Just this past week, I heard an outside industry expert say, related to his interaction with clients, “Wherever and whenever you hear the word digital transformation jump into it with A HIP strategy… Inevitably they end up coming to the conclusion, they need a HIP.” Wow, there you go! HIP enables Experiences.

I have been unpacking the “why you need a HIP” first from the perspective of the business challenges leading one here, and this comment fits right in. My last blog post touched on the broad topic of  “Digital Transformation.” We now go one level deeper on the business landscape driving a need for a Hybrid Integration Platform.

HIP enables Experiences

Customer Experience is at the heart of Digital Business. According to a report in Forrester Research’s Digital Business Playbook, “The first rule of digital business lies in delivering great experiences that customers value to grow your business.”1

The report states that one rule of business involves measuring functional success with customer-centric metrics. They quote Jeff Bezos: “You want to be customer-obsessed, not competitor-obsessed.

Customers are always dissatisfied and they always want more. If you’re competitor-obsessed and you’re a leader, you see everyone behind you and you slow down a bit. But customers pull you along.”

Customer Experience is a board-level agenda item. Customer Experience is the battleground to win the hearts and wallets of consumers. It is the battleground to win markets, disrupt markets, and to create new markets. The battleground is no longer fought on with your product or your service alone.

The battle is won by the experience that surrounds the consumer, the user or the buyer as a whole. The reality is that if you don’t embrace Customer Experience, you will be disrupted yourself.

Further hammering home Customer centricity is Forester’s second Rule of digital business in Forester’s Digital Transformation Playbook: “The second rule focuses on transforming teams, processes, and business operations in service of customers” (emphasis added).1

To complete the punch is Forester’s fourth rule. “Digital innovation: Innovate at the intersection of experiences and operations. Digital innovators quickly launch new offerings, then improve them on the fly. They also use customer insights to identify incremental and sometimes breakthrough innovations.”1 (emphasis added).

You can’t get far from the urgency of Customer Obsession and the criticality of Customer Experience. The same with the employee experience. A HIP enables Experiences.

So why do you need a HIP? You can’t be in business without one! You need a HIP because delivering brilliant and innovative experiences requires access to data. Integration must move from the old factory model to a model of offering integration as a business utility — as a service — to constituents, lines of businesses, third parties, and their developers and integrators that can and will scale the pace and speed of integration to deliver these brilliant experiences.

Remember, Hybrid Integration is not just about some mix of cloud and on-premise in your integration strategy – it’s got that element, yes, but it’s much more about the evolution of IT and how integration is managed, offered, run, and delivered to scale to meet digital business speed today. Learn more about Hybrid Integration in the resource library.

1. Forrester – Forrester: Digital Rewrites The Rules Of Business, Vision: The Digital Business Playbook, by Ted Schadler and Nigel Fenwick, February 26, 2018 |