Ă۶ąĘÓƵ

Transcript

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar on Enterprise Northstar Architecture Planning. My name is Justin Howley, and I work within the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Customer Success team. I’m a Principal Success Strategist, where we focus on helping Ă۶ąĘÓƵ customers drive value and enablement for their Ă۶ąĘÓƵ solutions.

Before we start, I want to thank you for your time and your time to join us for today’s session. As a reminder, the session is being recorded, and everyone who has registered will receive a link to the recording after the session. This is a live webinar. It’s a listen-only format, but please feel free to share any questions in the chat and QA pod.

Myself and my colleague, Julie, will answer as many questions as possible. In addition, we have reserved some time to discuss questions at the end of the session.

As we wait for a few more attendees to filter in, I just want to let you know that we do have a couple of other webinar sessions coming up this quarter. For those who are interested, I’ll put the links in the session chat, and you can make note of that for future reference.

All right. I think we can hand it over to our presenter, John Mosbaugh. Take it away, John. Hey, everybody. I’m John Mosbaugh, Principal Customer Success Architect. You can see my screen, right, Justin? Everybody’s good? Yeah, correct. Yes. Cool. Today, we’re going to do an intro to Northstar architecture. It’s a very high level, but I think we’ve got some pretty important points. We’re going to talk about what it is, why it’s important. Then we’re going to talk about the Lucid app that we use to create the Northstar architecture charts. Then we’ll go into, for our part on our team, how we’ve basically been using Northstar architecture.

Let me go to my next slide here.

This is the agenda. Right now, we’re in the kickoff stage. These are the areas I just discussed, the introduction, the process, importance. The sample architecture charts we’ll dig in somewhat. We may have future sessions to talk, to expand on the architecture charts. You’re going to get the basics, the blueprints, and the big rocks, and all the things associated with getting started using Northstar architecture. Then as Justin said, you can also ask questions in the chat. As we’re ongoing, we can also be answering questions for you all.

Let’s get started here.

I’m going to close this.

Minimize this guy. Get rid of him. There we go. Okay, cool. Introduction. What does a Northstar architecture, what does it do? What does it mean? Where is it coming from? Basically, Northstar architecture provides a unified target state. The Northstar, on your ship, you use the Northstar to navigate. It’s for system design, development, and operational evolution. High-level, that’s the definition of what Northstar architecture does.

To begin with, it’s an initial overview of a customer’s architecture, and it evolves as solutions change or optimize. Look at your entire Martech stack of all your data collection services, everything that you use to get data into your systems. Then you’ll have things like maybe some Gen AI, all the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools to create content that’s passed off to Experience Manager. Then that content’s used to deliver stuff on the other side to your customers via emails, push, web channel, etc. It’s everything else. Then it can be to Facebook or all the other tools that are not necessarily Ă۶ąĘÓƵ. It’s a layout of everything.

Basically, it forms a foundation for optimizing opportunities. And when you have a new challenge, just seeing that architecture helps things come into focus a lot easier because you want to have everything accounted for. We’ll talk about this a little bit later on in this presentation. And it’s not necessarily that big. That’s the ultimate level of everything. There’s also pieces that can outline principles, patterns, and components. So when I just mentioned the content creation stuff, maybe you’re using Firefly and some of our other Gen AI stuff and sending that into AEM, I have a sample chart I’ll share with you that just shows that piece of your architecture. So it’s not necessarily always everything. Everything is good to have. But you can also do small pieces of it, and we’ll expand on that.

It outlines the principles, patterns, and components.

This is right here. You’ll have this deck after the presentation.

Resilient, scalable, and business-aligned architecture.

And building it helps you reveal how everything’s aligned and highlights improvement and optimization opportunities. So on a high level, that’s what Northstar Architecture is.

It’s us working with you or whoever you work with to go through and say, what do we have? What do all our solutions together look like, and how do they interact? And just having that allows you to do a lot of other really cool things.

So the second part of this is the process. So think of the last slide as the final product, the final product being some charts, which we’ll talk about Lucid, which is what I use, that you can use, and you can pass those around and say, hey, here’s what we have. How do these things work together? And we want to do something. How would we use our solutions to make that happen? But when you start this process of building Northstar Architecture, a lot of it is asking about the process, right? So we’ll come in and we’ll say, what tools do you have, obviously? And then what pain points do you have? We avoid hyper-focusing on one thing. We want to see the entire picture, because that conversation is what makes this very valuable, right? If you think about your business and then you’ve got your tech, usually those are two basic components of every tech company. Your business wants to do stuff. They may not know the underlying tech, what that is, and your tech may not know what the business wants to do. So the process of building a Northstar Architecture is the point where those two sets of people can align. And they can say, okay, I want to gather some personalization data. I want to put that into, let’s say, RTCDP. I want to then send that to AJO or maybe Target. I want to personalize it and then pull in, maybe experience fragments from AEM and all the decisioning processes that happen. And then we send out the emails or we send out the push or the SMS or whatever, right? Or the web channel, Target case.

