What makes a successful digital platform?

A successful digital platform offers the freedom to adapt every part of your digital ecosystem to implement new technologies quickly and expand the possibilities for customer interactions. A simple CMS or a static website is no longer enough: companies need to think about brand experience as a whole and deliver a scalable, integrated system.

A successful digital platform should be flexible and scalable, so that you can move with your customers. With composable architecture, you can customise every module of your platform individually, making it easy to add new features or change existing ones. And with a cloud-based infrastructure, you can seamlessly scale up or down to meet changing user demand or data volumes.

A composable architecture can involve great complexity. The initial integration of such a system therefore requires more effort. However, the biggest challenge in switching to a composable system lies in the essential knowledge and technical know-how. Without a good integration partner, it can be difficult to seamlessly integrate the system into your business operations.

A successful digital platform connects seamlessly with other platforms, partners, suppliers or external services. But to ensure interaction between those systems, strong integration capabilities and the right tools and technologies to exchange data and information between systems are critical. Well-integrated and extensive APIs are important, but you’ll get nowhere without a development team that knows exactly which APIs and SDK (Software Development Kits) are essential for a smooth and future-proof platform.

One of the developments that you should not ignore when building and implementing your platform is AI. With a composable architecture, you can integrate AI applications into your digital ecosystem relatively quickly. Companies need to start by learning what AI can do, and then they need to think about how that can add value to your platform, organisation, and processes. Think of higher efficiency, lower costs through automation, increasing revenue or offering a better customer experience.

Digital platforms often contain a lot of sensitive data. Don't wait until problems arise – think of hackers, fines for non-compliance with laws and regulations and users demanding more and more transparency around the use of their data – but actively implement compliance measures. Think of clear processes, work processes and accountability structures and integrate security measures into the entire software development process of your platform.

An important development in the field of digital platforms is the increasing demand for inclusiveness and accessibility. Millions of Dutch and Belgians have difficulties with reading, writing or arithmetic. As a result, they often have difficulty with essential digital skills. And with impending the European Accessibility Act in 2025, 'digital' will eventually become the standard, while it remains an unexplored theme for many companies.

By not including accessibility as a success criterion in the (further) development of your platform, you limit access to your content and products for a large group of visitors. Inaccessible platforms can lead to frustrated users, negative feedback,  and reputational damage.

Due to today's enormous information overload,  it is important that your brand or organisation continues to stand out. This is only possible with a consistent and clear brand promise across all your touchpoints. You can solve this, for example, by using a design system. A library of recognisable, consistent, and reusable components so you don't have to start a new design process every time, because you build all your brand expressions from the same recognisable components.