The way customers are demanding access to services is changing. Whether it’s banking, financial services, shipping or the car industry, what businesses are exposed to is a fundamental change in the way clients want to consume those services. This is according to Pascal Matzke, VP: research director and CIO practice leader, Forrester Research. “There are several different factors: the technology that is now available, a generational shift and enormous market volatility. We used to have business life cycles that were five to six years. Everything around the business and product life cycle is contracting. So businesses need to move away from business propositions about value and outcomes and features to one that is about building a continuous experience.”

Matzke points to the car industry as no longer about features and safety and engineering. “Manufacturers like BMW are positioning themselves as mobility service providers instead. New customers have different expectations about value. Companies should be looking at digital transformation in the context of customer journeys, but what often happens is the activity is in the isolated business silos: it’s the marketing people driving multi-channel strategies, it’s the CIO with the line of business heads who are trying to digitise the processes. And as many of these customer experience plays get more complex, they tend to reach far into the domain of business processes as well. As an airline customer, you feel this: you want to check in and to do that you need access to the core system of the airline. If you lose your luggage, you demand access to the baggage handling system. So there is a need for companies to not only do a great job at the touchpoints, but also shift linear systems of records into systems of interaction so that clients and colleagues can get access to the right data at the right time.”