Our guest on the podcast this week is Jonathon Hensley, CEO at Emerge Interactive.

We discuss how Jonathan built Emerge Interactive from a technology advisory services company in 1998 and evolved it to a full service digital experience company. They are focused on how to make the most use of technology for clients. To this day, they offer advisory services to come in and help enterprises develop a digital roadmap and product plan and determine how they’ll invest in that over the next 5-10 years. They also do a lot of user experience work. They help clients develop a solution and either implement it or hand it off to an internal team to build. Building the company and launching any career in technology takes a lot of hard work and long hours. At the beginning, it takes doing a lot of work for free to break in, from speaking gigs to advising companies. It’s important to always keep up with trends and read the news because awareness is everything. You should be constantly learning. When you are passionate about something like technology, learning is not work and becomes part of everything you do.

How do you keep organizations on track with what they need instead of chasing trends and new buzzwords? We discuss avoiding buzzword bingo so enterprises can focus on what performance you are trying to enable with technology and what outcome enterprises are looking for with each effort. Compatibility and maintainability are also crucial to consider when looking at implementing new technologies in an enterprise. Enterprises need to peel back layers to understand what the life cycle is to this technology and what needs to be done.