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Companies aiming to build valuable services for their customers and consumers, first have to understand what the customers needs are (B2C oder B2B) before they start implementing any kind of digital initiative. Customer Journeys as appropriate medium to map those needs, identify service opportunities and monitor customer behavior are not questioned anymore. In addition, online and multi-channel interfaces need to be personalized, rich, intuitive, responsive, easy to use and visually appealing. A separate look and feel for customers needs must be implemented (UI-Layer), next to data, logic and back-end layers.

Once a company or digital initiative understands which business drivers and customer needs are to be implemented, the first layer of an Enterprise Architecture needs to be defined:

The Business Architecture including Business Domains and Business Capabilities

Do not try to “save the world” by resolving data quality issues in existing complex back-end systems. It´s a waste of time. Rather focus on which data is needed to operate customer-facing services and to keep your legacy systems running.

Digital systems are expected to be ubiquitous systems across geographies and locations. Digital systems are also expected to be agile and flexible and available 24/7. Cloud based principles and systems are a pre-requisite for IT automation, infrastructure as code and agile approaches.

Digital Architects need to enable the organization to react fast:

• Active monitoring: automated systems controlling the whole status health, able to learn and adapt, with ready-made backup plans (datacenter rollover, drop of dynamic transaction,…) 
• Predictive maintenance: based on machine learning, being able to monitor trends and act in advance, even with architectural changes

With data and application security becoming more and more a critical factor, security needs to be part of any digital architecture upfront and constructed end-to-end. This includes security considerations across multiple dimensions like authentication, multi-factor, key management, SSO, authorization, auditing, logging, and encryption of data in transit and data at rest.

A lacking confidence in security is one of the main blocking criteria why consumers are not willing to store private information

As soon as the different layers of an Enterprise Architecture are designed, analytics needs to be thought of as a fundamental functionality on all levels. In Digital Initiatives it is not about feeding tons of data into a big Data Warehouse dump. Digital workers need consumer data instantly to be able to provide personalized, regional services, campaigns, targeting based on consumer data, behavior and preferences. Therefore Digital Initiatives need to focus on collecting relevant customer data and therefore require a data framework orchestrating data channels over all touchpoints. This has an ever bigger significance in the age of AI where e.g. bots are utilized to automatically suggest the next best guess.

Customer insights are the key to earn more money and supporting Principle:

1. « Customer First ».

The more you know about your customer and his preferences and needs, the better companies can provide customer-specific services and improve the brands relationship towards a customer. This will pay-out in increased revenue and customer loyalty.