Cloud inovation: Experience innovator – Deloitte On Cloud Blog | Deloitte US has been saved
A blog post by Diana Kearns-Manolatos, senior manager, Center for Integrated Research, Deloitte Services LP
According to Deloitte’s 2021 Global Marketing Trends, 57% of respondents said their organizations significantly altered digital platforms to better meet customer needs in response to the pandemic. And indeed, customers have come to expect increasingly on-demand, personalized, and memorable experiences as table stakes, no matter the industry or interaction. This has placed pressure on organizations to create customer-first strategies that use cloud to power a range of innovative customer experiences enabled by the chief marketing officer (CMO), chief experience officer, and product innovation teams—and, of course, the cloud itself.
The CMO of a fictitious beverage company, Latoya Bradley has a target to double revenue. She uses cloud-enabled ML tools to analyze social media data and identify a correlation between female customers aged 18–34 buying lime flavors and being located at the gym. She tunes her strategy and uses mobile ad targeting to launch a new raspberry-lime flavor at a global fitness chain complete with an augmented reality workout routine under the beverage cap.
The cloud has an important role to play in creating innovative products and platforms for the organization looking to become an experience innovator.
Business and technology strategies for the experience innovator
The experience innovator’s cloud innovation strategy focuses on four key business outcomes:
- Proactive cybersecurity related to customer privacy and product integrity to build trust
- Data at the “intelligent edge” by which the organization can gain personalized user data from devices such as mobile technologies and wearables via cloud and edge computing
- Personalized and virtual experiences and powering the spatial web that bring in next-generation and next-horizon immersive, interactive, and experiential technologies to excite and delight customers
- Enterprise platforms that allow the organization to harness customer data and create a community among customers, who benefit from being connected to each other
Given these business requirements, the experience innovator’s cloud innovation program would benefit from:
- Centralization to enable an integrated, collaborative, product-focused team across strategy, technology, user experience, and more, from ideation to delivery
- Some standards to meet user expectations and benefit from frameworks that have already undergone user acceptance testing
- An evolutionary technology approach that is incremental, with the aim to slowly move toward new product architectures that will better allow the organization to evolve
- A hybrid cloud architecture that allows organizations to use public cloud for customer-facing applications while still storing sensitive data on-premises or in a private cloud. The key here is to look for cloud services that create consistent experiences for customers no matter where the data is being stored across the hybrid infrastructure (on-premises, private, or public cloud).
Innovating the future with the cloud
As with the reactive responder scenario, the experience innovator is one of many futures of cloud scenarios that the chief technology officer, chief information officer, and chief cloud officer will need to understand and assess where there may be opportunities to maximize cloud investment and infrastructure to support multiple business initiatives.
To learn more about this business case and other future cloud scenarios, visit our Deloitte Insights article, “A new framing for cloud innovation,” and don’t miss our upcoming blog, “Cloud innovation: Becoming an proactive data defender.”
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David Linthicum
Managing Director | Chief Cloud Strategy Officer
As the chief cloud strategy officer for Deloitte Consulting LLP, David is responsible for building innovative technologies that help clients operate more efficiently while delivering strategies that enable them to disrupt their markets. David is widely respected as a visionary in cloud computing—he was recently named the number one cloud influencer in a report by Apollo Research. For more than 20 years, he has inspired corporations and start-ups to innovate and use resources more productively. As the author of more than 13 books and 5,000 articles, David’s thought leadership has appeared in InfoWorld, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, Gigaom, and Lynda.com. Prior to joining Deloitte, David served as senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners, where he grew the practice into a major force in the cloud computing market. Previously, he led Blue Mountain Labs, helping organizations find value in cloud and other emerging technologies. He is a graduate of George Mason University.
