Did you know that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience, and 32% will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience? Today, providing an exceptional experience can determine whether your business sinks or swims. That said, only deploying attractive interfaces isn’t enough. To truly differentiate and drive ROI, companies must organize their entire operations around delivering seamless, valuable experiences, both externally and internally, which requires a shift toward Business Experience (BX).
What is Business Experience (BX)?
Business Experience (BX) integrates applied intelligence, customer experience, and employee experience to create cohesive and impactful operations that drive value across or within an organization. Companies that deliver superior experiences are more likely to achieve higher profitability and customer loyalty. Yet, many businesses struggle due to unrefined data, also known as data swamp, or outdated enterprise architectures that lack agility and integration. Addressing these challenges is crucial to building a strong foundation for modern BX solutions.
The BX Initiative Roadblock
Often, leadership will assemble the best minds in the organization, hire external experts to design an engaging user interface, and craft a strategy to revolutionize customer, partner, and employee interactions, yet when it’s time to execute – efforts grind to a halt, exhausting resources and timelines. The following areas contain the most common BX roadblocks:
● Data Silos: Your team can’t get data where it needs to be.
● Data Swamp: Data can be accessed but is unstructured or unrefined.
● Infrastructure Limitations: Scaling to meet usage demands becomes impossible.
● Skill Gaps: Teams lack expertise in technology, processes, and tools.
The result? Over-budget projects, slow response times, and outdated features leave the company trailing competitors. At the core of these issues lies enterprise architecture: monolithic, old systems that struggle with agility, integration, and scalability.
So, how can you transform your architecture to enable and sustain BX solutions?
5 Pillars of an Experience-Oriented Architecture to Support BX Solutions
To transform architecture, companies need to move to modern, experience-oriented architecture. Your infrastructure must exhibit the following characteristics to support BX solutions:
- Fast – Today, most of us have the attention span of a squirrel. With that, users expect instant responses. Architectures must support massive scalability through asynchronous, distributed, and cloud-enabled approaches.
- Always Available – Downtime is not an option. To achieve continuous availability and fault tolerance, systems must leverage edge services, high-availability containerization, and serverless computing.
- Integrated – In today’s experience-driven solutions, the users need accurate data in real-time to drive their experience. An API-centric approach ensures business events are streamed and accessible across systems with minimal latency.
- High Quality and Feature Rich – Business experiences constantly evolve, with new capabilities added rapidly to deliver increased value to end users. Modern expectations demand features released within weeks and functioning seamlessly from the moment they go live. To meet these demands, enterprise architecture must emphasize standardization, adopt automated and agile development methodologies, fully leverage usage analytics to drive continuous improvement, and deliver impactful solutions at scale.
- Secure – Security breaches can damage even the best business experiences and reputations. Modern architectures need advanced encryption, edge protection, and real-time security monitoring to minimize risks.
Many businesses today struggle with rethinking their enterprise architecture. There is no better place to begin than aligning business systems with the pillars of an experience-oriented approach. The next step should be to conduct a comprehensive readiness assessment by a professional services organization with a history of success in this area. Learn how to assess your architecture BX readiness and employ the best practices for creating a modern, experience-oriented architecture in our recent tech brief. With our expert advice, you can overcome roadblocks and deliver seamless, scalable, secure BX solutions.
Are you ready to transform your enterprise architecture and drive exceptional BX outcomes? Let us help get you started. Read our Enterprise Architecture Tech Brief or contact an expert today.
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