CIO-CMO Exchange for marketing and digital leaders event 2018 recap

On the 27th of February in Auckland New Zealand, CIO-CMO held an Exchange event of which SilverStripe was a table sponsor. Andy Rycroft, one of SilverStripe’s Account Directors, attended the event. These are his key takeaways.

At 7.30am the event kicked off. All together over 60 attendees came to listen on the topic of shifting from Digital to Customer-led transformation. The talks came from: Anders Sorman-Nilsson, a Global Futurist and Innovation Strategist; Lena Jenkins, a Customer Transformation Delivery Manager; and finally a panel consisting of four other digital leaders.

Throughout the morning the talks covered a range of topics within the digital space including Agile adoption, Artificial Intelligence, buy-not-build and the challenge whether to communicate or build technology first.

Andy Rycroft talking with the attendees (images sourced from the CIO-CMO website) 

These two worlds of traditional wisdom and technology can be mutually reinforcing.

The first speaker, Anders, was the keynote and provided a Ted-type style of presentation which was great to listen to. Throughout his talk, Anders provided lots of analogue vs digital references and how “these two worlds of traditional wisdom and technology can be mutually reinforcing”, focusing in on customer experience vs. technology.

He discussed the potential of AI becoming more human than human interaction itself, and “the dangers of always focusing on the shiny new penny” which was fascinating to hear. Anders then guided us on to a nice example of Lemonade’s customer experience work with insurance workflow.

Finally in his Q&A section, the cross-over between demographic profiling and marketing was one of the major questions asked. His response went straight to Psychographic profiling and AI personalisation, which linked in my mind to the customer profiling challenges we’re tackling with some of our customers now.

Anders Sorman-Nilsson presenting at the Exchange

Following Anders was Lena Jenkins, who provided a case study style presentation looking at Spark’s digital transformation from being a traditional telco to being a digital services company.

Throughout her presentation Lena talked openly about the rethinking of Spark’s brand and digital transformation. Rightly or wrongly, she admitted, they started with technology as a scope and solution which began and stuttered a few times before gaining the real traction required. I wasn’t surprised that the build Spark went through lasted 9 months (to rethink and repurpose the front end), or that it’s by no means complete - the ongoing continuous development reflecting the bigger change to agile adoption over the past few years.

Agile adoption was referenced time and again as a result of consultancy by McKinsey which accelerated this process. Over the process of their digital transformation, Lena openly discussed the key lessons regarding internal communications and how as time went on cultural change and adherence followed. For some more information about Agile, and improving Agile processes, take a look at our Agile Mojo Booster handbook. 

The panel: CMO's Nadia Cameron, TS4B's Liz Coulter, Yellow Pages' Darren Linton, Mercury Energy's Kevin Angland, and Fonterra's Dominic Quin (from left)

Finally the talks were rounded out with a panel. The panel featured Dominic Quin from Fonterra. Kevin Angland from Mercury Energy, Liz Coulter the head of TS4B (Tech Solutions for Business), and finally Darren Linton, the Chief Executive of Yellow (formerly Yellow Pages. Key points discussed included ‘buy-not-build’ and choice of best-in-breed technologies available and somewhat inevitably personalisation, and the plan to get there, was discussed, although a few examples would have been good.

Understanding of the customer experience, was also referenced as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) came up throughout the panel discussions which indicated a strong drive to measure consumer experiences and the value placed on them.

Overall some great insights provided into a number of leading digital trends, and SilverStripe and myself were very excited to have been a part of it!

If you are interested in hearing more about Digital Transformation, you should take a look at our blog on the Future of Content Delivery.