Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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The world of digital commerce has grown in leaps and bounds over the last two and a half decades, from quite modest beginnings to an astonishing $4.2 trillion in global revenue this year. In all ways that it matters, from wide product availability and deep consumer uptake to operational complexity and business sophistication, e-commerce has become a vast industry that powers much of the world of retail consumer sales today.

However, along with this maturity has become ever-growing overhead in time, resources, and management attention on making the many moving pieces -- product catalogs, commerce systems, feeds, channels, and marketplaces -- fit together and properly operational in a way that is truly sustainable as a business.

Related Research Report: P2C Management

Along the way a number of product categories have attempted to alleviate the many individual challenges of building and running an e-commerce business. Product information management (PIM) tools made product feeds/catalogs more manageable. The power of enterprise resource management (ERP) platforms were brought to bear on tracking the e-commerce supply chain. Experience management platforms were acquired to provide better buying journeys. Customer and master data (CDP, MDM) tools were used to sort out the torrents of product and customer data flying through a ever-greater number of feeds, channels, and marketplaces. Marketing and advertising services were used to maximize sales and product positioning. Workflow tools began to manage the synchronization of integrated systems.

Automation eventually moved from managing feeds and synchronization to silent governing and maximizing more strategic activities like campaign management, content enrichment, and ROI optimization. Then there was the cross-cutting concerns of running effectiviely across critical silos and boundaries such as different countries, multiple clouds, various local e-commerce platforms, multiple stores, many brands, and a multitude of currencies.

Modern Digital Commerce is About Taming Complexity

This then is the situation that digital commerce firms increasingly encountered in the 2010s: The sheer proliferation of data, channels, systems, and silos/boundaries. This includes managing the timely data flows between them, dealing with a constantly changing fabric of inbound and outbound systems, operational processes that made the most of such data, all sitting on top a large and unwieldy hub of core systems began to weigh on the growth and potential of many stories. 

Out of this, a few of the firms that specialized in helping organizations operate in this high velocity and turbulent environment began to offer more integrated solutions that began to create an overarching and holistic operational construct on top of this constant swirl of commerce technology and supporting processes.

After discussing these trends with those in the industry for a while and examining the resulting solutions, it began to become clear that a genuine new product category was emerging that sat an entire level above the rest of the e-commerce solution landscape.

Understanding the Holistic Capabilities of P2C Management

In short, P2C Management provides an entirely new high level abstraction for how a digital commerce ecosystem functions. Instead of manually having to operate the functional operations of digital product marketing and sales across hundreds of product feeds and hundreds more consumer touchpoints -- or even harder, effectively optimize and maximize the commerce outcomes in al lthese combination, the category of P2C Management provides a single and consistent way to do this. As my new report explores in much greater detail, the three main strategic functions that a P2C Management platform offers is:

• Consumer reach: Real-time syndication to a very large number of consumer marketplaces with both marketing and advertising support
• Commerce management and optimization: Enabling of the cross-platform operations and continuous automated improvement of a commerce business across myriad product providers and consumers
• Product data ecosystem: Large-scale integration of product information sources such as sellers, vendors, and manufacturers

In my research, I've also uncovered ten candidate platforms that offer some subset -- and sometimes nearly all -- of these capabilities in a way that can provide a very substantial and strategic improvement to digital commerce operations and business outcomes. These solutions I've summarized in a new Constellation Research ShortList that was published separately today with the main research report that explores and describing P2C Management.

The current solutions for P2C Management that Constellation Research has identifed so far include offerings from Akeneo, ChannelAdvisor, Inriver, Pimcore, Productsup, Riversand, Salsify, Skubana, Syndigo, Webgility.

The formal high level defintion of the P2C Management category is as follows:

P2C Management solutions provide a systematic way of maximizing the total overall effectiveness of product information value chains. P2C almost completely automates the complex real-time flows of the key inputs and outputs of product information in an -commerce environment. Such solutions enable the strategic administration, management, and governance across an unlimited number of stores, catalogs, consumer touch points, product items, transactions, and buyers.

Successful P2C Management solutions optimize and maximize each element of the commerce ecosystem including content, marketing, advertising, pricing, campaigns, sales, testing, and fulfillment to maximize ROI and net profitability.

P2C is most effectively realized by a platform that is designed from the ground up to deal effectively with today’s hyperscale and deeply integrated commerce operating environments. Effective realization of P2C results in higher conversion, more revenue, larger margins, faster growth, more repeat sales, higher stock efficiency and larger customer lifetime value.

Introducing Product-to-Consumer (P2C) Management: A Strategic New Product Category for Digital Commerce from Digital Enterprise Today on Vimeo.

Developing the P2C Management Category

While few of these companies themselves yet identify themselves with this strategic new category, I am convinced it is the inevitable overarching future of digital commerce. The sheer complexity and unwieldy nature of operating today's contemporary e-commerce business through one of the aging, functionally partitioned, and siloed capabilities that it is composed of is no longer really possible. With none of the constituent parts of an integrated e-commerce operation offering a suitable home for overall management, operations, and governance, it is left to the solutions that are aimed at the whole picture, from data and systems, to products and consumers.

