HCL DX License Simplification: More Value and Flexibility

30. Juni 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

HCL DX License Simplification: More Value and Flexibility

June 30, 2023 – HCL is simplifying its HCL Digital Experience offering and giving customers the opportunity to transition to a proven and predictable consumption-based subscription licensing.

Effective immediately, HCL is removing all Perpetual (PVU and Authorized User) HCL Digital Experience license packages for new license sales. However, DX customers can renew their S&S-associated E-Parts until June 30th, 2025.

HCL Digital Experience End of Marketing (EOM) Offerings
HCL Customer Experience Suite
HCL Digital Experience Manager
HCL Employee Experience Suite
HCL Portal Extend
HCL Portal Enable
HCL Portal Express
HCL Portal Server
HCL Web Content Manager
HCL Web Experience Factory

For the latest information about HCL DX:

  • Subscribe to the latest HCL DX news, interact with peer and HCL practitioners in the HCL DX Q&A forums and DX User Group.
  • Access DX training materials in the HCL Software U
  • Take a test drive of HCL Digital Experience 9.5 from the HCL SoFy platform
  • Continue your journey with HCL DX v9.5 and expand your TCO with hundreds of new features, fixes, security updates and Kubernetes capabilities like auto-scaling & self-healing environments.
  • Enroll in a complementary HCL Accelerator program for expert guidance to modernize, upgrade and maximize the business and technical value of your Digital Experience solutions

If you have questions, please contact your HCL sales representative or Business Partner, or contact us directly.

DX Product Team

Transform Your Digital Experiences with HCL DX 9.5

30. Juni 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Whether aimed at customers, partners, employees, or all of the above, digital experiences are in a state of continual evolution and improvement, subject to the ever-increasing demand for functionality, security, and user-friendliness.

To that end, HCL Digital Experience — already ranked as an “outperformer” in GigaOm’s Radar report — offers many updates, enhancements, and a new pricing model. They’re all available now in HCL DX 9.5 (note: some updates require Kubernetes deployment), via a painless upgrade path.

At a high level, these updates are geared to bolster value for our customers in several key areas of the digital experience market:

Let’s take a look under the hood!

Content Composer (Kubernetes)
Content Composer offers a central workspace for content creators and managers, from where they can help manage customer, employee, and partner experiences.

Creators can create, edit, update, and replace content for the current channel and all channels — meaning incredible time savings across teams. Templates for content models and items further streamline the process and deliver more power to your creators.

With centralized management and multi-lingual handling, your creators can easily specify the desired languages and locales for your content.

Everyone makes errors from time to time, and that’s why Content Composer offers document tracking and history with a simple option to compare and restore previous versions.

In addition, HCL DX 9.5 offers workflow with Content Composer to strengthen and streamline approval processes.

Digital asset management (Kubernetes)
Fully integrated into the DX content authoring experience, the HCL DX DAM makes it a breeze to organize, place and keep rich assets in a page.

Multiple APIs for third-party media integrations further simplify building out your asset library. The HCL DX DAM also supports images, documents, and videos at production-scale for rapid deployment in all markets with consistent performance and responsiveness.

Consumption-based licensing
A transparent, consumption-based pricing model option is available for HCL DX 9.5. For more information on the Digital Experience Cloud Native 9.5 simplified offering model, please reference Digital Experience Cloud Native 9.5: Simplifed Pricing, More Value. Consumption-based pricing is a popular choice for many software products; Bain & Company note that this model has many iterations, but “all with payment that is ultimately based on usage and aligned with value.”

Under this arrangement, you’ll pay only for the number of production sessions per time period. Users can work within their session as long as necessary, and the system will count it as a new session only after 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity.

For even more value, this new licensing approach offers:

  • Unlimited hardware deployments
  • Unlimited sites
  • Prod and non-prod environments
  • Unlimited content creators/authors

You’ll pay only for production sessions, enabling easy “pay-as-you-grow” scaling. Kubernetes deployment also offers out-of-the-box auto-scaling and auto-healing. With unlimited hardware deployments, it’s easy and risk-free to test out new sites, experiments, or even entirely new lines of business. Consumption-based pricing will accommodate any projects you undertake.

HCL Digital Experience is cloud-native
It’s 2023, and cloud delivery models aren’t exactly novel — but a Digital Experience Cloud is, to be fair, a more recent concept. With HCL DX 9.5, you can move your digital experience to the cloud solution of your choice, enabling maximum scalability, availability, and support. With this offering, HCL DX 9.5 delivers an option to have your deployment fully hosted and managed by HCLSoftware, providing more options than ever before to suit your needs.

HCL Digital Experience Cloud-Native, optionally available later this year for DX 9.5, elevates your digital experience platform to a business-critical, always-on, always-available, cloud-native deployment with a proven history of five-nines uptime.

Further benefits of our cloud offering include:

  • Single-term price for hosting, managing, and software
  • Single-tenant cloud hosting, with your choice of provider and datacenter location
  • Cloud security: web application firewalls and DDoS/bot mitigation, data residency with ISO 27000, SOC3 and PCI-DSS certifications
  • Monitoring and alerting: page and transaction monitors, plus an option for custom monitors
  • Performance monitoring
  • Auto-scale, auto-heal
  • Environments: production, pre-production, and dev/QA, with the option to add more
  • CI/CD Pipelines: standard CI/CD pipeline methods to connect your custom development to our platform
  • Support: dedicated named account executive, plus access to the HCL Now team in real time
  • Customer portal: see service levels, entitlements, SLA status, etc.

CTA: There’s so much to show you in HCL DX 9.5 — there’s never been a better time to make the move. Upgrading is direct, fast and easy. To get started with your software upgrade, visit the HCL Digital Experience Help Center – Supported Installation and Upgrade Paths Help Center topic for more information.

HCL also offers an option for a cost-effective services engagement, which can help you build your upgrade plan and support you throughout the process. For more information about the Digital Experience DX K8s Deployment Accelerator and other DX Accelerator program options, please visit the HCL DX Accelerators program site.

Navigating the MarTech Jungle (Successfully)

16. Juni 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Navigating the MarTech Jungle (Successfully)

Every company with aspirations of becoming a digital leader views customer personalization as priority. After all, what marketing team wouldn’t want to tailor their offerings to each customer’s specific predilections and needs?

But making it happen is a real challenge. To get personalization right, organizations need the right technology tools to enable them to sift through all their customer data. Solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are especially attractive, with their promise of unlocking customer insights that otherwise might forever remain unknown.

