Contributed by Kin + Carta

Executive Summary  

Most enterprises acknowledge harnessing the potential of data to transform their business as table stakes to competing in the coming decades. They’ve made investments and likely have some signature wins in terms of building data products (e.g. a recommendation algorithm, a customer churn model) or using data analytics to drive strategy. Perhaps they’ve made serious inroads co-locating their data in a lake. But where do they go from here? How do they properly democratize data – in terms of organization, governance, and infrastructure – to scale insights and applications toward true transformation?

Achieving Data Democrazation via Data Products

If you define Data Democratization as the practice of getting data into the hands of key decision makers or applications, you can think of Data Products as the medium or lubrication facilitating this process. On one end of the spectrum, data products can take the form of spreadsheets, powerpoints, or dashboards for business units to make informed decisions regarding their go-forward strategies. Moving down the spectrum, data products can be more interactive interfaces helping business units consume data and syndicate decisions (producing new measurable data!) in one streamlined interface. At the end of the spectrum, algorithms may completely absolve the need for a human in the loop, making customer-facing decisions such as how products or promotions are presented, or making operational decisions such as optimizing how scarce inventory is distributed. Data products can also function on a more meta-level, for example, data transformation pipelines that merge and clean data for dashboards or analyst consumption.

The Tension between Data Democrazation and Data Goverance 

The rapid evolution of big data technologies and cloud platforms, paired with the insatiable demand for data products, has turned old enterprise operating models on their head. To meet demand, artificial silos between data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and business functions can no longer survive with too much time lost to bureaucratic processes and too many details lost in handoffs and mistranslations.
At Kin + Carta Data Labs, we strongly believe that multidisciplinary individuals and/or teams should be organized to develop data products in support of business domain objectives. This model acknowledges the intense amount of business and operational context necessary to turn messy, raw data into a product with enough integrity to support enterprise decision-making. This model also facilitates the rapid iteration and collaboration necessary to accomplish such ends on a reasonable timescale. But this operating model and focus on rapid data product proliferation will introduce new problems in the realm of data governance if left unchecked. For example, how do you ensure teams aren’t duplicating work? How do you ensure data products treat data consistently e.g. similar KPIs don’t contradict each other? And perhaps most important toward changing culture and gaining trust in business users not used to relying on data: How do you ensure data maintains integrity, and that bugs don’t proliferate across your data ecosystem in unmanageable ways?

Example Data Governance by User:

Data Analysts & Data Scientists

• How do I know what data’s available for analysis or model development?
• How do I know the quality of this data, or identify outstanding issues in the
  data?
• How do I know how metrics are defined? And which data sources are the
  best sources of truth for these metrics?

Data Engineers

• How do I ensure automated processes are creating quality data for downstream users?
• When bugs are identified, how do I assess priority or notify consumers of that data that there’s an issue?

Business Users & Product Owners

• How do I know that data I’m using has integrity?
• How do I ensure bad data isn’t proliferating into customer facing
  applications?
• How do I reputably respond to customer data requests under CCPA, or ensure all PII is deleted in requests to be forgotten?

Read the full article here 

About Kin + Carta 

Kin + Carta is a global digital transformation consultancy committed to working alongside our clients to build a world that works better for everyone.

Our 1,700 curious minds make creative connections between people, data and technology to create connected outcomes across the full lifecycle of the product and platform ecosystems.

We’re makers, builders and creators by nature, and we come to work every day to build experiences for some of the world’s most influential companies. We help businesses accelerate their digital roadmap, rapidly innovate, modernize their systems, enable their teams and optimize for continued growth.

We’re a technology business with trust and human connection at its heart. As a Certified B Corp, our triple bottom line focus on people, the planet and profit is at the core of everything we do.

To learn more visit: https://www.kinandcarta.com/en-us/

Contributed by Rangle.io

Introduction  

We’re living in a digital-first reality, and more fintech companies are disrupting the banking and financial services sector with technology, leaving traditional banks struggling to keep up.
Why? Because many traditional banks are still operating on legacy monolithic systems with strict regulations and outdated core platforms. For example, many banks still rely on COBOL—a programming language devised in the 1950s—making it extremely hard to innovate.
To keep up with the pace of fintech, legacy banks need to have the same agility and flexibility that their outdated legacy monolithic platforms and systems cannot provide.
How can traditional banks catch up? It’s time to consider migrating to a composable digital experience platform (DXP).