Thus, my research shows that the P2C Management category is becoming the new "top of the stack" of digital commerce, and will be one of the most important to watch as it evolves and matures through the 2020s. While this category is becoming necessary to become and remain an efficient and profitable e-commerce business at the higher end of the market, I do anticipate the democratization of the category as it become easier to integrate, learn, and adopt for less mature organizations. Nevertheless, the P2C Management market is already quite large, with a total addressable market of over $11 billion in 2021. I look forward to covering this space more closely as this emerging category expands and grows throughout the decade.

My Additional Research on This Topic:

The P2C Management Vendor ShortList for 2021

Realizing a Decisive Advantage in Digital Commerce Through Economic Flexibility

How Headless Revolutionized Content Management

The Future of Enterprise Content Management

A New Digital Experience Maturity Model for Improved Business Outcomes

How CXOs Can Attain Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Customers, Employees, and Partners 

To Strategically Scale Digital, Enterprises Must Have a Multicloud Experience Integration Stack

Data to Decisions Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Sales Marketing Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work Supply Chain Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software IoT Blockchain ERP Leadership Collaboration M&A AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Growth eCommerce Next Gen Apps CRM finance Customer Service Content Management Enterprise Service Chief Analytics Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Information Officer Chief People Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Experience Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Operating Officer

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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Today’s technology-centric workplaces make it challenging for employees to quickly and effectively engage with common tasks in their work environment. It’s not that there is too much technology, but that it is situated in a way that lacks context and does not directly support the specific flow of work at hand.

In my research on digital employee experience, most digitally-enabled processes are built as functional silos. This means they don’t take into account the overall work experience or the other applications and channels that are used by the worker to complete a task. While it’s still challenging to design end-to-end digital experiences for general purpose knowledge workers, it’s become evident that the industry is closing in on solutions for semi-structured work for certain roles, such as call center operators or front desk workers.

In fact, I am seeing that more organizations than ever today are creating more tailored and customized employee experiences across channels and functions so that workers can focus on the work and not the underlying technologies. Organizations are doing this out of necessity to achieve certain needed benefits such as to reduce employee onboarding time, cut down on training, improve productivity, or reduce errors.

Where and How to Tailor Employee Experience for Better Outcomes

It turns out that one of the best places to guide and personalize the employee experience across functions and channels is in the collaboration tools that workers use daily. These are already the nexus for many key processes that involve more than a single person, and they are a natural location to bridge multiple channels and applications in the process as well.

Figure 1: How work events can be mapped to tailored experiences

For this tailoring of employee experience to work, however, it requires some adaptation to the process at hand. Relevant responses, including capabilities like auto-generated next best action, to important and/or common situations should be presented to the user when an appropriate situation occurs.  Contextually significant data should be filtered and shown in response to gating events in the worker's activities, such as which step should be performed next or who to hand the next step off to when it’s complete.

An Example of Tailored Experiences: 8x8 Frontdesk

A useful example of how personalized and contextual experiences can be provided to workers  to achieve the aforementioned benefits is with the new Frontdesk solution by cloud-based voice, collaboration, and customer engagement provider 8x8.

By entirely virtualizing the communications environment of the knowledge worker, a specialist contact center agent or front desk worker, Frontdesk provides businesses with the agility to dynamically assign roles to any user that is available and capable. This is an integral part of the software category known as eXperience Communications as a Service (XCaaS), which realizes an integrated cloud platform for contact center, voice, video, chat, and APIs. 8x8 Frontdesk is a new XCaaS composable experience aimed at the need for a dynamic receptionist solution for high-volume call handling. It consequently enables communication services to be available to anyone who can perform the work, from any location without special hardware.

Figure 2: How Frontdesk maps high frequency events to specifically tailored experiences

By completely virtualizing the call center worker or front desk operator, 8x8 Frontdesk extends their role to any user that is available and willing, as an integral part of their integrated cloud platform for contact center, voice, video, chat, and APIs. The solution is delivered entirely via software to anyone who can perform the work, from any location dynamically without special hardware.

What sets it apart from previous solutions is 8x8 Frontdesk offers a personalized solution for receptionists that is easily enabled in the same communications and collaborating app used across the entire organization, with centralized answering for both employee extensions as well as contact center agent user groups. Designed for a shallow learning curve aimed at speeding user adoption and time-to-value, the product provides contextual assistance with quick action icons for single-click call connections based on the caller and their likely destination, with pre-scripted greetings provided to the worker for the relevant inbound call. Voice and message-based call consultation capabilities are also provided that speed workers to the right internal contact.

The result is a solution that just about anyone can use with minimal training, maximum confidence in their actions, and significant efficiency boosts that greatly reduce time to task completion.

What Organizations Can Do To Maximize the Results of Tailored Experiences

While it’s helpful to have solutions that allow the tailoring in the first place, the key is to provision them upfront with data, filters, and contextually relevant content. Today, much of this setup is done in the solution design itself, freeing up the organization to deploy it seamlessly, as the use cases are already developed and realized with most of the tailoring already done for the situated work process. This enables organizations to outcompete using the strength of their customer/worker journeys.

