Implement a best of breed approach to allow your IT team to work efficiently and effectively.
IT teams power organisations, being depended on to successfully help digitise their businesses. In turn, tools power IT teams. For IT teams to build effective solutions and efficiently complete tasks, help is needed. There are a range of technologies that can help do this. A digital experience platform, otherwise known as DXP, is one of the technologies that is worth keeping an eye out for.
What is a DXP and a Best of Breed Approach?
Gartner defines a DXP as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimisation of contextualised digital experiences”. They’re designed to play a part across multiexperience customer journeys. A best of breed approach refers to businesses getting best of breed solutions from different vendors for each of their application areas.
Using an integration platform, such as a DXP, allows businesses to:
- Utilise key capabilities necessary for the building, deployment, and improvement of websites, portals, and other solutions
- Serve multiple user audiences
- Integrate business tools while allowing for future digital innovation
Evolving Technology and Changes in Customer Expectations
Due to an increased focus on the customer and their needs, a shift towards providing integrated and seamless experiences has become the norm. Customer expectations have shifted and only continue to rise. What’s more, these expectations are carried over into every digital context. The more digital channels we see being added, the more we see expectations rise and customer journeys becoming increasingly complex. When organisations meet these expectations, this inevitably results in customer retention, vital to the success of any business.
To put the evolution of technologies into context with customer expectations, we can take a look at the evolution from content management systems (CMSs) to portals to DXPs. While CMSs helped users to create, edit, publish, and store digital content, the rise of technology and emergence of new digital channels led to customers expecting content to be consistent across all platforms.
Let’s consider portals next. While they are great for nurturing long-term relationships with customers, they can be complex and expensive. This leads us to DXPs, which meet the rise of customer expectations, taking the best parts of preceding technology, while simultaneously addressing their shortcomings.
A Deep Dive Into DXPs
While it’s true that DXPs take from CMSs and portals, as previously mentioned, they are not simply a sum of these. DXPs are designed to be agile integration platforms that support businesses’ digital systems.
They are central technological foundations and not simply a bundle of either new or existing technologies. They enable multichannel delivery and are not monolithic systems; instead, they are built to be able to go through constant evolution and refinement to keep up with a rapidly changing digital landscape and rising customer expectations.
So, what sets DXPs apart from CMSs and portals?
- Digital interactions distributed through multichannel delivery
- Analytics, optimisation, and personalisation capabilities
- Flexible architecture – this supports integration with both legacy systems and third-party applications
DXPs come from heritage categories and knowing the difference between these categories will be useful, particularly in the context of an ever-evolving digital landscape.
3 Business Benefits of DXPs
DXPs act as an integration platform which result in significant advantages for your business. By supporting IT teams, you can promote digital success within your organisation, something that is always going to be applicable in a fast-moving technological world.
So let’s get into the benefits - what are they?
1. Flexibility
A DXP provides flexible architecture coupled with robust capabilities. These capabilities may include integrating multiple business needs such as building an employee intranet, hosting public domains, or storing documents with powerful search capabilities.
2. Productivity and Efficiency
Since legacy systems can be integrated with a DXP, there are significant productivity and efficiency gains that can be achieved. DXPs allows companies to extract additional value from investments they’ve already made into other systems, while also allowing employees and customers to access and interact with numerous source systems from a single platform.
3. Future Needs
DXPs allow your business to adjust for any future needs. By integrating with legacy systems, existing databases, and third-party systems, a stronger foundation can be created. It’s easy to evolve to your future needs.
Making the Most of a Best of Breed Approach for Your Business
With multiple advantages to be had, even in its emerging phase, it’s clear that an integration platform is enormously beneficial to your business, particularly when combined with a best of breed approach. For your organisation to thrive, your IT team needs the best tools at their disposal to deliver high quality solutions that address your business needs. Integrating with your existing systems means that you don’t have to replace or get rid of any of your current systems. Your users will be able to log into a single place, with access to all solutions within the Liferay platform.
There’s a lot of value in adopting a best of breed approach and with Liferay DXP, you can bring all your solutions together in one place.
