Originally published on Healthcare Management Technology blog:

Consumerism has significant implications for understanding data analytics, including the need to better understand the healthcare customer before they ever become a patient. This emphasis on wellcare versus sickcare represents a massive shift for healthcare organizations that are beginning to look at data from multiple sources to ensure better outcomes. This includes a smooth patient experience from payer/provider selection diagnosis, admission, treatment, and post-treatment touchpoints.

Read the full post.

A Forbes and Sitecore study found that organizations have an average of 35 data gathering points, but little to no integration. This kinds of breakage in marketing and IT systems breaks down the customer experience and costs companies revenue in lost opportunity.

My article in Chief Marketer offers five ways for marketing to get their internal martech house in order. Read the full article.

A customer-first, omnichannel experience is reigning supreme across industries. We’ve seen it hold traction for years in telecom, media and entertainment (TME) and oft discussed, but omnichannel has been more slowly applied to other areas, such as healthcare. As healthcare begins to think of patients as customers and how to engage them across the spectrum of pre-and post-purchase of insurance or pre- and post-treatment, there is a lot to learn from their TME brethren.

Where Healthcare Can Heed Lessons Learned

Get the answers here.

It is critical to balance risk with reward and, when it comes to microservices, embrace an evolutionary approach and process

While no consensus exists on how to define microservices, it is generally agreed that they are an architectural pattern that is composed of loosely coupled, autonomous, fine-grained services. The services are independently deployable and communicate using a lightweight mechanism such as HTTP/REST. Enterprises that need to make frequent changes to their systems—and where time to market is paramount—need to be investigating how to introduce microservices in their legacy environments to realize a digital transformation that drives tangible business results.

The benefits and potential hurdles associated with adopting microservices are well documented. On the plus side, the modular and independent nature of microservices enables improvements in efficiency, scalability, speed, and flexibility. Detractors, however, frequently point to management and security challenges, especially when they pertain to customer-facing applications and services.

It’s all about the monkey

Read the full blog post on InfoWorld.com:

The most successful IT outsourcing decisions create truly innovative execution strategies that deliver meaningful business results. The outsourcing decision, however, frequently comes down to a cost-driven ROI calculation: how much will all this innovation cost us, and how long will it take to recover those costs? This is the wrong mindset and often the primary reason why IT outsourcing is generally underperforming.

Surveys from various industries have shown dramatic failure rates as high at 70 percent. Complaints come from both the clients and the service providers they turn to for the outsourcing. In one survey, more than 50 percent of buyers reported lower-than-expected economic outcomes. But service providers also complained about economic outcomes; specifically, about significant margin compression between 5 and 50 percent.

Read the full story in Data Center Journal.