The following post was written by Anjali Yakkundi, a researcher at Forrester Research, where she serves application development and delivery professionals.

Organizations today often take a broad focus when it comes to digital customer experiences. Such an approach carries great risks for firms: too much experimentation for not enough return; too much duplication and waste; and too little use of data to drive and measure business results. And often, IT professionals are only involved at the end of a digital experience strategy. I’ve spoken to many organizations that recount instances when the business only comes to IT when it’s time to implement a campaign or large-scale digital experience initiative.
The result? IT ends up playing the “no man” to marketing teams (or e-business, sales, or product teams), which then makes the IT-marketing divide even greater. Instead, IT must be an enabler for exceptional customer experiences. IT pros can and should provide major contributions to—if not help lead—their firms’ digital customer experience strategies, along with marketing, line-of-business, and/or e-business leaders.
How can IT begin to take a more vocal role in the creation of digital experience strategies for your business? It can start by aligning better with the business, defining the technology architecture, redefining policies and procedures, and updating “must-have” IT skill sets.

• Be a marketing enabler instead of a marketing roadblock. Better alignment with marketing leaders and customer experience leaders is key. If and when there’s resistance from marketing teams, explain to the skeptics why their teams should take on a broader role in digital customer experience delivery and why IT should have a seat at the leadership table. Establish your team’s value in brokering the interplay between core business systems, customer channels, and touchpoints.
• Define your technology architecture upfront. While many organizations have made significant investments in technologies to support digital experience initiatives, they generally don’t have all of the technologies needed to support unified, cross-touchpoint digital experiences. These technologies will (1) allow organizations to manage the process of creating digital experiences;  (2) engage customers, partners, and prospects; and (3) measure the reaction to that experience, allowing information workers to optimize content accordingly. IT professionals should define their digital experience architecture using this manage, engage, and measure framework.
• Shift policies and procedures to become more agile. Most IT organizations aren’t culturally attuned to the fast-moving world of digital customer experience projects, and, as a result, time-to-market is far too long. Your processes should begin to shift toward agile practices so your pros can collaborate with interactive marketing teams and their agency partners, and keep up with the pace of innovation required by these teams. As your procedures move to be more agile, be prepared to shift existing governance policies accordingly.
• Plan to hire those with new, increasingly important skill sets. Unless your department focuses only on the back-end (in which case, your amount of staffing changes will be relatively low and will revolve around only newly sourced technologies), technical talents like HTML5 skills won’t be the only important skill set. Organizations must also place greater emphasis on communication and consulting talents. Expect that your most adventuresome people will welcome the opportunity to deliver digital experience projects and to partner with interactive marketing leaders on strategy, but that others may view the change as a threat to their position.

This is just a start, and there are many more best practices to help IT professionals increase their involvement in the creation of digital experience strategies. Join my colleagues John Rymer and Stephen Powers and me at our fall forum for application development and delivery professionals, where we will be exploring these and more key components in creating effective digital experience strategies.

And if you have any ideas, we’d love to see them in the comments area below.