Michael Facemire on digital transformation
From Keynote by Forrester Principal Analyst, Michael Facemire @ XChange 2016 · · Robert Janssen
“The biggest challenge in building digital experiences is connecting traditional back-end systems, which power our business, to the new front-end experiences on mobile devices and web.”
On , Michael Facemire, Chief Technology Officer at FORRESTER RESEARCH INC, spoke about digital transformation during Keynote by Forrester Principal Analyst, Michael Facemire @ XChange 2016 on Robert Janssen.
About Michael Facemire
Michael Facemire, Chief Technology Officer at Forrester Research, has spoken at industry events in 2015 and 2016 about the shift toward customer-centric digital experiences. In a 2016 keynote, he argued that businesses must build great customer experiences rather than simply digitizing existing data, citing USAA's mobile check deposit as an example of focusing on customer needs. He noted that users spend most of their mobile time on a few major apps and generally do not want to open additional apps, and he emphasized that connecting traditional back-end systems to new front-end experiences is the primary challenge in building digital solutions. Facemire also highlighted JavaScript and Node.js as key technologies for coordinating modern systems, and he pointed to web components and service workers as important standards for enabling offline capabilities and cross-platform development. In a 2015 presentation, Facemire discussed the need to move from a data-driven to a customer-obsessed mindset, advocating for a feedback-driven development lifecycle that delivers minimum viable products quickly and iterates based on analytics. He described composition as the future of development, arguing that teams must assemble reusable components rather than writing new code from scratch. Facemire also pointed to embedded experiences like Google Now and Siri as the next step in composability, where devices proactively stitch together information for users. He noted that delivery timelines have compressed from 12–18 months to 2–4 months, and he encouraged organizations to adopt open-source tools from leading companies rather than viewing themselves as behind.