Tools, however, are abundant. New solutions reach the market all the time, making it difficult for marketing teams to figure out which best suits their needs. That’s why the marketing technology solutions field is often referred to as the “MarTech jungle.” The sheer volume of tools, with their variety of features and capabilities, is overwhelming.

So marketers have a hard time deciding what tools to pick, how to integrate them, and how to generate the desired outcomes. In some cases, teams get creative with workarounds for specific projects, but those workarounds often do not scale.

It’s a team sport
When thinking about personalization, marketers typically envision 360-degree customer views, customer profiles, segmentation, and other components needed to build the experience. They know what they want the customer experience to look like but not how to make it happen. They may not understand the rules and the authoring tools to properly structure content.

But this lack of knowledge isn’t a deal breaker. So long as marketers recognize they should be tapping the expertise of other teams, such as IT and sales. Customer experience isn’t the responsibility of a single department. It’s a team sport. Different stakeholders should collaborate to build the infrastructure that supports personalization services.

Of course, everything starts with the data. Personalization teams also need to pay attention to the metadata. To deliver accurate personalized experiences, it is critical to understanding the metadata associated with the customer data. It’s what AI algorithms use to learn and deliver insights.

Avoid common obstacles
To avoid getting overwhelmed in picking the right tools, marketers should first address some problems involving vision, process, and the tendency of teams to protect their turf.

On the vision front, all stakeholders — whether they are from marketing, IT, business development or some other department — need a clear understanding of the customer experience they want to deliver. Setting common goals for everyone to subscribe to is essential for a successful strategy.

Corporate fiefdoms, for instance, must be dealt with. Corporate departments often tend to focus and protect their own piece of the personalization experience. But while different teams may handle different tasks, orchestrating their work to produce a common goal is critical to success.

The last potential obstacle to address is process. By setting clear goals and getting all stakeholders on the same page, the personalization team can decide on the exact outcome. Only then can it leverage the right tools to drive the outcome.

Democratize the process
Clear vision and process help organizations navigate the MarTech jungle. Teams should choose platforms and tools that democratize the process so all stakeholders can use them as appropriate to work on their respective pieces. If only IT can use MarTech tools because they are too complex or technical, the outcome may be in jeopardy.

Teams should avoid vendors that try to dazzle customers with buzzwords instead of making a strong case around matching a solution’s capabilities to specific customer needs and goals. The tools should simplify tasks and enable previewing outcomes to determine if anything should be tweaked.

Ideally, teams will have access to a composition platform that enables them to integrate third-party tools and use them in a modular way. This makes it possible to reuse pieces of the project, accelerate and simplify development of future initiatives.

With all these elements in place, an organization can get on the path to digital success. It can create a level of intimacy with customers through data capture and personalized experiences, demonstrating the organization understands what motivates them. The organization can evolve with customers as their needs and priorities change over time. And once an organization gets this right, it can rightfully start to see itself as a digital leader. Learn more about navigating the MarTech jungle and discover how HCL Digital Experience can help you on the journey.

 

Becoming Digital: It’s All About Enablement and Collaboration

15. Juni 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Becoming Digital: It’s All About Enablement and Collaboration

It’s time to stop experimenting with digital experiences and start walking the walk. For years, organizations have been iterating in a crawl-walk-run cycle that seems to never get them fully digitized. To break the cycle, organizations must take bold steps that allow them to actually become digital.

Going digital means full participation in the Digital+ Economy: a hyperconnected world where employees, customers, and partners all come together to do their part in achieving common goals through innovation and problem-solving. Call it “entering the age of co-creation.”

Organizations can’t just be a little digital or partially digital if they intend to extract all of the benefits of the Digital+ Economy — velocity, agility, and competitiveness. They must commit fully. And that means adopting a mindset that differs from how most organizations have tackled digital transformation in the past. It means prioritizing the three all-important groups of stakeholders — employees, customers, and partners — while building new systems and environments. This way, all stakeholders can contribute to company-wide goals by leveraging resources in a positive, collaborative way to deliver the desired outcomes.

But how do you get there? A lot of moving, interconnected parts come into play for companies to achieve the state of being digital. Three main components must be in place — structure, data, and automation. Without them it’s difficult, if not impossible, for an organization to reach its full digital potential.

Set the Foundation
Everything starts with the structural underpinnings that enable a digital environment. The foundation needs to be composable. That’s a term you are sure to hear more and more as companies digitize.

Set the Foundation

A composable architecture provides the rock-solid bed upon which an organization can build flexible and scalable tools that provide the right experience to its stakeholders. Composition makes it possible to integrate any number of third-party tools and services that empower

stakeholders to collaborate and innovate, both in addressing current needs and anticipating future challenges and opportunities.

A composable approach enables modularity, so users can take pieces of previous projects and apply them as they work on new ones. Organizations gain the flexibility to put different pieces together as they see fit — and to satisfy customer preferences. This approach is enhanced by the ability to mix and match tools and services that drive velocity and flexibility without the restraints of vendor lock-in.

Put the Data to Work
With a composable structure in place, it gets easier for organizations to make use of their data. Remember, everything starts with data — where you get it, what it means, and how you use it. For many organizations, this hasn’t always been easy because data comes in fast and furiously from different sources in various formats.

With the right tools, data doesn’t have to be mysterious or scary. And it needs to be made available to all relevant parties so they all can leverage it in their jobs. Of course, this requires a governed approach to ensure that any data subjected to regulatory compliance is properly handled and secured.

A democratic approach to data also requires making digitization tools available anywhere that stakeholder – be it employees, customers or partners – need to access it. After all, being digital means giving everyone the capacity to engage with data where, when, and how they need it.

Automate Repeatable Processes
Digital organizations automate everything that can be automated, and this usually starts with repeatable, predictable processes that are time-consuming when handled manually. Automation provides the velocity that digital organizations need, empowering users to make decisions fast enough to keep up with digital ecosystems and the power of personalization.

Automate Repeatable Processes

This means that with automation, companies can accelerate decisions to shape and deliver outcomes. Automation also delivers velocity in content creation. It takes everything an organization creates, no matter where, and helps the organization deliver it into the right hands at the right moment.

Once an organization is able to get these three components in place, it can reach the state of being digital. It is able to walk the digital walk — to push the boundaries of innovation by enabling all stakeholders to actively and collaboratively participate in shaping its future.

Hear from Liz Miller of Constellation Research on what it means to be digital, today and tomorrow.

Digital Transformation: Turning Corporate Dreams into Real Outcomes

13. Juni 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Digital Transformation: Turning Corporate Dreams into Real Outcomes

The real benefit of digital transformation is that it dares organizations to dream.

With the right automation, digitization tools and skill sets, companies can turn aspirations into achievements that otherwise would remain out of reach.

