This conversation was different. A seasoned group of martech pros discussing where personalization was really netting out. “Is that still a thing? Are we still on that?” The discussion turned from the topic itself to something more important.
What value do the features provide to business owners that don’t have the capacity or readiness to use them?
Much like my flying, (or setting the bar lower to the self-parking), car, if the technology were to magically appear, what would be my propensity to use it?
Read moreIt’s generally considered good to pause, to learn and to reflect, in particular in times of change. Still, how do we ever find the time and how to we actually do something about it?
To Mathias Jakobsen, reflections are a both a tool to change your own behavior as well as a tool to become closer with your colleagues and build stronger relationships as a foundation for collaboration
Read moreAs these lines are written, the entire world is affected by the Coronavirus, and in particular New York City is badly hit.
Physically, we need to stay apart as never before. This also means that we can’t go ahead with our planned Brooklyn conference in May and have decided to postpone the conference until May 2021.
Read moreProjects are all about implementing something useful and ideally with alignment in the first place. Still, that’s far from what always happen. Planning tends to be static while the world is clearly dynamic and always changing.
Specifically designed to foster creative thinking and deal with high impact changes, David Hobbs has developed the concept of depth scales. These are intended to help you get a project started on the right foot towards useful deliverables and satisfied stakeholders.
Read moreHow are you? How can I help?
These two questions are now front and center at almost every interaction. Looking back at just a few months ago, the beginning of 2020, and it seems so long ago. It’s clear that the world has changed so much during these past weeks.with unprecedented changes to what we consider normal.
No more travel, working from home is the norm, and there’s many Stay-At-Home orders around the world. It all also impacts us as a community and as human beings. Hopefully we’ll very soon be post-corona.
Read moreBig 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.
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