Perficient Digital’s Jim Hertzfeld, Chief Strategist over Digital, lent his expertise to the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) for the recently released 2018 SoDA Report, which provides a global digital outlook for 2019. In this edition of the report, centered around “Design for Change,” Jim shared insights on combining planning with Design Thinking to remain nimble in an age where technology and customer expectations are changing more and more rapidly.
Traditional strategy and plans tend to work around, rather than embrace, risk. We work hard justifying the plan rather than facing the threats to the plan’s actual purpose. Traditional digital strategies also have been driven by customer research, audience analysis, and competitive insights. These are table stakes in the Age of the Customer, but they tend to lose sight of the humanity that has been abstracted by beautifully-illustrated customer journeys and personas with stock-photo headshots. Embedding Design Thinking into the strategist’s toolkit can develop the human-centered empathy to truly understand how our ideas, as well as our strategies and plans, are really working.
SoDA is an extremely selective association of respected digital agency leaders and technology disruptors. The SoDA Report is an annual publication that brings together research, thought leadership, and case studies from some of the world’s leading digital agencies and technology innovators.
Read the full report.
