Digital Trends 2023

All our clients are currently engaging with their own future, the vision for the coming years and the strategy to realise it. This usually raises three central questions: what will target groups need in five or ten years, what makes economic sense for the organisation, and what is technologically feasible within which timeframe and at what cost.

In our projects, the foundation for such a future strategy always becomes clear: first, a shift in perspective towards users' needs. Understanding the people who need and use the offering is the basis. Set against this are the requirements and possibilities from a business perspective, as well as technological feasibility. Using methods from service and business design, new digital services and platforms can be developed that are even more relevant to users while making sense for the organisation. Only those who understand people – both users and the organisation's perspective – can succeed in the long term. In this sense of business design, we also work on the products and services surrounding our clients' core business.

Marketing automation is an umbrella term for a wide range of software solutions that all have one thing in common: they help automate individual or even all of an organisation's marketing processes. This relieves employees of time-consuming, manual tasks. These often cloud-based tools enable the setup and management of databases, individual workflows, multi-stage campaigns and the corresponding performance measurement. The focus in campaign management is on lead generation. The customer and their needs are at the centre of campaigns through lead scoring (customer centricity).    

We're noticing that almost all our clients are engaging with this topic. Of course, this requires thorough groundwork: successfully deploying marketing automation tools first requires a sales and content strategy, as well as a solid plan for who in the organisation creates content with which resources and for what purpose, and how leads gained can be converted effectively. The strategy behind marketing automation is at least as important as the individual tools themselves. 

Used correctly, marketing automation offers the chance to provide the right people with the right content at the right time in the right place.

Find out more about marketing automation here.

Low code is a type of application development that requires less programming language knowledge. This usually works via a graphical user interface on which an application is assembled, or through the creation of corresponding configuration files that can be processed without further tools.

The goal of low code is to reduce development time and project costs and significantly reduce technological complexity. Several people can work on an application across teams and deploy it quickly.

More and more technology providers are embracing low code and developing their products in this direction. This allows applications to be configured and deployed quickly. Especially now, as almost all organisations want to offer seamless customer experiences as quickly as possible while also consolidating their infrastructure, low-code platforms are becoming ever more relevant.

The digital infrastructure of large organisations usually grows over years and decades. New channels and functions are constantly being added. New systems, such as PIM, CRM, DAM, recruiting tools, are docked on. 
Many organisations eventually reach the point where keeping an overview of the grown digital landscape becomes difficult. It has become too complex, and a consistent, good user experience can no longer be ensured.  

For this reason, many of our clients opt for a headless architecture, i.e. a clear separation between backend and frontend. Information is exchanged between BE and FE via an API. The great advantage: the frontend, i.e. the output layer, can be changed and adapted without altering information in the backend. This makes an application very flexible. Currently, the term “MACH” is often used in this context: Microservices, API-First, Cloud and Headless.  

Advantages arise when the website is just one of many channels and a consistent brand experience needs to be ensured across various touchpoints. Headless can help make a grown system manageable again – and restore consistent customer experiences. 

Traditionally, applications are developed so that organisations (or server administrators) also take care of managing the servers on which an application runs. The availability and maintenance of the servers and corresponding security updates must be ensured by the team. With rising demand, a server must be scaled up; with falling demand, it should be scaled down. All of this costs time and, above all, money, because even if the server receives not a single request, costs are still incurred.  

In the “serverless” development model, a cloud provider takes care of all these tasks. Management, scaling, infrastructure, monitoring, updates – everything is handled by the provider. Developers deploy their code in containers, which are run as needed. This also means that a serverless function only incurs costs once it's used. Resources are allocated dynamically, so scaling up or down in response to changing demand is no longer necessary.   

We're observing a trend where even B2B organisations, which have previously relied on operating their own infrastructure and thus retaining control over security and further development, are now shifting ever larger portions to the cloud and outsourcing these services externally. 

Serverless doesn't mean there are no servers at all any more. However, it does mean a change in developers' everyday work and an opportunity for organisations to save time and money on server management. 

For the first time in history, five generations are working together in the labour market today. The reason is longer life expectancy – people who live longer and also work longer. This change presents organisations with the challenge of enabling communication and collaboration between people who may be 50 years apart in age.  

To meet this challenge, organisations need to improve their "Generational Intelligence”. Generational expert Amy Lynch defines Generational Intelligence as: „Awareness of cross-generational interactions. (…) A skill we all urgently need today: the awareness and social intelligence it takes to lead, influence and work with people who are not like you.“  

When people from different generations work together successfully, better and more durable solutions emerge. We looked at how this exchange succeeds at interactive tools in an interview on cross-generational collaboration. But we also place great value on communication at eye level in our work with our clients. Retrospectives with the whole team are therefore very important to us and foster mutual understanding. 

In future, every organisation will need to ask itself whether it is already doing enough to improve its Generational Intelligence.

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