What is composable DXP?

According to Gartner, a DXP is “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences”.
Many organizations are now taking strides toward composable DXP architectures, and banks should follow suit.

A new way to deliver products and services

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reshaped how banks interact with customers and vice versa. Customers’ expectations changed, and banks were forced to shift how they delivered products and services. Banks needed to invest more in marketing and build new, or better, customer touchpoints across their digital channels.
This is where the composability of a DXP renders itself beneficial.
The beauty of this type of DXP is that it’s composed of a series of solutions connected through APIs and leverages an intelligent microservices architecture—a type of application architecture that provides a framework to develop, deploy, and maintain services independently, according to Google.

One of the main differentiators between a composable DXP and a legacy monolithic system is that the front and backend components are decoupled. On top of increased capabilities to build better touchpoints and more integration with APIs, here are three reasons why traditional banks should migrate to a composable DXP:

3 reasons why banks should migrate to a composable DXP

A composable DXP sets the foundation for managing content

For banks with multiple divisions, products, and services (personal and commercial banking, wealth management, capital markets, etc.), a DXP can help link products together. This makes it easy to find and update different assets and modules on the site, enabling faster editing experiences and the ability to manage content for multiple channels.

A DXP is a central hub that can help bring the bank’s marketing stack together. Instead of having independent services and solutions for managing content, marketing automation, e-commerce, and analytics, marketing teams can add APIs to serve content.

In the past, marketing teams would have to submit Jira tickets to their development or IT teams to make changes to the content on their organization’s site. The flexibility of a composable DXP gives more power to marketers and reduces the load on development and IT teams. Developers can now focus on picking the best tools, platforms, utilities, and work in their stack; while marketing teams can assemble content from building blocks, components, and presets.

One of the big six banks we worked with is now saving millions of dollars because their developers are not spending countless hours fixing marketing requests. Instead, with a composable DXP, they can now focus on creating efficiency.

A composable DXP helps build better relationships with customers

Banks need to keep customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention top of mind, and a DXP is essential for delivering personalized customer experiences across different channels and touchpoints. Let’s explore two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A traditional bank that still operates on a legacy platform
Let’s say Mark, a 60-year-old VP of a large tech firm is preparing for retirement. He has a family, a house in the suburbs, and a small business on the side. When he logs into his banking app, he sees an ad for a first-time homebuyer allowance. Given his profile, we know he’s a homeowner, so why is this ad showing up on his app?

The problem with many traditional banks is that there’s no personalization, and the content isn’t catered to the customer. Many banks say they’re “digital” but still operate on a monolithic system—there’s no personal touch with how they communicate with their customers. Customers expect their banks to have a solid understanding of who they are. Without personalization, banks risk alienating their current customer base, leaving the door open for superior customer experiences of other banks to be explored.

Scenario 2: A bank has migrated to a composable DXP
Now, let’s say Mark is logging into his banking app—but this time, the bank has migrated to a composable DXP. When he logs in, the first thing he sees is a banner displaying investment and retirement savings options for seniors. He sees options to learn more about Registered Retirement Income Funds (RRIFs) and Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs).

In this scenario, the content is personalized and relevant to Mark. This shows that the bank truly knows its customers, providing consistent, immersive experiences. The result leads to increased loyalty and revenue.

A composable DXP provides a single source of truth for sharing data

With a composable DXP, banks can easily share data from a single source of truth—this means you don’t have to worry about presentations being different due to data pulled from different independent sources. A composable DXP is meant to be the one and only organizational data source, a repository of information that all teams can pull from.

Since a composable DXP can be the single source of truth, banks can eliminate any overlapping technologies in their stack—it’s cost-efficient, and teams across the organization can focus on what they do best while eliminating technological silos.

Migrating to a composable DXP enables banks to connect all digital aspects of the organization to create unified, cohesive customer journeys and experiences.

Rangle’s experience in the financial services industry

DXPs have evolved over time to keep up with changing digital consumer demands, and banks need to do the same. At Rangle, we’re helping banks transform the way they’re delivering seamless customer experiences. With our robust technology stack, we ensure the teams we work with are equipped with the right tooling to achieve composable DXP success.

