Imagine if you could buy a product that had “digital transformation” built in. Sounds ideal, right? While it may seem like wishful thinking, the reality is that technology alone won’t solve your digital transformation challenges. Success depends equally on people, planning, and processes—all working together to meet the evolving needs of your customers.
But here’s the thing: your efforts must be built on a platform that not only supports execution but also integrates all the key elements behind a successful digital transformation. The right digital platform connects the dots and fills the gaps in many companies’ attempts to overhaul their digital estates.
Let’s dive into why digital transformations often fail, why agility is crucial, and what a true digital experience platform (DXP) looks like.
Why Many Digital Transformations Are Failing
The urgency to implement digital strategies has never been greater. According to McKinsey , 70% of executives believe the pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation. Yet, despite this urgency, many companies struggle to achieve the desired outcomes.
A Harvard Business Review survey found that most leaders report poor returns on their digital investments . Why? Three key issues often arise:
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Rigid digital strategies implemented with static tools that can’t adapt to changing business environments.
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Ambitious strategies that are difficult to implement with the existing technology and resources.
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Limited scalability, where businesses struggle to move beyond a soft launch or minimum viable product (MVP).
At the heart of these issues is a lack of agility. Digital transformation isn’t a one-time project—it’s a continuous cycle of learning, building, and launching. To succeed, businesses need to launch quickly, gather insights, and adapt rapidly. Agility enables your team to iterate and scale as fast as your customers’ needs evolve.
Why Agility is the Key to Success
Successful digital transformation is about more than just technology—it’s about how quickly and effectively you can respond to change. Agility brings together the core elements of transformation—people, planning, processes, and technology—into one cohesive approach.
Without agility, businesses struggle to:
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Build scalable digital services, such as large multilingual websites.
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Gather and implement feedback to evolve digital offerings.
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Adapt to new insights from customer behaviour, data, and market changes.
Digital transformation thrives on continuous cycles of learning, building, and adapting. In today’s fast-paced world, you need an approach that allows for rapid change and expansion. That’s where an agile Digital Experience Platform (DXP) comes in.
What Is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
A DXP goes beyond a traditional Content Management System (CMS). While a CMS helps you create, manage, and publish content, a DXP tracks the entire customer journey—from their first interaction to their final conversion—and enables personalised experiences across multiple channels.
A DXP pulls together all the moving parts of your marketing strategy, simplifies personalization, and provides a centralised platform for fast learning, quick action, and precise messaging. In essence, a DXP gives you the agility to adapt to customer behaviours and deliver targeted content wherever they are in their journey.
What Does a Dream Platform Look Like?
A truly agile DXP needs a few essential components:
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Open Source: Your platform should be built on open source technology, providing the highest levels of security and flexibility. Open source systems are constantly tested by a community of developers, making them more secure and cost-effective. The openness of the code allows your development team to customise it to suit your needs.
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Low Code: Modern low-code platforms aren’t just for small businesses. You can now build a low-code platform on top of open source technology, giving you unlimited flexibility. This allows your team to create customizable drag-and-drop elements that can be quickly deployed across your web estate, speeding up the entire development process.
By combining open source flexibility with low-code agility, you get the power to create and launch products, services, and experiences at speed—all within a secure, unified platform that gathers insights from every channel.
A DXP in Action
At Coherence Digital, we’ve developed an approach that brings digital transformation to life at speed. By leveraging Acquia Site Studio, we transform bespoke coded design elements into drag-and-drop components, making it possible for non-technical users to build and manage complex sites.
Here’s how we do it:
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Acquia Site Studio: With drag-and-drop capabilities, we build design elements once and make them available for reuse across your digital estate. This agile approach reduces time to market and allows for faster scaling.
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Acquia CDP: We integrate Acquia’s Customer Data Platform to collect customer data across multiple channels, creating a unified customer profile that powers personalization.
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Drupal CMS: At the core of our design system is Drupal, an open-source CMS that provides the scalability and flexibility needed for large, multi-market website estates.
Real-Life Digital Transformation
Recently, we re-platformed 20 consumer healthcare brands operating in multiple markets and languages. The goal was simple: give the client the agility to focus on driving sales instead of battling with outdated, slow-moving technology. By moving all websites and CRM systems onto one Digital Experience Platform, we delivered a new foundation for rapid growth and agility.
Ready to Kickstart Your Digital Transformation?
At Coherence Digital, we’re helping businesses transform at speed—using technology that enables agile development and data-driven insights. If you’re ready to take your digital transformation to the next level, let’s talk.
Contact us today at hello@coherence.digital.
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