May 12, 2017
Contributor: Chris Pemberton
As Vice President of Digital Transformation for Motorola Solutions, Tim Dickson is on the front lines of leveraging marketing technology to drive business growth. With a company mission to predict and prevent crime the impact of an effective marketing technology roadmap is significant.
Mr. Dickson, whose role resides in IT, partnered with his marketing peers to capture and capitalize on rich and specific customer insights from marketing through Voice of Customer data.
Mr. Dickson used these insights along with a bimodal technology planning framework to deploy technology that delivered a unified customer experience and one-stop-shop to serve customers. His journey to deliver results started with the same question most marketers and marketing technologists ask when they embark on a roadmapping exercise:
How do I build a marketing technology roadmap with a strong foundation and flexibility for innovation?
Bryan Yeager, Gartner for Marketers research director, discussed best practices for planning marketing technology roadmaps with Mr. Dickson during the 2017 Gartner Digital Marketing Conference.
“The best roadmaps communicate a specific point to a specific audience,” said Mr. Yeager. “Companies need to consider using the bimodal planning framework when creating their roadmaps.”
Bimodal refers managing two separate but coherent styles of work. Mode 1 focuses on stable, scalable and predictable operations where the technology stays in place for a long period of time and has well understood requirements. Mode 2 is concerned with agility where constant iteration is normal to support innovation and differentiation.
When planning Motorola Solutions’ marketing technology roadmap, Mr. Dickson a bimodal framework to develop foundational technologies alongside technologies to support innovation. While technology planners sometimes assume Mode 1 means slow and Mode 2 means fast Mr. Dickson views Mode 1 as moving fast and Mode 2 as moving faster. With the new normal being constant change and disruption, both modes need to be built for speed.
A B2B manufacturer seeking to grow revenue through digital commerce would treat the digital commerce technology as a Mode 2 technology to start since that is seen as supporting innovation and differentiation. After the technology become a stable, predictable system of record for the business it would become a Mode 2 technology.
Gartner’s Bryan Yeager, Research Director, and Tim Dickson, Vice President of Digital Transformation for Motorola Solutions, discuss bimodal frameworks at the 2017 Gartner Digital Marketing Conference.
Use a framework such as bimodal and build a strong foundation first before moving to more advanced capabilities. Adopt five best practices to improve your marketing technology roadmap planning:
“I use Gartner to bolster my confidence in decision making.”
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