Designing an Operating Model for Content Supply Chain Success

Transcript

Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining. Today, we’ll be getting started in just a couple more minutes.

Today’s session is on VRA session number three, to be focused on designing an operating model for content supply chain success. We’re going to just wait a few more minutes for other attendees to join.

While we’re waiting, I’ll put in in the chat a couple of icebreaker questions.

Again, thanks, everyone, for joining. Today’s session is on VRA session number three, focused on designing an operating model for content supply chain success. While we’re waiting for others to join, we do have other sessions coming up this quarter that you may be interested to attend as well. For those who are interested, I’ll put the links to those sessions in the chat.

On February the sixth, we’ll have the fourth VRA session focused on establishing executive sponsorship to drive success throughout the content supply chain. On February the 11th, we’ll have the fifth and last VRA session focused on change management strategies to operate your content supply chain.

And lastly, on February the 19th, there’ll be a session on seamless journeys, unlocking identity with CJA.

During our presentation today, if you have any questions, please put them in the chat.

Hello, everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining our third VRA session of the quarter. We’re going to focus today on resource investments specifically, with designing an operating model for content supply chain success. My name is Berenice Blanc and I work in Adobe’s Ultimate Success Organization. I’m a customer success manager where we focus all on helping Adobe customers get as much value as possible from their Adobe solution. I’m happy to be joined today by my colleague, Micah Morgan, who is our co-host and will support me with the interface and the Q&A chat throughout the session. So because we’re three minutes after the top of the hour, I’m going to kick off our session today. So first and foremost, thank you for your time and attendance. Just to note that this session is being recorded and a link to the recording will be sent out to anyone who registered, as well as the slide deck. So this webinar, as you can see, is a listen only format, but it’s very much intended for you to be participating. So as Micah mentioned, please post your questions in the chat as they’re coming through or any comments, feedback you may have, as well as you have the reactions that are available to you if you want to engage throughout the session. We’ll answer as much as possible your questions. There is a dedicated Q&A portion for this webinar at the end of the session. If we do not have time to cover all of the questions, note that we will make note of all of the questions and make a follow up. We’ll be sharing as well a survey poll at the end of the presentation that we’d love your participation in. This is in order to get your feedback and help us shape future sessions.

This is our agenda for today. We’ll first go over some introduction and definition on the topic. Then we’ll review content supply chain key roles and responsibilities, content supply chain operational governance, how to build a center of excellence model, and then we’ll review a couple of cross-functional models and I’ll leave you with some examples at the end of this presentation. And at the end, we’ll have this time for Q&A as mentioned before.

So where does VRA come from? For those of you who attended the preview series, this will be a little bit redundant, but we wanted to make sure that we reiterate that there are five VRA pillars that exist, roll them up to value, technology, resource investments, sponsorship, and or greediness. Today we’re focusing on resource investment.

Adobe interviewed about 100 executives, I think it was about two years ago, to try to understand their most common barriers to value realization. And this helped form the foundation that you’re seeing here on this screen, what we call now VRA. So each pillar is a critical theme. Absence of strategic planning within any one of them is often the root cause for failure of deploying and scaling your Adobe solutions.

For today’s session, we’ll focus on resource investment, so how to get to an operational model. So, so far in the first session, you’ve seen the WATs, which is the identification and development of use cases. The second session was focused on with WAT, which means it’s the architecture that build products, and now we’ll focus on who does what, when, and how. So the people, processes, and technology. Without strategic planning, content supply chain orchestration risks being fragmented, leading to suboptimal creative workflows and marketing campaign execution, compliance gaps, and inefficient resource use. So it’s a deliberate approach to ensure seamless integration with your more tech stack and maximize the platform’s potential.

Content supply chain, we refer to it as the end-to-end process involving creation, management, distribution of content. So this encompasses everything from initial planning, ideation stages, thorough drafting, editing, and approval to distribution, and finally archival.

There’s five key components to CSC. So when I say CSC, moving forward, I refer to content supply chain to be briefer. You have content strategy, content architecture, content production, content delivery, and content tagging. There’s those five components that are related to the key importance of content supply chain, which is personalization, efficiency and speed, quality and consistency, and data-driven decision-making, and finally, competitive advantage. So by adopting a comprehensive CSC approach, businesses can better meet the demands of their customers, streamline their operations, and drive greater efficiency and effectiveness in their content marketing efforts.

