You can use digital experience platforms (DXPs) to engage and educate prospects, transact complex offerings, and digitally deliver your business’s value proposition. But the 33 vendors in my recently published The Digital Experience Platforms Landscape, Q2 2023 were loud and clear that composing an enterprise DXP is both the biggest trend in the space and the biggest challenge.

The Path Forward And Pay-Off Is Clear

Customer obsessed brands with a future fit technology strategy compose their own DXP using parts from multiple vendors, selected to deliver their distinct digital strategy. Your differentiated digital strategy provides the impetus (and justification) to modernize your technology organization.

Composable product offerings from cloud-native vendors have reach near saturation among the digitally advanced early adopters. Now, as enterprises at intermediate digital maturity begin to adopt MACH architecture, I’m spending more time guiding Forrester clients on everything it means to be the architect of their own DXP.

Businesses new to composing their digital experience platform are learning a few lessons:

  • Sourcing parts from more vendors than their procurement teams are comfortable with. Buy what you need, not what’s easy to buy. A future fit investment framework empowers new business models through technology-driven innovation, follows an iterative process, uses early results to justify further investment, and relies on external and pilot data. Gone are the days when you had one strategic vendor for most of your DX needs.
  • Incurring costs from more sources that their finance teams are used to. You need to map the value of new customer interactions more intentionally to the technology component that enables it. Gone are the days when you had one strategic vendor and could easily compute its cost as a percent of gross merchandise value (GMV).
  • Assembling a platform from more commercial parts than their technology teams are used to. You must deliver your platform like it’s the product your business uses to create all of its digital experiences — because it is. Establish a center of excellence (COE) to give the development teams using your platform leverage and guardrails (e.g., component architectures, experience themes, global capabilities). Gone are the days when you had one strategic vendor that pre-integrated all of your DX needs.

If you need help finding the right balance, give me a call.

Schedule an inquiry with me to talk about how modern digital experience technology can help you deliver your digital strategy. I can help you and your teams make sense of this, as well as understand how to be future fit.

Forrester clients can read The Digital Experience Platforms Landscape, Q2 2023 to understand the value they can expect from a DXP vendor, learn how vendors differ, and select one based on size and market focus.