Your customers have been dazzled by the customer experiences they see from firms like Google or Apple. How are you going to keep up? Do you have the right IT culture and people in place to deliver on this new imperative? Are your IT objectives based on deep customer understanding? Do you have strategic scenarios to achieve your goals that are cross-business and take into account important strategic elements like governance and change management? Do you have the right provisioning policies and technology tools in place?

Most firms we speak with still have application development and delivery (AD&D) pros focused on keeping systems stable and secure. That’s no longer enough. In our recently published Digital Experience Delivery Maturity Assessment, we outline more than 100 essential practices for organizations looking to act on their digital transformation strategies. Keep in mind this is an emerging space so no one has figured everything out, but our assessment outlines four major areas to begin with:

  • People.  IT’s culture, leadership practices, collaboration methods, and skills and staffing are important factors that affect the delivery of digital customer experiences. Organizations strive to have IT groups with an agile, customer-first culture; collaborative organizational structures and metrics that foster collaboration between marketing, lines of business, and IT; and the appropriate skills and staffing that support both back-end development (e.g., mobile application developers, data-literate architects) and solution management (e.g., web content management specialists, digital asset managers).
  • Objectives. Your objectives identify and establish the customers your organization intends to serve, your short- and long-term goals, and a framework for digital customer experience business cases. Organizations who have been successful disseminate customer understanding to IT groups, who use this deep customer research to form long- and short-term IT goals.
  • Strategy.  Strategic elements take objectives a step further; they create achievable and prioritized scenarios so that you can reach your goals. Organizations further in maturity here have, among other things, created firm reference architectures about various sourcing priorities and have disciplined digital experience governance around not just the digital strategy, but also around the various digital experience technologies (and the integrations between them).
  • Technology. Technology solutions and tools play an important role in managing, delivering, and measuring and optimizing digital customer experiences and the associated business processes. Successful IT groups map out their sourcing priorities (not just for technology but also for third-party agencies and SIs), bridge the technology/design gap, and source best-of-breed technologies to support the management, delivery, and measurement of digital experiences.

Where are you in your digital experience delivery goals? What areas have you progressed the most, and which need some work? Take our digital experience delivey maturity assessment. We’d love to hear your thoughts below.