The five building blocks that you can leverage in order to optimize your content supply chain are built as you’re seeing here on the screen. This is the end-to-end process where you have planning, producing, approving, managing, and distributing content at scale. Adobe’s solution set that we call Gen Studio Solution has been built around those five main pillars. You have workflow and planning that you can realize with Workfront, creation and production with Creative Cloud, Firefly, Express, Rem.io, asset management with AEM Assets, Assets Essentials, Content Hub, delivery and activation through AEM Sites, Journey Optimizer, Compang, Marketo, and finally, reporting and insights that you can leverage through Analytics, CGA, Content Analytics, and Gen Studio for Performance Marketing.

So this is important to keep in mind for our conversation moving forward as we have content supply chain, we focus not on one solution, but on several solutions and across different clouds.

There is a lot getting in the way of value and customer success. So if you take a look at the right side of the screen, there’s a couple of like typical challenges that are faced by our customers. So we’ve learned over the past year, past few years that content supply chain optimization is complex and there’s many moving parts. This is a lot for customers to take in while they’re still running their day to day business. The complexity is amplified by organizational and technical challenges that if they are not addressed will provoke big obstacles and will be in the way of getting to value. So for organizations who have the capacity to adapt and scale effectively, they need to address that internal chaos upfront. Operational transformation and organizational readiness need to be top of mind along with the technical aspects of the solutions across the CSC.

What is an operating model? This is where you bring how people, process and technology work together day to day to execute your content supply chain. In other words, it is the bridge between architecture and value realization. It determines where and how you invest people, skills and time and how fast you get to the outcomes.

A successful operating model should provide a structured framework that supports collaboration across different teams and fosters organizational maturity and growth. It should be built on clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Additionally, cross-functional governance is critical to coordinate efforts across departments, enabling seamless decision making and alignment with strategic goals. Together, these elements create a robust foundation for operational excellence.

So this is what we’re going to review in our first section of this presentation. The key roles and responsibilities that you will need across your content supply chain.

The team structure recommendations here are high level and this can be positioned at suggested roles. So when you’re talking through with your different teams and you start thinking about the different roles that you’re going to need, you can use this as a blanket recommendation, depending on your organization size, on your industry, on your company specifics. Not all roles may be required that you’re seeing here listed across the three categories. Always keep in mind that also some individuals may operate in multiple roles. They’re going to wear different hats.

On this summary slide, you have an overview of what we call role clusters that exist and that you need for your CSC acceleration. For each of those, we’ve outlined the key responsibilities, the alignment to the program that they have, their unique value proposition, as well as some examples of activities they are performing.

This is to start thinking about how these roles are different and how they must collaborate. So we’ll dive into the specifics of each role cluster in the next slides.

First role we’re going to dive into is executive and senior marketing leadership. So you have some typical roles that I want you to just identify here on this slide. You have the chief marketing officer, chief digital or experience officer, some VP or director of marketing, and some VP or director of creative or content. So as you can see, those are pretty high up in the hierarchy. What are these roles responsible for? They set the vision, the funding, so the budget and the enterprise priorities for content supply chain, and they sponsor the operating model and the center of excellence. Their value proposition here is highlighted with like three main pillars, which is clarity, direct line of sight from content investment to operating model to measurable business outcomes. They provide governance, so confidence that brand risk and compliance are baked into how the teams are working. And then they provide efficiency and growth, so ability to redeploy budget from waste and rework into innovation and personalization. So they have a lot of influence and they’re here to set the vision and explain the why behind the changes as well as coordinating the efforts related to providing sufficient funding.

I wanted to highlight a couple of activity examples that they would perform if we’re thinking about the Adobe ecosystem and the different solutions that exist within CSC. So here I put you in Workfront, for example, in AM Gen Studio or CJA, and as well in the Journey tools, what specific actions they would perform.

What I wanted to also make sure we have a clear understanding is what you’re seeing at the bottom of this slide. Those are the main, I would call them steps that you see across the content supply chain journey. Plan and govern, intake and prioritize, create and review, store and govern assets, deliver and activate, and finally measure and optimize. The bottom line in blue indicates where those roles are present. So here executive and senior marketing leadership are present in the plan and govern phase, the intake and prioritize phase, and at the end with the measure and optimize. We’ll follow the same structure for all of the different roles that we’re going to go over right now.

The second role clusters are marketing and content operations. They are the ones that are at the heart of the center of excellence. We’ll talk more about center of excellence later in this presentation, but they’re the ones that are really designing and running the operating model, creating governance, and managing the day-to-day orchestration across the different teams and also across the different tools. Typical titles that you might be looking for here are marketing operations, content operations lead or CSE lead, people responsible for the COE, marketing PMO, program director, or the specific product owners that you have.

