WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

In this section, dive into one of the 55 Business Model Patterns, each providing a practical template to help you build new business models from scratch and supercharge your existing business models. A short description is provided, capturing the key concept and underlying mechanisms of the respective business model pattern, as well as exemplary firms applying the pattern.

Several stories here have highlighted the importance of creating accounts online tied to your various identity, financial and communications services before identity thieves do it for you. This post examines some of the key places where everyone should plant their virtual flags.

Réalisé pour le compte du ministère de l’Économie, de la Science et de l’Innovation (MESI), le CEFRIO a regroupé dans le Portrait de la logistique en commerce électronique les conclusions de deux grandes enquêtes - d’abord auprès d’un échantillon représentatif d’entreprises actives en commerce électronique et oeuvrant dans les secteurs du commerce de détail, du commerce de gros ou en fabrication, puis auprès d’entreprises oeuvrant spécifiquement dans le secteur des services logistiques. Analyses et perspectives d'experts et de chercheurs universitaires complètent cette publication afin de dresser un état des lieux complet pour les PME québécoises.

The current reshaping of the customer engagement center (CEC) market is characteristic of the consolidation of the customer service technology market. Customer service and support organizations must deliver consistent, effortless, intelligent and personalized customer service to their customers. The ability to orchestrate customer requests with assisted service, as well as with self-service, is one of the four pillars of great customer service within a leading customer service and support operation.

MIT Sloan has developed, validated and applied a new framework called the “innovation radar.” This tool presents and relates all of the dimensions through which a firm can look for opportunities to innovate. Much like a map, the innovation radar consists of four key dimensions that serve as business anchors: (1) the offerings a company creates, (2) the customers it serves, (3) the processes it employs and (4) the points of presence it uses to take its offerings to market. Between these four anchors, we embed eight other dimensions of the business system that can serve as avenues of pursuit. Thus, the innovation radar contains a total of 12 key dimensions.

Complimentary copy of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) and find out why Freshworks is the only company recognized as a Visionary.

An agile approach to overhauling data architecture improves speed, flexibility, and innovation.

The future travel experience will be personalised, delivering seamless and safe services that are high value, low touch and consumer-centric, thanks to an accelerated digital transformation post-pandemic. These new advances in technology will usher in a new era of automation, requiring upskilling for employees to provide greater levels of high-quality service. Tracking climate impact across consumers, brands and destinations will be critical for building resilience, agility and speed to combat future risks and accelerate the green transition.
This white paper outlines a vision for how consumers will book and experience travel in 2040, exploring how technology and the need for sustainability could change the travel experience over the next 20 years. In particular, this analysis will focus on the future of travel — exploring what online travel agents, urban mobility, air travel and hotels will look like.

Euromonitor International looks beyond standard demographics and profiles 11 distinct personality-driven consumer types. Learn about the traits of Impulsive Spenders, Minimalist Seekers, Empowered Activists, Secure Traditionalists and more.

The C4 model was created as a way to help software development teams describe and communicate software architecture, both during up-front design sessions and when retrospectively documenting an existing codebase. It's a way to create maps of your code, at various levels of detail, in the same way you would use something like Google Maps to zoom in and out of an area you are interested in.

Insights from 17 of today's biggest marketplaces, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Thumbtack, Etsy, Uber and many more

An in-depth guide to understanding and optimizing your recurring revenue pricing strategy.

Make no mistake, the knowledge of hacking is different from a hacker. A hacker is a person, not the skill. And the use of any knowledge is a personal choice and that choice isn’t universal. The same way some politicians are corrupt, some hackers are corrupt. The same way some politicians are good, some hackers are good also. You may be a Satoshi Nakamoto or an Albert Gonzalez, it is your choice. There is nothing wrong with the hacker knowledge. It is all about you. What You’ll Learn

Integration, Speed To Insights, And Real-Time Decisioning Matter Most For Orchestration

Vendors that take a technology-agnostic approach to integration can deliver insights at speed across all permutations of journeys. They also have a proven track record in real-time decisioning across a wide variety of systems and can help companies drive business results and CX differentiation.

There are two ways you can talk about newspapers. You can talk about the ‘fourth estate’, and newspapers’ role in culture, politics, governance, the exchange of ideas and civil society. But you can also talk about newspapers as a specialised light manufacturing industry, that aggregated attention to sell advertising. There’s a common line about Google and Facebook that ‘if you’re not paying, you’re the product’, but this is pretty much what newspapers did: if you read old accounts for, say the New York Times Company, you can see that they were giving the product away at close to cost and making the money from selling your attention.

Which technology trends are most likely to impact your business in the coming years? Trends are waypoints to help anticipate future states in a world where uncertainty looms. The Future Today Institute's annual Tech Trends Report asks you to examine your assumptions, cherished beliefs and expectations for the future using a bolder, more holistic perspective. In the 13th edition of our Tech Trends Report, we forecast the key technology trends that will redefine businesses in the coming years. More importantly, we offer strategic analysis and guidance on those trends and further explore them in future scenarios to help you understand their implications on your organization and industry.

If this all seems like it’s cobbled together, that’s because it is. I’m currently going through the process of setting this stack up for my local deli and I can attest to how frustratingly high-touch and difficult it is. But if the dine-in experience means filling four tops with mannequins and separating diners with plexi glass and shower curtains, restaurants better start preparing for a world where takeout is the new dine in no matter how steep the learning curve.

Digital marketing leaders use multichannel marketing hubs to orchestrate contextually relevant experiences across complex journeys. Vendors emphasize unified customer profiles supported by predictive insights to drive personalized interactions. Use this research to evaluate suitable MMH solutions.

Planbox receives the highest score in strategy AND current offerings in the latest Forrester Wave report on innovation management platforms.

The Technology Radar is an opinionated guide to technology frontiers. Read the latest here.

Developers own the whole process. There are no release managers, sign offs, or windows that developers are allowed to make releases in.
We have infrastructure to limit the blast radius of bad changes
Unfortunately, sometimes things will break, and that’s ok. We have built our infrastructure to limit the blast radius of bad changes. Most importantly, we trust each of our developers to be responsible and own the recovery if their change goes bad.
Developers can fast track a fix using /shipit --emergency
Once a fix has been prepared (either a fix-forward or revert), developers can fast track their fix to the front of the line with a single /shipit --emergency command. To help our developers make decisions quickly, we don’t have multiple recovery protocols, and instead, just have a single emergency feature that takes the quickest path to recovery.

Contently's Playbook provides tools to help you align content teams, improve your content strategy, , and improve communication organization wide.

7 steps, from communication tools and performance reviews to team morale and helping new hires.

Google Cloud was named a Leader and received the highest score across all 10 Forrester New Wave™: Computer Vision Platforms, Q4 2019 evaluation criteria.