In today’s world where consumers are continuously bombarded with marketing messages; delivering the right ones, in the right context, and at the right time is essential.

More than ever, marketing teams are expected to drive revenue growth and, in a maturing telecom industry, exceptional customer experience and timely, relevant messages that hit the mark. Frankly, this is where telecom, media, and entertainment (TME) firms will succeed or fail.

With the proliferation of advanced marketing technologies (martech 2.0) and the promise they hold to spur revenue growth by considerably improving customer experiences, IT departments must accept an expanded role and collaborate closely with their marketing teams.

All 3 parts of this Blog Series can be found at InfoWorld.

Previously in this three-part series, I wrote about how to introduce microservices in a legacy environment and provided an overview of domain-driven design (DDD) and how this development philosophy can be used to represent the real world in code, while also being well-suited to a microservices implementation. This time, I cover some of the tools and frameworks that can be used when implementing microservices.

Outsourcing decisions often come down to a relatively simple cost-driven Return on Investment (ROI) calculation: how much will the cost change in each scenario and how quickly can that investment be recovered? 

On the surface, this purely economic approach seems appropriate enough. After all, economics are certainly important. But over-reliance on purely financial-driven outsourcing decisions is one of the biggest causes of the “strategy-to-execution gap,” namely the distance between a company’s business strategies and its ability to execute on them. 

Meeting customers and patients “where they are” is already shaping up to be the healthcare consumer and patient experience mantra of 2018. Consumers are starting to demand it as their tolerance for slogging their way through the system of care decreases.

Benchmarking can be an effective tool to determine areas in need of process improvement and budget realignment with business goals. Used correctly, benchmarks are used to develop and continuously improve a high-performing organization. It is important to keep in mind, however, that a benchmark is simply a place to start—a point of reference for motivating action aimed at improving the organization’s future position.

In November, I delved into explaining how microservices can be introduced into a large organization with well-established legacy systems. In this post, I cover domain-driven design (DDD) and how this development philosophy can be used to represent the real world in code while being well-suited to a microservices implementation.

What technology will change marketing the most in 2018?

This was just one of many questions posed to 350 marketers, CEOs and influencers, including Capto, by John Koetsier, Mobile Economist at TUNE regarding their thoughts on MarTech in 2018. See the results.

Consumerism has significant implications for understanding data analytics, including the need to better understand the healthcare customer before they ever become a patient.

A Forbes and Sitecore study found that organizations have an average of 35 data gathering points, but little to no integration. This kinds of breakage in marketing and IT systems breaks down the customer experience and costs companies revenue in lost opportunity.

My article in Chief Marketer offers five ways for marketing to get their internal martech house in order.

A customer-first, omnichannel experience is reigning supreme across industries. We’ve seen it hold traction for years in telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and oft discussed, but omnichannel has been more slowly applied to other areas, such as healthcare.

While no consensus exists on how to define microservices, it is generally agreed that they are an architectural pattern that is composed of loosely coupled, autonomous, fine-grained services. The services are independently deployable and communicate using a lightweight mechanism such as HTTP/REST. Enterprises that need to make frequent changes to their systems—and where time to market is paramount—need to be investigating how to introduce microservices in their legacy environments to realize a digital transformation that drives tangible business results.

The most successful IT outsourcing decisions create truly innovative execution strategies that deliver meaningful business results. The outsourcing decision, however, frequently comes down to a cost-driven ROI calculation: how much will all this innovation cost us, and how long will it take to recover those costs? This is the wrong mindset and often the primary reason why IT outsourcing is generally underperforming.

On August 6, 1991, marketing was changed forever by the birth of ‘Internet technology’. It was day one of the World Wide Web. The web would one day grow up to be the mechanism that not only gave the power of brand influence to the people, but inextricably connect marketing to IT.

Hospitals are not strangers to complexity. Here are clear steps to make sure your organization is ready for new regulations, new customers and new patient experiences that I recently published in Becker's Health IT and CIO Review.

Now that Google, Apple, Facebook and other muscle brands have revealed plans to enter the crowded field to win the highly coveted and competitive telecommunications, media and entertainment (TME) market, time is running out to restart your IT funding engines to ensure the tech geeks down the cube-riddled hall are firing on all cylinders.

This should be done to a large extent by revving up internal funding sources that can transform IT departments from cost centers to revenue generators.

There's a lot of hype around IoT in healthcare as well as other businesses. If you're considering, or already implementing, IoT strategy in your organization, you should be using these four sequential areas of focus, or the four As of IoT: Access, Aggregation, Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence.

Tides are turning on who owns the technology budget. CMOs are increasingly under pressure to improve revenues switching the traditional technology budget owner. Read the full article in RCR Wireless.

The telecommunications, media, and entertainment (TME) industry – specifically in the new world of streaming video – has become highly competitive as over-the-top (OTT) providers seek to acquire new customers while locking down existing ones.

Free video service promos, flexible packages, predatory pricing, and lack of differentiation make churn inevitable. Even market leaders with less than two percent churn are exposed to losing customers and the revenue associated with their departure. Add to that the expense of replacing lost customers and it’s easy to see that controlling churn is a top priority for TME players.

Healthcare has seen a boom in sexy new “killer apps” that have drawn a lot of attention from payer organizations seeking to advance their health IT investment strategies. Many have opened innovation centers or spawned new sister organizations to evaluate, invest in, and market new innovations venture-capitalist style. This is all well and good but typically makes for better PR than ROI.