Content, Data and Experience: The Primary Colors of Digital Transformation

As we all learned in elementary school, every color in existence can be factored down to some combination of the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. At that age, it wasn’t something we were ready to hear. The shock that overcame my face after I heard that was visible and intense, especially when I learned of the millions of shades of color that exist out there.

But true to her form, my elementary school teacher immediately treated that shudder. She took a blue marker and shaded a box on a piece of paper, then took a yellow marker shading over the same box. Voila! I started seeing green and came to grips with the concept.

Despite the evolution of primary colors, with some suggesting that additional colors are still being introduced, the concept of those hues as the root of all colors remains astounding.

In today’s digital space, the primary colors idea is equally profound. Fast-forward a few decades, more than I would like to admit, and now I am facing off with the same concept. I spend most of my day helping businesses undergo digital transformation by sliding upward on that stubborn digital maturity scale. While digital transformation consists of many things, it fundamentally requires devising the right content strategy for your brand, delivering that content with an intuitive, consistent, and personalized user experience, and capturing the relevant data to help your organization make the right decisions.

In hopes of avoiding run-on sentences, it is as clear now as ever that the primary colors of digital transformation are content, data, and experience.

The first reaction (including my own) to that proclamation is always, “Wait a minute… What about commerce, IoT, technology, innovation, automation, AI, mobility, etc.?” Certainly, all those elements are critical to digital transformation and may even receive more attention and bigger budgets than content, data, and experience. So what gives?

In keeping with the metaphor, the best way I can answer that is: Surely, no one is arguing that green is not a very important color, but at its core, green is nothing more than yellow and blue mixed together at the right ratio. Analogously, commerce, mobility, and all other elements behind the strategy of digital transformation are the products of the right content, rendered by the right experience and measured with the right data.

The value and substance behind these building blocks are on full display when observing the top DXPs (Digital Experience Platforms) on the market: Adobe, Salesforce, Acquia, SAP, etc. All these platforms have corralled their tools to cater to content, data, and experience. A quick chronological review of the past decade makes it apparent how those companies marshalled their resources to sell digital transformation through the value of our primary colors.

At TA Digital, we have undergone a transformation of our own. We have been a leading technology company for 20 years, focusing on helping clients utilize the top digital platforms in the industry. However, over the past few years, we started a journey to transform our services from a technology-first consultancy to a value-first digital transformation agency, led by content, data, and experience.

That doesn’t mean we don’t love our greens, purples or oranges – we still do. But it means we start every meaningful conversation with content, data, and experience.

Feel free to reach out and drop us a note. Let’s talk about how we can help with your transformation.

• AI
• Digital Experience
• Digital Transformation
• IoT