The following should be considered by organizations to get the most from tailored experiences:

• Specifically seek out solutions that realize tailored experiences at the junction between multiple people and systems. Collaboration scenarios such as call centers tend to have the most contextual relevant value that is easy to tailor repeatedly and reliably at scale.
• Look for use cases in commonplace, high frequency collaboration scenarios that will deliver high ROI due to volume-based increases in speed, performance, reliability and reduced errors.
• Test and validate the tailored experiences to ensure they actually deliver the benefits expected, configuring or customizing them as needed until the desired level of performance is achieved.

In today’s complex and high velocity workplaces, tailored experiences can deliver signal from the noise and ensure workers are a) focused on task , b) proactively enabled in their common processes, and c) able to quickly learn what they to do, deliver on it, and ensure the high quality of their resulting work activities. Organizations that seek to gain the highest performance for their digital workplaces will seek out solutions that contextually enable their workers, especially at the point of communications and collaboration, to carry out their activities with as much relevant, in-experience support and personalization to task as possible.

Additional Reading

Realizing a Decisive Advantage in Digital Commerce Through Economic Flexibility

Reducing Team Communications Silos to Rapidly Increase Usability, Adoption, and Lower Support Costs

The Crisis-Accelerated Digital Revolution of Work

Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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The stakeholders of today’s digital commerce and online shopping properties are currently afforded several significant growth opportunities, even in the face of today’s often uncertain times. That is, if they can successfully adapt to shifting online buying habits. The twin impacts of the pandemic and the resulting economic turbulence has indeed changed both consumer needs and perceptions.

These buyer shifts and the growth opportunity they represent are genuine and significant. For example, more consumers now shop online due to the pandemic according to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development data, with 3% overall growth globally from 2019 to 2020. This represents millions of new online buyers that can be readily tapped by those ready to meet their needs. Furthermore, as buying habits shift towards online, consumers may also be attracted to new digital experiences. This could quickly expand to buying experiences that weren’t considered online before, such as purchasing houses or using healthcare services.

The lesson: Those that adapted have tended to benefit most from these shifts. Yet, retailers have also encountered difficult economic times too, with sales having dipped measurably in recent months due to economic uncertainty. With a generally unclear sense of the near future, it’s certainly understandable that consumers may have interest in greater economic flexibility, such as more convenient payment options, from their preferred online shopping sites.

Solutions addressing economic objections directly in-channel have high appeal

The friction in the average digital shopping experience remains significant however, especially during the checkout process. In fact, today's e-commerce cart abandonment rate has risen to just over 70%, a rate it has remained at for years. This is because available means of payment or ease-of-credit-qualification has become a leading reason for cart abandonment. The latest data suggests that e-commerce sites seeking to reduce shopping cart abandonment must focus on reducing the friction directly in the payment process itself, where the main resistance tends to take place. This means e-commerce sites seeking to reduce shopping cart abandonment must focus on reducing the friction directly in the payment process itself, where the main resistance tends to take place.

Reducing abandonment of the typical e-commerce buying session has three primary solutions that can help reduce friction and increase successful conversions:

• Easier navigation and user experience.  Usability is intrinsic to the digital commerce experience, but it can be time-consuming and costly to implement and test.
• Just-in-time offers/coupons. Reducing the cost of the sales transaction is a key way to increase conversions, but negatively impacts margins.
• Flexible payment options. Making it easier for shoppers to use services such as buy now and pay later removes friction with little effort or risk on the part of the e-commerce site.

The Shortest Route to Offering Economic Flexibility To Online Consumers

While online storefronts have numerous options to address cart abandonment and e-commerce friction in general, an easier way is simply to use available offerings provided by existing payment partners. Because these partners are likely already integrated into the e-commerce site, they can be quickly activated and used to help reduce buying friction. This in turn offers more payment options to buyers with the least amount of time and effort and can directly help reduce cart abandonment.

Almost all e-commerce sites already have trusted payment partners that have flexible payment options ready to turn on. These almost always offer the shortest time to value for site owners and operators. In fact, in my current analysis, new payment options from trusted partners are the fastest route to conversion growth and higher customer lifetime value (CLV.) That isn’t all: In my research into modern e-commerce payment solutions, I have found that more flexible payment options don’t just address cart abandonment, it has other downstream benefits as well.

Figure 1: Overall cost creates the friction in the online buyer journey

The key downstream benefits of high economic flexibility in the customer jouney are:

• Customer retention/repurchasing. Shoppers who are given additional options to pay for their purchase tend to find the experience both helpful and rewarding and thus they tend to favor that site again says in-depth research.
• Higher customer lifetime value (CLV). Existing customers will convert more often and for larger amounts when they are given access to economic flexibility. This increases the key metric of CLV, which is the gold standard for customer value.

The key to rapid and successful rollout of shopping options offering economic flexibility is the use of trusted partners, who consumers may recognize and be comfortable with from the start.

