Did you know that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions? Today, “the customer is always right” holds an entirely new meaning. Businesses must take it one step further because 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 an organization. Accenture has found that companies that deliver superior experiences are more likely to achieve higher profitability and customer loyalty. Yet, many businesses struggle due to outdated enterprise architectures that lack agility and integration.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. The following areas contain the most common BX roadblocks:

  • Data Silos: Your team can’t get the information they need due to its isolation in various systems, making timely access and analysis problematic.
  • Infrastructure Limitations: Existing infrastructures crumble because of their inability to scale to accommodate growing user demands.
  • Skill Gaps: Teams lack expertise in technology, processes and tools to meet growing demands.

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 Over-budget projects, slow response times and outdated features leave the company trailing competitors.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:

  1. Fast – Today, most of us have the attention span of a goldfish. With that, users expect instant responses. Architectures must support massive scalability through asynchronous, distributed and cloud-enabled approaches.
  2. Always Available – Downtime is not an option. To achieve continuous availability and fault tolerance, systems must leverage edge services, containerization and serverless computing.
  3. 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.
  4. 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 agile development methodologies and fully leverage usage analytics to drive continuous improvement, delivering impactful solutions at scale.
  5. Secure – Security breaches can damage companies with even the best business experiences and reputations. Modern architectures need advanced encryption, edge protection and real-time security monitoring to minimize security risks.

For businesses looking to overhaul their enterprise architecture, the journey begins with aligning systems to the pillars of an experience-oriented approach. This alignment sets the stage for a comprehensive readiness assessment, a crucial part of implementing effective BX solutions.

Beginning a Comprehensive Readiness Assessment

Now that you know what areas of your architecture may need an overhaul for optimal BX solutions, it’s time to hone in on where to begin. As with any journey, start by fully understanding where you are. Lay the foundation with a few questions in these eight areas:

  1. Engineering Capabilities: Can you consistently develop solutions with high usability, functional capability and technical quality?
  2. Application Hosting and Monitoring: Do you have the ability to deploy and manage solutions at the necessary scale, availability and fault tolerance?
  3. Management Process and Tools: Do you have the tools and processes to create and deploy solution builds in an agile, consistent, and coordinated way?
  4. Quality Management: Can you ensure that the released solutions meet all the functional and non-functional requirements to provide a high-quality experience for the user?
  5. Integration: Do you have the ability to enable a seamless, real-time exchange of information across enterprise architecture?
  6. Data Management: Do the tools and processes exist for structuring, storing, managing and extracting value of information assets in the enterprise?
  7. AI Enabled:  Are you applying artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to improve experiences?
  8. Security and Compliance: Do you secure enterprise applications and information efficiently while maintaining compliance with internal and external controls?
  9. Architecture Management: What is the existence and effectiveness of the deliverables and processes for planning, communicating and governing the overall architecture?

While it may feel overwhelming, it is important to remember Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your architecture. Very few organizations have the luxury of delaying new BX solutions until the architecture is ready, which is why partners exist. The path forward for each enterprise is as unique as each BX strategy, so ensure your selected partner understands the industry pillars, your goals and the company’s readiness for your step out of the past and into the future of BX. Embracing these modern architectural principles will help your company ensure its infrastructure meets the current demands of today and adapts to future challenges, all while delivering a positive experience that resonates and supports both customers and employees.

Read the original article in Customer Think here.

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