From Virtual to Real
But worthy achievements require vision. One of the technology trends that is currently inspiring company planners to dream is the metaverse. It has the potential for immersive, personalized, collaborative experiences by integrating augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) with the internet. With its ability to connect people and technologies from virtually anywhere, the metaverse is a realm worth exploring for organizations of all types.

Through gaming and other immersive interactions, companies could leverage the metaverse to present products and services in new ways. They can stage scenarios to gauge utility and user satisfaction. For manufacturing giant 3M, for instance, the metaverse could serve as a virtual showcase for products, complete with virtual store aisles where retailers can get ideas to display items, says Rick Fryar, IT architect at 3M.

Retailers could develop virtual planograms that reveal how products would look on shelves, how consumers would see them, and how the displays might affect store traffic patterns. Virtual secret shoppers could even offer feedback on layout and presentation.

The use of the metaverse isn’t confined to retail, of course. Manufacturers have started leveraging it to design and test products. Some companies use it for training and employee onboarding. Other organizations have started using the metaverse to test out practices and tasks in areas such as surgery and machine maintenance.

Getting ‘Twitchy’
In addition to the metaverse, organizations that embrace digital transformation have plenty of other options to explore digital offerings.

Financial services company BMO is taking advantage of the live streaming platform, Twitch, to better know its customers. To that end, the company’s marketing team launched a Twitch channel to engage customers through gaming and conversations with bank employees.

These interactions create opportunities for the bank to learn about customer needs that can be matched to relevant products and services, says Ali Kazerani, Senior Manager of Marketing Strategy at BMO. Through the channel, bank employees can share information with less-experienced patrons about mortgage planning or how to manage savings accounts, to name a few.

Twitch-based conversations feel comfortable to customers and deliver positive results, Kazerani says. And they could be replicated in a number of other company-specific settings.

Live streaming isn’t the only innovative digital tool at BMO. The financial services company has been A/B testing artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service personalization. When users log on to their accounts, they can view personalized, contextualized content.

And personalization matters to all customers. According to Gartner, “71% of B2C and 86% of B2B customers expect companies to be well informed about their personal information during an interaction.”

Customers expect companies to offer a personalised interaction

BMO is also looking at transactional data to refine its offerings. For instance, by analyzing data from a declined credit card transaction, the bank can prepare its call center staff for an interaction with the cardholder that can lead to a much faster resolution of the customer’s issue.

Other tried-and-true practices to engage customers include the use of SEO. 3M, for instance, has leveraged it in its globalization strategy to build country-specific content, which makes it easier for customers to find information on the company’s websites.

When Marketing and IT Collaborate
While digital transformation opens numerous paths to innovation, success requires the right mindset. Marketing professionals need to have an open mind about ideas that originate in other departments and the tools to employ to achieve their goals.

Collaboration between the marketing and IT departments is essential. The teams should work together to set expectations and timelines. This fosters a spirit of collaboration and trust, resulting in a joint sense of achievement when a project is successful.

Having the right technology is also important. Organizations need the tools and platforms that provide flexibility to pivot when necessary — to make course corrections when a project isn’t going quite as expected. A gradual approach to digital transformation typically works best, allowing organizations to introduce one service at a time and learn from each one.

That’s why the use of the minimum viable product (MVP) model, which enables the introduction of a product with just enough features to draw interest, can help make a quick determination of whether something will work. Both 3M and BMO have leveraged the model in their digitization journeys — watch this video to learn more.

With the proper tools, mindset, and practices, companies can set their sights on the digital future and turn their aspirations into real business outcomes. Curious about the solution enabling this innovative approach? Request a demo of HCL Digital Experience or learn more here.

Empowering Citizen Developers: The Salad Bar Approach

12. Juni 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Empowering Citizen Developers: The Salad Bar Approach

With digital transformation well under way at most organizations, business leaders have to empower their citizen developers to innovate and solve problems. That means allowing business users to create digital experiences, applications and services that make meaningful contributions to their company’s agility and ability to compete in dynamic markets.

Velocity and repeatability are essential. With the right resources in place, citizen developers can access exactly what they need to quickly develop applications that automate and improve their processes. Too often, organizations lack these resources.

The result is the untapped potential of citizen developers. When employees encounter inefficiencies in business processes, they don’t have a simple, proven way to solve them. There is no process in place to access the data or resources they need to come up with a custom solution. And they don’t have an easy, productive way to interact with business colleagues or professional developers to get a project off the ground.

These challenges aren’t insurmountable. They can be addressed with a digital experience platform that pulls all the relevant resources together to deliver a consistent, productive approach for citizen developers. Yet it’s not that simple! Such a platform must empower citizen developers to be autonomous in their endeavors, while ensuring IT governance is keeping the organization safe.

A digital experience platform enshrines a “governed” approach to building experiences, handling content and integrating with the company’s enterprise systems enables organizations to keep a handle on creativity and innovation when it comes to data projects and application development.

“Governed” means all the controls are in place to achieve compliance with privacy regulations and minimize security vulnerabilities that can unintentionally open the door to cyberattacks. These controls set the standards for the “who” and “what” of data: who can handle the data and what data can be collected.

Rogue Developers

Without governed processes that follow sound IT standards and best practices, companies may end up with chaotic, unsafe business operations. Instead of properly sanctioned citizen developers, an organization ends up with rogue developers and a shadow IT.

For instance, projects involving personal identifying information (PPI) may get under way without oversight from IT and compliance professionals, potentially opening the organization to regulatory trouble.

Or, for the sake of expediency — or to get around IT roadblocks — one team can take the initiative to procure a SaaS solution. This leads to the all-too-common issue of “shadow IT,” when computing resources become part of the environment without proper compliance, security, or validation by IT staff.

This creates friction. While the organization wants to empower its citizen developers (and the business as a whole), it doesn’t mean giving them carte blanche to use whatever digital tools they want. What’s the solution to turn this around? How does a company create a positive experience to unleash the collaborative and creative potential in citizen developers without running afoul of regulations or unintentionally inviting security breaches?

The Composition Platform

When citizen developers are autonomous, they can easily collaborate with professional developers when needed, and this encourages innovation. For that to happen, organizations should embrace the concept of a “composition platform.”

“This means implementing a digital experience platform that enables citizen developers to build what they need, including integrating third-party tools and services in minutes. The platform can harness the skills of business users and computing professionals so they can work together to solve business challenges and innovate.

Composition Platform

With a composition platform, organizations avoid “vendor lock-in,” instead leveraging multiple options for mixing and matching tools that address current needs and anticipate future requirements.