Their value proposition here is providing control, visibility, and scalability. Again, some examples here in a work from, they might be configuring request queues, for example, they defined folder structures in AEM, they align company structures in Gen Studio for Performance Marketing, or they build operating dashboards.

On the CSE lifecycle, they are present in almost all of the steps of the process except in deliver and activate here.

Creative production and DAM, here we have the team that produces on-brand creative and assets at scale and manage their lifecycle, their quality, and their findability. They’re the hands-on keyboard, the people creating all of the assets related to your marketing campaign. So you have executive creative director, design leads, studio manager, the DAM manager, the senior designer, for example. Their value prop is you want them to be focused, you want them to be able to reuse their assets, and you want them to have impact by measuring their performance data. Here you can see the role involvement that they have across the CSE lifecycle. And this is they’re creating and reviewing the assets, they’re storing and governing those assets, they’re delivering them and activating them in the different channels. And then they’re measuring and optimizing to understand what are the assets that perform the best, what are the ones that we can reuse, what are the ones that we need to adapt based on, for example, a local market deployment of a campaign.

Channel automation and analytics. Here they take approved content and audiences and turn them into live measurable experiences across channels and they close the loop with insights. Again, here you can have head of digital marketing, CRM, paid media lead, marketing automation manager or a digital analyst. The value prop for them is to ensure speed with faster campaign assembly, precision, where we align content, audiences and journey, and feedback loop. We want clear insights on what content works here, feeding into planning and creative for the next cycle. They’re involved in the store and govern asset phase, the deliver and activate, and the measure and optimize one.

Now that we have a very good understanding of the roles, which is the people side of the operational model with roles and responsibility, we’re going to discuss in this second section the operational governance of CSC, which is to mean the different events, the cadence and the roles that are necessary to ensure we have a good operating model.

These are the main steps. So this is why we’re recommending this as a best practice of a campaign orchestration workflow. So at a very high level, without going into too many details, you first have a marketer that would request a new campaign and submit a brief. Then the request gets converted into a project. That request is being validated and synced. The request is reviewed and prioritized by the content supply chain, CoE. And then finally, the campaign is built. All the assets are being created. You go through quality assurance and then it’s executed by operations.

If we’re going to drill down into each of those phases here, you’re seeing the roles that we’ve defined before in our first section. And what does this mean if we’re considering our end-to-end content supply chain journey? At the top of this slide, you have the different phases that are more detailed here. So first you have defining goals and strategy. Second, intake, prioritize and approve campaign. Third, design, brief and plan work. Four, create and review the content. Then you approve and store the assets. You assemble and personalize experiences. You activate across the different channels. And finally, you measure, learn and optimize. So here, you see that underneath each of those phases, you have specific actions that need to be performed, the ones that are numbered from one to nine. You have typical workflows that exist. And at the bottom, we have listed the roles again and when they are being involved. So that way you have the content supply chain journey, the specific actions and who’s executing and when. At the center of this slide, you should notice that there is a run and operate that’s listed as action number 10. This is the central phase and task, which is the run and operate of the content supply chain. This is the team that’s involved through every step of the process to maintain the operating model, maintain the standards, create specific races, govern the platforms and organizes the cadences of the meetings. How often are we meeting? So here, this is how we establish principles on people, process and technology.

On this slide, we’re providing you with a race specifically. So for the orchestration workflow, what does that mean? We have some key tasks that are being listed here on the left side. And then at the top, we’ve put you a mapping of like the typical role. So try to remember the role clusters that we went over in our first section. Here we’re trying to generalize a little bit more those role clusters. That is to say for defined campaign goals and strategic feed steering committee, we’re trying to understand, okay, who’s responsible, accountable, consulted or informed. The main roles that we’re putting here are leadership, CSE, COE, governance team, marketing ops, creative and managers, channel and automation, and then analytics and data. This needs to be customized and tailored to your specific organization, the industry you’re a part of, your company.

So consider this as like a first stab at like what this would look like for you and then refine as needed.

