In the world of Digital Transformation, businesses are challenged to entirely rethink how Digital can give them a disruptive market advantage before their competitors disrupt them. Often companies find themselves unable to compete with their existing slow moving and risk averse information systems. The Digital landscape changes quickly and requires velocity and agility to adapt.
So how can you build a platform that empowers you to innovate quickly to market, build great digital experiences for your brand and continue to be risk averse to your existing information systems? That’s what a Digital Experience Platform is.
Digital Experience Platform Architecture
The Digital Experience Platform (DEP) is made up of three layers:
- Data store
- Data delivery
- Content delivery
The Data Store
The Data Store is the heart of the DEP. One central location from where all data on your content delivery layer comes from. Keeping your data in a central location allows you to try new content delivery strategies without risk of data loss if the initiative fails. The Data Store gives the DEP the risk tolerance it needs to innovate with low risk to core business.
Data stores are responsible for providing data to the rest of the DEP. Often, data the DEP requires lives elsewhere in other systems the business runs. So one of the largest tasks involved in implementing a data store is synchronizing all the across the company into the data store. But in doing so, it unleashes the rest of the DEP to innovate without needing to impact other business operations and projects that rely on the same data.
Data Delivery
The Data Delivery layer is where your business logic is held. Here, you implement content workflow, build content silos and build in business features for the content delivery layer to consume. The data delivery layer should be omni-channel capable. For example, expose services such as RESTful APIs.
Content Delivery
Content Delivery is the customer facing layer of the DEP. It's where you focus on customer journey, user experience and branding of content and company. The Content Delivery layer retrieves data from a data delivery channel and processes that into consumer content.
A content delivery channel can exist in many different forms: a smartphone app, a website, a VR app, advertising on smart billboards, etc. But what they have in common is that they obtain the data from the same data store through a data delivery channel.
Creating a Digital Experience
Using a DEP architecture allows you to innovate and adapt your digital brand unconstrained by existing business systems. It gives you the freedom to develop on emerging technologies quickly and just as quickly discard fruitless initiatives to adapt to the ever changing landscape of Digital.