Those two, your business is let’s do this. And we have marketing people and we have all these ideas of how we want to approach this. And then you’re aligning with the technical people who will say, okay, this is how we do this. And we have a one-stop place where we can see how all our tools work together, right? So to that point, we’re focusing on the requirements, right? And the customer goal, your goals, without over-engineering anything. We’re just saying this is one way we can do that. We can also, now we have this workflow that’s sitting in front of us, we can also say, okay, are we flexible? Can we do this more than one way, right? An example might be, I have the web channel in AJO. I also have Target, Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Target. They can do the same thing. What’s the best way to do that? And how is everything integrated? Is my RT-CDP data going into, being shared as segments with Target? Great. It’s also in AEP, AJO has it. So that’s a real high level example of being able to look at the North Star architecture and see, hey, we have this built and we maybe have more than one way to do it. What’s the most efficient way to get this completed, right? Another process when we start is like, do you have a current state architecture diagram? That’s super helpful. A lot of customers do, not all customers do. So if you do, it’s great. Our team can take that. This is their current state. Now let’s see, are all the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ solutions currently in there? Are all the integration points built? It’s also a great way to figure out if something is not integrated. Maybe a customer’s not sharing segments to say Target.

Maybe you are doing a lot of stuff with Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Analytics, but you have CJA. We can look at this diagram and see how those two things, you can move from one to the other or APIs on the backend, everything you can see, right? So you’re discovering the current workflows and business strategies, identifying gaps and assessing goals for the existing technology that you have.

Let’s go to the next one here.

So why is it important? Okay, so from a high level, the advantages of implementing it are alignment. Like I said before, you have technology and you have business strategies, the best way to get synchronized, right? You can actually see what you’re doing.

You can align on what marketing and business wanna do and say, how would we do that? So you can move cohesively with a shared objective. And that can be a challenge for every company. Most companies I’ve ever worked at, you’ll be silos and people aren’t necessarily talking to each other and then maybe the business is like, why can’t we do this? So in the North Star architecture, you can say, hey, let’s sit down and look at how we would do this, okay? There’s also scalability and agility. Okay, simple over here.

So in this case, the agility and the scalability might be, I have a legacy product in my North Star architecture that I wanna replace. I wanna pull this out and replace it with something else. When you have the architecture set up, you can say, okay, this product, look at all the integration points in one place. We can see how that exists. If we were to replace that, we would have to replace all those integration points. Having a North Star architecture enables you to really quickly say, okay, if we replace this with something else, does this new thing do all the things the old thing does? And if so, where are those integration points and how do we set that up with API calls and all the backend stuff? We might have to build out, right? So that helps a lot. It also facilitates iteration, experimentation and adoption of best practices, right? So a little bit about that. And I’ll show you some Lucid charts in a while, but let’s say you want to do something with once again, Gen AI. If you have that whole content creation part, content supply chain, right there where you can see it in a chart, that makes it easier for you to say, okay, we know how this works. We know all the things that are connected. Let’s look forward to maybe the next experiments.

AJOs is a great example and target. How can we take all the data, the segments, the content, experience fragments, et cetera, that’s going into those and then increase our experimentation? Having North Star architecture really helps you have just a higher level view of how that all works without having to have some murky, oh, there’s something over here that we think works like this, right? It’s right there. It’s right in front of you. It’s also continuous delivery, the ability to onboard new capabilities. Like I mentioned just a second ago, maybe you’re bringing in a new product. How would this new product that does something really cool work and where does it fit in the architecture? You already have that. It’s been created. It’s updated, let’s say every three months even.

Some teams do it every month, right? If things are rapidly changing, we wanna introduce this new technology. We know it from a high level top view where that would go. And we’re pretty sure how to get that new solution in there and stay ahead of the market trends. It also reduces technical debt, right? You have a clear roadmap. You have a lot of structural guard rails. You can look at this and say, this is how we do this. If we were to put some new solution over here, that may cause an issue because it wouldn’t be fully integrated with all the other data points or all the other integration points that we have. So big, big advantages here to having this Northstar architecture when you’re building your stack. Okay.

So when once again, we had process in the first part, now we have actions and questions. So the main deliverable is Northstar architecture that paints the vision of how all the different systems should work together, okay? That gives you that path forward. And it’s that one-stop shopping of what do I have? When you’re working with our teams, I’m on ultimate success, which is part of field engineering. We’ll perform whatever technical death our customers feel comfortable with. Some of these charts are pretty big and I’m showing you kind of the high level, but mid stuff. There’s some of these charts that get really super sophisticated as you can imagine, where you get to every solution and then within the solution, you might have another chart and it gets really deep. It doesn’t always have to be like that. It can be, obviously we have the expertise to do anything you need, but it could be just a, how does the content supply chain work, right? To start with. And then we can move into more sophisticated things as the questions, as you start understanding how your architecture works together, which I’m sure you do, but maybe businesses is coming on board and other groups are learning. We can start slow and then build out the whole thing. And just know that this is not like this, everything done in one, this is a process.