A New Industry Example of Economic Flexibility: PayPal’s Buy Now Pay Later Solution

PayPal has recently entered in the market with a major offering that provides consumers with a way to buy now and pay later with a very simple and straightforward process. Pay in 4 from PayPal lets consumers split their payments for an e-commerce transaction into 4 equal payments, one every two weeks, starting the day they make their purchase. Pay in 4 is interest-free, has no impact on a consumer’s credit score and is fully backed by PayPal’s well-known brand.

Pay in 4 is prominently offered through the regular PayPal payment option in existing sites, making it extremely simple to use. One click makes it easy for an online shopper to understand the terms and another click to agree to them.

Figure 2: Pay in 4 payment options are typically included in the existing PayPal checkout experience

A leading adopter of Pay in 4 is the well-known food shopping service, Omaha Steaks. Omaha Steaks sought to offer their customers flexible payment options and evaluated Pay in 4 as a primary solution. As a key step in the evaluation, they chose to A/B test the economic flexibility solution to ensure the results were net positive.

During the test, Omaha Steaks displayed dynamic messaging about Pay in 4 to 65% of their customers on both product pages and in their shopping cart. Within a few months, the company saw an increase in both conversion and Average Order Value (AOV). As a result, they decided to roll out Pay in 4 to 100% of their customers in March 2021. Pay in 4 has since cited a 10.4% increase in AOV for those that use it in their messaging in the cart to customers.

The best part is the overall effort to enable Pay in 4 by most merchants is lower than the other ways of reducing friction that are listed above. Integrate easily and add dynamic Pay in 4 messaging with just a few lines of code.

Bottom line: New Innovative Payment Options Boost E-commerce Sales

E-commerce firms must ride industry and consumer trends successfully to continue to thrive. This means adapting to current market conditions as well as to specific customers’ needs to achieve sustainable growth.

Those who aim at directly reducing one of the largest sources of conversion friction — given it is one of the most significant sales performance advantages available to most merchants today — is an easier option for most e-commerce sites today.

Payment options such as PayPal Pay in 4 are leading examples of trusted payment options likely to drive growth in sales and customer acquisition/retention through offering shoppers more economic flexibility in a highly consumable way.

Learn more about PayPal’s buy now pay later solutions.

Additional Reading

A New Digital Experience Maturity Model for Improved Business Outcomes

How CXOs Can Attain Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Customers, Employees, and Partners

The Digital Transformation of Back-End Customer Experience: What Leaders of The New C-Suite Are Thinking

Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Future of Work AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...

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Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Future of Work Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Sales Marketing Insider Associates SoftwareInsider Security Zero Trust Leadership Chief Analytics Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Privacy Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Experience Officer

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation…...

Read more

 

Matrix Commerce Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work Sales Marketing Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Data to Decisions Tech Optimization Insider Associates SoftwareInsider Metaverse AR Leadership Chief Customer Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer Chief Experience Officer

Andy Thurai

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Andy Thurai Andy Thurai is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor, enterprise architect and evangelist with more than 25 years of experience in executive, technical, and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel, and Oracle. Andy has written more than 100 articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, The New Stack, AI World, VentureBeat, DevOps.com, GigaOm and Wired. Andy’s fields of interest and expertise include AIOps, ITOps, Observability, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud, Edge, and other enterprise software. His strength is selling technology to the CxO audience with a value proposition rather than the usual technology sales pitch. Find more details and samples of Andy’s work on his…...

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When it comes to crisis and incident management in the cloud/digital era, HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY!

An Incident is defined as unplanned downtime, or interruption, that either partially or fully disrupts a service by offering a lesser quality of service to the users. If the Incident is major, then it is a crisis!

When it starts to affect the quality of service delivered to the customers, it becomes an issue, as most service provides have service level agreements with the consumers that often have penalties built in.

As I continue my research in these areas, and after talking to multiple clients, I have come to the realization that most enterprises are not set up to handle IT-related incidents or crises in real time. The classic legacy enterprises are set up to deal with crises in old-fashioned ways, without considering the Cloud or the SaaS model, and social media venting brings another quirk. Newer digital native companies do not put much emphasis on crisis management, from what I have seen.

Especially with the need and demand for "always-on," opportunities are more than ever to break, and incidents do not wait for a convenient time. Problems can, and often do, happen on weekends, holidays, or weeknights when no one is paying attention. When an incident happens, a properly prepared enterprise must be in a situation to identify, assess, manage, solve, and effectively communicate it to the customers.

Another key issue to note here is the difference between security and service incidents. A security incident is when either data leakage or data breach happens. The mitigation and crisis management there involves a different set of procedures from disabling the accounts to notifying stakeholders and account owners and escalating the issue to security and identity teams. A service incident is when a service disruption happens, either partially or fully. It needs to be escalated to DevOps, developers, and Ops teams. Since they are similar, some of the crisis management procedures might overlap. But if your support teams are not aware of the right escalation process, then they might be sending critical alerts up the wrong channel when minutes matter in a critical situation. For the sake of this article, I am going to be discussing only service interruptions, though a lot of parallels can be drawn to a security incident as well.

Avoid incidents when possible

Avoidance is better than fixing issues in any situation. There are many things an enterprise can do to avoid situations, such as vulnerability audits, early warning monitoring, code profile audits, release review committees, anomaly detection, etc. One should also invest in proper observability, monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions. I have written many articles on those areas as well; they are too complex to cover in detail here.