Establish governance meeting cadence. This is a question that we often get from our customers. How often do we need to meet? What types of meetings should we need to organize? Who are the people that should be present during those meetings? So there are different types of events throughout the year that you should be hosting when you’re starting to create a governance committee. So you have the annual customer journey, strategy meetings and workshops. Usually it’s a series of executive meetings, strategy workshops where you’re defining what you see here on the left side of the screen. You want continuous value driver identification. This is when you’re establishing your key business objectives for the year to which you’re attaching, as always, some key performance indicators. You’re reviewing your strategic roadmap and you have also thought leadership forum. This is where everybody is willing to bring ideas. And this is also something I wanted to point out during each of those specific events. You can have your Adobe partner being involved to help you think about all of those strategy events that you have and want to make sure you’re being accompanied.

Business reviews are more punctual. For example, you can have one at the annual kickoff. You can have quarterly check-ins, what we call QBRs and end of the year wrap up. This is the occasion for you to look back and look forward, understand the wins, understand what is left to do. You can have roadmap review and refinement events and enterprise enablement. Monthly leadership check-ins. This is to review specifically from your key business objectives, how do you break down this into specific initiatives or workstreams. You’re again reviewing KPU and KPI progress. This is where you can have a review of all of your reports. And you can also review escalations, main issues that we need to look into.

Biweekly discussions are meant for really the core team of your governance committee. This is workstream progress updates, next steps and blockers issues risk. This is way more tactical and this is where we have all of those prioritization discussions. The day-to-day content supply chain working team activities and meetings are happening as usual in parallel of those other activities.

You can generally look at the content supply chain team model as evolving through three stages. So we’re calling them incubate, scale, embedded. You could call them something different. But we wanted to provide you here some guidance. Again, this should be customized and adapted, but this is a clear framework that is efficient and that is proven by our customers. So if we consider the size when we’re incubating, this is for example, you’re launching one of our new products, but you may already own the rest of the suite. You always want to start small with like a pilot team. So that’s why the scope of influence is limited to pilot team or one business unit or one region, for example. And you focus on a handful of priority campaigns and channels to test out the model. What does it do from a content supply chain acceleration? It proves value on a few end-to-end campaign journeys from the brief creation to the assets creation and finally the activation of those campaigns. We’re trying here to prove that it reduces the cycle time and the rework.

The tool utilization, you can look at it from like just one tool perspective. Ideally, all of the different tools that you have in your workflow, it should be basic, but it should be consistent. So you’re using all of the core tools and you have a narrow set of use cases. So you’re very focused and targeted.

Processes are still mostly manual or semi-manual. So that’s what we call sometimes ad hoc. The scalability is proven via a small number of repeatable patterns. The resource allocation, because this is a pilot, it’s usually part-time or dual-hat. You’re going to have people being present in different types of roles and responsibilities on top of like assuming their responsibilities from their day-to-day job.

Training and development, here the governance committee should be focused on creating specific targeted trainings for their pilot team. I highlighted all of this in like a blue rectangle because this is usually where you want to As you’re scaling, you want to increase the size of your governance committee. You want to have cross-business unit influence. You want to expand to show that you can influence on enterprise standards, processes, and priority campaigns. You’re involved in roadmap decisions. What does it do? It drives systematic acceleration. You can reuse templates. You can have modular content patterns and shared asset libraries across the different teams. You’re also going to notice that there is a broader adoption of the full CSC stack with defined integrations. This is when we’re noticing that the maturity of our customers is a little bit more elevated. You do not only own several products, but you’re making the best use of them via integrations and automations. You have standardized workflows, templates, and metadata that enable repeatability across teams and regions.

You have dedicated roles. This is the main difference as you’re looking at not only the size and the scope of influence, but specifically the resource allocation, dedicated roles across the different clusters that we saw, and structured programs and playbooks that are being at the disposal of the different teams of the different business units to adapt the training to their specific role and to their specific regions, for example. Once the CSC team is being embedded into every area of the business, you should have a good number of champions that are being identified. We call them champions or subject matter experts. There are people that have been usually involved from the very beginning of the onset, and you have a lean center of excellence that is built. We’ll talk more later. We’ll have a dedicated part on COE. Here you’re fully integrated into the enterprise planning and the governance. This is where you should see that every resource is portfolio-based and data-driven, and you have a continuous learning culture where the training materials are being updated and improved based on your users’ feedback and based on the evolution of your processes and of your business.

In this third section, we’ll talk about the COE, which is the center of excellence, more specifically.

A center of excellence is a strategic organizational framework that focuses on building and scaling digital capabilities across a business. This is what ensures that people, processes, and technology work in harmony to meet the company’s objectives. The COE plays a critical role in establishing governance, planning, and change management practices that enable a smooth technology adoption and effective customer engagement. Whether you’re operating within a single enterprise or across a distributed environment, the COE helps standardize best practices and drive consistent results. This is making it a vital component for digital transformation and operational excellence.