Think of this as the “salad bar” approach to delivering solutions to business challenges using enterprise resources that are familiar with their business needs, goals and customers first-hand.

Salad bars always have lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and other ingredients considered essential. The same goes for the composition platform; it includes basic building blocks such as personalization, content, assets, as well as various reusable components used in previous experiences that business users (citizen developers) can easily assemble in minutes.

As discussed in this video, the composition platform approach can make a big difference in a company’s agility and ability to innovate in order to solve business problems and seize market opportunities.

Instead of thinking about where your digital experience platform (DXP) should be headed or whether you should use a headless CMS or not, consider that HCL DX empowers a business-meaningful contribution to digitization transformation with real outcomes in days rather than weeks.

How? By giving an option of using the right tool and company resource — citizen and/or professional developer — to get the job done.

Learn more about a composable DXP and how it can help fit your organization’s needs by getting a free demo.

The Next Big Milestone for Organizations: A Better Employee Experience

27. April 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

The Next Big Milestone for Organizations: A Better Employee Experience

For years customer experience has reigned supreme in the boardroom. As organizations have learned how to leverage data to improve business outcomes, they placed a strong focus on pleasing customers. That makes sense but employees deserve great experiences too, and organizations that provide them become measurably more productive and profitable.

In fact, organizations that optimize the employee experiences outperform S&P 500 companies by 122%. It’s hard to ignore this metric. But what makes it achievable? It comes down to the tools you put at the disposal of workers so they can access, use and share content to better do their jobs and advance their careers.

The corporate intranet is at the center of it all. Set up properly, it makes for a happier, more dynamic and productive workforce. As HCL executives recently discussed in this video about creating a successful employee experience, getting it right requires investing in the right digital experience platform (DXP) — one that connects people across the organization to work, communicate, and collaborate.

The platform should make it easy for employees to find answers to their questions on topics that interest them, such as HR policies, sick leave, travel guidelines, and finding subject matter experts within the organization. A platform with the right levels of functionality can empower employees to make them feel good about their work and their contribution to the organization. It makes for motivated, gratified workers.

Four Key Ingredients
The right DXP enables the creation of a rapidly evolving, hyperconnected ecosystem that encourages participation and collaboration across the enterprise. With that in mind, the platform requires four essential capabilities:

  • Engagement — Provide meaningful personalized content that motivates employees to seek, use and share content.
  • Connectivity — Provide links that allow employees to engage with each other to share common interests and address needs.
  • Access — Enable a single point of access for all applications that employees need, and personalize access to match employee roles and duties.
  • Collaboration — Make it easy for employees to collaborate and share information so they can do their jobs better, individually and collectively.

While all four ingredients are essential, the importance of engagement cannot be overstated. Engagement goes beyond what happens to the user; it requires action by the user — press a button, click a link, read something, email content to a coworker.

That’s achievable only if the content is timely and relevant. It has meaning because it matches their personal interests, helps them complete tasks, or connects them with another employee with similar interests. Often employee experiences fall short because they don’t drive engagement.

Centralized Platform
To drive engagement, a company’s intranet must be designed properly, so architecture is key. With HCL, organizations can create a central repository for all employee self-service operations and integration with productivity tools such as Microsoft Office 365. This gives people quick access to what they need through a single point of contact.

Switching between multiple screens and websites to get content is frustrating. And, unfortunately, all too common. Consider that in the past three years, the number of applications organizations use increased by 68%. Companies have an average of 129 applications, and individual employees access a whopping 72 applications to do their jobs. If those applications aren’t easily accessible from a centralized portal, the result isn’t hard to figure out — it’s a whole lot of wasted time [Link to the other blog]

In addition to silo-busting, HCL DX has built-in intelligence for continual self-improvement. Using behavior analytics, the platform tracks and interprets user interactions to tailor the experience to everyone. So, every time the employee logs in, the experience gets better and better. The use of intelligent chatbots enables conversational interactions, further enhancing the experience.

And the better the experience, the happier the employee will be, knowing that whenever they need content, it is readily available, meaningful, and relevant.

Ready to empower, educate, and engage your employees? Learn how the HCL DX platform can help you create a more connected workforce.

LEARN MORE

Worried about adopting yet another tool? Schedule a demo of HCL DX today and see our powerful, fast, and easy-to-use employee experience platform in action.

REQUEST DEMO

Employee Experience Is Key to Digital Transformation Success

27. April 2023 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Employee Experience Is Key to Digital Transformation Success

While just about every company today has a digital transformation strategy, most struggle to generate successful outcomes. The Harvard Business Review estimates that 87.5% of digital transformations “fail to meet their original objectives.”

Reasons for such a low success rate vary, but one area that merits significantly more attention from enterprise decision-makers is employee experience. After all, companies have a lot riding on how well their employees can do their jobs.

Employees that enjoy great experiences at work help their companies reach new performance heights. Research shows that companies providing great experiences outperform S&P enterprises by 122%. This means organizations not only create a better working environment for their workforce, but also help themselves in a measurable way.

Wasted Time
Currently, too many organizations are falling short when it comes to employee experience. A recent survey found employees spend 25% of their time searching for information because they have to navigate multiple applications for a single business process. It’s wasted time that can never be recovered and ultimately hurts the bottom line.

It’s frustrating for employees, cutting into their productivity and eroding the gratification they should get from a job well done. If employees are spending that much time just looking for information, it is clear that the organization needs to make changes.

With that in mind, companies should make employee experience a priority for their digital transformations. They should be enabling agile methods for task completion. And that means investing in intelligent tools such as a digital experience platform (DXP) that centralizes systems, data and content and learns user habits to continually improve the employee experience.

Workers shouldn’t have to spend 10 minutes trying to find a link to HR policies or an application they need for a specific task. And they won’t have to if they can leverage AI automation and self-service portals providing quick access to relevant content.

The need for these capabilities is urgent. Over the past three years, the average number of applications an employee uses to execute their work rose 68%. Employees on average come across 72 applications in their day-to-day experience. Juggling that much software is time-consuming, and it explains how a fifth of the workday can be lost to the simple task of searching for the correct application.

Changing Expectations
The need for great employee experiences is also urgent for another reason – expectations have dramatically changed. Employees want easy access to digital assets that provide meaningful content relevant to their jobs. They want tools that enable collaboration with other workers in other teams and to make important contributions to the organization’s mission. Having the ability to do so helps get them noticed, boosting their chances of success in their jobs and enhancing career advancement prospects.

In a recent Microsoft poll, 59% of respondents said the collaboration tools they use are misaligned with their teams’ work preferences. Furthermore, 64% said the tools don’t integrate with company processes such as marketing, finance and sales. And 72% said they would like collaboration tools that are compatible with one another because, otherwise, it’s difficult to work with other teams.