“Too many companies are blocked by their CMSes. They were told that investing in these products would negate the need for more engineers and IT professionals, but they’re finding that the reverse is true. Our goal is to help clients achieve a modern digital experience platform that takes care of much of the costly and confusing decision making.” – Bertrand Karerangabo, Chief Strategy Officer at Rangle.io

For banks that are considering migrating—or have already migrated—to a DXP, here is our CEO Nick Van Weerdenburg’s four non-negotiable attributes for DXP success:

1. A DXP is both comprehensive and open-ended
2. Marketing and merchandising teams can build experiences without help from a shared services team
3. Testing is safe, and it becomes the norm
4. Reversible actions mean there are no mistakes, just bigger or smaller successes

If you want to learn more about how to create a true composable DXP, integrating your CMS platform with your design system and operations practices, reach out here for a conversation and assessment of your unique digital context.

About Rangle.io

Rangle is a strategic partner for enterprise organizations and scale ups, solving their most complex challenges at the intersection of technology and product management. Our experts are hands-on, working directly with our clients’ practitioners, embedding in the business to co-create the goals, growth strategy and processes.

To learn more about Rangle.io visit: https://rangle.io/

Contributed by Rangle.io

Digital experiences are where customers communicate what they want, how they want it. Managing these experiences is where digital-first companies win or lose.

As customer-centric operating models flourish in this hyper-competitive digital economy, it’s important for executives and team leaders to ask themselves a simple question: What are the attributes of an effective digital experience platform?

As customer-centric operating models flourish in this hyper-competitive digital economy, it’s important for executives and team leaders to ask themselves a simple question: What are the attributes of an effective digital experience platform?

Strategies are just paper. Digital experiences are touchpoints where your customer communicates what they want and how they want it. Your platform and how you manage it are essential to success. More bluntly, best-in-class experiences are the only path to being competitive in a digital-first world. Your platform is where the action occurs.

In order to make a digital experience platform (that is, your highly-integrated technologies that are used to create your frontend customer experiences across all available touchpoints) successful, there are four non-negotiable attributes that represent a mindset and culture shift necessary for the digital era. Compromising on these is like compromising on the foundation of a skyscraper — you’ll never be able to build and scale your existing business if your foundations aren’t solid.

Attribute 1: A digital experience platform is both comprehensive and open-ended

Your digital experience platform must enable multi-channel experiences for a wide range of users, leading to an infinite set of digital interactions.

There’s no getting around the fact that a modern digital experience is an ecosystem of products and platforms. Because of this, your teams are building more and newer experiences, creating more complexity over time that you have to grapple with.

Most projects slow down because of complexity. They can’t achieve scale so they become inconsistent, making for slower releases and exponentially slower approval times. “We can’t publish!” becomes the refrain heard over and over again.

In the highly risk-averse waterfall era, executives assumed that they knew what the future held. But could you have predicted cloud architecture? What about the disruption of the taxi industry by a technology company? Or how about a global uptick in online shopping necessitated by a highly contagious disease?

To be truly successful in modern digital, you have to embrace uncertainty and complexity instead of trying to reduce it. A digital experience platform keeps the experiences synchronized and evolvable in real-time and puts your focus on the future.

With a consistency-building and speed-enhancing product like a design system, your integrated digital experience platform will ensure that long cycle times are reduced and waiting for approvals, instead, becomes a built-in set of checks and balances. Modern digital teams should be able to publish weekly (if not daily), and this goal for increased speed and flexibility is the North Star that can drive your digital experience platform build.

Of course, this means that the design system itself is a set of experiences, and needs to evolve with the same fluidity as the experiences built with the design system. It also means that everyone needs to be at the table: Brand, product, design, technology, and marketing. And the supporting services — DesignOps and DevOps, for example, must be in place. Hence, all design systems are part of a larger digital experience platform, and all digital experience platforms must include a design system.

Attribute 2: Marketing and merchandising teams can build experiences without help from a shared services team

In traditional digital commerce models, the teams that are closest to the customer, such as marketers and merchandisers, have their hands tied in updating digital experiences like their websites – this is because they must route all requests through their IT or development team (often using a ticketing system, where improvements to customer experience are deemed less important than bug fixes).