On this slide, we wanted to highlight the strategic benefits of establishing a center of excellence within your organization. It focuses on four main pillars. As you can see here, you have leadership, organizational framework, governance, and communities of practice. The COE drives company-wide alignment on your digital strategy.

It ensures that everyone is working towards the common goals. It accelerates time to value by streamlining processes and reducing inefficiencies. It provides clear KPIs and governance structures that help maintain accountability and measure success effectively. Additionally, fostering communities of practice empower teams to share knowledge and innovate collaboratively. Communities of practice are usually groups of people that may belong to different teams, different business units, but who have a similar role and similar responsibilities.

Overall, the COE plays a crucial role in reducing costs, enhancing operational efficiency, and creating a proactive culture that anticipates and meets customer needs more effectively.

Depending on the stage that a company is in, different models might apply, and this maturity scale helps us visualize a little bit what this might look like. In the initial decentralized phase, responsibility for content and activation sits within individual teams, like brand, digital, regional marketing, IT, or agencies, each running their own content supply chain. So what this looks like in terms of CSC. Each team has its own way to plan, brief, create, store, and activate the content. Workfront or your equivalent work management tool, AEM, Creative Cloud, and Channels might all be present, but they’re used differently by each team or they’re not used by all the teams. Asset libraries live on local drives, on SharePoint, on agency, on the storing systems. There is no single source of truth. So what does it mean? You have duplicated creative effort, you have inconsistent metadata, and you have conflicting templates. Personalization and reuse are possible, but only in small local pockets, and any wings are hard to scale because process standards and ownership are not shared. On the second phase, which is the centralized phase, you have organizations that unify to content supply chain efforts through a center of excellence. So this is what’s bringing together the core CSC capabilities, talent, data, tools, and processes into a single shared engine.

So CSC Gen Studio COE owns the end-to-end operating model from intake, planning, creative workflows, dam governance, and activation patterns. Workfront, AEM asset sites, Gen Studio, Creative Cloud, AGO, Marketo, Analytics, etc. are configured and governed centrally with shared templates, taxonomies, and standards. So the campaigns here run through the center of excellence. You create the brief, you orchestrate the workflow, you govern the digital asset management system, and then you activate the patterns. Here you can see already a strong increase in content velocity, reuse, and brand consistency. There is a clear ownership through the RACI, governance cadences, and platform health. So it’s easier to stand up CSC accelerators. You’re able to have global tool rollouts, you have modular content frameworks, and then you have generative AI guardrails that are put in place.

I’m going to focus on the COE model moving forward because this is where most organizations start to really see a steep change in CSC performance. So over time, many organizations evolve to a federated model. This is what you’re seeing here on the right edge of the slide, where the COE maintains the CSC backbone and standards, while the business units in the regions gain control autonomy to execute. So the COE still owns the core foundation. It’s at the center, if you will. They own the platform strategy, the integrations, the metadata, the global templates, and the operating model. And then you embed those content supply chain champions in regions and business units where they use the shared tools and patterns, but they adapt the briefs, the content, and the activation to their local markets or to their specific channels. So your governance here becomes two layers. You have central consoles that set the standards and monitor the KPI, while the local steering groups make tactical decisions within those guardrails. So this way, you have a balance between global consistency and local relevance. CSC is truly repeatable and scalable across brands, markets, and use cases. And personalization at scale is no longer a pilot. This is embedded in how the organization plan creates and activates the content.

On this slide, we’re going to focus mainly on the differences between centralized and decentralized organizational approaches. So I’ve touched on it with the federated model and the centralized model on the previous slide. But I wanted to show you here how this differs in terms of flexibility, focus, autonomy, and standardization.

So you have centralized systems that emphasize on the enterprise-wide standardization and the strategic focus. But the downside is that they’re lacking flexibility. The opposite, the decentralized systems offer greater autonomy and adaptability at the business unit level or at the market level, but they can suffer from inconsistent standards. So the COE with agile pods that we have is a different model that represents a hybrid model, where you balance these tradeoffs to try to optimize both the standardization and flexibility. It’s taking the best of both models to try to create a brand new approach.

Here you have further details on what are the pros and cons of each model. So I’m going to focus on the enterprise-wide first. So when you have a centralized model, what you have is breadth and strategic impact. Disadvantages is it is so in bureaucratic, a lot of bottlenecks because you have to go all the way, the management chain gain approval. It’s a little bit disconnected from the actual business and the local business units and market. They’re more focused on the numbers, on the reporting, and it’s less effective for the BUs.

