Yes I made that up myself :-) At least the second part. Headless app is a technical concept in which you separate your application front-end (head) from your application back-end (body). I'm not going into the technical details but the concept should concern us. How many times do you have to go to IT to buy/build an application and then have to go through the whole cycle of.....

• Requirements
• RFPs/Tendering
• Architecture and IT discussions
• Build and Operate the application

.............and then have to defend the use of the application against all enemies 'foreign and domestic' who are out to cripple your business capability? Every application vendor is out to cripple its enemy by offering overlapping business capabilities. Before you know it, you end up in a tribal war akin "Apple" vs. "Android" in which one person says "My application is better than yours. You need to migrate" and the other person says "Over my dead body". The result is the endless migration conundrum which pretty much paralyzes your progress.

For quite some time I - and probably all of us - have been struggling to deliver great customer value in time and make sure that you keep delivering and be agile enough to make the right evolution steps. It seems that this is a worldwide problem which of course is not a surprise.

The headless concept allows you to separate the Marketing/Sales driven CX/UX from the Enterprise IT driven back-end business capability. Take, for instance, a community platform like Telligent. Is was designed with headless in mind. In fact, it started its life in Microsoft as a headless Community Server that could provide business capabilities like Forum, Blog, Ideas to any front-end. Why should I care from which back-end this is coming? I let IT worry about that. I just need to design a forum capability into my CX.

In the B2C world where brand experience is key, this is becoming rapidly the only way forward. Why? Because it ends the turf war and decouples the speed at which we want to design and deliver great CX from the speed at which IT migrates their application landscape: Bottomless Marketing. Yes! I made that up.

Any thoughts or progress on that subject would be welcome.

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