You want to understand the inputs, the outputs, and how, for our part, how the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Stack fits into the architecture. So I’ll show you in a second here, but we can understand, let’s say Ă۶ąĘÓƵ’s not even in there. This is a brand new implementation.

For my part, it would already be in there, but you can say this is our existing architecture. How does Ă۶ąĘÓƵ fit in? And you put AEP in there and then all the other tools, and that’ll give you a good understanding of how our tools work with your existing stack.

I’ve been talking to a lot of people who do this and it’s always good to say, why are you doing this? And this is kind of a big deal.

Things get built and a lot of times people just build them and we want to get this done and then we move on to the next thing. When you’re doing a Northstar architecture review, working with us together and your teams together, you want to always ask, why are we doing it this way? Does this make sense? And it’s because there may be some optimizations there that when the initial implementation happened, we didn’t know about them at the time. So you always want to approach this in such a way that you’re never afraid to ask questions about why we’re doing this, because there may be some optimization possibilities in there that you hadn’t thought of before. So always be open to saying, hey, you know what? Maybe we shouldn’t, maybe there’s a better way to do this. And then that of course just makes everything stronger.

We can analyze your current stack and then we’ll provide the best path forward for optimization.

It also helps you understand disparate systems and how to make those more effective and efficient and to synchronize all your data. Synchronizing data is a really big part of this too. So you may have different data sources going in different places. One of the why are we doing it this way could be let’s bring all those together and then have a single point where all that comes out, right? In the process of doing this, you’re going to come out of it with obviously a better understanding of what you already have, but also a better path forward. And we’re always looking for optimization and best case scenarios going forward. I have a talk thing over here I was ignoring. Let me make sure I’m not missing anything here.

All right, this one here. So second part of actions and questions.

Obviously it provides a single source of truth, making it easier to locate and resolve issues, okay? If there’s an issue, Northstar architecture can help you understand where the issue is.

So let me, here’s an example. Let’s say for example, you have your RTCDP or whatever your customer data is going in, and then it goes through a process and then it is saying, personalize some content coming out of experience manager or sites, what have you, and then send that along as email, SMS, et cetera, right? One example we had was where the customer’s focusing on the content provider or the content supply part of it. It’s like, why is AEM not providing the right stuff to, let’s say AJO to send an email? So it’s not personalized. We understand why the personalization process, you know, we know these things about this customer, you know, they’re a family, therefore we’re gonna send them family content versus, you know, the veteran or et cetera, all the different personalization buckets we have.

Having a Northstar architecture deck that allows us to say, hey, you know what? We’ve been focusing on the AEM content supply part of this, but you know what? If you look where that’s integrated point, that goes into the RTCDP. Then you start examining what’s going on in AEP and they found, oh, you know, these schemas are not optimized. Some of the data we need for AEM to provide the stuff to AJO, those, that’s where the issue was, right? So having a Northstar architecture makes that a lot easier because sometimes people tend to focus on a single solution within the entire stack.

And there may be something even be, you know, somewhere else in the chain that you just wanna take a look at. And then by doing that, you can really hit, you know, optimize things and figure things out a lot easier, which brings us to the second one here. Documenting architecture helps identify the true source of customer issues, not just assumed causes. So what I was just saying. It also aids in decommissioning solutions by highlighting areas that might need remediation. So what I was speaking about earlier, I have a legacy tool. I wanna remove it. If I remove it, what are all those integration points? I know because I look at my Northstar architecture deck and I’m confident that all the things that solution was doing, we just need to make sure those integrations are built into the new solution. So makes that a lot easier.

One of the concepts, you know, we have the chart where we’re looking at the architecture and we have all your solutions there.

Another thing are these big rocks. So big rocks are identified when we’re going through the process of discussing the architecture, we wanna know what your challenges are. You know, have you, you wanna do something, it’s not working, you wanna do something you don’t know how to do it.

Maybe you’ve done something and you’re seeing, you know, your emails are, people aren’t clicking through on your emails, something along those lines, right? We call those big rocks. And so you’ll have your chart, then you’ll have your big rocks. And we keep those at the top so that we can, as we’re doing, going through this process, we can address those. And of course the end result is that we hope we resolve those. We at least discover what they are and then we resolve them however.