With a decentralized model, we have depth and it is more tactical. Now the downside is that we don’t have standards or coordination. There is no real training or shared practice best practices across the organization. There is no enterprise perspective and that can make you lose sight of the KBOs and the KPIs. There is inefficient tactical use of resources and there is limited growth opportunities for the team members that stay stuck in their small organizations.

The center of excellence with agile pods shows you a unique list where, as you can see, because they are at the center of this graph, they are more balanced in terms of the level of flexibility and the level of focus that they have between being enterprise-wide focused or business unit focused and making sure there is enough flexibility but also enough autonomy to standardize.

The disadvantages that we wanted to highlight here is that you need strong executive sponsors. With a COE, with agile pods, you need to make sure that you have leaders that are involved in your initiatives, that they are the ones providing the vision, they are the ones explaining the why behind the change, they are the ones that explain why this matters for the business so that you have your local teams that are motivated, that are involved, and are then being pushed to adopt new processes. It requires buying across the organization, so you need to make sure all the BUs and all are working together. As a result, it requires more communication and more coordination.

There are five main steps that we wanted to simplify here to go through the COE maturity path. You have COE Reginess, where essentially you’re at the very beginning. All that you’re doing is you’re completing the current state assessment. You’re doing some sort of audit. You want to look at your MarTech ecosystem, analyze what are the gaps, what are the challenges, interview your users, look at your numbers and your reports. You complete the competency mapping and the skills assessment and you define the enablement needs.

Second step, which is number one here, is to define the initial COE. This is where you define roles and processes, the governance, you build cross-functional teams, you design potential enablement paths, and you prepare change management plan and reporting. What I’ve put at the bottom of this slide here, that a change management program is required to sustain success, this is essential. Usually change management and operating model and governance, they really work hand in hand. So to ensure that you have a soft and successful transition, you need to ensure that you have a change management program in place.

Step number two is to launch and operate. This is where you would establish a first CSC journey, pods, and pilot. You establish a customer-centric marketing operation approach by building those pods. You pilot this agile delivery methodology and cross-functional team, and then you test and learn. And you see how this is working.

Third phase is the rollout. You implement this selected journey and you deliver campaigns for your first campaigns across the cross-functional team. Again, here you test and learn and you iterate on the journey pods based on the results that you’re getting and you implement agile marketing delivery methods.

The step number four is to then scale. You manage now the entire CSC life cycle. So this is not just one initial CSC journey, but like all of the different journeys that your customers may be going through with cross-functional marketing delivery and iterative cycle. You establish an organization-wide data-driven mindset and you optimize customer experiences accordingly. Obviously, the COE maturity path is like a phased approach. It takes times, if not years, until you’re able to properly scale. But making sure that you’re going through each step with a lot of time and a lot of being very conscientious about making sure that you’re going through each step and ticking all the boxes is necessary here. Wanting to scale too fast will most likely result in an inefficient model.

Some considerations to be aware of with center of excellence. At the very core of this graph, you see that the strategy is at the center. This is what we call this vision. This is why leaders need to be involved. You have your three main pillars that are the technology, the products you’ve invested in, your people, who are going to support your processes, who are the roles and responsibilities, and then the process, which is the design of the operating model.

There’s a lot of questions that you can start asking yourself when you’re starting to build your COE. And so I’ve highlighted a couple of examples of questions that you should ask yourself with your organization when you start brainstorming across the different components from delivery to enablement, knowledge, quality compliance, requirements through lifecycle management, standardization of processes, collaboration structure, skills, and accountabilities. So this should really help you get started on what is the work that needs to be done and where should we get started. And also doing the inventory or the audit of what you have currently.

Put together a little roadmap for transitioning to a center of excellence. So first, this is the strategy. Who will own the governance of the transformation? You could hire external resources that will help shape the strategy. You’re looking for a partner that knows the best path to save you time. This is one option. Every brand builds a clear charter and measure for success. Identify the high value use cases. Little side note here that your ultimate success team can definitely spend a great deal of time to help you evaluate what are your best use cases that bring the biggest ROI. So you can talk to your account team if you want support with the development of those use cases.

Benchmark your current personalization maturity and understand where you’re at, what are the gaps.

