her top tips for making them easier to use and more effective. As Caroline simply said:
“The outside world sees you through forms”
Caroline is an expert on forms and has published several books on the topic. We started by trying something simple as paying for a parking ticket. As it turned out, also among the call participants, we look at forms quite differently.
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