Interview with Dan Anderson, Managing Director of Technology at VShift

1. Can you share some of the key strategies you have implemented to grow world-class technology organizations over your 25+ year career?

A few key principles critical to highly successful technology organizations include:

• An unwavering focus on technology as a means for solving real-world business problems.
• Understanding that people and processes matter more than technology. Technology solutions must work for people and make their experience better, easier, and more efficient; allowing them to focus on their work rather than the technology. A technically brilliant solution will otherwise fail.
• Ensuring flexibility with the ability to constantly evolve and bring new and different technologies into the fold – paired with a constant eye on and a measured, thoughtful approach to emerging technology.
• Constant, ongoing development of technology assets and capabilities that can be leveraged to make future efforts faster and more efficient ¬– modular, capabilities, components and systems that can be reused and recombined.
• Speed to market is critical. Get something into market that solves a core problem or provides a key benefit quickly, then iterate and refine. 

Two core strategies that VShift employs to help clients break through their go-to-market issues, which arise directly from these principles, are:

a. Decoupling: Clients typically struggle to get digital experiences launched quickly – or at all. Companies are commonly organized in diverse functional groups, while their legacy technology is monolithic, often provided by a single third-party vendor that is aligned to the needs of only one of those groups – typically the IT team. Decoupling the user experience layer from “as-a-service” platform components has been effective at providing product, marketing, and customer-facing digital team members with autonomy over the creating and managing the experience. These experiences can be launched and updated with minimal dependencies on shared services groups while still adhering to the needs and guidelines of IT and compliance groups, all without the vendor “lock-in” that is typical of monolithic technologies.

b. Accelerator Kits: Composable, modular solutions can be difficult to understand, can seem complex or unapproachable, and are difficult for non-technical, often skeptical, stakeholders to envision. VShift has leveraged our extensive experience to develop and utilize pre-built digital experience accelerators comprised of fully implemented frameworks, technologies, and components. These accelerators provide a means for aligning all the diverse team members and allow full feature digital products to be delivered in a third or less of the time and effort of a more traditional, “legacy” approach.

2. How does the VShift AEM Digital Experience Accelerator expedite website project timelines compared to traditional methods?

Teams looking to utilize AEM headless capabilities to realize the advantages of a decoupled, composable architecture are often overwhelmed by their expectation of the required effort and investment. They assume that the adoption of a headless AEM digital experience will take the same amount of time (or more) than it took to originally implement the Adobe stack. 
The Accelerator shifts control to the business stakeholder and away from the vendor or systems integrator allowing the business to progressively adopt the new model without having to wait for upgrades, new software purchases or lengthy engagements. Once the scope is set, the Accelerator allows projects to progress far more quickly via a ready-to-deploy composable solution stack with prebuilt components, workflow, and integrations, ready at kick-off. The Accelerator gives teams a massive “head start” placing them far closer to the finish line by the time they complete the first or second sprint.

3. Can you explain the historical development of the AEM Digital Experience Accelerator and its integration with Adobe’s Universal Editor?

AEM has historically been called out by “MACH-native,” composable technology providers as a prime example of a monolithic, rigid technology stack that requires a significant, ongoing investment in specialized vendor certified consultants. This situation, in our view, is changing as Adobe continues to focus on expanding and enhancing headless capabilities. The AEM Digital Experience Accelerator was born out of our experience leveraging these growing capabilities in a way that maximizes the benefits while reducing vendor “lock-in” and bringing best of breed technologies, frameworks, and solution components into the mix. 
The AEM Universal Editor is a good example Adobe’s focus on headless and the growing suite of supporting capabilities. The Universal Editor provides an efficient, intuitive interface for managing content while at the same time allowing for reduced vendor “lock-in” via flexible content integration capabilities. VShift is continually evolving and enhancing the Accelerator to take advantage of these capabilities as they become available. 

4. Why might organizations choose to use a visual content editor interface, and what benefits does it offer?

Organizations tend to choose a visual content editor “add-on” to a composable content management system based on the experiences and preferences of their product owners and content management teams. If they have historically used an advanced WYSIWYG CMS interface, they will want to retain comparable features that a visual editor can provide including drag and drop content creation and live editing and previewing. A visual editor paired with a well-structured content model offers the best of both worlds – users focused on layout and page construction will typically prefer the visual editor whereas those focused on content creation and management, especially for multi-platform, multi-channel use, will often prefer the more structured, streamlined content editing interface.

5. How does the AEM Digital Experience Accelerator ensure compliance and security in highly regulated environments such as financial services and healthcare?

Companies in financial services, healthcare and other regulated industry sectors have historically purchased and implemented Adobe technologies. We have developed the Accelerator with an understanding and focus on the type of security and compliance requirements common in these sectors. The Accelerator, implemented with connectivity to legacy content sources, allows for enhanced capabilities for content versioning, workflow, and business rules. As part of any engagement, we work closely with clients to ensure a thorough understanding of their compliance and security needs. 

6. What advice would you give to organizations looking to adopt emerging technologies to stay competitive in their industry?

My advice is to start and end with a business sponsor and the organization’s business goals. Far too often, emerging technology programs are relegated to a lab or to an IT team not well aligned to what the market is looking for. It is critical to focus initially on projects that can be delivered to market quickly with meaningful impact to demonstrate viability and real-world benefits, and to build support and consensus. Having a program sponsor, a budget, and the right type of project with measurable objectives, in our experience, is the best ways of ensuring success.