All these wishes can be fulfilled with the right DXP — one that centralizes access to everything, from HR policies to business applications to web-based resources. The right DXP delivers personalized experiences so that when an employee logs in, the person is recognized. This eliminates the frustration of getting notifications to sign up for services a person already has. Or wasting valuable time trying to remember how to access a particular application.

DXP software enables collaboration and links employees across corporate groups to share information, learn from each other, and complete tasks together. Advanced DXP solutions have built-in intelligence to personalize experiences. So, each time a user logs in, the platform learns a little more about the individual to make content more relevant and targeted each time.

As organizations undergo digital transformation, they stand to benefit significantly from enhancing the employee experience. Doing so increases the chances of success for the transformation overall so that organizations can better compete in the digital economy.

Ready to empower, educate, and engage your employees? Learn how the HCL DX platform can help you create a more connected workforce.

LEARN MORE

Worried about adopting yet another tool? Schedule a demo of HCL DX today and see our powerful, fast, and easy-to-use employee experience platform in action.

REQUEST DEMO

Why Every Public Sector Org Needs a Modern DX Platform 

8. November 2022 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

HCL DX

DEK: A digital experience platform can modernize private and public sectors.

The wide range of government services that constituents depend on are increasingly accessed and delivered online—with varying degrees of success. These challenges—and the changing expectations of a population conditioned by Google, Amazon, and Uber—have pushed the public sector to seek ways of keeping pace with the digital transformation all around us.

To do that, they need technology that can smoothly and securely connect people with the services they need, while also giving government employees the data they rely on to do their jobs. And why not make the experience enjoyable?

With those goals in mind, governments are turning to digital experience (DX) platforms that can deliver a modern consumer experience for traditionally bureaucratic processes.

Why a DXP makes sense for governments

While private sector organizations often have the luxury of focusing on a specific product or service, government agencies must provide a diverse array of resources to their constituents—almost always with a high degree of urgency.

Look at any state website and you’ll see a broad range of crucial services, including:

  • Professional licensing and business permits
  • Voter registration
  • State benefits—health care, food assistance, childcare and more
  • Tax information
  • Driver’s licenses and motor vehicle registration
  • Consumer protection
  • Caregiver support
  • Unemployment benefits

Alongside all that, of course, are the innumerable departments and administrative systems that carry out the smooth functioning of government—led by employees who rely on effective communication tools and unimpeded access to data.

Connecting constituents with the information they need—in a suitable format, at the exact right moment—is no small task. To achieve all that—while providing a user experience that feels less like DMV and more like H&M—requires a digital infrastructure built to deliver those services while managing the obstacles that are bound to pop up.

For governments, that means finding a DX solution that responds superlatively to four key challenges.

     1.Cybersecurity

No surprise here—data protection is top-of-mind in every industry, and especially in the public sector. To get a sense of the scope of the problem, consider that the federal government’s proposed cybersecurity budget in 2021 was projected at $18.7 billion.

Besides managing stores of constituents’ sensitive personal information, governments act as essential intermediaries for systems that range from voting and waste management to gas and electric utilities. These are services―and collections of data―that simply cannot be left vulnerable.

     2. Continuity and Reliability

As important as safeguarding critical data may be, so too is the assurance that systems will work no matter what sort of bizarre event might occur. Maintaining a continuous connection to essential services is what people expect―and what governments must deliver.

     3. Scalability

The ability to scale ensures that governments can see the full benefits of their digital platforms by flexing in size or scope and across workforce models―without compromising expense ratios or infrastructure cost. This drives efficiency and effectiveness throughout the programs used and boosts the satisfaction level of key stakeholders, employees, and constituents.

    4. Speed and ease of use

Digital experiences must lean into serving the “everything” constituent, who wants everything available to them both in person and online. According to Gartner, half of all digital government KPIs include a constituent/customer experience metric to ensure services delivered are constituent-centric. The future of civic services will combine the speed and ease of digital with the practicality and resourcefulness of human interaction.

The HCL DX platform is future-ready

HCL DX solves these critical problems with dynamic features that will satisfy the needs of governments and agencies of all sizes—large, mid-size, or small.

Security you can rely on

HCL DX is renowned for unmatched data protection—and that reputation is well deserved.

Security is baked into the platform through end-to-end encryption, multilevel authentication and role-based access controls that ensure the system architecture is customizable yet secure. With rules-based protection built in, HCL DX ensures that sensitive data and essential systems will be safe from threats.

Continuity that keeps people connected

With over 2,000 APIs, HCL DX makes seamless integration of data and apps a reality, protecting the continuity of business-critical processes that are too important to be interrupted. With pre-built continuous integration, your digital experiences are delivered effortlessly yet securely.

What’s more, with over 200 new REST APIs with industry JavaScript frameworks, any government office can customize its apps with no training, while supporting new channels headlessly.

This facilitates a new level of integration for custom applications and connects people and networks to the essential data they need, when they need it—no matter what.

Scalability that everyone needs

HCL DX’s cloud-native platform allows you to choose the cloud option you prefer or host your own Kubernetes deployment, so there are no multi-tenant vendor constraints on how you build and scale your operation.

A platform like this provides economical scaling, enabling the distribution of data and workloads across multiple independent datacenters with high availability. That high availability also removes limitations on how you deploy your own data and physical resources.

By bringing together HCL DX on HCL Now, a cloud-native-as-a-service managed cloud solution, you can access expert cloud solutions with ease―simply and seamlessly accelerating your growth as you see fit.

Serve the “everything” constituent 

Access. Convenience. Customization. Quality.

As digital experiences for consumers continue to evolve―and increase―so do the expectations for those experiences. Simply providing a digital option is not enough―that option must be personalized and enjoyable. Yes, even for government services.

DX’s intuitive content tools, insightful analytic integrations, and easily automated deployments open a new frontier for creating customer experiences that jump off the screen―and in a fraction of the time it would take to create them with code. By using HCL DX, you can save time and optimize your content without the need for IT development or intervention.

A DX platform can help resolve many of the challenges facing governments today. But only the HCL DX platform resolves these issues with the combination of security, consistency, and out-of-the-box scalability and ease-of-use that fits the needs of governments everywhere.

For more information on HCL DX’s features, click here.

 

DX Transform Was … Truly Transformative

17. November 2021 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Liz Miller, Principal Analyst from Constellation Research, kicked everything off as moderator and introduced HCL’s Gary Schoch and Becky Creighton’s session which gave a wide-ranging overview of all the “superpowers” that a successful digital experience should have. A DXP must be more than just a website and its content. A powerful one offers an experience that delivers the “moments that matter” and delivers trust. Trust is created when a person’s digital experience is personalized, secure, empathetic (culturally and regionally tailored) and seamless.