Prepare for the unexpected

With most enterprises, there is no preparation or plan of action when an incident happens. In the digital world, incidents do not wait around for days to be solved or managed. If you let social media take over, it will. Sometimes it can even have a mind of its own. When you are not telling the story, the social media pundits will be telling your story for you.

Identify the incident before others do

I wrote a few articles on this topic. In my latest article, "In the digital economy, you should fail fast, but you also must recover fast," I discuss the need for speed to find issues faster than your customers or partners can. Software development has fully adopted the DevOps and agile principles, but the Ops teams have not fully embraced the DevOps methodologies. For example, the older monitoring systems, whether they are application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, or digital experience monitoring (DEM) systems, can also find if there is a service interruption fairly quickly. However, identifying the microservice that is causing the problem, or the changes that went into effect that caused this issue, seem to be complex in the current landscape. I have written about the need for observability and for finding the issues faster at the speed of failure repeatedly.

Act quickly and decisively

When major incidents happen, it should be an all-hands on deck situation. As soon as a critical incident (Sev. 1) is identified, an incident commander should be assigned to the incident, a collaborative war room (virtual or physical) must be immediately opened, and proper service owners must be invited. If possible, the issue must be escalated immediately to the right owner who can solve the problem rather than going through the workflow process of L1 through L3, etc. In the collaborative war room, often finger-pointing and blaming someone else is quite common, but that will delay the process further. In addition, if too many people are invited to these collaborative war rooms, there has to be a mechanism to identify mean-time-to-innocence (MTTI) so anyone who is invited can continue their productive work by leaving if they are not directly related and cannot assist in solving the issue.

Own your story on your digital channels.

When a severity 1 or a major service interruption happens, your users need to know, your service owners need to know, and your executives need to know. In other words, everyone who has skin in the game should know. Part of it would be external communication. At a very minimum, there has to be a status page that will display the status and quality of service, so everyone is aware of the service status all the time. In addition, an initial explanation of what went wrong, what are you doing to fix it, and with a possible ETA should be posted either as a status update or on regular posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms where your enterprise brand is present. Going dark on social media will only add fuel to the fire. Your users know your services are down. If they get no updates from you, speculators, or even competitors, will spread rumors to ruin your brand.

This is where most digital companies are weak as they are not prepared, which can make or break an SMB enterprise. Real-time crisis and reputation management are crucial in those critical moments while engineers and support teams are trying to solve the problem. It is also a good idea to use sentiment analysis and reputation tools to figure out who is saying extremely negative things and to try to either take them offline to deal with them directly or respond in kind to avoid further escalation.

Do a blameless post-mortem

A common pattern I see across organizations is after the crisis is solved and the incident is fixed, everyone seems to move on to the next issue quickly. It could be because there are too many issues that the support, DevOps, and Ops teams are overwhelmed, or they do not think it is necessary to analyze what or why this happened. An especially important part of crisis/incident management is to figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong, and more importantly how can you fix this once and for good, so this will not happen ever again. After figuring out a solution, document it properly. You also need to have a repository to store these solutions so in the unfortunate incident that it happens again, you know how to solve this quickly and decisively.

Follow-up

In addition, discuss the situation with your top customers who were affected by it, what you did to solve the issue, how you fixed it so it will not repeat, but more importantly, discuss how you were prepared for the incident before it happened. This instills huge confidence in your brand. Not only will you not lose customers, but you will get more because of how you handled it.

In addition, the general advice from crisis management firms would be to cancel any extravagant events that are planned in the immediate future. If your critical services were down for days, but your executives were having a huge conference in Vegas, the social media world would be at it for days. Monitor social media platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook at a minimum or whatever other social media platforms your company has a presence on, including negative comments on your own blogsites) for tone; you can even use AI-based sentiment analysis tools to identify still unsatisfied customers to discuss their concerns and how you can address them. Until these concerns are addressed, your incident is not completely solved.

Another best practice would be to avoid hype content or marketing buzz for a while after a major incident happens. I have seen companies go on with the plan and get a backlash from customers that they are all talk and nothing really works.

Conclusion

Let's face it: every enterprise is going to face this sooner than later. No one is invincible. The question is, are you ready to deal with it when it happens to you? The ones who handle it properly can win the customers' confidence, showing they are prepared to handle future incidents if they were to happen again.

Do you earn your customers' trust by doing this the right way, or do you lose it by botching and covering this up? That will define you going forward.

At Constellation research, we advise companies on tool selection, best practices, trends, and proper IT incident/crisis management setup for the cloud era so you can be ready when it happens to you. We also advise the customers in the RFP, POC, and vendor contract negotiation process as needed.  

 

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Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...

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Those of you who know me know that this statement is not one to be taken lightly: this news left me speechless. RIGHT??? Doesn’t happen often. And it was only for a moment. But when I first heard the news that Intuit had agreed to buy the notoriously bootstrapped email marketing platform Mailchimp for $12 Billion in cash and stock, I was flabbergasted. I was flummoxed. I was ALL of the old-timey feelings for utterly confused.

