How Did Our 2018 Predictions Fare?

In early January, 2018, RSG made twelve predictions for the coming year.  It's an annual tradition for us to go back the following year to measure the accuracy of our foresight.  (You can peruse our 2017 assessment, where we came up 71% accurate...)

2018 Digital Workplace Predictions

1. Office 365 Supplants SharePoint

Yeah, this totally happened.  How do I know?  Redmond released SP 2019 and almost nobody cared. Now, I know some of you will remain stuck on-prem and will upgrade your estate to the latest version in the coming years...but it's not because you want to. 

But what is O365 actually good (and not good) at?  Check out RSG's hard-hitting research.

2. Community Manager Revolt

Yes, this is happening and continues to happen, especially with the apparent Jive free-fall.  Where's a sophisticated community program manager to turn?  Don't say Yammer or Facebook...

3. Cambrian Explosion of Digital Workplace Tools

I'm not sure...  Office 365 is pre-occupying many enterprise budgets, and we still see more energy around customer digital.  Are new toolsets coming online? Yes.  Cambrian explosion?  Probably not, at least not yet.

4. Employee Experience Centers of Excellence

I wish!  Unfortunately most enterprises look to their digital workplace vendors to supply effective user experiences, and when that doesn't happen, typically nothing gets done about it.

5. Small-P Workplace Portals

We're definitely seeing more of this, especially with the demise of SharePoint on-prem and O365's dearth of dashboard services.

6. DAM for Your Digital Workplace

It's not a huge trend, but we see it, and it's promising, and it's going to continue.  DAM technology has a growing set of use cases.

2018 Digital Marketing & Customer Engagement Predictions

1. Customer Data Platform Explosion

Without a doubt.  Check out RSG's growing roster of CDP vendor evaluations.

2. Vertical CRM Implosion

We were wrong.  As CRM becomes less of a data store and more of a process platform, industry-specific solutions will continue to matter.

3. DAM Vendor Market Split

Yes.  View this recorded webinar.

4. Rethinking Segments and Campaigns in Your Marketing Automation Platform

This is totally happening and smart enterprises are starting to think about adjusting their technology investments accordingly

5. Marketing Dashboard Revival

Yes.  With the revival of market ops in the digital age, nearly all our subscribers want this.

6. Headless WCM Backlash

Sort of. Hype has surely died down. The market no longer sees headless architectures as some magical solution to your multi-channel engagement needs.  We're settling into a comfy "head-optional" world without much fuss.  (Although a lot of interesting things did happen in the WCM marketplace during 2018.)

How Did We Do?

By my count we were 8.5 out of 12, or once again about 71%.  That's pretty typical for the 15 years we've been prognosticating...

What About 2019?

While you're here, be sure to check out RSG's predictions for this year.

 

Other Microsoft Office 365 posts

Latest Review of Office 365

You may struggle to find truly critical evaluations of the Office 365 platform, and that's where RSG comes in

Take a Critical Look at Office 365

It can be difficult to map employee journeys with O365 experiences, since the platform tends to be feature rich, but application poor.