Second pillar is technology. So assess what you have in place for technology. What are the gaps that would inhibit you from being able to personalize at scale in real time? Get the data right, making sure you’re looking at the data from all of your different tools. Brands who make this transition set it up so they can democratize data and mean by doing so they enable the organization to move faster. Upgrading or buying new tools. More than 80% of brands upload technology during this transition. You can hire tech partners. You can work with your, again, your the ultimate success team for implementation and to reduce risk of later issues due to lack of good implementation and processes being put in place.

The third piece, looking at talent. This is where you need to quantify skill and resource gaps. So you look at what you have today. What are the people that you have in place? What are the different roles and the different skill sets that they have? And then based on this, you can create training plans based on the new skills and the resources that will be needed. You can upskill and reskill employees on the new tools and the program management. This is a great way for them to expand their career and to learn new skills if necessary. Very technical resources or because all of your current employees already wear different hats, you can hire external for new roles to infuse new expertise. Training is always ongoing, so plan for this to ensure that the skills are current. This is one of the main training is one of the main pieces of governance. And this is something that is constantly evolving because your organization constantly evolves.

And then finally, you have process change management. You can conduct a change management impact. You map the change impacts to different interventions. You tie your critical business processes. And again, you can hire external partner to help with both the tech rollout and the communication plan. This is also something that Adobe can support you with. The fifth session of this VRA series will be dedicated specifically to change management. We’ll have a series on February 11th, so I really encourage you to attend because they’re going to really drill down into those details.

All right, so we’ve just talked about the COE and how it underpins our content supply chain from planning and creative workflows through to activation and measurement. But the COE on its own isn’t enough to mature your CSC use cases. So to really scale value, you need cross-functional models where different roles across content supply chain are coming together. So it’s not just individual business units. So it means you have strategy and brand, you have marketing operations, you have creative, digital asset management, channel owners, and data analytics. They’re all having a very clear part in the use case and the company planning faces. So in that model, CSC isn’t owned by a single team. It’s an end-to-end workflow that’s jointly governed. So I’m going to go through all of those different cross-functional models and governance here in this section. The key point is that as you mature, you move from siloed teams running their own content supply chain to cross-functional pods or consoles that own specific journeys and use cases together.

All right, so on this slide, this is almost taking a step back and understanding what is required for a successful COE. You need sponsorship and support. So looking at the left side of the screen, this is the organization structure that you need. You have key executives that provide the vision and the credibility. Then you have your CIR committee or what we call usually CIRCO that provides standards and governance over the capability. And then you have all of the orchestration team. This is what we call the core team. They execute through dedicated specialists. So you have here some more detailed roles and responsibilities that are listed on the right column, as well as the time dedicated. This is to give you some, you know, almost like a guide on how often these people are meeting and what are the types of discussions that they’re having.

Program leadership sets strategy with joint business and tech expertise and delivers with cross-functional agile team. Okay, an important aspect of making the CSC work is a strong program leadership. So you need expertise in three key areas. First is the CSC experience strategy, which involves translating the enterprise roadmap into CSC use cases and journey. Second is capability strategy, which involves owning and implementing the technology required to power those use cases and resolving blockers as required. The third one is the program management, which involves the more day-to-day management and the oversight and so the measurement of progress and the ROI at the program level. So program leadership can optimize speed and efficiency by delivering these objectives through a combination of agile teams and core capabilities. The agile cross-functional teams drive towards specific, measurable, and distinct objectives. Like for example, they’re going to be launching a use case. They’re typically oriented to customer journey faces like acquisition or customer segments, and they’re typically composed of six to seven cross-functional fully dedicated FTEs. Again, this number on full-time employees is variable, but this is just to make sure that we understand there are several people involved, which helps break down the traditional silos that exist. So you have an exact mix of roles. You have marketers, creatives, DAM, channel data, depending on the initiative.

The capabilities team, this is what you have listed here at the bottom right of the slide, they own the CSC capabilities and the products required to power buying group engagement. These resources might be dedicated to buying group engagement, shared depending on the different business needs that you may have.

Here, I wanted to call out, like if you remember at the very beginning of our presentation, in the section number one where we did some definition, I was highlighting the common roadblocks or the common challenges that are being faced by customers when they’re trying to activate or accelerate their content supply chain. Here, those best practices can serve as general recommendation to bridge the gap and avoid those challenges. So best practices areas that we have listed here are campaign governance and ownership, structured briefing and documentation, end-to-end campaign steps, feedback and learning, leadership engagement, and training and scale.

Again, here we created a mapping where you have the key practices and how this would appear in real life to the best practice area, and then how. How you’re executing this, which types of tools are you leveraging. So hopefully this provides a good model.

