Agency 39A's Digital Transformation Playbook

Redefining How Businesses Operate and Deliver Value in the Digital Age

Digital transformation is more than just adopting new technology—it's a complete shift in how organizations operate, engage with customers, and deliver value. It involves rethinking business processes, leveraging data and digital tools, and fostering a culture of innovation to stay competitive in a rapidly changing landscape. By aligning technology with strategic goals and customer needs, digital transformation helps businesses drive growth, improve efficiency, and create meaningful experiences that resonate in today’s digital-first world.

Digital transformation frameworks, like any framework, give decision-makers a starting point.  This digital transformation framework provides a repeatable process, strategic planning and implementation, when it comes to repositioning a business to achieve digital maturity. This is our process for developing mature digital capabilities through digital transformation.

Step 1: Defining your digital transformation objectives

Our strategists work with you to ground your digital transformation in terms of target business outcomes. Digital business is often defined through the lens of the customer experience, and although a key driver for business outcomes, the customer experience is one of many key components in a successful digital transformation strategy. Transformation objectives often map to the following needs:

• Improving the digital customer experience and user experience to continuously improve brand value, revenues, productivity and retention
• Optimizing internal processes to lower cost, improve productivity, integrate partners and create differentiated offerings
• Redesigning operations to improve organizational capabilities, flexibility and cost-effectiveness
• Leveraging insights from data analytics to improve decision-making, improve offerings, and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace

You will have a unique set of transformation objectives and different priorities, but this is a grounding first step for organizational alignment.

Step 2: Understand the needs of the audience

Too often digital transformation programs dive deep into organizational transformation and technology platform selection without truly understanding the needs of the audience. Understanding the needs of your audience is the single greatest influencer on future success whether you are driving internal innovation or external customer experience transformation. Audience personas, behavioral analysis, heuristic analysis, and observational research illuminates areas of opportunity and pain points across the digital continuum.

Step 3: Understand the technology landscape

Disruptive mobile, wearable, artificial intelligence, and mixed reality technologies now serve as the foundational building blocks – some mature, some emerging – in the new digital business platform ecosystem. We help you form a holistic view across all these enablers that can help to maximize business benefits in the short term and unlock new forms of value in the years ahead. 

Step 4: Envision your future platform for digital business

Based on your needs, we help you identify and select the right combinations of these technologies to achieve your strategic business goals. Improving the customer experience, optimizing the digital workplace, transforming processes, and simplifying management are all part of the foundational business strategy that will help your business evolve. 

‍Step 5: Develop the digital services capability

Innovative products and services require a new competency that defines how you design, develop, deploy, manage and continually evolve your digital services. Agency 39A helps you as your implementation partner as well as developing the competency to continually innovate.  

We augment our implementation capabilities with consultative expertise that can be leveraged to develop fully-operational internal innovation, CX and UX studios, defining the org chart, and helping you acquire the right talent to sustain and scale your investment.

Step 6: Prepare your business for digital innovation

Having established the organizational design for digital business, we will help you identify the latest technology that most effectively achieves your strategic goals. Instead of monolithic platforms that are tied to an inflexible transformation strategy, we will help you design a platform of cloud-based, distributed services from best-in-class providers - ensuring the most flexible and tailored solutions possible. 

Step 7: Design a successful transformation journey

Transformation is a process and during the journey to the future platform you will still support and maintain existing applications and infrastructure. While some elements may be retired or modernized, other elements may need to co-exist and be integrated into the new platform.

An agile and iterative journey to the future platform will optimize infrastructure, simplify management, improve the user experience, and transform business processes.  This ensures that your business can gain early benefits from data-driven transformation while systems integration continues forward.

Now that you know the core components of a successful digital business transformation, it’s time to get started.  Our team can provide you with the right services and input to accelerate your business towards becoming a digital-first organization. From strategy development and implementation, to digital technology selection and operations management, Agency 39A will help you steadily walk the path to good digital transformation.

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