That is until I remembered this one line from a keynote I once watched: “I'd like to see business go back to a model where everybody believes that marketing is the center of what every company has to do.”

It was 2003 and it was the first time the CMO Council had gathered for what would become an annual event. The keynote address was delivered by the Chairman of the Board at Intuit…the former CEO with “humble roots” as a CMO. Bill Campbell didn’t just believe marketing was important. He truly believed that real marketing—the act of a brand engaging with and telling shared stories with a customer—should drive growth.

I honestly had not thought about that line from Campbell’s keynote until I read the Twitter statement from current Intuit CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, on the decision for the acquisition: “Together, we will deliver an innovative customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses with confidence.”

So let’s get into the weeds on this one. Intuit has officially announced plans to acquire bootstrapped mail phenom, MailChimp. Headquartered in Atlanta (which Mailchimp CEO Ben Chestnut has already dubbed Intuit’s east coast hub) with a roster of over 13 million users, Mailchimp represents a growth-driving solution for an SMB market that was ravaged in the pandemic.

A report from Intuit Quickbooks noted that in April 2020 alone, SMBs lost $4.6 billion in monthly revenue. Goodarzi is apparently betting that by binding a growth engine like marketing automation to back office finance resources, SMBs will regain pre-pandemic confidence in growth and business.

But the biggest hint as to WHY this acquisition happened isn’t in the power of the platforms being brought together or even Intuit buying its customer base a giant $12 billion dollar band-aid. The purchase driver is in the data…and they pretty much said so. In fact in an investor call held on Monday September 13, Goodarzi noted that Mailchip sits on “a lot of customer data. We (Intuit Quickbooks) have all the purchase data.”

This telegraphs, in a pretty direct and loud manner, that this move isn’t just to benefit Quickbooks, or even Intuit’s SMB customer base. This is a data and intelligence service play for enterprises that often struggle to gain access to intelligence based on customer behavior and customer transaction intelligence.

I’ll wait for everyone to search for books on “CMO / CFO Alignment”…yeah…there aren’t any…yet. But don’t be shocked if someone at Intuit releases one soon.

But maybe that’s where Intuit has been all along. Afterall, they had, at their helm for many years, a coach and a leader who was one of the first CMOs to step into a CEO role without so much as breaking a sweat.

What Intuit has done has shifted the center of gravity of a “business graph”—something Ray has been poking people on for years now— that is purpose-built to make better decisions at both speed and scale. (Check out this podcast where Ray breaks down the value of a business graph: https://lochhead.com/ray-wang-2/) Transaction and account data alone was never going to get there…the graph demands a massive amount of data on customer event and behavior…an overflowing firehose of data that…ohhh I don’t know…a sales and marketing engagement and automation engine like Mailchimp can provide. It is about helping business leaders make better, and perhaps as the Intuit Quickbooks Mailchimp Customer Intelligence (name totally made up for the record) solution moves farther down the AI path, more automated decisions.

So, does this mean H&R Block is suddenly in the market for a sales and marketing engagement tool. Dear lord I hope not. But, it sure shines a spotlight on solutions like Zoho One with its business operations platform for small business. What this ALSO means is that customer engagement engines need to innovate and advance quickly on just how their data can do more than parrot back campaign success metrics, CTRs and opens.

No matter where this new marriage leads: to a high powered decision velocity machine built to accelerate the path from micro to small to mid-sized business, or into a whole new realm of business intelligence for Intuit, there is one thing I know for sure: Campbell, who passed in 2016, is sitting back on a spiritual football or rugby field somewhere, having a pretty good laugh.

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Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...

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For the record, I love the DAM space…and not just because it lets me say things like DAM space, DAM ShortList and DAM solution. Saying DAM all the time is just DAM fun. I’m adult enough to admit I’m not adult enough to let that DAM opportunity pass. But a DAM is a critical tool that has oddly been confused with or replaced by cloud file storage solutions that allow for controlled file transfer and access…please…I beg you…don’t make error in content judgement. It is part of the last mile of experience delivery. Stop thinking it is just a place to stick brand police stuff.

Now with that out of the way, let’s focus in on the news of the day and why it should turn some heads. Acquia, the digital darling of the open-source developer set, has announced their definitive agreement to acquire Widen, one of the longest running names in assets. Terms have not been made public at this point.

Founded in 1948 as Widen Engraving, this family-owned business has literally been at the heart of turning words and photos into engagement, engraving type onto plates which then churned newsprint. As print turned into color, Widen evolved into a print leader producing assets from brochures to ads. As print turned into digital, Widen evolved yet again applying the organization, collaboration and distribution processes and mindsets required to successfully create printed assets into a comprehensive digital asset management solution. Widen has literally been there from the earliest days when assets started to shift buyer and market perceptions.

