Today’s marketing challenge: creating content that stands out in a media saturated world Customers today are inundated with marketing messages—by some counts, thousands of messages each day. They’ve also changed how they consume content. In addition to traditional channels, customers are interacting with new channels, such as web, mobile, and social media. How can financial institutions break through the chaos to connect with their customers?

As Transformation CIO, Louise has worked on major Global CIO transformation for over 13 years in a number of major successful transformation roles, covering IT commercial sourcing, Organisation design, Data Strategy, SMART store digital, IT Innovation, Major cost reduction, Sourcing Strategy, Strategic objectives, Performance management, IT cost transparency recharges, PMO and Global Portfolio, investment manager almost all areas of CIO function.

Thought Leadership Panel titled “The New Economic Development Model for a Digital World”

IT Must Shift from Provider to Integrator in this New Sourcing Model. An Evolving Landscape Global sourcing, open source, and Moore’s law have made technology widely available, standardized, and cheaper than ever. Further Cloud, Virtualization, As-a-Service, Business Platforms and new forms of delivery are changing the technology landscape.

WGroup Strategy Brief - Evolution of Managed Services

A few key aspects of an outsourcing contract typically drive its projected savings and return on investment (ROI). You must carefully consider all of these areas to avoid mixed financial results on your outsourcing project. Strategizing the following five areas can help you develop a successful outsourcing contract.

WGroup Perspective - 5 Ways to Develop a Successful Outsourcing Contract

One of the biggest myths about user experience is that it is something you can assign to just one person in your company.

Let me tell you right now, if you just assign a designer to UX and wash your hands of it, then it won’t work.

UX is more than one person. UX is a team.

Everyone who is involved in a user-facing element, software, product or service needs to be part of the UX team. Who might this include?

• User Researcher
• Information Architect
• Content Specialist
• Interaction Designer
• Visual Designer
• Project Manager
• Front-end Developer
• Online Marketer

Not every project has each of these positions, and many projects have multiple people on each position. But the point is, if you have people in these positions, then they need to be on board with user experience.

What does it mean to have people on board with user experience?

At the very least, these people need to understand the importance of UX and be on board to (possibly learn) and utilize UX methodologies.

And it’s important to note that user experience needs to be ingrained in the company even deeper than the above positions.

UX needs to be at the core of the company.

Therefore, management needs to support UX, all the way to the top. That’s why we strongly recommend companies include UX in strategy. If UX is integrated into the very vision and philosophy of the company, then it goes without saying that users will notice and will reward you.

With good user experience, your users will feel respected and heard and will, in turn, respect you and give their attention, support, and money to you. It’s an ROI no-brainer.

It’s crucial for the success of your product, service, strategy, and ultimately business, to fully integrate user experience into your strategy, design, and development processes. It saves time and money, ultimately boosting your ROI, which is every company’s goal. But it leads to one important question:

Who will lead your UX efforts?

You have to decide whether to recruit members of your team internally or hire an external team.

While it may seem easy to assign this to someone in your office who’s already working for you, there are some disadvantages to recruiting internally.

• Your staff may not have the time to dedicate to user experience. Outside teams are dedicated to UX and aren’t jumping back and forth between different tasks like internal staff have to.
• They might be too close to the company. An outside team has an outside perspective, which is often a more honest perspective to see what needs to change.

• Your staff might not understand the importance of user experience like you do. External UX teams are devoted to it and believe in it, which is important for finding success.
• They might have time and they might understand why it’s important. But do they have the track record to be as efficient and effective as an external UX team would be?

When making the decision to go internal or external with your UX efforts, you have to think about what is best for your project and company. Make sure that whoever you choose has the time, perspective, understanding, and track record to find maximum success with UX integration.

And if you can’t find exactly that internally, then the answer just might be to look outside your company.

Gregory North joins Outsourcing Institute President, Daniel Goodstein, to examine digital convergence and transformation within the enterprise.

The interview explores:

• What is Convergence and What is Happening in the Marketplace?
• Buyers vs. Providers – How will I Be Effected by Digital Convergence?
• Advice on How to Go About Digital Transformation: Digital Acuity vs. Digital Agility vs. Digital Affinity
• How to Adapt to the Digitally Fueled Outsourcing and Automated Environment
• Challenges & Advice to Companies Embarking in Digital Transformation

Gregory North will moderate a panel about how analytics and data science can drive competitiveness at this year’s event. Don’t miss out–to learn more about the topics, speakers and sessions, download the agenda.

Conduct better IT governance meetings by setting goals, planning ahead, and understanding best practices.

As more IT services and applications are outsourced to third-party vendors, it becomes increasingly important for companies to understand how to effectively manage vendors and conduct governance meetings at predefined intervals. This allows organizations to take full advantage of IT-vendor relationships by providing the opportunity to strategize, review, align goals, and hold vendors accountable for their performance. However, in order to conduct better governance meetings and create stronger governance structures, it is critical that companies understand what effective governance is and how it can help them achieve their core business goals.

WGroup Strategy Brief - Effective Multi-Vendor IT Governance

When Outsourcing Can Create Value through Fundamentally Changing the Way You do Business.

This is an unparalleled time of transformation. Disruptive technologies such as cloud computing and the “as-a-service” model for software, infrastructure and platforms have led to fundamental changes in how
IT services are organized, managed and delivered—whether they are outsourced, insourced or a combination. The reality that IT services can be delivered to anywhere on the globe via the “Cloud” has accelerated the commoditization of IT. Ubiquitous access to IT services has lessened business units’ dependency on internal IT and shifted the IT organization’s prime role from process excellence to technology and service innovation. In WGroup’s Global Enterprise Model (GEM)(see figure 2), outsourcing plays a key role in the lifecycle. The strategic partnerships developed and maintained are critical to exploiting global trends. Key partners are recruited because of their core competencies in delivering optimized services that, in turn, enable the business to realize cost-effective results. Further, this enables IT to focus on its new role as service integrator, business strategist and driver of innovation for the business.

WGroup Strategy Brief - Next Generation Outsourcing