Digital Architecture
Times have changed, not only for businesses but also for IT. Companies are not competing anymore between themselves, but are threatened nowadays more by its digital equivalents: Netflix vs Blockbusters, Amazon vs bookshops and Uber vs. Taxi companies are just a few examples. These new digital businesses have the advantage that they started building recently from scratch without legacy debt, the latter inhibiting many traditional companies to allow rapidly and smoothly transforming towards a digital business.
The only way traditional business can compete is by having an architecture that leverage their existing IT, enable a way to expand and obtain omnipresence in their sales channels and obtain better capabilities to understand and interact with their customers.
Digital architecture key objectives are:
Leverage technology debt
Enable omnipresence
Optimize client interactions
A digital architecture is the fundament on which a company can transform towards new and improved business model.
Businesses need a more efficient architecture to build their digital future. To respond to those needs, a digital enterprise architecture needs to address three main enablers to build a digital business:
Decouple from Technology Debt
Enable Omni-channel presence
Optimize customers interactions through analytical capabilities
1. Decouple from Technology Debt
The first digital architecture enabler is to leverage existing legacy debt. Companies cannot change nor update their existing back-end systems easily and instead of replacing them, need to think how to re-use them without adding additional complexity. To enable connectivity with various front-end channels, we need to construct a new layer in between back-end legacy and front-end channels that optimizes the interaction in between.
Companies cannot replace their technology debt at once and instead of replacing it, need to think how to re-use them without adding additional complexity.
This new layer decouples (separates in a more efficient way) back-ends and builds on top new functionalities that can be used directly in the buying processes in the front-end channels. These functionalities are called APIs (application programming interfaces) and they become the new channel facing side of the legacy systems.
These APIs are different than the traditional existing legacy interfaces because of two main reasons:
Functional: Traditional back-ends offer limited integration with just few rough business functionalities that needs more granularity when using in digital channels. On the contrary, APIs offer "more complete" functionalities interacting and integrating with various back-ends that can be used directly in new digital processes, not only making these interfaces more re-usable for more channels, but also easier to orchestrate front-end business processes with. It is moving the heavy logic from the traditional front-ends to the API layer.
Technology: Where back-ends depend on older technology standards, new APIs leverage new open web standards and protocols.
This so-called decoupling strategy is key to achieve a digital foundation for a company as it leverages existing application landscape towards a digital architecture platform without investing in replacing all back-ends.
2. Enable Omni-channel Presence
Second digital architecture enabler is its omnipresence capability. This is the layer that maintains a customer session (such as login) and orchestrates the client buying process.
This layer has several elements:
Session management: its main element is to maintain a consistent session management handling throughout all channels with the same customer. It needs to recognize the client who searched on the web or reacted to the advertisement, is the same person who then wants to buy a product. This helps to optimize client interactions and increase cross and upselling.
Personalization: clients need to be able to personalize their digital experience to their own needs in look & feel, but also to their own interests. For example, a a client who is only interested in certain categories of products, is shown his or her primary interests in the top section of the page.
Orchestration: this is the component that enables the flow of the business process and interaction with the client. It typically involves a 5 step process: Landing page > Search product > Register Client > Buy > Process and deliver order, but depends on specific industry. Together with session management, it enables omnichannel presence, so a customer can enter or leave any time, any place and continue.
Channel Management: manages and optimizes customer experience for each channel to get a seamless, integrated, and consistent look and feel. Based on the channel, user interface parameters may change due to screen size, resolution and user interaction possibilities.
Digital Marketing: enables to improve up and cross selling, not only within its own channels but also in external social media. It leverages the customer profiles that is created through the analytical capabilities to understand a so called 360 degree view of the client based on previous interactions and interests. With that client profile, it can optimize current client interactions and display better matches to customer needs. Digital marketing also targets to obtain higher search rankings through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and leverage search engine and social media advertising with Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
3. Optimize Client Interactions through analytical capabilities
The third digital architecture component is its analytical capabilities that includes three components:
Data Warehouse: most companies do have a data warehouse that contains various perspectives on company corporate performance in sales, products and key indicators. Its data is uploaded from different back-ends.
Datalake: a new kid on the block for most traditional companies. It is a storage for all kinds of data, not just corporate performance, but also social media feeds and other information. It is used to create a 360 view of clients to understand previous interactions and his or her social media interests. Data is stored as it comes from its back-ends, social media and external sites and analyzed when needed.
Analytical capabilities: allows to create a 360 view with information from its data lake and sends the information and profile to the experience management capability so it can optimize client interaction. It also allows reporting to measure sales and channel performance.
So one can see that digital architecture is not just a nice-to-have but a critical prerequisite to ensure companies can decouple their existing IT debt, create omnipresence and stronger analytical capabilities to better interact and understand their customers.
