A consistent theme is emerging from all the recent technology conferences that RSR partners have attended, that businesses aren’t keeping up with the pace of consumer technology adoption, but really need to. The message from the technology providers is, “we’re changing too, so that we can help YOUR business change at the speed of consumer technology adoption. “

And so it was at the IBM Amplify conference, held last week in San Diego, California. Being categorized as an “industry analyst “, my agenda started with a Design Thinking workshop. IBM wants industry influencers to understand what they’re up to and why they’re up to it. But I’d heard of this new methodology before, from SAP in 2013. Here’s what I had to say about it in a June 2013 Retail Paradox Weekly column:

“…It was really interesting to hear at last week’s SAP Analyst Base Camp… that the company is diving headlong into what founder and technology guru Hasso Plattner describes as “design thinking “. Plattner has been expounding the virtues of design thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Perusing the Institute’s website, I came across an ‘introduction to Design Thinking In One Hour’ workbook that describes the process for a project to ‘redesign the gift-giving process for your partner’. Here’s the process:

• Gain empathy, by interviewing your partner, and then digging deeper
  
• Generate alternatives to test, by sketching out at least 5 radical ways to meet your user’s needs, sharing those solutions, and capturing feedback
  
• Reflect and generate a new solution
  
• Build and test that solution
  
• Share it and get more feedback
  
• Do it again (the “virtuous cycle “) ” 

Now it’s IBM’s turn, and the technology giant is clearly all-in. IBM puts its own twist on the Design Thinking methodology, and that provides an important insight into the company’s overall positioning; the workshop focused exclusively on the point at which humans (and especially consumers) interact with an assumed underlying information enablers, without any specificity about what the underlying technology infrastructure needs to be. The whole point (as our moderator explained) is for “a radically collaborative approach to designing an excellent experience. ” When I probed IBM developers later about what underlying infrastructure is needed to enable “an excellent experience “, they expressed complete agnosticism, merely saying, “there are APIs for that “.

While the interactions between people, process, and information may in fact be exactly what Design Thinking is all about, its worthy of note because it’s IBM that’s saying it. After all, the technology icon has in the past been about “the glass house “, starting from the “computer room ” and pushing access to information out into the enterprise as far as possible while still maintaining control. I always thought that the title “Chief Information Officer ” reflected the bias; the officer got to decide who could access information and how it would be accessed. It wasn’t a democracy. In IBM’s 100^th Anniversary book, the company proclaimed, “IBM didn’t coin the term ‘chief information officer’—its provenance has been lost in the mists of history—but the company laid the conceptual groundwork for the role in the early days, and lobbied corporations to make technology an essential part of their business. “

Now the company is all about the democratization of information, starting from the “edge ” of the enterprise (where information consumers are) and pushing in – but not too far. That’s a big shift from IBM’s historical positioning, not subtle at all. But it’s also not new – in fact it really began with former CEO Sam Palmisano’s push to change Big Blue. In 2011, he said, “… because the frontier of what is truly innovative keeps moving, that compels us not to sit still. It is a constant reminder never to define ourselves by the things we make, no matter how successful they are today. “

How Is Your Customer Feeling Today?

Deepak Advani, the GM of IBM Commerce, amplified what industry analysts observed in the Design Thinking Workshop, by asking the general session audience, “how do you get customers to love what you’re offering? ” He then went on to explain that consumers often make decisions based on emotions, not logic, and that to be loved (a pretty strong emotion!) companies must be authentic and true to their Brand’s promise. The inference of the GM’s comments was clear – that to understand how the customer is feeling today, companies need to “hear ” and “understand ” the signals that consumers are dropping in their digitally enabled paths-to-purchase, so that they can offer a “relevant, in-context engagement at the point of contact. “

Then Mr. Advani delivered a reality bite; according to a recent study, while 81% of Brands say they have a holistic view of customers across channel, 78% of customers disagree. The gap between those two perceptions is a huge challenge. He then outlined how IBM can help companies address that challenge, with three additions to IBM’s Marketing Cloud service:

• Journey Designer: a marketing automation toolset that enables the Marketer to design the customer experience in the digital space
  
• Journey Analytics: a set of analytical capabilities that enables the Marketer to see how well the designed customer experience is doing (i.e. is it delivering the business outcomes expected?);
  
• Commerce Insights: a set of tools designed specifically for the E-commerce website, to facilitate a product or promo launch, along with embedded analytics to monitor results. 

So while the Design Workshop was focused on the point of contact between the consumer and the enterprise, IBM isn’t truly “agnostic ” about what lies beneath the veneer of the user interface, and is also offering a set of solutions to enable that “excellent experience “.

Marks & Spencer

At the IBM Amplify conference, the main tent presentation also included a brief overview about how the user experience and the underlying capabilities can work together. The director of M&S.com David Walmsley described how the company is working with IBM to enable a “30-second offering “. The retailer described how the company offers a “digital pub ” (a digital magazine, not a new way to buy beer) that updates daily and is focused on style and living. The Apple iPad app features content focused on consumers’ individual preferences, and merchandise that is “actually available ” (Mr. Walmsley explained how the company’s years-long efforts to deploy RFID have enabled “a universal sense of where our products are “). The “30-second offering ” will even be available via the new Apple Watch (the result of some Design Thinking).

The UK retailer then went on to explain that the company has undertaken “proximity initiatives ” to enable geo-targeted content to consumers’ mobile devices. As to how practical this content would be, David described how M&S can highlight relevant products that are available close to where the consumer physically is (tying together the company’s customer analytics, marketing capabilities, and RFID-enabled inventory insight).

Getting The Whole Picture

What was missing from the general session was any roadmap discussion about the whole of the IBM Commerce portfolio, which includes not only Silverpop (which IBM acquired in 2014), but past acquisitions Coremetrics, Tealeaf, Demandtec, the Sterling solutions, or exactly how IBM’s Watson technology fits in. Perhaps that wasn’t the point of the big tent sessions (those things were in fact covered in the break out sessions), but given the fact that retailers right now are very focused on the need for a true distributed order management capability (which the Sterling suite offers) in addition to advance marketing analytics, or that retailers need to focus on profitable fulfillment of omni-channel orders (which the collaboration between JDA and IBM enables), it seemed like a missed opportunity, not unlike SAP CEO Bill McDermott choosing not to use his SAPPHIRE keynote to talk about the major release of the new version of SAP software (S4/HANA) in any great detail.

Those weren’t accidental omissions – the outside world is hyper-focused on the tech-enabled consumer, and so big tech giants like IBM need to show that they are agile players too. But it’s important for tech companies and retailers alike to remember that consumers expect all that sexy stuff on the “edge ” to interface with some underlying capabilities, as in the Marks & Spencer example.

That’s not nearly as fun or exciting as creating an Apple Watch app (or whatever the next big thing is), but it’s the real name of the game.