One of the cool things about Northstar architecture is, like I said, you can have the full architecture of everything you’re doing, which can be super sophisticated. But if you have a big rock challenge, something as easy as like before, using personalization to show the right content in email, you can do it, you can create a chart that’s just that process, right? So, you can do anything from the data collection to creating the segments, to then sending it to AJO or Target, AJO for email, I would recommend. And then, you know, how would that work? And then all the things on the other side, where you’re sending the data to, that can also be an expanded part of a Northstar architecture deck. And this is a, it’s a great way to say, you know, this big rock, how do we fix that? And to be able to see all the tools, all the possible things that might influence the personalization, et cetera, in one place.

Another cool thing to do with this is once you’ve built a chart, a Northstar architecture, you know, chart, a diagram, and when Ă۶ąĘÓƵ’s working with you, it’s great to be able to say, you know, is this right to one group of people, maybe somebody in IT? And they can say, yes, that’s right. And then to go to another group of people and say, what do you think of this? So when you’re doing, when you’re working on a Northstar architecture process, you wanna make sure that you get more than, the way I’ve heard it described is if everyone agrees, you’re probably right.

But if they don’t all agree, you’re gonna get some insight on what you may be missing. So just like the always ask, why are we doing this part of it? You know, sharing it out, multiple teams who would understand the architecture and even the business groups, you know, does you know about the tools? What is your understanding of this? That’s only gonna make this more precise and more valuable. So always be, sometimes people tend to say, oh, this is our team doing this. And we’re in our low silo. When you’re doing Northstar architecture, you know, share it out with everyone and anybody who’s interested and get their feedback cause you’re gonna get some valuable feedback doing that.

It also, you know, analysis of solution decisioning and outbound experience orchestration. So that’s just kind of obvious, you know, when your data is going in, the decisioning that’s happening, and then outbound experience orchestration would be all the things that you’re sending, for our part for Ă۶ąĘÓƵ, you know, all the personalized content, what is that going to? So that’s kind of what that means here.

Sorry, I didn’t miss anything.

All right, so let’s go to, what are we talking? What does this look like? Okay, so when we’ve talked about why this is important, we’ve talked about an intro to what it is. Let’s talk about what it looks like, okay? It’s that literally a chart. I use Lucidchart, Visio is another solution people use another app. So basically you will go into Lucid app putting the pieces of your architecture in this chart.

It lets you take complicated technical concepts and distill them into diagrams.

It can be exported as SVG or Visio.

And like I said, it’s good to keep these updated depending on your situation every month, every three months, at least every six months, just as things evolve, because you’re always going to be maybe creating new integrations, using things a little bit differently. So it’s not just a one and done, it’s kind of an ongoing thing. Plus that ongoing conversation is really helpful, right? So maybe you start doing something differently. You can look at your architecture and say, are we doing this the best way? Is this optimized? It’s a collaborative effort. So with Lucidcharts, we can create one with a customer and start working on it together.

Y’all can update it, we can update it. It’s a collaborative process, which is really great. Good way to help you understand how it works, help us understand how your stuff works.

And we also have experience league links, which will be as part of this chart or part of this deck at the very end, which has a whole bunch of blueprints on how to get started.

So Lucid or Visio log in and we would start creating and you don’t just get crazy to start off. And I’m going to show you right next up, we’re going to go over some examples of some charts.

So let me take a sip of water here.

Okay, here we go. So this is an example of a retail generic architecture. This is a Northstar architecture deck. So what we have here on the far left here are your data collection.

There’s different, some people do it different. This is the way left to right works for me. Data in, all the solutions that affect it and then the data out to your customers. So in this case, we have all our data collected. How’s the data coming in? Is it through the mobile app? Is it the website? What kind of Ă۶ąĘÓƵ applications are in? Cloud apps, et cetera. We’ve got our e-commerce and our, maybe we have a product inventory database. Everything that goes into your decisioning process, if you will, the edge network stuff is going to be listed here. And how does it interact? Who does it interact with? In this case, we have a gateway developer console where this stuff, everything goes through here, as you can see. And then it goes into the AEP experience. This is all Ă۶ąĘÓƵ here.

So just having this in one place, being able to say, okay, we added a new data source. We’ll add that to the North Sturt Arc. Does that behave like the rest of the things? Yes, it does. We have streaming, we have batch data. I’m on my app, we’re streaming. I’m once every hour, I’m batching. It goes into the data lake, the streaming segmentation, as you can see, this moves forward in a different way. In this case, it goes directly into the journey optimizer. This is our streaming part of AJO. Whereas the batch will go into experience lake. You can do, this is your data distiller processes where you’re getting profiles in there, you’re getting new ECIDs, whatever they are. And then you’re distilling that data right here. So if somebody says, hey, what are we doing? Maybe we have an issue where profiles are exploding. Why is that happening? Well, you would look in this part of the North Star architecture and say, hey, we’re doing something that we don’t need to do. Maybe we have too much data coming in that’s bad data.

