Congratulations to Klaus!

As somebody who has looked up to Klaus Petersen and his involvement in the Sitecore community for over a decade, I have to start off with the amazing recognition done for Klaus at this year's Symposium. Kathie Johnson presented Klaus with the inaugural Sitecore MVP Red Jacket award which recognizes a Sitecore MVP for an outstanding achievement. Klaus has been an MVP since 2008, and like he said on stage, remembers visiting the Sitecore office when it was just 5 people.

Klaus has held Sitecore MVP titles for Technology, Commerce, and Ambassador and is still going strong! This year he presented at the closing keynote for SUGCON Europe in Dublin and held a breakout session on retail order management there and spoke at SUGDE. He has had a continuous history of giving back to the community and driving Sitecore forward. I remember another "first" when John West was awarded the Lifetime MVP award in New Orleans and Klaus spoke on all the contributions John has made. I hope that Klaus had a Klaus to give a speech for him at this year's party!

Congratulations again!

Klaus Petersen receives his red MVP jacket from Kathie Johnson and Eric Stine at Sitecore Symposium 2024. See the official Alpha Solutions blog for more: https://www.alpha-solutions.com/da/indsigt/sitecore-mvp-red-jacket

HIPAA HIPAA HOORAY!

Pardon the dad-pun, but I've been waiting for Sitecore to finally announce the HIPAA compliance for XM Cloud and their other products.

I recently recorded a webinar about migrating to XM Cloud and Netlify, and one of the things I called out was the need to check for compliance with organizational requirements around privacy, security, and specific legal restrictions. HIPAA is a big one to unlock the Healthcare industry in the United States.

Eric Stine, the new Chief Operating Officer for Sitecore, kicked off the day by reiterating what was said on day one: Sitecore will never use your data to train their LLMs. This was not only for meeting legal standards for compliance, but also ethics and morals. As stated by Eric: "the power of trust is earned in drops, but lost in buckets."

This was a lead-up for the big announcement that Sitecore has had all of the XM Cloud/CDP/Personalize/Content Hub products go through the evaluation to now be HIPAA compliant! This is going to be huge for the healthcare teams that have been wanting to go SaaS but can't find the solution they need that also meets HIPAA requirements.

As mentioned by Rick Heron from Western Health Advantage, who joined Eric on stage: "This is a big f-ing deal."

Eric Stine, Sitecore and Rick Heron, Western Health Advantage, talk about health care industry challenges and HIPAA

Go Go Power Builders!

Other than those two moments, today's keynotes were primarily focused on Sitecore customers. Between announcing the Sitecore Experience Award winners and a bunch of customer story presentations, I felt like there was a common theme: aligning the physical on-premise experience with the digital experience.

Azhar Kholwadia from Aston Marton spoke about their focus on getting their dealers rich digital experience data so that they be better informed in the continuous lifecycle of the customer. They want to give that continuous luxurious experience across the channels, and that requires getting deeper into data.

Angela Ross, from Cracker Barrel, talked about how they blend their tech stack with the tradition in-restaurant so that customers get a better overall experience. They focused on things like table wait times on their site so that there was a smoother experience getting to the restaurant.

Christopher Davis, from The Tile Shop, highlighted that they felt they had a huge opportunity with online commerce but they struggled to do things with speed and confidence. The premium in-store experience was difficult to translate online, but they were still seeing double-digit growth online and were being asked to get exponential growth.

In the case of the Tile Shop, they needed change. They looked at a complete overhaul of the architecture and a rebuild that led to a 5 times page load speed increase. Their marketing team was freed up to be independent, allowing the tech team to focus. This is a story that I've seen again and again.

Is it the technology?

Often, companies aren't really struggling with a technology platform. The platform might be fine, but the implementation is often done to the needs of the business at the moment of purchase. Those needs change, but we rarely see the ability for teams to change their digital platforms and experiences at the speed of the business. So you see big projects every 3-5 years where everything gets re-imagined onto a new stack with new technology, architected to keep the good from before but change over to what will work for the business now.

Yes, there are exceptions where customers evolve on their existing platform gradually and continuously, but I haven't found this to be the norm. It's often a minor change, updating to keep supported and resolving major issues, but not actually continuously transforming.

I suppose the advice I want to give here is this: when you feel like you and your business can't make it to the next level, it's probably not AI or a new tech stack that is going to solve your problems. All of these companies had great tech in place already, but the challenges they faced went beyond what tech that they purchased. Vendors are going to tell you that they understand your business and can solve your problems, if only you signed up for a 5 year contract before the quarter ends. Buying new software doesn't solve your problem unless you are also taking advantage of what that software can do.

For example, if you are on Sitecore XP today and only using the content management piece and disappointed that you aren't able to have your marketing team work without involving the dev team... that's not a vendor technology problem. That's an issue where the implementation you have today doesn't match the needs your team has today.

I think I got off on a tangent here as I was writing, but I suppose listening to all these stories brings that out in me! 😀 Sitecore Symposium is a big vendor conference aimed to get you excited about the latest and the greatest, while showcasing amazing accomplishments by teams around the world. I think the unifying piece that I see across these stories is that you need to understand how to address your audience needs and then build to create a great experience for your team and your customers. Don't trust the tech to do it for you, people are going to be at the center of the solution here!