Over the last 15 years, I have “met” him regularly. The boy who can do the eCommerce solution or the CMS portal in half, oh what am I writing, a quarter of the time of an agency. He is usually the godson or son of a good colleague of a relevant decision-maker. And we service…
I am currently supporting a large omni-channel eCommerce project for a retailer. We are in the middle of the discovery phase, discussing thousands of requirements with various stakeholders at the customer and trying to bring together many loose ends. In one of the first sessions, in which we also analyzed the risks, someone formulated the…
User experience is one of the buzzwords of today. Ever since it became generally known how Steve Jobs dealt with the customer experience of his products in an almost manic way, it has been part of every marketing manager’s good manners to ride around on it in projects and emphasize how important a good UX…
Disruption is one of the buzzwords of our time. In the business context, it refers to the complete upheaval of an industry through new solutions that better meet the needs of customers. Disruption is feared by long-established industries and is the declared goal of start-ups. Since I published the explanatory model for digital transformation, I…
They still exist, the black holes on the map of software products. Applications for which there is demand but no good, simple solutions. One such black hole is B2B commerce. Although there are solutions in the proprietary sector that are aimed at this sub-market, for various reasons none have yet established themselves. OroCommerce has set…
Magento has been the dominant store system for the last 4 years. In Europe, and especially in Germany, many smaller agencies have specialized in Magento and TYPO3. Their solutions often consist of both products and offer customers a wide range of sophisticated functionality at comparatively low costs.
It’s fintech. In Germany as well as in Switzerland. Many initiatives and start-ups are emerging. There is even more talk about it. In small Switzerland, various larger companies are trying their hand at mobile payment apps and even though I find such motivation and action commendable, I think the solutions shown are aiming nowhere. Here…
A few days ago, I saw the poster below. I reflexively tweeted it with a rather cynical comment. Too often I experience traditional management consultancies as mills that grind extremely slowly. Encouraging the customer to be idle. Transformational doing? How paradoxical to advertise this when you work almost exclusively theoretically and hypothetically. And then leaving…
It seems to be a diffuse, mysterious ailment. I see it again and again in customers. Customers with very different characteristics. Be it origin, gender or skin color. Whether in large or small companies. Be it in Germany, France, Italy or Switzerland. I’ve experienced it everywhere, the “our customers” syndrome.
The following article was published in Topsoft magazine in August 2015. I am publishing it here as many German readers do not subscribe to the magazine. The digital transformation has reached the executive floors of “Corporate Europe”. Gone are the days when even high-ranking management staff denied digital progress and its impact on society and…