Composable Commerce is the future. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already heard it last year when we had our popular MACH Alliance member call, but what does Composable Commerce really mean and why does it matter?
As Group SVP Technology at Valtech in wonderful Copenhagen, Casper Aagaard Rasmussen heads up the global strategic activities within their MACH and Composable Enterprises business. In our latest member call, he shared why the future of commerce is composable, what it means to the marketplace at large and how it impacts agencies and customers. As he said:
We are in the era of the shared ecosystem. Composable Commerce enable new business models and helps you achieve the accelerations you are seeking. We live in a world with constant change to how consumers buy products and services.
Read moreThe future of work unfolding as a distributed and hybrid digital workplace is throwing us some new challenges. Andrew Pope's work for a government client surfaced one such challenge that digital working during the pandemic has caused: a lack of focus time when compared to traditional office working.
Finding focus when we’re largely away from the office requires new behaviours and habits to reflect new working arrangements. What happened in the office isn’t happening right now.
For our very first member call of 2022, Andrew showed us how introducing game-based cards can help teams, leaders and individuals find new techniques that help us both find time and introduce structures to provide more space to focus. He also generously shared some of the more popular techniques that have been adopted in both private and public sector organisations.
Read moreHappy New Year! The answers are out there, also in 2022. Let’s start the year, with a quick refresher of what we learned in 2021.
Personally, I found that what was the tried and tested age-old recipe now no longer holds up. This means that we even more than before need to listen carefully. We have to observe, be open to trying things out and foremost learn with an open mind.
As a community, we once again grew our member base and while doing meetings in person, hybrid and a few virtual, we also managed to publish 40 blog posts during the year. Thanks to everyone who shared their story.
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read more“Nothing today is designed for old people”
For our final member conference call of 2021, we heard the story about how Anja Saabye is building a UX and Design team at Universal Robots. Universal Robots is based in Odense, Denmark and works with industrial automation. They are known for producing a robotic arm that is characterized by being extremely versatile and easy to use in day-to-day production.
Anja Saabye joined as Head of UX in late 2020 and has since rapidly grown her team. She joined with an agency background, including almost 6 years at Hesehus. She firmly believes that designers are the most important people in any company.
Read more“Internal communication can build the bridge to the future of work”
Contributing towards making the world a better place to work is a big part of what Anke Maibach does. In her role as Head of Internal Communications and Employer Branding Europe at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), she is based in their Frankfurt office and focuses on filling her role in a very large, complex and global organisation. As of writing these lines, TCS has more than 530,000 employees.
In her own words, she sometimes sees herself as the black sheep at work. The one who comes with the unexpected point of view, or the one who looks beyond the traditional silo thinking. Interconnectivity between departments and finding the different pieces of the puzzle is important to Anke,
Anke is coming up with 14 years at TCS. Her past roles include being the Director of Communication for Central Europe and before that she was the Marketing Manager for Central Europe. Prior to joining TCS, she also worked in various marketing roles. She is our final expert of the month for 2021 and below you can learn more about her way of thinking and how she sees the big challenges towards 2022.
Read moreIn late 2020, IT analyst firm Gartner made the blunt prediction that ‘The Future of Business Is Composable’. A few months later, at the beginning of 2021, Gartner then also introduced the term ‘composable’ to the CMS marketplace with a splash in their annual Market Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
To Gartner, a “composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks” and many in our industry translated this to moving away from the large software suites or what’s also known as the monoliths.
This is largely a response to increased customers expectations, demands on shortening project cycles, increased technical debt and finally a growing demand to fit into the existing tech stack. In other words, composability has become a big thing, and many vendors have seized the momentum to also talk about how composability is key for commerce, but what about content?
As we look towards 2022, composable content management is likely to become a key requirement and we already see vendors picking up on the emerging trend.
Read moreEmployee advocacy is when the people who work for your company take steps to promote their employer. It has become a really big thing in recent years, in particular given the rise of social media and the never-ending challenges with recruiting and retaining top talent.
Surprisingly according to Anne Frost, marketing and corporate communication can actually often be a part of the problem, if you want to succeed with your employee advocacy program. In a recent member conference call, she provocatively shared three easy steps on how to ruin your advocacy program.