This slide and the following one are concrete examples of a proposed operating model. So here you need to remember again, this needs to be tailored to your organization’s unit structure, goals and maturity. But agile teams are great for execution. Due to their lean nature, they’re great for driving speed to market of outcomes under the oversight of the program leadership. So program leadership, this is what you have on the left side of the screen, and then the dedicated program on the right side. You have the SVP of digital that’s kind of like at the top of the two agile teams, and then you have those two unique agile teams. So in this example, with those two agile teams, what are we seeing? On the left, this team is focused on activating experience-led CSE use cases for acquisition, for example. This team is led by a use case owner with dedicated representation across core CSE functions that are needed to launch acquisition campaigns end to end. You have the marketing or the brief owner, you have the work front and the operation owners, you have the creative and the dam, channel activation, data segmentation and testing. In practice, this team runs the full pipeline for a set of acquisition journey.

On the right side, you have another agile team that’s focused on a broader business outcome. Like for example, you want to increase mobile app CSAT results through better content being pushed and experiences to your customers. This pod includes a digital lead, a creative lead, an app program manager, product owners. Instead of owning dedicated technical resources, they pull in shared CSE platform and data resources as needed. So rather than having dedicated technical resources, the team leverages shared resources as required. So depending on business priorities and constraints, either team structure can be used and the actual composition of roles can deeply vary.

Putting org structure and operating model together. This is a case study example that you’re seeing here. So we have a company that initially had a fragmented content supply chain, different departments on pieces of the progress process. So you have planning, creative, asset storage, activation. They were working in silos with their own tools and ways of working.

Despite a centralized setup, they recognized the value of personalization and had already made some investment in a couple of different tools like Workfront, AEM, Creative Cloud, and Activation tools, but they lacked an integrated operating model. So here the solution is to establish a content supply chain center of excellence. This COE is focused on four pillars. Customer-centric CSE use cases to define and prioritize campaign journeys, activation strategies where you have standard patterns for how assets and journeys are orchestrated across the channel, data and content readiness, and then MarTech and CSE enablement. So the COE is comprised of your exec sponsor, your circle, your program team, and your core team.

Here you can see how all of the roles and all of the different clusters are essential for your overall program organization structure and op model and how they work together. So the feedback loop in this model is crucial for ensuring continuous optimization and alignment with business goals.

All right, so we went through the four main sections of our presentation. I wanted to leave you with some key takeaways. And so each little block is summarizing the top three key takeaways from each section. There’s top three things that customers must do to accelerate their content supply chain is I was going to leave you with like some best in class examples and to simplify all of this information. The number one is to make sure you’re standardizing and connecting your end-to-end workflow. From planning all the way through activation and insights. The second piece is to build a centralized searchable asset foundation to serve as your single source of truth. And the third one is to leverage the tools that you have today, such as AI and automation to scale creation and personalization. Those are essential to scaling content creation and personalization.

What are the next steps? Assuming that you have done everything that we have recommended at this point in time. If you want to have three key takeaways, number one is to build your cross-functional team. Look at what you have today. Identify the roles that are going to be needed. Appoint some sponsors.

Connect with your leadership and make sure you have your core team in place. Then once you have that, you have the people aspect that is put in place. You need to focus on the process. Design your dedicated program operating model. And lastly, this is where we really want to call out that your Adobe account team is here for support. Please reach out to them. There’s an incredible team of strategies that can help you through every step of the process to make sure that you’re designing an operating model that is unique to your organization and that will be efficient.

So that’s it for our presentation.

If you have any questions, please throw them in the chat. We’re going to launch a poll in order to get your feedback about this presentation.

And yes, I see. Do we get the recording of the call? Absolutely. You will get the recording of the call. You’re going to get the slide deck as well. If when you get all of this via email, you want to follow up with questions, this is also possible. So please take a moment to answer the questions on this poll. This is really helping us understanding if this was beneficial and also helping us shape future sessions for the upcoming quarters. We’re always listening to our customers, trying to understand what is most critical, to create thought leadership content.

I’m going to give everybody a minute to fill out the questions in the poll. I don’t see any other questions in the Q&A chat.

Thank you, Benjamin. Appreciate the feedback.

And a reminder, before we close out, do not forget to register for the two other upcoming sessions focused on VRA for content supply chain, specifically, so session number four and number five that are upcoming this week and the following week.

All right, I will stop sharing my screen.

And I will end the recording. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your participation. Take care.