Enabling the ongoing evolution of Audi’s digital experience and creating robust, efficient and scalable technology solutions is a big part of the mission for the Digital Experience Tech team at Audi of America.
Amanda Skura heads up the team which focuses on the enablement and implementation of marketing and CRM tech alongside product development for digital business platforms.
In a recent informal member call, she shared a brief update on her work and plans for 2023. We started the conversation on how the mission connects to their everyday work.
Read moreSusan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology from way back when most people did not interact with a computer.
Back then, Susan also took a course in computer programming and these were the days with cards and card readers. One day, while programming, the card came back with ‘Job aborted’ and this made Susan think:
“How’s anyone going to understand what that means”
When speaking to Susan, this is the beginning of interest in the field of what was then called human factors and designing tech to better fit us humans. Initially she didn’t know human factors in computers existed, but now many years later she can look back at a career that has taken her onwards in a field later known as man machine interaction, then it became known as usability and today simply referred to as user experience.
Susan is the CEO at The Team W, a services firm focused on behavioral science. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. She’s also our expert of the month.
Read moreYou might have noticed that there’s a new buzzword in town: Digital Experience Composition, also known as DXC. Several niche vendors are getting together around the term, sharing their somewhat similar definitions and also their messaging on how DXC can help you solve your digital problems. Or actually, for some of them only your web problems.
If you follow the wider digital experience industry or like me have worked with CMS for decades, and sometimes try to decipher vendor marketing, you might think that Digital Experience Composition (DXC) is the new big thing. Perhaps even the new trend after headless?
Read moreHeadless CMS has been around for almost a decade and experienced an explosive growth, in particular in recent years. Still, the marketplace is confusing, crowded and it doesn’t require the veteran analyst certification to see that many vendors are struggling to define what they sell.
Yet, to customers selecting the right tool, it’s not only hard to navigate the marketplace, it’s also more important than ever.
In this post, we’ll look at why you might want to consider a headless CMS, share our advice on what you need to make it work, how to select the right one and finally, share a list of headless CMS vendors to inform your shortlist.
Read moreDo you remember plasma globes? Mainly used back in school as a fun thing in physics and also known for the tricks that can be performed on them by users moving their hands around them.
To Nicole France, content is similar to that old invention by Nikola Tesla when he was experimenting with high-frequency electric currents in a glass vacuum tube. Content also has tremendous energy and it can go in all kinds of directions. It’s something everybody think they can play with and certainly have an opinion about, but it takes quite some work to make something useful out of it.
Nicole has a background as an analyst with both Gartner and Constellation Research, she’s also been almost 6 years with Fujitsu, worked in both the US and Europe and now she’s Evangelist, Director of Content at Contentful.
She’s also our expert of the month.
Read moreAre 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 more