The year is 2020 and after content, experience is the king. Digital leaders with whom I had the privilege to work with across industries & geographies are solving for a connected customer experience and easy, frictionless marketer experience. While the customer were provided with the right content, the digital team had to sweat through juggling between compliance norms, data formats & creative sizes.
Last week as the Adobe team walked through the capabilities of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), and I found a promise to solve these digital enterprise challenges.
Faster Data Ingestion & Activation
Digital leaders who have been part of the Adobe Experience Cloud are aware about the limitations to share data within Adobe solutions and onboarding external data into them. After waiting for ingestion & onboarding, you are at the mercy of the activation platform – DSP or otherwise to receive the data and activate on the same.
Adobe Experience Platform establishes a centralized Data Lake as the single persistent record of customer with Petabyte Scalability. Hence, your data is promised to be ingested quickly irrespective of the size and available for omnichannel activation. Additionally, data scientists can access the same centralized data lake to derive actionable insights and recommendation models. In case of any destructive actions, databases are promised to reconcile into last view of the data at runtime.
Keep Your Standards High
With more data sources comes more opportunities and problems to merge them together to drive end user connected experience. Low standards in data collection – from incorrect nomenclature such as business_name vs businessName to capturing duplicate data such as ECID in eVar are followed for a successful merge. What appears to be a Band Aid approach , actually is Crossing the Chasm for the digital leader.
Following the wide success of Digital Data Layer, AEP introduces XDM aka Experience Data Model. Just like W3C DDL, it provides a formal specification to describe & collect user info (aka PII) , action and events to integrate data. Hence, you can bring data from Google, Salesforce and Dynamics 365, each with different data formats and can happily live together within your tech stack.
Ease of Data Governance
If a digital leader is having sleepless nights, one reason might be that their partner is snoring and other can be legal/data privacy team. No doubt that they are a fundamental necessity of an enterprise. There might have been countless initiatives that have had near death experiences or stacked under heaps of emails awaiting sign off.
AEP introduces DULE labeling aka Data Usage Labeling & Enforcement framework that enforce data usage restrictions based on the applied labels/metadata. Hence your targeted omnichannel initiative would have permission to use data labels that have been already signed off by your compliance team.
Build Once, Deploy Everywhere
While the market celebrated Adobe acquisition of a new product, the digital leader clapped and lamented about another new Javascript/SDK . Followed by fighting for a space in the next available sprint to move the new code into production.
Adobe Experience Platform has a developer friendly approach using principles of API-first design which views APIs as a growing, evolving and life-like entity. Hence you build your data ingestion APIs only once and deploy it across web, native apps & OTT. The same API can be scaled to apply DULE labels programmatically to ensure later usage according to compliance. Finally, there’s democracy in data access! Abiding by the open system framework, all developers can access data at various states for further analysis.
Speed As A Business Strategy
Digital leaders realize that they are in the midst of the NOW economy. Customer’s needs, wants and demands are changing with climate changing weather & latest Tik Tok videos. To capitalize on these trends, digital business has to recognize these trends and drive connected experiences across all platforms.
Adobe Experience Platform promises days when digital leaders would wait for data to onboard are long gone. Across the AEP presentation, I felt the team realized the challenges with speed and ensured the latest in cloud computing are brought to the digital leader and team’s fingertips.