Let’s look at where the data is coming from. It’s not so much that we have the data’s in here and this is not working correctly. It’s that the data from here, we’re getting a bunch of junk data. Let’s focus over here. So that’s a perfect example of why this would be a worthwhile thing to have. People might get focused on this part of it, but the real problem is you just have too much coming through in your batches. Why is that happening? Then let’s take a look at what’s happening over here. Perfect example of using this to get over, that would be a big rock. And then it talks about going up into your edge network, where your profiles live, your segmentation, all your decisioning, you know exactly where that’s happening. And then what happens from there? Well, you’re RTCDP, you’re creating your identity graphs, you’re sending data back as you learn things about your customers, et cetera. And then once you leave the AEP part of this, what’s out here? These are all the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools, a lot of cool stuff out here. You could also have other tools in here. This is specific for Ă۶ąĘÓƵ right here, but if you had a whole bunch of other tools here, those could also be included in the North Star architecture because we want you to know what’s happening with your data, how it’s being decisioned and where it’s going. So this just happens to be Ă۶ąĘÓƵ. So in here you can see we have our content up here, our content supply and experience applications, got some Photoshop going on here. Workfront is central to a lot of the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ products. It’s really a good way to organize stuff, especially with content. In this case, we’re sending stuff to Target via segments. This is actually the content coming through. This would be the segments coming through. Same with a journey optimizer, a lot of segmentation going on. Here’s your RTCDP and your CJA.

So this part of the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ stack here, a lot of people on this call I’m sure are very familiar with this. And then where does it go? Right, boom. This can go to a lot of things, obviously. Everybody here is in tech. So we know this is just a sampling of the multitudes of stuff you can send the content to. The personalized content that started way over here, went through this whole process, and then, hey, customer, click on this or purchase something or what have you. So this is a real, this is a pretty involved, there’s a lot more, like I said before, there’s a lot more involved.

Some architects who will distill this down or distill something down. So that could be its own chart with the different levels of we’re doing API calls here and all this stuff’s happening within one of these, but this would be the high level version of that.

And this, okay, so what we have here is a content creation and management deck, which is you’re creating the content.

I was speaking to somebody just recently, and they said a lot of people right now, a lot of our customers are asking about the Gen AI stuff.

If we have enough interest, we should probably have a webinar on that, Justin, because I think there’s a lot of interest in that. But for our part here, this is Firefly, which is AI, Gen AI. And then all the different Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools where that content is created, where it’s pulling from different sources to enhance it, and then what it goes, it goes to AEM. You’ve got some work front here, and then here it goes into the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools. We’ve got Marketo, Target, and AJO. So, and then down here, you’ve got, again, your data sources. This is the personalization side, the data management reporting. Actually, this isn’t personalization. This is more just the data management and reporting side of things. And as you can see in this case, the AEP is right there, whereas this was the AEP before. So the reason I bring that to your attention is you can be very flexible in how you create these architecture decks. You can say, we are interested in something, and this focus, we know that these things exist, but we wanna include, we don’t need to dig too deep into that. Now, that doesn’t negate when I was talking about how maybe there’s a big rock and you haven’t discovered exactly where the problem is, but once you start creating these decks, you’ll realize we have a lot of resources here where, okay, let’s go look at the AEP deck if we need to. But on a high level, what we’re concerned with here is data management and content creation, going to Target, AJO, and Marketo, and then out to the world, okay? And these are also high level, advertising personalization and campaign management. Obviously, there’s a ton of actual apps and solutions those are going to, but this is kind of more of a high level, how does the content creation and management work? So it illustrates, and then it can be even simpler than that. Here we have a product information database. I think I had a little bit of talk check on this.

Product information management system, and it’s delivering directly to experience manager, sites and assets. Once again, work front integration there, and then personalization. I mean, that’s like way out view of what we were looking at before, and it just goes there. And starting with this, this is a conceptual thing. So maybe in my organization, I want to explain, how does this work with the PIM getting stuff to the desktop? Well, this is a high level, Lucid app created chart that I can then share with people and they’ll say, okay, cool, I get it. It’s right there, I can review it and look at it again if I need to.

Okay, this is one that’s more based on the journey optimizer AJO. Cause as I work with, I work a lot with Target, I work with AJO, I mean, there’s a lot in there. So on our previous slides, we hadn’t really boiled down to what’s inside the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ journey optimizer. This is a great example, we still have our data sources. We still have the AP going into the edge network. This is the same thing that you saw before, except this was expanded with the batch and the stream, the data lake, all that other stuff. That’s inherent to this piece. But what we want to know, how does AJO work, right? When you get into AJO, if you use this tool, you’ll know there’s a whole lot of things in here that you can use. There’s a lot of decisioning stuff. There’s the runtime, the journey runtime is the big piece of it.

