Partners in Digital Experience: Bounteous on Co-Innovation and Composability

Image

How do you define “innovation?” Simply stated, innovation is doing better things and doing things better. At Acquia, we help ambitious brands innovate and create leading digital experiences for their customers. Companies compete and win through their digital experiences, and through our network of world-class partners, we help organizations fundamentally transform how they connect with customers.

One of Acquia’s long-standing partners is Bounteous — a Global Acquia Partner and holder of a Certified Acquia Practice in Drupal Cloud. They represent the power of co-innovation. Through co-innovation, they’ve been able to create and execute end-to-end digital transformation, pushing the boundaries for new modes of working together and helping their clients successfully compete and win in their digital transformation efforts. To learn more about how Bounteous helps their clients compete and win digitally, we spoke with their CTO Seth Dobbs about the importance of collaboration and continuous innovation.

Co-Innovation Means Eliminating Silos with Flexible Solutions

A good partner can serve as the communicative and connective tissue between the departments in an organization. They will help your team look beyond individual department goals and see a cohesive picture that can better inform the implementation. Seth explains:

At Bounteous, innovation is accelerated by a virtuous cycle we call ‘digital flow,’ in which data yields critical insights that enable multi-moment orchestration. We believe in always having a measurement strategy in place with the right tracking to ensure we can continue to learn and evolve.

Bringing together all experiences to form a coherent, seamless customer journey requires internal teams and technologies to work in unison. Part of the strategy Bounteous develops with their clients is focused on developing overarching goals and business objectives. These goals then inform how they choose and implement a successful technology stack. “If you’re only focusing on short-term goals or looking at one part of the customer experience, you end up with organizational silos around your data,” said Seth. Instead, each system, department and campaign should be centralized and allow data to flow freely from one point to the next. 

​“When we talk about co-innovation and collaboration, we talk a lot about the right enablement model that must be in place in order to help our customers mature across talent, methods, tech and data — all of which are critical in achieving a continuous cycle of innovation,” said Seth. These pillars are critical to delivering innovative digital experience. Without the right team, technology, strategy, platform and data tools, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.

Composability Empowers Organizations to Be Customer-Centric

When it comes to integrating different pieces and enabling the freedom to transform in multiple directions, Bounteous trusts Acquia's Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). “One of the most compelling features of the Acquia Open DXP offering is that you’re not bound by any one set of tools. For example, composable commerce solutions using the Acquia Commerce Framework can be utilized to manage landing pages and product data in Drupal, commerce activity and transactions in Elastic Path or Commercetools, and AI-driven product recommendations in Lucidworks,” Seth explained. This is just one example of a composable approach, but there is a lot of flexibility to compile the best solutions and pass data via APIs versus being locked into one platform.

Successfully implementing a composable architecture offers a competitive advantage by adding capabilities, increasing marketing agility and unlocking creativity. Most importantly, it unlocks customer value by providing the best-in-class user experience they deserve. 

“When you lose sight of your customers by letting technology dictate your approach, you start serving the means rather than the end, meaning you’re implementing technology for its own sake, rather than serving a business purpose,” said Seth. As digital ecosystems become more sophisticated and integrate multiple platforms as well as bespoke components, flexibility and the ability to integrate with new capabilities are crucial to constructing a customer-centric architecture.

Learn more about how Bounteous is optimizing customer experience and adopting digital innovation with Acquia in this case study on the Mars: TREAT TOWN project, which earned Bounteous a 2021 Engage Awards win.