Introducing Adobe Experience Platform’s New Digital Experience Blueprints

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Authors: Kevin Cobourn, Nick Hecht, and Jody Arthur

In this post, Adobe Experience Platform introduces Digital Experience Blueprints — a whole new way to learn and understand how you can use its technology to build incredible customer experiences.

When it comes to analyzing vast amounts of data and simultaneously delivering personalized experiences, knowing how to do that right can be daunting for brands today, especially given the complexity of the data and technologies they are working with and privacy regulations that increase the risk of doing it wrong. It can also be difficult to determine whether a particular solution will work for a given use case and whether that solution will provide a sufficient ROI to warrant the investment.

Sorting out these problems doesn’t have to be challenging. Adobe Experience Platform is unveiling a new program we are calling Digital Experience Blueprints built to help our customers improve their digital transformation strategy and implementations. Digital Experience Blueprints help CIOs, CTOs, technologists, and developers clearly understand how they can quickly deploy Adobe Experience Cloud technologies using proven high-value patterns. They do this by reducing implementation effort with architecture produced by Adobe’s product and engineering staff.

Each Blueprint offers Adobe Experience Cloud customers a series of artifacts that explain the high-value business problem, solution architectures, enterprise architectures, technical considerations, links to the relevant documentation, and product demonstrations.

This post is the first in a series that will introduce you to Digital Experience Blueprints. Each post is made to be a resource for you as you design & implement Adobe Experience Cloud Applications, Application Services, and Adobe Experience Platform to meet your customer experience use cases. We’ll also introduce you to the Audience Activation Blueprint, which can be used to create consistent, real-time experiences for your customers across all their interactions with your brand with Adobe Experience Platform Real-time Customer Data Platform.

Vetted and tested for successful implementation

Making Digital Experience Blueprints starts with a vetting process managed across Adobe’s engineering, architecture, and product management teams to:

1. Validate a Blueprint’s integration and functionality pattern for each prescribed Adobe Application, App Service, and Adobe Experience Platform capability.
2. Identify any relevant technology guardrails, as well as prerequisites a customer must have to implement the blueprint such as specific code libraries, licenses, and features.
3. Publish artifacts our customers, partners, and internal staff can reference as repeatable patterns proven to deliver customer success.
4. Reference, or build, documentation people can use to implement a Blueprint in their organization.
5. Continually update to reflect the latest product releases happening across our portfolio of technologies.

With this process in place, Adobe ensures that every Blueprint is accurate and implementable from Day One of its publication. It is because Blueprints are subjected to end-to-end product tests to validate systems perform as expected.

As to be expected there are a number of ways to solve for the different use cases each customer may wish to design against. This is why Digital Experience Blueprints are prescriptive in terms of the components they require and those they can optionally include. Because of this Blueprints provide a sound foundation for successful implementation. This foundation is very much intended to allow for architectural enhancements as your operations mature.

Blueprints provide a recipe centered around your success

Blueprints are developed to show how to build a successful implementation using Adobe technologies to meet the needs of your brand’s unique requirements while also considering the current state of your technology stack and data flows.

Every Blueprint includes:

• Customer Challenges/Use Cases
• Technology Implementation Prerequisites
• Reference Architectures
• Usage Guardrails
• Order of Operations/Implementation Diagram
• Operational Activities required to implement a Blueprint
• FAQs and Reference Documentation

Like a great recipe, our Digital Experience Blueprints help ensure you get the desired results with your technology implementation.

Description of customer challenges or use cases

Each Blueprint is designed to address a specific business or technical problem associated with delivering customer experiences. They describe common customer experience problems prior to Blueprint implementation while also showcasing the technical patterns, using our architecture, to solve those customer experience problems.

The Blueprint also illustrates how its implementation will improve customer experiences and the technology pattern that allows brands to deliver that new and improved experience. This helps brands evaluate the value of the implementation within the context of their use cases.

Technology Implementation Prerequisites

Prerequisites identify all the components your system needs to have in place in order for the solution to function:

• Current state Applications & features requirements
• Minimum code version requirements
• Identity Service requirements
• Guidance on regional availability

Reference Architectures

Architecture is core to Blueprints. Each Blueprint provides a series of architecture diagrams that illustrate all components necessary to build the implementation, inter-dependencies, and the order of operations for each Blueprint implementation scenario. Each architecture varies depending on the Blueprint and the different technologies it might include (some Blueprints include only Adobe Experience Platform technology while others use multiple Adobe technologies). Each diagram shows the associated data flows from collection through to activation. The documentation and detail regarding the integrations at play in the Blueprint and any prerequisites necessary to implement at that stage are provided.

Usage Guardrails

Profile guardrails dig into the system restrictions and design considerations, such as any scale limitations and latencies that should be considered in order to build your implementation. This documentation provides guardrails at each stage of the entire workflow, including the data ingestion into Adobe Experience Platform Real-time Customer Profile, and batch and streaming segmentation criteria. We track all these guardrails so that as they improve or as things change they can be updated quickly. They are also incorporated into our product roadmap release notes so that when we have a new product release, we’re able to update them as that information is updated.

Adobe Experience Platform’s ongoing development to better meet the needs of enterprises in delivering personalized customer experience means that the guardrails provided with each Blueprint are likely to change over time.

Order of Operations/Implementation Diagrams

In order to architect a system, it is critical to understand the order of operations upfront, including:

• What you can expect from your implementation in terms of performance
• What components of Adobe Experience Platform are required and the order in which the data must flow through them to make the implementation work

These diagrams effectively pop open the hood to reveal the mechanics of the system — what makes the implementation work.

Operational Activity Required to Implement a Blueprint

The operational activities described in each Blueprint are intended to help with your planning. They explain the categories of the scope of work and how the different components of the project can be organized to make the work of implementing the Blueprint as efficient as possible. Operationally speaking, this helps you understand:

• What kind of resources you will need to implement
• What each resource will do
• What you will get by doing to work prescribed

FAQs & Reference Documentation

Our Blueprints make it easy for you to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. We know that developers, engineers, and architects like to figure things out for themselves. We support them by providing a Blueprints website with curated content that provides user-level training videos, all the links to relevant Adobe Experience Platform API stacks, and other documentation relevant to each Blueprint.

Technical References

1. Overview — Adobe Experience Platform
2. Overview — Adobe Experience Cloud
3. Overview — Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform Overview
4. Documentation — Getting started with Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform
5. Documentation — Understanding Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform
6. Documentation — Evaluate events in near real-time with streaming segmentation
7. Documentation — Guardrails
8. Overview — Adobe Experience Platform Real-time Customer Profile
9. Overview — Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service
10. Overview — Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service ECID
11. Overview — Adobe Destinations Overview
12. Documentation — Adobe Destinations Catalog
13. Community with Q&A — Experience League

Thanks to Kevin Cobourn.

Originally published: Oct 29, 2020