What We Learned at DOCUMENT Strategy Forum '16

In Chicago this past week, hundreds of senior executives gathered at DSF ‘16 (DOCUMENT Strategy Forum) to discuss their own strategic journeys and how they are being impacted by industry trends like holistic customer experiences, digital strategies for communications, cloud and information security, and the future of enterprise content management. If you missed it, here are some of the top takeaways that came out of this meeting of the industry.

1. Transforming the customer experience is about 80% customer needs and 20% technology.

2. Technology is the enabler of optimized customer experience.

3. Five trends transforming enterprise content management/information management are:

Cloud/Software as a Service (SaaS): Empowers the business versus information technology (IT)
Big Data
Information Security: Improve records/information management through the security team
Execution: Look at general direction and real results achieved rather than the grand strategy
Change Management

4. To achieve your digital goals faster, it is best to decouple from legacy systems, since these systems become too complex. You need to have agility to get out there fast. Build infrastructure that is quick, rapid, repeatable, and scaleable. Due to speed, application development needs to be open source. You can’t be afraid to fail—simply learn along the way and fix.

5. To meet evolving business needs, think about your communications development and ask:

What's our vision?
How is it built?
Who is doing it?
How is it used?
How is it delivered?
How is it managed? What inventory is used?
What is our definition of the life cycle of the document?

6. User experience affects the effectiveness of a customer service strategy.

7. By adding push notifications, a 3.5 billion payments organization increased web accounts by 40%, with 45% of customers being digital today. You need to harmonize the transaction and give customers an out.

8. The challenge to aligning your campaigns and various channels with analytics is the time/resources required, the existing data silos, and the data quality between those silos. You need to clean and analyze data, connect new and old systems, effectively communicate your marketing strategy, and measure the effectiveness of those communications.

9. Transforming message content into plain language and simplification techniques can deliver return on investment.

10. Imbed communication standards/metrics throughout the organization through tools, training, best practice sharing, and awareness building.

11. Customers leave data footprints everywhere. According to InfoTrends, in 2016, 28% of enterprises plan to create a single customer view, up from 21% in 2015.

12. Cloud technology bridges the gap between systems of records and systems of engagement.

We hope to see everyone again in 2017! For more information on the DOCUMENT Strategy Forum (DSF), visit http://documentstrategyforum.com or email jdunkel@EventEvolution.com.

Allison Lloyd serves as the editor of DOCUMENT Strategy Media. She delivers thought leadership on strategic and plan-based solutions for managing the entire document, communication and information process. Follow her on Twitter @AllisonYLloyd.

What We Learned at DOCUMENT Strategy Forum '16

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