Expert of the month: Andreas Ramos

“We are just at the beginning of seeing the practical application of AI in digital marketing.”

Andreas Ramos is a true Silicon Valley legend and when I recently spoke to him, he was just wrapping up his slides on what is probably the first university lecture on Using AI for Digital Marketing.

Andreas moved to Silicon Valley in 1992, has worked in engineering at SGI, SUN Microsystems and other companies. He did translations and localisation in six languages before joining as head of a digital agency, where he worked with Global Fortune 200 clients. Later he led global SEO at Cisco, where he worked in 44 languages in 86 countries.

Today, he’s the author of 22+ books (he stopped counting), several of them Amazon #1 Best Sellers, and also an instructor in digital marketing at Omnes Education, one of France's leading schools for management and communications.

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The six pillars of content experience and how digital asset management enables them

At its simplest, an exceptional content experience means delivering the right content, to the right people at the right time and in the right format. 

But brands across the globe know it’s not as simple as it sounds. And getting it right in times of economic uncertainty is more important than ever.

In a recent member call, Warren Daniels, CMO of Bynder (Digital Asset Management Platform) joined us to tell us about the six pillars of content experience and how digital asset management enables them.

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Higher Education digital needs to move to the next level

Surviving the next several years as a school requires investing in digital marketing beyond a basic brochure website and a couple of tweets.

The hard truth is that most schools lack the means, executive understanding, and staff to succeed in digital marketing.

For example, after twenty years of market availability, a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is crucial to understanding how prospects engage with your digital ecosystem. Yet, it's rare to find a school outside the top 5% that even uses a MAP for more than an overpriced email platform.

If you're a community college or a smaller school and you own a marketing platform from Hubspot/Adobe/Salesforce, the going salary for a digital marketer who can use those tools to get results is over $100,000. Have you budgeted that much?

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Hyperautomation: More hype than hyper

The first and foremost question which comes to mind is: What is hyperautomation?

According to industry analyst firm Gartner:

“Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, event-driven software architecture, robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM) and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other types of decision, process and task automation tools.”

Now from the above definition from Gartner is very clear but at the same time it’s complex, it’s integrated, interdependent but mutually exclusive and independent at the same time. Which adds to more confusions, queries, fears, complex terminologies and eventually results in procrastination, lack of confidence and finally failures.

If there is any organisation which comes forward and say that we have attained hyperautomation or we are a hyperautomation organisation, I would humbly say either they are not sure or not aware what they are doing or they are definitely on the wrong path.

In my view, hyperautomation is not a state or a milestone or a title. It’s a journey. A journey that continues as we mature, as new technologies arrive and also when Gartner’s definition of hyperautomation changes, as it will in the foreseeable future.

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Does your IT project hurt?

If your IT projects hurt, you are far from alone. There are many reasons why these things go wrong, even with smart people and good intentions all around.

Martin Michael Frederiksen is a self-proclaimed grumpy project realist, and a seasoned Danish software executive. He recently created a top 10 list with the usual painful symptoms which caused some good debate on social media. As it turns out, all these digital projects we've been doing still have a success rate with plenty of room for improvement.

In a recent member call, we reviewed his list of usual pains, and extended his list of helpful tricks.

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The missing manual for service organisations

How do you lead and deliver successful services, sustainably? 

All organizations are becoming service organizations. But most weren’t built to deliver services successfully end-to-end, and the human, operational and financial impacts are abundantly clear. 

In the digital era the stakes are even higher, given how rapidly services change. Yet default working practices (governance, planning, funding, leadership, reporting, programme and team structures) inside large organizations haven't changed. Rather than modernize just one service at a time, it's the underlying organizational conditions that need to be transformed — anything less is futile.

Kate Tarling has written the must-read guide: The Service Organization, which came out in February 2023. In a recent member call, Kate introduced the book and we also talked about the future of service organizations.

Below you’ll find my highlights from the call and at the end you can lean back and enjoy the recording.

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Expert of the month: Tina Schmechel

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.

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Strategy for Trust

“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. 

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Higher Ed usually does not need proprietary website platforms

In 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.

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Ask me anything with Peter Merholz

Peter 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.

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Selecting the right process mining vendor

Process 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.

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Climate change and carbon accounting in the cloud

As 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. 

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Intranet Strategy Trends for 2023

Intranets 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.

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Digital Experience Technology 2023 Themes

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.

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