The inability to respond at the speed of the market and keep up with the customer means a lot of lost revenue for businesses in the digital age. It also means a ton of coordination, queuing, prioritization, research, negotiation, and consensus-building. Five minutes of work can take months of lead time and dozens of hours of effort.

These rigid systems that both marketing and development hate should be a thing of the past. With a digital experience platform and headless CMS, the power and control of the website are put straight into the hands of the content creators. As a result, their ideas, customer feedback, and shifting market trends can become new content in a matter of hours or minutes, not a matter of weeks. More importantly, the governance process can be moved closer to the team, and the reversibility of changes it allows means 95 percent of the work can be deemed “fast path” and low-risk. Companies that want to be truly customer-centric need to make this change happen today.

The old way serves the system, not the customer. If your organization is truly committed, you must invest in decoupling the development and design of your digital products from the delivery of new content-heavy experiences. Instead of being constrained by your platform, any digital tools your teams use should be an enabler — your digital experience products most of all.

Attribute 3: Testing is safe — and it becomes the norm

A digital experience platform allows customer-facing teams to test experiences without permission-seeking. This is critical for speed to market for several reasons.

First, it ensures that your customer is always the most important stakeholder in your decision-making process. Second, it reduces time-wasting permission-seeking from those in different parts of the business who don’t have the full context needed to make informed decisions about your digital products and the customers they serve. Finally, it holds the teams who do work on your products and serve your customers accountable — and this makes them more engaged and more likely to generate the ideas and solutions that will differentiate your business.

Getting permission to make iterative changes to your product from anyone but the team’s executive sponsor is a waste of time. A team that is focused, empowered, and accountable for your digital products is much better poised to make decisions than anyone who is half-involved, half-interested, and ultimately not accountable for failure. Single-threaded leadership, made popular by Amazon, ensures that only those accountable for the success of the digital product are making decisions about it, as their expertise in the product and its customer is critical.

This ultimately means that your teams can iterate on your digital experiences and be in dialogue with your customer in a way that few companies have been able to achieve thus far. Fast changes, faster feedback loops, and a pure customer focus keeps experiences fresh and exciting, and keeps customers engaged and happy.

Attribute 4: Reversible actions mean there are no mistakes — just bigger or smaller successes

With a well-integrated digital experience platform, teams have permission to follow outcomes, rather than just follow instructions.

Instead of being beholden to project timelines with specific deliverables based on weak assumptions, teams can adjust to what’s most valuable in service to the business (within the constraints of their team mandate, of course!).

With reversibility, teams can be accountable to goals and the supporting data, not the project plan. They can experiment and test towards a better product than could be conceived at the beginning of a digital product build.

This unlocks flow, purpose, and customer-centricity like nothing else. When a digital product is governed by a broader set of business outcomes, rather than feature or project outcomes, the focus on serving the customer becomes paramount.

Consider this example from Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio and author of Ask Your Developer. In his book he asks executives if they would prefer to “put a team of hundreds on the idea, [take] five years to build the ‘perfect’ thing, [take] out a Super Bowl ad, and [spend] $25 million on a big ad campaign, all to find out that customers don’t care” or to have a small team spend three months and $50,000 testing a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong.

As Lawson says, that team didn’t waste $50,000, they saved you $25 million. With a future-ready digital experience platform, small bets on customer experience can return big results — or they can prevent you from chasing ideas that your customers don’t find worth their while.

No executive has perfect intuition or a crystal ball that allows them to see the future of their business. But what they can do instead is create the conditions for future success by enabling their teams with the tools and platforms they need to test, iterate, and experiment their way towards real customer-centricity.

An effective digital experience platform allows for reversibility. This can’t be overstated. Yes, testing is valuable, but rapid reversibility is magical and allows for massive reductions in operational expenses and time-to-value while improving customer-centricity and innovation.

Read the full article here

About Rango.io

Rangle is a strategic partner for enterprise organizations and scale ups, solving their most complex challenges at the intersection of technology and product management. Our experts are hands-on, working directly with our clients’ practitioners, embedding in the business to co-create the goals, growth strategy and processes.

To learn more about Rangle.io visit: https://rangle.io/