And so if you were saying we are implementing AJO or we want to use AJO to send the stuff to screens or messaging channels, what do we have that we can utilize within AJO specifically? This is the kind of chart you would use for that.

And then you could be able to answer questions, your AJO expert or Ă۶ąĘÓƵ could say, okay, what is it you want to do? What is your big rock, for example, and then how would we do that? And this just gives you a high level ability to say, you want to use your content, use AM, and then you send it to inside of AJO’s asset essentials. And then you have all your segments and your qualifications coming through your batches and et cetera. How does this all work? And then how does it go out? So this is a tool, this is a pretty powerful tool, right? And once again, for the people, the IT and the stack management and the business. So I’m a business, I have an idea, we have marketing stuff. We have all these campaigns. We have all these use cases we want to implement. How do we do that? This slide, if you were using AJO would say, okay, let’s take the use case.

Let’s talk about it. What do we have? Where’s the data coming from? And then these are the places within AJO where we can create those use cases and send them out.

You can see this is invaluable and it really makes things a lot easier. So why is Northstar architecture important? Let’s see what we got here. And then there’s one more here. This is just another, it’s the same with the AP here, with the batch and the streaming and the experience lake and data distiller, and it’s got the same Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools here. It’s just got some different, let me move this over here, some different outputs.

Personally, I think this is really fun. I’m learning a lot about the different outputs and the inputs.

There’s so many, the field has grown I saw there was like 500 of these 10 years ago and now there’s like tens of thousands. So everybody, there’s so many tools that are customer views, they all use different tools.

So being able to say, how does the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools integrate with those tools with these charts is invaluable. And also how do we get that data from something like Snowflake into AEP and then use it to personalize and decisioning. This is the journey optimizer, which was the last slide. So think of everything here can be expanded so you can get inside and see under the hood how each one of those things works.

So I hope this is useful. And this is just a beginning point. We have a section in experience league that has example blueprints for a lot of things. I mean, B2B stuff, everything you can think of, we’ve already, all the different, our different tools, we’ll share that with you at the end of this. And then maybe in future sessions, get deeper in if people have a specific interest in something like Gen AI, et cetera. But a lot of this stuff exists and can be adapted to what you’re doing. And I’m a big fan of helping customers do this. And here’s an example of big rock. So you’d have your charts that you’d built, maybe some are small, maybe some are conceptual, maybe some are the whole thing. And then you have a big rock. So in this case, this is the example of not knowing why your AJO emails are not always personalized. The customers thought it was coming from AEM and it actually was because the schema and the RTCDP stuff, they said, hey, we can see everything.

Experience fragments may not be working the way we want. Why is that? Is it AJO, Target? But then they were able to look back and say, oh no, this is starting at the very beginning.

Some customer, some users are not getting the right personalization delivered to even start the process. So that’s a big, that would be a big rock that hopefully could be fixed using the concept of, Northstar architecture. Let me see here. Yeah, let me read this.

There was an issue with personalized content not always being delivered. Customer assumed the issue was with experience manager and the content delivery. Upon review, we were able to see that the personalization was not being properly defined in RTCDP and we were getting intermittent personalization for some users. Profile schemas for reviews and segments were fixed in AEP and the issue was fixed. So being able to see the entire architecture allowed us to move away from just examining AEM as a possible culprit and finding other places that may not have been optimized or configured properly. Perfect example of a big rock, perfect example of how Northstar architecture can help you figure that out.

Cool.

All right, so at Ă۶ąĘÓƵ, how do we use Northstar architecture? I’m personally, I’m in ultimate success, which is part of field engineering. So for our part, customers may come to us and I think I’ve said this already, but they’ve never done this. And so we can help them examine through a solution review what they have to really level set and get you up and running to understand your entire stack, how it’s working.

We may do a solution review and then maybe there’s some kind of use case, we call them accelerators, where you can say, hey, first of all, can we do this? And what are we doing with the solution review? And then we have a use case. How would we do that? Well, now that we’ve done your solution review, we can tell you how the most optimal way to do that would be, okay? We, and this is across Ă۶ąĘÓƵ, there’s a bunch of teams, there’s some really cool teams that go in pre-sales, I’m mad respect for them, what they do.

I’ve actually learned a lot from them, but they’ll take it ongoing. A lot of the people in ultimate success, like I said, maybe they’re coming in and they don’t, they didn’t have that pre-sales and all that post-sales stuff. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re bringing in these concepts to help you to understand how do we do this and all the other points so far, the questionings, the being able to share, being able to align your teams, your business and your IT, et cetera. So that’s what we’re doing when we come in and we engage with customers to create the blueprints and then we align our product evolution and your business objectives. It’s that simple.

The readiness, so a solution review or readiness assessment.