Read moreIt’s all about building bridges - in particular between different ways of thinking
Talking to Kristina Larsen who is a UX specialist at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark, you might expect to hear about how her design leadership work bridges different departments, but as she shared her story, it became clear that her years studying at Aalborg University and Aarhus University, and now almost 14 years working in higher education, has taken her to the next level.
In her own words, she strives to make others feel welcome, heard, valued and supported, which applies whether you are a colleague, student, a customer at VIA or a close friend.
Kristina is also a leisure doodler, a freelance mini farmer living on a field in the middle of Jutland and dreaming about landing her first board position in the next couple of years. Earlier this month, she was a highly rated track leader at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference and she is our expert of the month.
Read moreSmall features can indeed have a huge impact and make all the difference. This has always been the focus of our Small Feature Award, and earlier this month the annual contest was held for the 3rd time at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference with 6 strong contesters.
Congratulations to content operations software firm GatherContent, which impressed both the crowd and the jury with their shareable links feature - enough to win the prestigious award ahead of 5 other vendors.
Read more"Microsoft Power Apps is a game-changer"
That's what one of our non-technical Norwegian government members said when we returned from the summer holidays and met in our local peer group meeting.
Since then the Microsoft Power Platform and Power Apps have come up multiple times in several group meetings, be it communications focused, digital leadership and also our more technical groups focusing on Microsoft 365.
In a recent member conference call, Andrew Sayers from Heineken in the Netherlands told us more about the low code platform and the business apps he is responsible for. The call provided a look behind the scenes at how they approach governance, how he is responsible for the end-to-end support, and finally his work on promoting awareness and self-service usage of the Power Platform tooling to facilitate business processes and drive efficiency and transparency.
Read more"If not you, who?" and “if not now, when?"
Ron Brumbarger set the stage for an inspirational conversation about leadership, mentoring and life-long learning with these two seemingly simple questions.
Ron enjoys mentoring and teaching and finds it fascinating to hear the different answers to these two questions, but clearly also challenges himself with the questions from time to time.
He is Founder and President of Apprentice University, based in Indiana in the US and also our expert of the month.
Read moreYou have probably heard about SLA's. Service Level Agreements that contractually define what service you can expect, like uptime for your website, maintenance windows for your app or that your search has filters. That's fine and good, but what about the experience?
Casper van Amelsvoort works with Workplace Services at Rabobank and a year ago he introduced the idea of moving from Service Level Agreements to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). If your website is up and running, but the experience is really bad? Slow loading or what if your search engine doesn't give you reasonable and expected search results?
In a recent member conference call, Casper elaborated on the idea, what the difference means in practice and how he is considering implementing it.
Read moreLeadership has always been about making decisions, but when it comes to digital, you tend to be dealing with many unknowns in a fast-moving and innovative marketplace.
Coupled with adapting to unpredictable market conditions, even following the best recipe have been tricky, to say the least, and the need for learning from the best and networking with peers has been higher than ever.
Together with Kontent by Kentico, we recently organised two breakfast briefings in Amsterdam and London. Both events looked at what lies around the corner when it comes to digital leadership, but our world-class speakers also shared some of the key decisions they have made.
Read moreThe MACH Alliance’s mission is to future proof enterprise technology and to propel current and future digital experiences with open and connected enterprise tech.
Still, as Casper Aagaard Rasmussen from Valtech said in a recent member conference call, many companies don’t know about the MACH Alliance, don’t understand it or find it an uncertain multi-vendor play.
Besides several notable software vendors, the alliance has also been joined by leading agencies, including Valtech. Casper heads up the global strategic activities within Valtech’s MACH and Composable Enterprises business.
In the member call, Casper shared why the MACH Alliance matters, what it means to the marketplace at large and how it impacts agencies and customers.
Read moreIt's tricky to find talented new colleagues and building the right culture takes much more than just academic qualifications.
Jan Zerkowski is Innovation & Design Partner at Roche in Basel, Switzerland and he was recently a guest star in one of our Future Workplace peer groups. In the session, he mentioned the idea of hiring using 'creative CVs', where you highlight life skills, like film making, music, or like me elite running and learning quite a bit from working in a supermarket.
In a recent member conference call, Jan elaborated on the idea and he shared how he encourages different applicants and what he looks for in CV’s.
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