Meet Jeff

Jeff has spent his entire career focused on transforming the way organizations communicate to affect real and lasting change. With 22 years of experience in visual design, digital media, user experience, brand strategy, and strategic consulting, Jeff has led digital strategy and design engagements for some of Booz Allen’s top federal clients including the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. He envisioned and led the creative media solutions business at Booz Allen, a 140-person team dedicated to bringing the best creative, communications, and learning solutions to federal clients. Jeff currently leads Booz Allen’s digital strategy practice, where he is focused on evolving the firm’s strategic capabilities to best adapt to the digital disruptive nature that characterizes today's environments. He is passionate about looking at every challenge through the lens of people first and then crafting a solution based on that insight.

How did you get involved with digital strategy? Looking back, I’ve always been interested in how an organization or brand can better leverage technology to meet their mission or customer needs. In my early days as an art director, I was focused on moving my commercial clients’ marketing and communications campaigns onto the nascent digital platforms of the day: interactive multimedia, digital video, and proto-web. While my current focus on enterprise digital modernization might seem like apples compared to the oranges of my early career, the notion of deliberate, fluid, and proactive change management using human-centered design principles is a core theme that has persisted throughout my career.

What advice do you have for leaders who want to drive digital transformation within their organizations? You must look at the transformation first through a people lens. Too often leaders, especially CIOs and CTOs, start with predetermined technology and platforms, and then build everything out from there. And what happens is you have a digital ecosystem that does not actually translate or fit with the needs of people, real business needs, the culture of the organization, or the customer experience needed to build stronger brands. In most cases it will be a compromise between human-centered needs and available technology, budgets, policy, etc. Fully realizing the benefits of a digital first business will require cultural shifts, but using input and feedback from your own employees, customers, and stakeholders first to drive the technology solution greatly increases the likelihood of successful transformation.

What differentiates the way Booz Allen approaches digital strategy? We use an integrated and holistic approach that starts with people, not technology. Rather than thinking of “strategy” as a separate activity or business line, it’s integrated into everything we do. Our software engineers, data scientists, platform engineers, experience designers, cybersecurity experts, and digital strategists are all working in concert across the entire lifecycle of digital transformation to plan, design, implement, and continuously improve solutions that users and customers want to use, not have to use. Plus, our deep mission knowledge developed through over a century of consulting brings the domain expertise necessary to fully understand the context, culture, and environment of our clients.

What excites you about your work? At my core, I’m a designer. I love creating experiences—whether I’m manipulating musical journeys through my DJing, working with my team on a visual brand strategy, or reimagining the way employees interact with the digital enterprise. When I come to work, I get to combine my passion for design with the incredible missions of our government clients, and I get to do it with some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known.