Some answers to questions in realizing Customer Experience design in a Digital Business
- Mark Skilton
- Aug 4, 2015
- 8 min read
Here are my answers to the recent questions that came up in the July 30 webinar on
The Customer Experience Journey in Digital Disruptive Business Models
Q: There is no trust ; vendor might want to think that way or that view is UK specific, but, in general, trust is in reverse to the amount of info it possesses.
A. Trust is a relative perspective between the individual, individuals, corporate, the state and society, it is not an absolute or simplistic. There are concepts for example of a “social contract” and a “cultural contract” that a person may enter voluntarily or involuntarily. For example, in the physical world you put a letter into an envelope and seal it and post it. You assume the letter is “secure” because you have entered a kind of social contract where the “norm” is that all participants involved see it as a personal letter. The semiotic “marker”, the envelope, signifies this is private to the cultural norm who follow that convention. This analogy becomes less obvious in digitization where the domains and domain transactions between parties become virtual and less easy to see the “markers” of what is private or open. The terms structures , semi-structured and unstructured are incorrect terms and the wrong taxonomy to use as they are merely taxa, a set of data syntax rules compared to a lexicon that seeks to define meaning and an ontology that defines the relationships of meaning. We need the latter in next general data oriented services that seek to define, manage and leverage the value of data and trust, not just a digital assets silo that treat trust as a defensive position only. This is one of the key differences between digital business 1.0 and digital business 2.0 that we introduced in the beginning of our presentation.
Q: Each entity within a Digital Ecosystem / Value Chain may be running their own proprietary ERP or CRM. How would you drive the interoperability conversation with all these entities to help deliver THE customer experience ?
A. Yes, agreed, the aim of the work group is to establish customer centric models to find journeys that bring together these digital platforms into the next generation of connected spaces and joined up business and economic markets. We are at the verge of this new era of connected data and services and ERP, CRM and other technologies can combine in ways to make this happen.
Q: How does infra and IT solutions costs being lower (in some cases commoditized) influence in this customer digital scenario?
A. I see this as several paradoxes, it is lower costs performance/price is driving cloud, mobile and social app adoption as the barriers to ownership and consumption are well within consumer grasp. The second is that increased massive data collection, usage data and analytics are making traditional infra and devops a commodity and that additional more complex infra that can run analytical scale services for real time decision support and contextually supported services across a supply chain is now more critical than ever. The new competitive market space. Digital is not just extensions of the infra back office but a front office disruption and new set of business models that requires a joined up approach across channels and touch points with customers and other parties. The old world of infra is dead as a result of this effect.
Q: How do you think the Drone technology will create new business model?s
A. Digital technology has no formal definition but can be seen as a set of technologies that work with rapid , near real time response and connectivity for a joined up experience. The performance/price points of technology is driving this together with the adoption of technical standards and platform models such as two-sided marketplaces and multi-sided marketplaces that are creating new modular layered architecture solutions. We see Uber, airbnb, amazon, Alibaba, Facebook , Apple, Google and many others using a combination of customer experience design techniques and technologies to engineer new kinds of business models and experiences.
Q. How you think the Drone technology will generate new business models ?
A. It’s a physical to virtual design pattern. This is early days but it is what I see as “Actuator technology” that is more akin to robotics where the internet and software services in the virtual world can then physically interoperate with the physical world with devices like drones that can move sense and move to carry out actions. The Drone is the “first robot” of the cyber society, we have seen nothing yet to what may be coming next.
Q. I think it is not just trust but also the legal frameworks that are a challenge. My experience is that many organisations don’t know where they stand with many of these new capabilities – who is ultimately responsible when things go wrong?
A. Yes agree, its about understanding the conditions for “liability and Indemnity”
What are the conditions of liability?
What indemnity does the digital service provide?
Personal Liability versus Corporate Liability
What are the charges for the digital service to cover L&I ?
Where is the Liability ?
Q. I think the bigger challenge, outside of architectural, is the silo’d nature of companies with silo’d decision making and responsibility. Often times these new CXO’s or folks focused on customer experience have ideas but no authority. Suggestions to overcome?
A. In reality there is “network effects” and what I call “radius effects” , the former is about connectivity and economies of scale, the latter is the ability of the person or organization or supply chain to reach and coordinate/orchestrate an end to end experience. In most cases this is limited by standards and openness and, importantly, governance and protection assurance practices. I see it as an “arms race” between cyber threats and lack of governance practices and ill defined legal rules and the ability to create exciting and innovative new experiences. It’s a wide scope of opportunities and issues.
Q: Which deliverables will be constructed into this group to support organizations apply all this ideas and practices to their daily operations and gain advantage over competitor offering this customer experience?