Customers’ interactions and personalized actions should connect them to the information and expertise essential to getting the help or services they need. This requires a way to close the gap between all the data in the back end to the digital touchpoints and the experiences people engage with.

When you can close this gap your company improves efficiency, fosters innovation, and, ultimately, drives growth.

How does an organization do this, and what are the moments that really matter (and why does that matter)? Watch the replay

Why Your Business Should Care About Cloud-Native

Liz Miller from Constellation Research led a compelling, lively conversation with analysts and executives around the value of cloud to today’s organizations. The roundtable explored what the business value is of cloud, as it relates to digital experiences, and who the key stakeholders are now. These experts laid out the challenges facing us in today’s world and showed us how new ways of working require the agility and mobility that cloud provides. They dived into how cloud infrastructure and cloud-native solutions help untether organizations from IT and concerns and bottlenecks — which provides corporate agility and frees the business up to focus on innovation and differentiation.

IDC’s Research Director Marci Maddox then told us something staggering. In 2020, 60% of the world’s almost 8 billion people were online. That’s a lot of traffic! And 40% of the world’s organization saw massive spikes — and some sites just couldn’t handle it. IDC conducted a survey that found that 70% of organizations with digital experiences prefer a cloud-native solution. Why? Resiliency, scale, and uptime. All of which lead to building the required confidence and trust in your brand.

Dave Torres, a DX and commerce executive from Perficient, explained that cloud turns IT into the part of the organization that can more easily say “yes” rather than “no.” Organizations are no longer hampered by systems that can’t stay up — and business processes can be better automated and updates more spontaneous. Google’s Rodrigo Rocha added that cloud empowers organizations to focus on the key needs of the business and the marketplace, rather than worrying about infrastructure.

How does cloud power digital experiences and the “moments that matter”? By empowering companies to put their essential systems and processes everywhere — online and mobile — means they can act, react, and communicate at scale to their customers, constituents, and partners. Hybrid cloud, also a big boon for business, allows organizations to update and modernize existing applications and processes, without having to rewrite or redo them.Besides who, what, why, how of work, the other crucial thing which could help solve for is data. Over the last 5 years, we will have two and a half times the amount of data — a stunning 180 zettabytes — that we’ve seen in the past 10.  Data needs to not be in silos for organizations to be successful. All backend systems and processes (even from external partners and the surrounding ecosystems) need to be woven together to create seamless experience on the front-end. And mobile devices allow us to have access, in our hands, to all this vital data we need to live daily lives.

“Over the next 5 years, we will have two and half times the amount of data — a stunning 180 zettabytes — than we’ve seen in the past 10.” 

But what are the KPIs of digital transformation? What are the shared, agreed-upon measures of success? Listen to the replay now to find out

How to Transform a Multi-Billion-Dollar Company 

During the hot season in Dubai — where it’s very very hot — people seek the cool comfort of air-conditioned malls.  Al-Futtaim provides these essential services and technology and used HCL Digital Experience to digitize and scale its entire business and establish its powerful digital footprint. It uses its digital experiences to grow brand awareness, reach its customers, power its e-commerce business, and reach powerfully successful business results. Heman Dhagai, the head of engineering, described the need for a digital solution to be affordable, robust, flexible, and cloud-native. HCL Digital Experience was key to Al-Futtaim’s digital transformation.

How does a company with 33,000 employees in 20 countries with multiple lines of business not drown in chaos?  

How was Al-Futtaim able to satisfy the traditional sides of the business, while growing and evolving its expanding digital organization? What are the virtual portals that were key to success? What caused the scenario where it required going back to the drawing board? How did the solution serve all the different businesses within the organization, and how did it help make each business unit better at doing their jobs? Arjit Bose, solutions architect, breaks it down and explains the tangible strategies and tactics this global enterprise used to transform its entire operation. Watch the replay here

Enter the Customer Experience Studio 

We all agree, now more than ever, how crucial digital transformation is, and how digital experiences are at the center of this journey. The Customer Experience Studio is what we have developed to help organizations do things differently. Listen to the replay, to hear how the collective digital agency and digital consulting experience (275 years of it!) at HCL can help our customers — hands-on — reach integration, digitization, and true transformation.

We want to put our ideas to work for you by creating a free, 100% personalized strategy for your business — sign up for our DX Accelerator program today. Let’s build a plan for future success!

SIGN UP NOW

Six Ways to Ensure Your Digital Experience Is Excellent. In a Digital-Focused World, Make Sure You’re Working With the Best

12. Januar 2021 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

A digital experience takes place when a customer has an interaction with an organization exclusively through digital technology. The world was already heading in an increasingly digital direction, but in the wake of COVID-19, as more and more teams and organizations have been working remotely and relying on technology to power their workflows, a strong digital customer experience has never been more imperative. What are some steps you can take right now to maximize your digital experiences? 

  1. Invest in strong customer experience software

In order to ensure that they’re providing the best possible customer experience (or CX), companies need to prioritize their customer experience platform — cheaper one-trick-pony solutions won’t cut it. A strong CX platform will offer personalized options to the customer, ensure that their information is secure, and offer quick and reliable self-service when needed. Advanced data collection and machine learning personalization solutions included in a CX platform make a well-rounded solution crucial to invest in.

      2. Provide a secure platform

When providing secure personal information such as a bank account or patient ID, customers need to be sure that private and personally identifiable information is handled safely and securely. Though customers are generally willing and enthusiastic to engage in convenient digital experiences, the major data breaches of recent years still leave plenty of consumers understandably skittish about providing organizations with personal info. According to data gathered by Lift361, “strong security increases overall customer satisfaction from 13% to 40%, and customers have shown they are willing to spend more with companies they trust to protect their privacy and data.” Ensure that your tech has personal security measures in place and be transparent with users and prospects about just how safe they can feel using your platform.

HCL Digital Experience is one of the most secure solutions out there, trusted by 8 out of 10 of the world’s largest banks

 

      3. Make sure your solution “plays well with others”

Excellent digital experiences are ones where the user- or customer-facing experience may look and feel simple — but the back-end systems and processes might actually be very complex. Think databases of health and patient data, bank and financial transactions and accounts, government entities who need to share information or resources. These are the kind of transactions millions of people rely on every day to get about their daily lives. And many of the back-end systems are legacy systems — or don’t run in the same operational ways and business processes as others.  Being able to bring these disparate and varied pieces together and deliver a unified, seamless, and even single-sign-on experience is what separates success and customer satisfaction and confidence from brand erosion and mass exodus to a competitor. Learn more about what to look for when you need to digitize business-critical processes here.

