Implementing innovation into a business with Marketing Technologies (Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Reality plus Artificial Intelligence) will change internally and externally how things are processed, managed and understood. How owners and executives prepare for this disruption, will be measured in its success with the ability to adapt with the right operations budget for a successful ROI.

It is estimated that the XR Industry will reach at least $150+ billion by the year 2022, according to Bank of America, thus affecting everyone and every business as we move towards this digital transformation. Every company should already be discussing in the boardroom how to prepare to innovate and implement new digital strategies to be a part of the business, and if Executives are not leading this conversation, the business will most likely not survive.

Implementing XR technologies mean there will be changes internally that will affect spending and adjustments to your departments including technical, creative, sales, HR, training, leadership and even the business model will change. There will be digital illiterate employees, new communications methods, new social media marketing strategies, and different sales methods that will take place and there needs to be a plan to tread through the unknown as well as a budget that will support it. These changes are not just for the C-Levels or IT department, change will apply to everyone invested in the business, including employees and your clients.

What changes does Innovation bring to a Business?

Expect new steps and processes that add up to additional hours, employees, contractors, hosting fees, data storage, bandwidth challenges & growth to stabilize the business to scale. With the right planning and forecasting, businesses can prepare for a new budget model, new communications processes, up skilling team members, hiring new IT talent, implement digital maintenance, and of course, how you sell.

The key to any business being successful moving forward is digital literacy and to be proactive with Innovation Education & Training built with a strategic business plan.

Understanding development considerations that will take place is a good place to start. Learn all there is to know about the development process and implementation and how they will affect each department. There may be more team members required, or up skilling the ones you have. Having a supportive and digital literate HR department will be essential to the digital literacy of the company.

XR Development Considerations

  • Do I have the team skills sets internally to create this project?
  • Do I need to upskill my team? What training do I need to put in place?
  • How does this development change our sales strategy?
  • How will our customers accept the change and how do we transform their experience?
  • Dev schedule should include a 2 week buffer to apply to Apple Store for any application.
  • Did your SOW protect the business from Additional Scope? How will you measure this?
  • What are your future plans to build out this application?
  • What Artificial Intelligence implementations for the future?
  • Budgets should include Testing Time and Revisions
  • Understand what a Revision is and how it works during development. This will be essential to your budget.

Definition of a One (1) Revision refers within an XR development to the subtotal of time and number of developers to make the changes of the data and code to a lowercase letter, or to an uppercase letter, to a font size, a margin, a colour, an insert or deletion, Image add or move, a drop in or a margin placement, then to be re-coded, compressed rendered and tested and tested again.

Each Revision = Minimum 24 hours x 3 Developers/Programmers = $$$

  • Everyone in the business needs to have the digital literacy and understand how the business will be disrupted and changed. Not just the CIO.
  • Every employee will require up skilling, some will not understand, expect they will not survive their current employment.
  • Lack of Education & Training for anyone in the team will hinder expectations & decisions. Get the entire company literate on the steps the company is making to stay in the game.
  • When you decide to build an XR application for the business, make the wireframe agnostic for internal and external applications, just design the User Experience (UX) differently.
  • Development Hours will always exceed more than your expectations, so budget for this with an “Innovation Buffer” line item
  • Don’t undervalue how long things take to build
  • Don’t expect your project to be built for the version you contracted for, expect amendments to your SOW and create terms of satisfaction for developer and business
  • Expect that Apple or Google will implement a development that will change your development at some point.
  • Expect to have development created to be version specific
  • Plan for maintenance and hosting fees in your budget.
  • Prepare to discuss bandwidth and location settings in your application
  • Communications of creative & technical instructions internally and externally will change
  • XR Developments will never be a completed project
  • Documentation of additional scope hours and reasons why
  • Implement progress milestones & Create Sign-offs of approval
  • Learn new Legal and Insurance considerations. Ask your legal advisory on their VR & AR from a Legal Lens

Haven’t started planning your Business Experience Strategy yet?

Plan for an Innovation Strategic Workshop to Educate & Train your team where they learn about the state of XR Technologies — Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) Artificial Intelligence (AI). This presentation provides everyone with the basic knowledge and digital literacy about XR terms, the software, hardware, fundamentals, the history and the future of where the applications will fit into the vision of the business both internally for operations and externally for sales and clients. Having everyone with mandatory basic education will have the team on the same page to understand the strategies they need to implement moving forward.

Coming from the top executives, there should be a 3-month, 6-month, 1-year, 5-year strategy in place that the business will follow. Making sure every employee understands the innovation plan, the developments and tools that will be implemented that will inspire the team to work and promote the business towards a successful ROI.

Emerging technologies ARE emerging. At minimum to survive the disruption, a business should invest in a suggested $50K minimum POC budgeted for 2020 and a plan for employee up skilling. The Sales team should also be working with Marketing to include Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat strategies to build communications with the next generation and the IT team should be building 3-D Web Viewers into your websites to prepare for 3-Dimensional integration.

Having stakeholders who hold Digital Leadership and understand the plan for the Future of Work using and implementing XR Technologies will be a successful step, but it will take more than a Chief Innovation Officer, or IT Department to run with innovation on their own. It will take the entire business to focus on the changes with individual digital literacy expected to be successful and move the business forward into a new digital age.