Customers, stakeholders and value first. Digital transformation now clearly has become the next big term and that isn’t without risks, especially if we forget the core objective of optimization and instead focus on the next shiny thing or technologies alone.
The purpose of transformation: innovation leads to optimization
Everyone who has worked were IT, business and information/content meet eachother and who ‘lived’ the de facto evolutions in the enterprise noticed ‘something’ was happening and, more importantly, needed to happen. It is a must to dramatically improve how busines are conducted. In that sense, digital transformation, always felt logical: it just had to ‘happen’, despite all the other factors that made it happen.
Optimization amid rapidly changing expectations and expanded choices
In more than one way and, even with increasing marketing optimization and personalization possibilities, optimization has become more complex. The idea that we optimize for people instead of for media, channels, technologies and so on isn’t really that new. Just think about how smart marketing optimization experts looked at the overall journey and experience of the search engine user in the scope of an intent, a task and a consecutive series of actions (and micro-conversions) that starts before even typing in a keyword and ends after having clicked a search engine result and, in the end, finalizing or stopping the intent for which the search was conducted to begin with.
Still, it’s more important than ever to optimize with the individual user in mind because the context has become so much more important and complex. People do expect more. Just look at how changing customer expectations have changed the face of retail, transformed how we do business with banks or want to be approached as “empowered” citizens.
Add to that the explosion of devices, increasing connectedness, huge mobile abilities and ever more ways and forms to access the Internet (the smartphone is certainly not the end of our mobile ability and our connectivity possibilities, one day it will be a very old relic too).
