Reviewing the tech stack to enhance digital customer experience

Andrew Wong

Managing Director, Appnovation

According to the latest report by IDC, almost half of the organisations surveyed in APAC have already implemented some form of document solutions to help save cost and increase efficiency. However, the majority of the organisations are still planning their transformation journey in the next 12-24 months, have indicated that they have no concrete plans, or have not even considered any form of digital transformation journey.

Appnovation, a Vancouver-based global digital consultancy, introduces the concept of a Shared Services Mode and a Global Design System. CIO World Asia spoke with Andrew Wong, Managing Director, to find out how businesses can go about defining common services and standards in a digital experience economy. 

Enhancing Agility And Scalability With Shared Services Mode And Global Design System

Creating a global, seamlessly unified customer experience is key in the age of highly mobile users. With travelling back on the horizon, customers will be accessing the same familiar app but from different locations. Ensuring calling an Uber in Hong Kong is the same experience as that in New York is central to organisations staying in customers’ good books. 

A Shared Services Mode and Global Design System aids this goal by firstly building organisation-wide team agility. 

When the tech team conducts a quick development and release process, it doesn’t mean customers get to benefit from new features immediately. The policy and marketing team may take a longer turnaround time to complete their end of the work. Organisations offering digital products in multiple languages, have a steeper uphill challenge. Different languages have different processes and timelines, complicating the workflow. A Shared Services Mode forces organisations to standardise these processes by identifying the common denominator to maximise scalability and speed. 

Teams in various countries propose their need for various different features. Subsequently, the international team overseeing these personnel should understand all the teams’ requirements, figure out which is most important to current business challenges and prioritise developing those.

A Shared Services Mode and Global Design System secondly accomplishes the goal of creating a unified customer experience by facilitating new feature design while ensuring regional data governance regulations are adhered to. Each geographical region has its unique regulations surrounding data governance. Ensuring data privacy and residency laws are adhered to while leveraging cloud technologies allows organisations to take advantage of new digital transformation products. 

With different technical features requested by tech teams, comes different security and privacy concerns. Before greenlighting a feature for release, it is important to double check if it’s mandatory in this country to include certain technical features like a checkbox. Keeping regulations in mind provides a background of consistent guidelines and division framework. 

An overarching view of local teams’ processes is again beneficial because – If each local team assesses their own requirements of the regulations, they will probably come up with a lot of different processes and features to maintain. Multiply the time and effort by the number of local teams, the total workload increases exponentially. Having a centralised view on all policies potentially reduces duplicated work while still meeting the applicable regulations. 

Appnovation’s white papers discussing the Shared Services Mode and Global Design System concepts are available here – Modernizing Technology in Insurance and Modernizing Technology in Health.