Another part of complexity that comes with delivering digital experiences is understanding who’s visiting and what they are doing. This data is part of what you need to know before you can deliver better, faster personalized experiences. The best solutions have analytics included, so that you can analyze and optimize with tools that offer “struggle” detection and resolution (for better, more personalized digital journeys), behavior insights (capturing and analyze site visitor behavior), and business analytics (so you get visibility into business impact and can improve experiences). The best solutions also let you scale, without compromising security, integrity, nor user experience.

      4. Optimize your digital experience management process

DX management is the process of monitoring, assessing, and acting on your digital customer interactions. A strong digital experience platform will make sure your team members can keep track of each customer interaction — where are they in their journey? How often do your emails reach them? Have they expressed any frustrations working with your organization? DX management software should be able to:

  • Personalize interactions 
  • Gather important customer and customer-journey data 
  • Categorize, deliver, and adjust based on those important data points and analytics 
  • Scale your CX as your business grows
  • Flag customers that are at risk of churning

      5. Provide omnichannel capabilities

It’s very likely that customers will use multiple channels to interact with your organization, like mobile, desktop, and even voice. Ensure that any action completed on one channel is automatically reflected on other channels, and make sure that your website is optimized for mobile. Customers should be able to click a link from an email on their email app, for example, and be seamlessly transferred to your site where they can easily complete their purchase. Make sure that large image assets or text blocks aren’t slowing down your site’s mobile loading.

      6. Make sure you offer flexible deployments — including the cloud

With more and more businesses moving their digital experiences to cloud-based deployments, it’s crucial to carefully evaluate their current implementations and create a cloud strategy and path to getting there — and get the boost of cloud for driving transformation and differentiation. Organizations need to be flexible about their journey to the cloud, since there can be challenges inherent in migration mission-critical functions and workloads. The new hybrid-cloud support in solutions like HCL Digital Experience, means you can get the benefits of cloud — but preserve the value of existing on-premises investments and deployments — to help “future proof” digital experiences. 

See also: 4 Features of a Cloud-Native Digital Experience

Investing in a stand-out DX solution like HCL’s Digital Experience is more important to businesses than ever, and that importance will only increase in the coming years. Schedule a demo with us to learn more about exactly how our DX software will best help your organization. 

What Is a Customer Experience Platform? the Last Great Experience Your Customer Has Becomes Their Expectation. You Need the Right Solution.

5. Januar 2021 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

Customer experience (or CX as it’s commonly referred to) is an increasingly important priority for companies of all sizes. Organizations need to deliver highly contextualized experiences — not just simple websites and mobile apps — to reach customers with the right information, in the right way, every time. Business models are shifting and all us are having to adjust and adjust quickly. The last great experience a customer has now becomes their expectation — plus 96% of customers say customer service is important when choosing the brands they’re loyal to. Customers are more and more empowered in transactions as they’re able to do extensive research before buying and can closely compare between one company and their competitors. As organizations focus on providing exceptional CX, they need strong technology backing their process. That’s where a customer experience platform comes in. 

What does customer experience software do? 

To first understand why customer experience software is beneficial, we need to take a look at what customer experience is and why it matters so much. We know it’s an important factor in solidifying brand loyalty — but what does a solid customer experience actually look like? 

It generally refers to the feeling and impression your customers are left with after they leave an interaction with your brand. This is a combination of how easy your website is to navigate, how helpful your customer support services are, how personalized the content it, how customized the experience is, and how much value they gained from your brand, services, or products itself. CX can be assessed with surveys, feedback, and churn rates. 

Customer experience platform software is the technology solution an organization will use to observe, measure, handle, and improve the customer journey. These platforms serve as one-stop solutions for making sure that an organization doesn’t lose sight of important customer experience needs and initiatives, and are able to successfully meet their customer experience goals by tracking customer behavior, raising red flags when their activity points to a likely churn or dissatisfaction rate, suggesting personalization tactics to improve their experience, and using analytics to identify challenges in a journey so it can be addressed and conversion rates can increase. 

Why does my organization need a customer experience solution? 

No matter how strong your customer support team members and solution might be, you’ll still want to see all of your customer’s data in one place in order to make sure their experience is as satisfactory as possible. A solid customer digital experience allows team members to easily access data like a customer’s purchase history, purchase frequency, and feedback, giving you valuable insight into what they enjoyed about working with you, and where you might have room for necessary improvement, along with displaying the data of your customers en masse so you can identify bigger trends and catch issues that might lead to churn. These kinds of capabilities, along with the ability to bring in diverse systems, solutions, and sets of data, is exactly what the recent integrations between HCL Digital Experience (DX) and HCL Unica Discover allow you to do.  

Get access to the info you need — and only what you need 

An advanced customer experience platform allows role-based user access, so team members are only presented with the data and information that they need to better complete their part of the customer journey. Team members won’t get overwhelmed with too much information, and they’ll be able to leverage the data they do need to help improve CX in their area of expertise. 

Advanced platforms will also allow organizations to seamlessly integrate data and insights and use these to address customers’ needs. This is highly recommended (along with role-based access) when choosing a CX or DX solution. If you’re looking for a fully featured platform, consider HCL Digital Experience, with new analytics tools, completely reimagined content creation tools, and the broadest cloud-native support in market.

How and Why You Should Digitize Business Processes

15. Dezember 2020 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

If it wasn’t abundantly clear before, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved that digitizing business-critical processes (and making teams productive remotely) is key to business continuity. Whether a business has 50 — or 50,000 — employees, its operations are influenced and impacted (if not completely overhauled) by technology designed to speed up, connect, improve and sustain work in the modern world. Digital transformation for enterprise organizations is a no-brainer. It’s the “how” that defines what success looks like.

For some companies, embracing this digital transformation has been a gradual process of adoption.  Others have been digital all along, or they jumped in headfirst, undergoing a major overhaul all at once.  And for some it’s still an overwhelming burden, approached tentatively and perhaps even with aversion to change and new technology.  No matter the scenario, there’s little doubt, especially with remote work becoming ubiquitous, that old-school business processes that involve emailed documents and spreadsheets (or even paper-filled file cabinets) is not the way to go. 

Digitizing business processes refers to the integration of digital information — pieces of physical, non-digital material that has been converted into a digital format — into an automated workflow that can replace manual, disconnected and paper-based processes.  It means digitizing business processes, increasing employee productivity, and improving customer satisfaction. It provides dramatic benefits to employees, partners, customers and the organization as a whole. Converting not just documents and data to digital, but also workflow, transactions, functions and processes, can be very complex. There are many payoffs, however.