We look at, we benchmark your current environment against the Northstar architecture. We identify gaps, risks and modernization paths and then deliver with confidence, right? So think about this. I know this is only a one hour session, but from what I’ve shown you, if you’ve built all this out, you’re gonna be more confident in what you have. You’re gonna know exactly how things are built. If you didn’t already, you’ll have double-checked it, triple-checked it. You’ll also have been able to tell every integration point and be able to with confidence say, you know what? If we look at this, this is probably the best way to accomplish this use case that we have. Also future proof your integrations, et cetera.

So let’s, for our part in our, for my part as Ă۶ąĘÓƵ, you know, we came up with three themes of Northstar architecture and field engineering. You know, we’re using Ă۶ąĘÓƵ solutions to accomplish your business goals, obviously. I keep hammering this home, you know, understanding your tech and then being able to accomplish your business goals. That is a, that’s an essential part of succeeding when you’re a technology company. So this will definitely push that forward. Also, you know, once you start understanding what the tech does, one cool thing, I was watching a presentation, with all the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools, you know, AJO, Target, et cetera, you can insert a link to our Experience League. So if you were to deliver this chart to somebody who’s looking at it like, okay, I kind of understand what this stuff is. You know, you can click on the actual, you know, Journey Optimizer, and that will take you to Experience League that will tell you what the tool is, you know, how it works, how it integrates. So that it’s kind of, it’s not just a look at the chart, you’re done, that can take you off into more learnings and enablement, which is really cool for people who are maybe not as intimate with, because you have a lot of tools. Some people are more intimate with others. So just throwing that out there so you know that. I mean, also just go about use cases. So once you see, you know, the whole process in Northstar Architecture, you’re going to come up with, it’s going to help you with ideation of use cases, you know. It’s going to help you to optimize your Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools and understand what they can do, but also understand the data coming in, how that can be used, the decisioning part of everything, and then where you’re going. And that last column is really important, because, you know, you’re sending, you know, you’re sending content, personalized content, et cetera, and testing experiences too on the web channels, et cetera. But, you know, that’s really important to understand the different things I’m sending this to, and what would be the best Ă۶ąĘÓƵ solution to deliver to whatever that solution is. So real high level stuff, but really important conceptually to know that that works. And then reviewing your, oops, existing, sorry, I got to type on there, architecture to provide optimization and the best path forward. Yes, of course, that’s what we want. And then this is just to kind of go over the charts. You know, we have high level charts, which I showed you. I didn’t even show you the highest level charts. There are much more high level charts, but that sophistication in charting is very important. And then the use case based charts, that might include specific solutions and integrations.

And I’ve said this also, you know, you have a use case or you have a big rock. I have a challenge I don’t understand. I think it’s this, I’m going to write that down. I’m going to then consult my Northstar architecture.

And then I’m going to use that to accomplish and ideate on new use cases. So cool, I think we’re getting towards the end here, Justin. We’re going to have 10 minutes. Yeah, I think we’re running okay on time here and we can jump into Q&A in just a couple minutes. Okay, cool. All right, so the high level takeaways, you know, this is when you get this chart. Don’t let me forget to fix that typo existing. Let me write that down.

Well, so just high level, you know, it aligns people and processes and platforms in a unified vision. That is just so important and that’s what this does.

The value of that is huge. Just going through the process, creating the charts, then moving forward and being able to utilize this for the next steps, your next use cases, your next explanations, people come in, what is this? Here you go, right? Using the visual tools like Lucid to make transformation clear and actionable and also collaborative, you know, so you can work with Ă۶ąĘÓƵ if you do a solution review to build these things and that collaborative effort is really valuable.

The architecture itself is valuable as the final result. So, you know, I know I keep harping on the process of getting there and how important that is, but having those charts is also very, very important. Keeping those updated also is very important.

It defines principles, patterns, and components. Let me see, let me, so I don’t think so.

Yes, pretty much. Yeah, for scalable, resilient. Resilience is big, scalability is big, the integration points are big, and then aligned with the business is also huge, right? It also helps with debugging issues, where I was talking about the data coming in and assuming it’s happening here, having a holistic view for the whole MarTech enables you to say, well, maybe it isn’t here, maybe it’s here, maybe it’s here. Huge, huge advantage of having Northstar architecture. And it should also be continuously updated. If you make changes, obviously those should be integrated, but even revisiting it, and think of the example where I showed you the high level retail that was using AJO, but then you can dig down into the whole, what’s going on inside of AJO, going by layers and understanding, and like I said, we have Blueprints, which is this link here, just going through and spending time learning how all these things work and knowing what you have already that you can start using immediately is gonna really help you succeed. Let me get this stuff out of the way.

Sorry. It’s gonna make everything robust.

It’s highly recommended.

Cool.

And now Q&A. So I just wanna thank everybody. I hope that was helpful.

