If you follow the news, even just a bit, you can easily get the impression that we live in an age of self-centeredness and are more focused on our own success than helping others.
In her work as the Alumni Communications & Digital Marketing Officer at Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading science-based institutions, Tina Schmechel gets to work with graduates from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life. Her experience is the exact opposite: people are supporting, encouraging and giving their time, energy and enthusiasm.
Tina has been with Imperial since just before the COVID-19 pandemic and previously worked in marketing roles in the high-end fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and luxury sectors, both in the UK and abroad. A journalist-turned-marketer, she’s authored one of Time Out’s most read articles on the 10 best rooftop bars in Barcelona and she wrote her thesis at Berlin’s Humboldt University on Banksy, the famous unknown street artist.
Tina is our expert of the month.
Read more“We need a new strategy to earn trust and help consumers and citizens make confident decisions.”
This is the premise behind Trustworthy, a 2021 book by Margot Bloomstein with the catchy subtitle: “How the smartest brands beat cynicism and bridge the trust gap”.
Margot is a Boston-based working content strategist for more than 20 years, she’s consulted with clients in a range of industries, from software-as-a-service to sex toy retailers and footwear technology to 401(k)s.
In a recent member call, we held a book club for Trustworthy. Margot introduced the book, explained how to bridge the trust gap, what the smartest organizations are doing to foster trust by using content and design to build the confidence of consumers and citizens alike and much more.
Read moreIn almost 20 years of working with the web in Higher Ed, I've seen many marketing websites built in all kinds of systems or even home-grown systems. The one thing that I've found in common with schools that use proprietary website platforms instead of the very common open-source ones is that no one knows how to use them! Especially at smaller schools and colleges.
Usually, no internal staff members have the technical know-how to affect change in the systems, and most schools don't have the luxury of hiring technology staff based on one specific platform with proprietary programming needed to do even the simplest of things. Additionally, these schools are mostly beholden to either the platform's creator, an agency, or both for any changes that need to be made.
Those factors = Time and Money.
Read morePeter Merholz has worked at the intersection of design, technology, and humans for over 25 years. Currently, he’s an independent consultant focused on improving the effectiveness of design organizations. His clients include JP Morgan Chase, Ceridian, The New York Times, Roblox, and Starbucks.
He co-founded Adaptive Path, the premier user experience consultancy, acquired by Capital One in 2014. After leaving Adaptive Path, he has served as a design executive, leading teams at Groupon, OpenTable, Capital One, Snagajob (now Snag), and Kaiser Permanente.
He co-wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, still the premier book on building in-house design teams, and co-hosts Finding Our Way, a podcast exploring design leadership. Oh, and, yeah, he coined the word “blog.”
Peter kindly offered to host a 'Ask me anything' session as one of our regular member calls. The conversation started with his book and took us through current design leadership topics onto his take on the recent tech layoffs, also named by some as a social contagion phenomenon.
Read moreProcess Mining is a growing to become an established discipline in the IT landscape of large and complex organisations.
IT analysts are also increasingly paying attention to both the innovation happening in the space and the vendors. Still, it can be a confusing market to look at and as usual, if you want to reap the benefits, you need to do your homework.
In brief: Process mining is a scientific tool with capabilities of process blueprinting, process optimization and data visualization with the help of machine learning engines. Typically, a process mining tool visualizes data in much more details then conventional visualization tools. The information captured is used to build a storyline highlighting the journey of a transaction on a process and time flow.
In this article, I’ll share my take on process mining in 2023 based on my experience, which started with a decade of RPA work and now with 5+ years focusing on processes at Danish insurance firm Tryg.
Read moreAs you might already know from following our work, the information communications technology (ICT) sector contributes ~4% of global greenhouse gas emissions – this is equivalent to global aviation.
In a recent member call hosted by Leah Goldfarb from cloud hosting platform Platform.sh, she explored how to reduce your carbon footprint in the cloud quantitatively. She also unpacked what information is needed for a carbon audit in the cloud, Platform.sh’s approach to carbon calculations, and concluded with how a shared-responsibility model will help us minimise carbon emissions.
Leah works as Environmental Impact Officer at Platform.sh in Paris. She is a certified Climate Leader and belongs to the “Climate Reality Leadership Corps”. Al Gore, the 2007 Nobel Prize winner, trained Leah to give informative presentations on climate change and how to address this issue, which affects all of us.
Read moreIntranets have been around since the mid-90’s and during the past decades, we’ve seen quite a few waves of different intranet concepts like the employee portal, the social intranet or even the digital workplace.
According to Frank Wolf, co-founder of employee communication software vendor Staffbase, we are now right in the middle of the next wave with intranets playing an important role in organisations, in particular when it comes to improving the employee experience.
In a recent member call, Frank joined us to explain what is behind this wave.
Read moreEnabling 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.
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