You will save time and money 

Using digitized processes can free up employees from a multitude of monotonous tasks. Rather than email chains for tedious and regular processes approvals, regular and routine functions (payroll, time logs, inspection signoffs, etc.) can be routed through workflows automatically. Functions such as financial transactions, insurance claims, medical prescription processing, in-house training can be automated and make teams more productive and efficient. People are free up to focus on real priorities and the needs of the business instead of avoidable minutiae.

Productivity and communication are increased 

The digital platforms now available can link employees via chat and messaging services, giving them the ability to work efficiently from anywhere. They also help keep teams safe and informed during business disruptions or crises. Teams are able to collaborate virtually using software that can store, organize and share information like.  Communication to your audience becomes faster and more seamless.  By digitizing your business processes, you enable a level of connectivity that has quickly becoming the new normal. 

Your data is more accessible and more secure 

Digitized data and content can be accessed and protected by creating and providing authenticated and role-based access to core applications and processes, allowing access to only those who specifically need it.  Locating a single file is as easy as clicking a button; accessing an entire collection of documents is just as simple, and can be done from work, home, or in line at the Starbucks.  Data can be stored in servers either on-premise or on the cloud (or a combination), protected by security protocols designed specifically for your organizational needs.

Emphasize improved value and experiences 

Changing fundamental operations can cause some uncertainty, to say the least, among employees and customers.  But digitizing business processes is all about leveraging technology to create better experiences, for all parties. Make sure teams understand that any disruption to their current routine is in pursuit of a better work experience for them, and the same for customers.  Emphasize and be transparent about change and how much value they stand to get from implementing new ways of working.

Don’t get piece-mealed to pieces 

There are so many possible components to a digitized business environment, and so many specific hardware, software and application options that it can make your head spin.  And while it is possible to cobble together an infrastructure of odds and ends that manages to coexist and get the job done, it’s not highly recommended.  Even if all your systems and backend data and key functions are disparate, they can be brought together and unified in a digital experience if you find the right platform and solution.

There are many digital experience platforms (DXPs) out there to choose from. The one you choose needs to meet the needs of your business, specifically. It needs to be able to scale and grow. It should be able to streamline communication both within the company and externally to your audience.  It should have a comprehensive data storage and security system that fits your needs.  And it should add real value to your work and enhance the experiences of everyone who uses it.  Find out more about our latest version of HCL Digital Experience as a place to start.

Be strategic about your digital transformation 

To truly digitize your business process and undergo true transformation, you need to first conduct an honest assessment of your enterprise and where it is on the maturity curve of digital transformation. Identify worker skills and tools gaps. Anticipate and map out changing customer expectations. Learn and partner with line of business leaders to assess and map how they work. Develop roadmaps, and get organizational buy-in. Figure out pathways to experiment and reassess. Test, iterate, repeat.

We all need to transform the way we do business. You need a technology and services partner to get this done and find your path to the future. You need digitized processes, and new ways to engage your customers, partners, and audiences. We understand digital transformation. Let’s transform your business. Sign up for a free demo now.  

What Is a Content Management System? And Why Are They so Important for Today’s Enterprise Organizations?

7. Dezember 2020 Posted by Demetrios Nerris

If you’ve ever published anything on the internet, you’ve used a web content management system (or CMS) to do so (unless you’re a brilliant developer and built a site from scratch, which is very impressive, but highly time-consuming and impractical). These days, more than half of all websites are built, updated, and maintained via CMS portals, and that number is only increasing. 

What does web content management software look like? 

CMS portals — also referred to as web content management software, content delivery managers, and content hubs — look slightly different depending on the type of site they service (personal blogs require different functions than a B2C retail site, for example), but retain some similarities across the board. Your CMS software will have a menu that lets content creators and managers create and edit web pages such as landing pages, blog posts, and contact forms, ideally with only a few clicks. Creators will log in to the portal, find the appropriate page from an index tab, make additions or edits and … voila! Content managed. 

Why should you use a CMS? 

Content management systems like the Content Composer in HCL Digital Experience are major development time savers, since marketers and other content creators can easily go into the platform themselves to create and publish content. Digital asset management systems, which, if you’re lucky, are part of a CMS, also let you create, manage, and deliver rich media (video, images, animations, and text) to partners, customers, and employees.  

Workflow is often built into a CMS, or customized at the organizational level. Different users can be allowed various levels of autonomy within the platform, so that, for example, an intern can add text or edit a blog post, but a marketing manager can be assigned to approve any published changes. When the whole team is working directly within a CMS platform, requests and approvals can be made seamlessly, reducing the back-and-forth of external email communication and the risk of a task getting lost in Slack or email notifications. 

CMS portals also help ensure that brand guidelines are automatically adhered to in every new web page, since developers can implement brand colors and logo imagery within the platform itself. Templates and drag-and-drop capabilities are a big part of the redesigned content tools within the most recent version of HCL Digital Experience, and let teams quickly and intuitively build and organize content.  Teams that use CMS portals will still need to have a developer or team of developers to make high-level coding edits that content creators might not know how to do, but the dev team won’t have to manually build every new website change, freeing up their time for higher priority projects. You can deliver time-sensitive news and resources through your site without having to wait on IT. 

How can you find the best enterprise content management software? 

Ultimately, finding the right CMS for your organization is a strategic choice based on how easy the platform is for your team to learn, the unique features one might have that stand out to your team (Do you need strong retail capabilities? Are you a creative agency that needs a visually stunning site?) and the level of design capabilities that you need. Before committing to a CMS, make sure that the features that are a priority to your organization are available and user-friendly, and that the integration and learning curve required isn’t one that’ll overwhelm your team members. If your organization is one that is complex and has multiple systems and backend repositories of data that manage business-critical functions, you need a platform that doesn’t go down and can scale to meet the needs of the business.  

Features of strong content delivery platforms 

Besides the general abilities that content management systems need to include (the ability to create and publish content, add image assets, and add tags to blog posts, for example), it’s worth looking for a content delivery network that offers features such as: 

  • Integrating data and workflows/ your current tech stack 
  • SSO and security that’s working even when the platform is at rest 
  • Tools and an interface that’s intuitive to marketers/content creators
  • Flexible deployment scheduling
  • Role-based user access
  • Reliable, scalable technology 

With these guidelines in mind, content creators can find the CMS that best serves the needs of their organization and manage their content delivery as efficiently as ever. HCL’s Digital Experience is a great place to start if you’re looking for an intuitive, multi-faceted solution. 

Sign up for a free demo workshop.

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