Acquia is best known for providing the building blocks for how experiences are developed, displayed and deployed across an expanding list of digital presentation layers. Acquia splits into two product clouds, Drupal Cloud for composing and deploying experiences and Marketing Cloud for engagement development and orchestration. Acquia’s CMS comes in the exact size and shape an enterprise needs with traditional, hybrid and headless applications available, enabling content to flow where and how organizations intend and envision. Acquia’s Marketing Cloud takes that same open-source spirit of their CMS and applies it to how customer experiences and engagements are developed, deployed and optimized with a CDP, marketing automation and journey orchestration capabilities.

Now…an open-source digital experience platform has brought on a seriously enterprise grade DAM and product information management (PIM) solution for an end-to-end content operations and experience play. I like both of these solutions for very different reasons having named Acquia to the recent Constellation Shortlist for DXP and Widen to the ShortLists for DAM for High Volume Commerce, DAM for DX and PIM. This is a bit like the ultimate ShortList mash up. And gotta say...I like it. The thing to keep an eye on is where the DXP heads next.

For so many in the DXP space, focus has been on unifying the tools and the data that power the most powerful digital experiences from websites, mobile apps to advertising and email campaigns. The addition of a DAM and PIM advance the toolkit of what can be used to aid in telling those content stories and delivering on those moments. While Acquia remains the developer’s friend, tools like Widen add to the growing demand for marketing and business unit friendly solutions that make the work of engaging with a connected customer through cohesive, personalized and relevant stories easier and more secure. It starts to empower engagement teams to think beyond the confines of an asset they have created or a channel they have built and manage.

The real power in these systems is in the intelligence they can deliver BACK to the organization…HOW are these moments in an asset’s journey helping optimize the next step or next engagement? Are the moments of content engagement occurring where, when and as long as we expect? Is there more to content’s value than its ability to appear where we ask it to appear? What can the content and drupal cloud tell the marketing cloud about the customer? That’s where the DAM rubber meets the road.

What is taking shape in this Acquia acquisition is a clear shot across the bow of the engagement and experience players like Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle. Acquia isn’t just “that Drupal CMS” or that open-source “build it yourself kit.” The intentional expansion of the Acquia DXP signals a clear intention to mix it up with those marketing and experience cloud players. With the addition of Widen to the arsenal, content has a whole new toolkit and a pretty big sandbox to grow in.

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Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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In my new research report exploring the future of content management, I examined the many new attributes and capabilities that a vital new category of content management services provides. Known as advanced content management, some of these improvements offered by these new types of platforms have led to a literal revolution in the art-of-the-possible when it comes to managing today's complex content ecosystems. However, the advancements have been quite rapid and so I find that that many organizations are still in the process of learning to fully appreciate and effectively absorb how these potent new features can transform what they do.

As shown in the first figure below, there are a number of compelling new capabilities that have emerged from hard won lessons over the years from both the traditional content management as well as enterprise content management (CMS) industries as they sought to reconcile early generations of such tools with what organizations actually needed to do with their content as a business and lessons learned in general from the last decade of operational experiences in the field.

For a limited time: A complimentary copy of my new report on The Future of Content Management

Of all these advances, however, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the others. That's because it has become a foundational capability that makes today’s more complex and sophisticated content scenarios not just possible, but straightforward and easy to manage.

Specifically, I am referring to the so-called “headless” capability of today's advanced content management systems. In the past, the traditional content management approach was to manage content by putting everything in a single bucket: Content, images, HTML, CSS, everything. This made it impossible to reuse the content easily because it was commingled with code. Even worse, all content typically was handled inside a single platform, not recognizing that today content must be managed from and delivered to whatever digtal touchpoint it needs to be on to satisfy the needs of the business with as little effort as possible.

As digital platforms have evolved to fill far more niches in our businesses, the need for more flexible ccntent services has emerged. Now, enterprises are developing websites, mobile sites, apps, digital displays, connected devices, and conversational interfaces that need access to content stores, wherever they might be, or perhaps one master content source at a central headquarters.

What is headless content management

As I highlighted in my research report, a headless CMS is any type of back-end content management system where the content repository body is separated or decoupled from the presentation layer, or the head. Content that is housed in a headless CMS is delivered via an industry standard interface (an API) for seamless display across different devices. 

By defining this simple industry standard, the content management industry, and all the platforms that support it, have enabled virtually any kind of arrangement of different content systems into one functioning ecosystem. 

The actual benefits of headless content management

One advantage of this decoupled approach is that content can be sent via the interface to multiple display types, for example, mobile, wearable, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices from a single content management system, alongside the website it's hosted on. A minor disadvantage of headless, however, is the requirement to maintain two or more separate content systems for a single site, which can require more resources. However, in practice, organizations often maintain different content management systems to their advantage because they offer different features that are uniquely designed for the strengths of a particular channel or use case.

Those who not only adopt headless content management standards for their content management systems but fully take advantage of what it offers, can realize the following benefits.

