Adobe Workfront – A Collaborative Solution for the Enterprise
Covid-19 has forced brands to rethink their digital initiatives. Companies are increasingly adopting an operating model that enables them to rapidly respond to consumers, employees, and partners as they shift towards an efficient way of exchanging value or information with the brand. This operating model is constantly adding new marketing solutions, more manual processes, and complex marketing workflows within its enterprise. This is evident as 2020 saw 13.6% more Martech solutions added to the Marketing Technology Landscape. A recent Forrester Global Emerging Technology Survey shared that 37% of digital business executives are concerned with their staff not having enough bandwidth while people, process and technology challenges are hindering their teams in effectively communicating with their consumers.
The initiatives to change how brands must operate now and in the future are business critical. While adopting new marketing solutions are critical, brands must also focus on initiatives that deliver highly collaborative solutions for their marketing teams so that they can operate at scale to deliver the best and most relevant digital output to their consumer. Marketing at-scale requires marketing teams to spend their valuable time on high-value tasks like understanding the consumer and delivering the best message. These teams will benefit from an efficient workflow that connects all their tools, processes and team members within a single collaborative workspace where they can rapidly share their ideas, identify new trends and cross-collaborate to unleash creativity within their brand’s consumer experiences.
As the types of marketing tools increase in variety and complexity, it is necessary for teams to use connected collaborative solutions to operate and seamlessly manage the output from these tools. With a single operating platform to produce digital artifacts from any integrated enterprise tool, marketing teams can finally focus on their consumer’s shifting demands and the changing marketplace.
Collaboration Work Management (CWM) solutions is a category that intends to deliver a transformative operating model for brands that want to connect their teams, their technology, and their processes so that the teams can focus on producing the next best digital artifact and not on the duplicative and manual processes that drag them down.
Per a recent Forester survey, 75% of more than 10K global information workers surveyed were satisfied with their CWM solution. The CWM category offers many solutions for brands to consider when identifying the best CWM for their enterprise.
Workfront is a leader in this Forrester Wave category
Adobe Workfront
Adobe Workfront is a Collaborative Work Management Solution. It allows teams to centralize work in a single platform and enables them to focus on being strategic and creative while removing the distractions and manual processes from their workflow. Teams can build their own personalized and connected workspaces for the purpose of cross-collaboration and to gather and manage information between enterprise teams and systems. Connectivity across enterprise systems is enabled with Workfront Fusion, a platform that teams can use to integrate with virtually any enterprise application for the purpose of coordinating digital work across systems and teams. It’s a rule-based workflow that can be rapidly built with available codeless connectors that make it easy for information to flow between virtually all enterprise systems. This enables the team to focus on their task while staying accountable, transparent, and confident in the quality of their digital output.
Workfront’s AI enabled solutions allow teams to simply gather information from enterprise systems for the purpose of understanding various scenarios and decide on the best course of action. Workfront makes it easy to integrate simple collaborative tools such as email and instant messaging within the full enterprise marketing stack. With this integration, teams can use these tools to engage in simple conversations, brainstorm and then seamlessly convert those blue-sky ideas into tangible, assignable tasks. These tasks can then be tracked within Workfront while the teams use the enterprise marketing tools to complete the task. Teams can then have complete line of sight into their marketing programs which will allow them to shift or change strategies as soon as they notice a new trend or shifting consumer demand.
An enterprise workflow enabled by a CWM solution such as Workfront can unlock efficiencies and effectiveness for a brand and its teams. Below is a sample list of scenarios where a CWM can drive performance and value:
⦁ My teams use ad-hoc tools such as emails, messaging tools or meetings to review, approve and execute media plans. This leads to errors in our media execution.
⦁ Our current processes to identify and allocate resources leverages spreadsheets, instant messaging, emails, and meetings. We do not have a simple way to manage our resources or a line of sight into our resource needs and status.
⦁ Our content requires weeks to plan, create and deliver as it requires several internal and external stakeholders to weigh in on the strategy.
⦁ My teams have more tools and siloed processes than ever which slows down the overall workflow to build and deliver our digital outputs.
⦁ My teams are virtual and co-located globally, so we need a collaborative workspace that can bring everyone together to produce digital artifacts in the most efficient way possible.
Today, teams are creating and delivering more content than ever. Privacy and compliance requirements are driving teams to build new workflows and processes so that they can respect their consumer’s preferences while exchanging value using the most contextual content. With tools like Workfront, the most successful brands are already committed to delivering differentiated and high value experiences for their consumers externally and their employees internally. A commitment to adopt an operating model that is built on collaboration, connectivity and efficient management will enable brands to deliver marketing programs at speed and at scale, all while earning the trust and intent of their customers and employees.
Harsh Walia is VP/group director, technology strategy at Digitas