A. This new Digital Business & Customer Experience (CX) Work Group will produce 3 deliverables currently planned to help this
A customer experience Reference model – to help define operational best practices
Customer user stories Guide/white paper – from vertical industries and horizontal cross industries to help define real practice examples of joined up CX
Digital disruptive business models guide/white paper – examples of how to measure digital value and its disruption in an enterprise plus examples of real case studies
Q. Hi, how are. if possible, I would like to hear comments about how/if design thinking on EA solutions is related with this.
A. EA includes designing how digital technologies and business architecture will create effective enterprise solutions for customer experience and value outcomes. This work group will define a new CX reference model and customer and disruptive business models cases to help this. We will also push beyond traditional EA into an ecosystems perspective where we seek to join multiple EAs across may systems and enterprises, something that typically EA does not address well. One of the reasons this new WG was set up was because of these types of issues we see in EA that is often more internal and bottom up when customer centric thinking is today outside in and starts beyond the enterprise in the digital economy. My own view is that we need a new approach called Ecosystems Architecture which moves beyond an Enterprise centric view and approach.
Q: How this drives Health Care outside of the current reality ? I think I missed that.
A. There are several examples of where care in the community to clinician mobile and wearable technology use , to translation big data research can use digital business models and business practices that do not need to be in traditional centralized control.
Q. Is the Drone technology an example of Disruptive Technology ?
A. Yes , see previous answer
Q. On the point made by Vickie, businesses org. structures are not ready to absorb this framework of digital customer, other than in technology companies.
A. Yes the bad ones don’t work well and will fail as a result. The issue is that business needs to think digitally and work out how to have a digitally enabled enterprise. The risk is that your business will miss opportunities and potentially lose customers and revenue.
Q. Probably there’s a challenge of adjusting the way CXOs agendas are structured)
A. Yes Digital is a top CXO agenda item now, many surveys and analysts support this.
Q. Tnks a lot for this comment. I asked it due to omnichannel enterprise future.
A. Yes omnichannel is here today
Q: Do you expect revision to TOGAF document content and impact on certification (currently its 9.1) in near future?
A. (By Sonia Gonzarlez, Director of the Architect Forum) There is at this moment a process and defined road map for the development of an improved version of the standard. The improvement is handled at this moment in the Architecture Forum and we are at this moment in the review process of new improved drafts. When the new version is stable we will address the impact in the certification program an all the related ecosystem.
There is no defined date for this process yet
Q: How can we estimate the Value of a Journey to Digital extending to the broader Ecosystem?
A. In summary it is about understanding the value of the space and moments. The traditional economics is in trading products and services exchange, but in digitization it is about the potential of locations and experience and the wider ecosystem. You therefore need to put a value of , for example the 1 hour train journey or the 15 minutes walking through a shopping mall. Looking in this context suddenly moves from cost of transactions to lost opportunities to add value in these moments. This is the digital economy thinking.
Q. How to approach cost effective technology change management that is required transitioning to digital ecosystem view?
A. As before , we need to retire old legacy technology to enable funding and usage of the new. It’s not magic, the difference is the skills have shifted to social behavioral design, user interactive design, analytics data science and next generation infrastructure and cyber security that the traditional world of the “as-a-service” model no longer covers. This impacts the culture, leadership, skills and organizational models as well as the knowledge management and collaborative processes necessary to compete.
Q. Is there any framework designed to address the issue of interoperability between the different digital worlds (Usage, Personal, company etc)?
A. Yes several exist in academic papers and several exist in open standards and proprietary “smart” kits and analytics platforms that seek to aggregate and bridge different systems and technologies.
The challenge is that there are multiple “clusters” of solutions such as apps an app store that represent alternatives. Dynamic late binding doesn’t work in the sense of one to one relationships here. It is about growing communities and networks n the digital solutions to adopt and scale and innovate the solutions and services. The other challenge is the supplier centric data management and legal issues of IP and control that block interoperability in practice either unintentionally or intentionally. Hence there is no one single model currently, a universal theory of IOP if you like, yet.
This new work group is seeking to define a customer experience reference model that will cover some of these issues from a customer centric outside in perspective.
Q: Most of issues we experience in the asset intensive Electricity utility is within the operating processes as the infrastructure ages, and unreliable performance of the fleet. Will the customer journey be relevant for Internal customer? Are there examples?
A. Yes, there is consumer centric customer journeys and also “non-commerce” centric user journeys like the one you describe , where users are not purchasing but just need to use resources efficiently as we see in many public / Federal and utility sector cases. This new work group will look at both types and also the impact on operating model efficiencies. How do organizations get ready to use customer experience journeys is also part of the guides and white papers we will develop.
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