• A non-linear productivity improvement. The more content management systems an organization has, the more content that has to be manually moved around in order to get it to the desired locations. With headless content management, one headless content management system can seamless publish to an unlimited number of downstream content management systems automatically, and with no manual effort. For very large content ecosystems, this can literally be a 100-fold improvement in productivity.
• Greater consistency, quality, and reach in content distribution and publishing. Headless content ecosystems are much more reliable in terms of getting changes propagated to downstream systems and keeping them in sync accurately. This increases the overall quality of content production and distribution processes. It also makes it far likelier the right content is delivered at the right place at the right time.
• It offers a strategic system that runs more like their business. Headless content management systems are connected into content networks that look like the underlying business, whether it is publishing news in multiple languages on different sites around the world, maintaining documentation for a global company with different divisions, or maintaining a series of marketing microsites. The advantage of this is that content management flows mirror what the business does more naturally while requiring only some oversight instead of continuous effort to keep the business operating seamlssly, with its content flowing steadily as desired.

However, one obstacle to headless content management is that it does require a more sophisticated understanding of how federated content architectures work. In other words, a bit of technical skill and conceptual understanding in this area. However, even if it’s a bit of learning effort, a good working understanding of headless quickly pays off with all the attendant benefits cited above. This system runs like the business as a technical realization of what the business actually does, instead of relying on manual operation (importing and exporting content, etc.) to make it so. FInally, it's also clear that headless is here to stay, and consequently organizations must develop experience with it.

Those looking on capitalizing on the considerable power of advanced capabilities of headless content management have to take care of a couple of other things too, such as making sure all their content management systems are headless capable and producing their content in a format that can be easily federated across many different channels. For most non-trivial use cases, headless content management provides businesses with a sustainable strategic improvement to their operations.

Additional Reading

The future of enterprise content is modular and headless | ZDNet

How CXOs Can Attain Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Customers, Employees, and Partners

To Strategically Scale Digital, Enterprises Must Have a Multicloud Experience Integration Stack

 

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Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform…...

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How much collaboration does Adobe want? $2.775 billion dollars’ worth…so far. The creative and experience giant announced a definitive agreement to acquire video workflow and production collaboration solution, Frame.io in a $1.275 billion deal. Add that onto the $1.5 billion dollar deal for Workfront which was completed in December 2020…you’ve got nearly $3 billion that says collaboration IS the future. At least the future of both marketing and creative work. But…I like to think that this is core to the vision of where Adobe is heading.

Predictably, there is a video…

So now the brass tacks: The deal brings some 100 million Frame.io users more deeply into the tools many are already using like Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Effects. Frame.io offers video editors and production stakeholders the ability to streamline everything from collaboration to approvals in a cloud-first workflow environment. Through key partnerships with industry leading hardware solutions, Frame.io offers a real-time camera to cloud secure footage upload solution that, when viewed in the totality of the Adobe video production suite, can extend from camera to cloud to completion in a fairly seamless and collaborative manner.

A great deal of Frame.io’s value proposition is wrapped in the idea of taking the pain, inefficiency and lag out of video production. As someone who has waited for hard drives to be shipped around the world (and one odd incident of tape, drives and a midnight run across the border into Mexico...don't ask) before raw footage can be reviewed let alone edited…the idea of fast, reliable and secure access to footage from camera to editing is worth its weight in gold. Then...if you start promising me that the workflows can extend all the way through the always painful gauntlet of approvals, suggestions and general frame by frame nitpicking…well…now I’m just blushing from all this excitement.

Yes. The Adobe pickup of Frame.io adds some valuable firepower to the video suite. And it hasn’t been a secret that a great deal of innovation attention has been paid to expanding and enhancing Adobe’s footprint in the world of video which extends well into 3D, AR and VR now. But as I day-dream about it...that's just the starting point.

Similar to the Workfront pickup, Adobe identified a partner that deeply understands the work of their customers. With Workfront, it was a foundational understanding of what goes into the actual WORK of marketing and engagement. I see that same vein in this Frame.io acquisition. Frame.io isn’t just “some collaboration tool” …it is a production tool developed by post-production for post-production. It isn’t a random workflow…it is purposeful and intentional. It is unapologetically for the makers, creators and do-ers. And that's pretty much become Adobe's new mantra.

What gets really interesting is when you extend the roadmap for collaboration beyond the integration of Workfront with solutions like Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Assets, or beyond Frame.io with Premiere Pro. Imagine what happens when Adobe pulls the best of the best from BOTH Workfront AND Frame.io to reimagine what collaboration for creativity and experience really works like. THAT is the future that is worth at least $3 billion dollars in my mind.

There are plenty of competitors with collaboration and connectivity solutions. And there are oodles of solutions that address work coordination. My colleague Dion Hinchcliffe is one of THE leading experts in this space and has an exceptional ShortList outlining the leaders (hint: Workfront is already on it) in work coordination. But as a marketer, there is something I can say for certain: there is something just a bit different about the work of marketing and the work of creators. This is why tools like Workfront, Asana and Frame.io are as popular with creators as they are. Like the memes say…they just “get” us.

Only time will tell how far collaboration will connect the two sides of the Adobe coin—a coin that has had lines of demarcation segmenting Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud in a way that can feel like the gaps and fissures between marketing and creative teams themselves. If anything can bridge that gap in a meaningful way, it just might be collaboration and workflows. From camera to content consumption, once again, Adobe is just scooping up bigger chunks of territory in this shrinking land we call engagement.

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