Northstar architecture is very cool.

Lucid App is really fun too to use. And once you start down this process, I think you’re gonna get a lot of value out of it. A lot of alignment, optimization is also very cool. So with that, I think we’re a little bit, maybe three minutes ahead, but Justin, do we have any chat? Yeah, good question. Nothing in the chat so far, John, thank you so much. But before we jump into Q&A, I’m gonna put a poll up in here. So there’ll be a quick kind of question, a couple of questions. So it’s really to get your feedback that’ll help shape the future sessions. So I’ll pop that up. And then if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the chat.

Excellent.

Okay, I see something in the chat.

Oh, that’s the poll in the chat.

Would I say yes? Cool. So it seems like no questions. We’ll just give another minute. If any questions pop up, we’d be happy to answer them. We’ll just hang around for a couple more minutes. Cool.

Am I still sharing my screen or no? No, it’s just the view of all of the attendees.

Cool. John, do you want me to jump in and answer these as they come up or you got it? Go for it, Julie. Julie. Julie’s really the expert here. So if you guys have any questions.

Yeah, here’s one here. Julie, if you wanna grab some of these or we can kind of tackle them together and go for it.

So Sherry has a question. Do you support North star mapping with non-Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools such as data lakes or Salesforce data? Yeah, I was gonna write an answer, but I’ll talk about it. Yeah, we should support it. Anything that integrates should be part of it.

Sometimes, at least in the ultimate success part of the world, my experience so far has been that it’s sometimes a little more difficult to get with the technical people that understand maybe the functions and those integrations. But yeah, if we can get that information, we should absolutely be putting it into the North star.

You’ll see that a lot of the North stars, the higher levels are more generic with both sources and targets and some of those integration systems. But if you get in front of a client and they have that information in their current state or can give it to you, absolutely, we definitely want to support it.

Yeah, does that answer your question, Sherry? You want all the information.

That’s the way to make this work perfectly.

I wouldn’t imagine ever…

Obviously, you can… Like some of those charts I was showing, that’s the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ tools. Just trying to understand how something like AJO works. But yeah, you wanna know how everything’s interacting because there’s integration points. To me, that’s so valuable to be able to see how these things talk to each other to optimize.

Yeah, I’m working on one right now while we’re talking. Right, that’s for a customer that has another third-party tool that does validation of content and it needs to go back and forth. And so not only are we providing sort of the higher level of how all the Ă۶ąĘÓƵ products they own work with each other, but also drilling in and sort of a more of a use case level to address what could be exchanged between Fusion and AM and those systems, for example. So I think we should be including any of that. If we have the information and that’s what supports the customer, I think, yes, the answer would be, yeah, we’ve tried to diagram that out for them and talk them through it. Totally.

Ricardo has a question. A point of view about how the far north should we focus on while creating an NSA? What do you think, Julie? Well, my first answer to this would be just something that I’ve found recently that’s been, the first part is going into these engagements in ultimate success versus TPS was that customers are really afraid that we’re trying to sell them more stuff, right? And so I think you have to kind of play out that part in your consideration about how far north to go because we’ve been kind of setting that straight from our first introduction about what we’re doing with the engagement and how we are because we’ve found customers are worried about that. So I think going too far north can get you into that territory. So you have to sort of be careful.

For other customers, it might be you are going north and it may be that to get to meet some of their requirements there will need to be something integrated better. Maybe they haven’t done anything to bring Fusion up, for example, with Workfront, but their requirements are to have all these kind of advanced integrations with Marketo or something. So I think you have to play it by ear a little bit, Ricardo, but I would caution us to be careful that so far I’ve had several clients that were real worried that us being in there and looking too far in the future meant trying to get them to buy more products. So I think we just have to walk a line there.

And I don’t know, Jon, whatever you think, but that’s my experience so far. I was just gonna say one of the coolest parts of being in field engineering ultimate success is as the tech person is I can always say, I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just wanna make this work.

Yes, yes. I mean, I will recommend, hey, if you’re using Target for emails, maybe look at AJO if you have that. But I’m not a sales person. I would tell you how.

Yeah, it was an aha moment for me to remember because I got kind of called out on it. And the first time I was in front of a customer and I was like, oh, yes, I will pull that forward now from now on.

Cool.

Okay, any other questions from the, I hope this was valuable to y’all. I hope that you have a better understanding of North Star architecture and how it can be really important and it can really help you move forward and align on a lot of things.

So I hope that was helpful.

So Justin. Yeah, there’s no other questions. We can probably conclude we have a minute left.

Thank you for everyone’s participation today. This is a great session. As mentioned, everyone who registered will get a link to the recording and we hope to see you in future sessions. Definitely.

Great. Cool. Thanks all, appreciate your time. Great session. Cheers. Bye. Bye.