Every organisation relies on an ecosystem of underlying processes, people and technology working together to serve customers though digitally-powered experiences
experience ecosystems grow organically and in silos
Most experience ecosystems are messy, having grown organically over time, with different departments owning different parts while having different goals and motivations guiding their decisions about the technology, skills and processes they adopt. Often the knowledge about how each part of the ecosystem works is held in the silo that owns them. Yet before an organisation can improve, replace or introduce a new experience, how it plugs into the ecosystem and how it will ultimately change it must be understood in real time.
They rely on in-demand experts collaborating
It takes a combination of advanced technical and people skills to track down and map silo’d information correctly, as well as decent pattern recognition to see experiential and platform patterns. CX strategists, service and UX designers, researchers, business analysts, technology architects and business strategists must come together to create an experience ecosystem map that everyone can understand, which is an uncommon outcome.
They are mapped using multiple DISCONNECTED tools
Even when collaboration works as it should, there are no existing tools that adequately enable such varied specialists to map the depth and breadth of that information into a unified and shareable format that can adequately illustrate a live experience ecosystem for varied decision-makers to act on. This is why so many experience transformations fail and why Sociust needs to exist.
Most digital ecosystem transformations aren’t successful
POOR EXECUTION blocks progress
Organisations get into a pattern of hiring expensive consultants who create static maps, only relevant at one point in time, before having to rehire and remap, again and again. Transforming a digital experience ecosystem often means acting on documents that have been produced without the teams who have to execute on the resulting insights, often without the skills to decode complex and dispersed documentation.
the odds of success are low
A BCG study of 850 organisations found that just over a third were able to achieve their digital transformation objectives. McKinsey said that 7 in 10 business transformation projects fail. Gartner believes data transformations fail to deliver against expectations 80 per cent of the time. So, while research outcomes vary amongst leading transformation consultancies, the message is the same; digital ecosystem transformation is a costly business that may offer substantial rewards eventually but not before most organisations fail, repeatedly.
poor returns on huge investments
With digital transformation programs costing a minimum of $30 million, it can severely injure an organisation if it fails, not to mention the additional cost of employee churn and ill-chosen partnership agreements and licenses. Most organisations fail repeatedly before they see a return on their investment. A large proportion of those costs go to the hours spent pursuing solutions that don’t work because their ever-changing experience ecosystem was misunderstood to begin with.
We know how to radically improve the odds of success
Sociust is an enterprise-level tool that helps organisations to map experience ecosystems and diagnose the issues that prevent holistic solutions. It allows complex ecosystems to evolve in real time, with gaps perpetually visible and actionable. It makes tried and tested service blueprinting methods fit for the future, accessible to so many more team members, aiding the kind of collaboration required to support growth.
It will enable organisations to create a live central menu of all their customer types, all systems, all teams and the processes that connect them, which they can use to map unlimited ecosystem skews as the organisation evolves. It overlays prioritisation frameworks so that organisations can adapt their focus as they need to.
It uses pleasing and usable design to make it easy for varied specialists to map. This also means that everyone in the business can view and understand ecosystem maps.
It mitigates the substantial cost and the risk of consultants having to redo the same work over and over, as well as the frustration and time it takes for stakeholders to have to repeat themselves in protracted meetings, every time a new initiative begins. It will also mitigate the cost and the risk of making expensive procurement mistakes and focussing on the wrong priorities, repeating work in silos across many teams. It will provide a platform for making data more actionable across the business.