Nowadays, success as a company depends on customer centricity, innovation in digital, the use of data for decision making, and your ability to reinvent yourself constantly. This requires a tech strategy that does not only enable you but one that becomes the driving force for success.
As experienced practitioners, we understand and breathe modern e-commerce & customer experience technologies and development best practices to implement them. You know your business, customers, and the existing tech landscape & processes. Together, and outside-in with the customer journey at its core, we define a tech strategy that helps you transform into a thriving ‘digital’ company. At this stage, we also engage our customer experience experts.
And yes, we not only advise, but we are also more than happy to help you execute the new strategy and enable your teams to master the digital skills & capabilities that you need to achieve your success.
Technological advancements in the last decade like Cloud, SAAS software, microservices and an increased number of touchpoints to support are driving the shift from monolithic applications to composable or MACH landscapes. This shift is confirmed by the rise of MACH solution providers in the well-known Gartner & Forrester quadrants. And for a good reason!
We help you navigate this technology landscape based on our experience building cloud-native systems since our inception in 2015.
Architecture is about future-proofing technology in a company. We believe that the basis for digital products is a modern architecture that enables delivery on business needs at speed and a reasonable cost. Good architecture enables change but remains stable in itself.
To deliver this architecture, we provide business analysts, solution architecture and cloud infrastructure consultants who first gain an understanding of your business, the existing architecture, tools, processes & data infrastructure that you have.
Through our discovery and architecture definition process, we jointly define the future architecture that is right for your business for the years to come. A roadmap and implementation plan will prepare you for the execution of the architecture, hopefully with us as well.
Digital products drive customer engagement and retention, and digital business models help companies reinvent and stay relevant. A successful digital product strategy is closely linked to the tech strategy.
A new digital business model or product rarely stands on its own. It is often built upon a core competence or domain expertise recorded in one or more legacy systems and/or business processes.
We enable our clients with a successful digital product strategy by including the tech strategy early in the process. We match the business & customer needs with the existing systems & technology landscape. Is the right data available? Are there documented APIs? Do we miss certain features or technology that we need to acquire or build?
We always aim to start small with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and advise how the right technology can support this. But we also look at the future; what direction do we expect the product to grow in, and what architecture is needed to facilitate that. We start small but with the end state in mind.
If you ask us, digital commerce is the equivalent of digital nowadays. It is often about digitising the core processes with your clients and bringing transactions online.
Many businesses are still in the early stages of digital commerce, and we have the experience and knowledge to help you open up and grow your ‘digital branch', which can become your 'biggest branch' in no time.
To do this and start transacting online, we have a pragmatic approach and respect the existing processes & technology. More importantly, we ensure that you are technologically prepared for future growth.
Many global organisations operate multiple brands in multiple markets and languages. Delivering a cost-effective whole e-commerce experience requires a flexible and scalable platform. It should consider both ‘global’ and ‘local’ needs, and there is no one size fits all type of solution here.
Advising clients and solving this puzzle has been our bread and butter since our inception.
Through MACH Composer, our proven approach to building and scaling large-scale systems, we have helped many global brands to build & operate such platforms. It is the foundation for our strategic direction and contains many reusable tools and components that accelerate your implementation.
Modern composable landscapes often combine an increasing number of tools to deliver a unique customer experience. These landscapes are broken down into front-end channels, experience APIs, as well as integration to the back-end systems of record.
Having built these landscapes for many years, we know the patterns and systems and understand how to integrate these best. Our drive for standardisation of code & processes has resulted in a set of accelerators to speed up development and prevent reinventing the wheel.
Jointly we determine the proper integration approach for your project, where we will take care of incorporating best practices and the right tools for the job.
Most clients we engage with utilise the cloud as part of their IT infrastructure or are in the midst of a cloud transformation. However, few of those are reaping all the benefits the cloud offers for building and managing your e-commerce and customer experience landscapes.
Using the cloud is different from becoming cloud-native; both are important, but the latter is often underestimated, but once implemented correctly, it yields many benefits.
Helping you become cloud-native is something we love. Since our inception, we have been cloud-native and help clients build and run e-commerce landscapes at scale. We mainly focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, and often operate these infrastructures on our clients' behalf. This enables us to advise clients on the best cloud strategy, pros, and cons of various approaches, DevSecOps, infrastructure as code, multi-tenancy, and other cloud-native practices.
We live in an age of instant gratification and increased consciousness of privacy. Successful digital products and e-commerce websites provide a great user experience, have fast loading times, and win users' confidence that their data is safe. So how do we ensure that you have the best performance and security to stay ahead of the competition?
Throughout our portfolio of services, whether it is architecture consultancy, vendor selection or a maturity assessment, we make sure to address security & performance as one of the dimensions of our advice.
As practitioners, we also believe that there is no quick fix, and security and performance should be part of both the strategy and the development process on an ongoing basis. We implement this through the practice of security & privacy by design.
Selecting the right tech partners is key to achieving digital business goals. The list of tools that compose an e-commerce landscape is continuously expanding, from an e-commerce platform and CMS to solutions for search, personalisation, promotions, and more.
As independent advisors, we help clients navigate this space by combining our experience with a structured process for vendor selection. The outcome is a flexible and future-proof set of tools to help meet short and long-term goals.
We identify the main business, user, and technology needs through several workshops with key stakeholders. Using the outcomes of these workshops, we identify two or three vendors in each area and add them to a shortlist. We take a more detailed look at high-priority functional and non-functional requirements, Total Cost of Ownership, vendor viability, and Proof of Concept. Together, we score the shortlisted vendors and make one or more vendor recommendations.
A digital strategy is vital to building long-lasting customer relationships, and the continuing shift of revenue to online creates the need for companies to assess whether their current digital capabilities are sufficient for delivering future business objectives, aspirations, and experiences.
At Lab Digital, we have a track record in building digital multi-disciplinary teams and processes which develop and operate modern e-commerce landscapes. As practitioners and independent advisors, we can help clients assess their technology organisation, stack & tools and advise on the roadmap to achieve future growth. We like to do this outside-in with the customer journey at its core.
We utilise various maturity models to benchmark the as-is situation, identify gaps and opportunities, co-create future architecture, and define required skills and capabilities. This includes modern DevSecOps practices and provides an actionable multi-year implementation plan for delivery.
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When you’re ready for a real step up in the digital work field, Lab Digital can offer a modern foundation for your ambitions and growth.
