Running Design-Led Digital IT

 High mature digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to design-led strategic business initiatives that most fit to achieve the strategic goals of the business.


IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage, it plays a pivotal role in orchestrating the business’s digital transformation. Design Thinking is a unique path of pursuing innovation. Digital CIOs need to wear their design thinking hat to tap the creative side of IT. The strategic objective of design thinking can fundamentally change organizations, build a strong brand, improve the overall organizational maturity and make the societal impact.

Leverage design thinking to create new categories of products/services/processes/business models: The distinctive advantage of being design centered is that you prioritize in making things likable rather than just making them functioning. Create innovative products or services that are profitable to your business while being exciting to the users. It’s actually very critical to embrace design-centered development when you have a highly competitive environment around functionality. Aesthetics is one of the important ingredients of high quality. There are two sides of IT, the best way for IT to help win customers’ heart is to hide the complexity of IT/technology infrastructure and operation, making them “invisible”; what is left visible to the customer should be simple, intuitive, secure, reliable and predictable solutions, etc. It is the teamwork to design and produce delightful products or services based on well-defined design thinking principles. Forward-looking design thinkers can determine what will be considered aesthetically pleasing tomorrow rather than today! First - aesthetics as trends in public taste. Second - exposure to the designed environment as a direct influence on those trends! The structural design innovations most often require design teams to attend to the total system of all valued product interactions and related opportunities to systematically create new design features that efficiently enable new value across wide ranges of current and new product interactions.

Follow design thinking principles to run customer-centric IT: IT is getting involved in building products for either/internal or external customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle. User Experience refers to the experience users have when using a piece of software or technology, rather than the purely technical capacities of that device. From the IT management perspective, the methodologies being put into design thinking bucket are somewhat unique and previously outside of the business norm, but have the great potential to run customer-centric IT organization. The design does need more recognition as thinking and problem-solving process. Following design thinking principles to reinvent IT helps to reframe the problem which in itself is a huge contribution to IT innovation. Taking outside-in business view stimulates design thinking and enables IT managers and staffs to gain customer empathy and improving business maturity. The outside-in view is more important because the customer's experience is about how they encounter, observe, or undergo a company's events or stages. Design thinking is a collection of methodologies. Rather than focus on one method, as a team with broad expertise across a range of disciplines, there are choices of tools or methods appropriate for the challenge.

More and more of work is less about design in its purity and more focused on holistic and strategic design-led business initiatives: Design Thinking is not just about wireframes and visual designs. It has a broader scope and you need to think about the brand, long-term business positioning, and rigorous user understanding. The very characteristics of the digital world are complexity, uncertainty, and velocity. Thus, organizational design needs to be a part of the digital strategy management. The organizational design sensibilities and skills are important. It is the ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy - because it reflects the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating processes. The “organizational design problem” would be to build the “best” mix of organizational elements that enable organizational interdependence. Mappings of high-level business processes to technology must be in place to allow for an understanding of the impact of strategic changes, and to open discussions across business lines on the steps that need to be taken to reach strategic goals. With emerging digital collaboration platforms and tools, high mature digital organizations should integrate the organizational design into the business process design and organizational re-engineering, to improve business fluidity, adaptability, people-centricity, and maturity.

Digital business is moving up the maturity from functioning to firm to delight. Companies large or small are brainstorming the next generation of organizational design, products or services innovation, take advantage of the new digital tools and design methodologies, to enforce creativity and collaboration cross-enterprise ecosystem. A high mature digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to design-led strategic business initiatives that most fit to achieve the strategic goals of businesses, enable employees doing their work more productively, delight customers and reap the business benefit for the long term.

Posted in: IT Innovation,IT Transformation,Strategy,UX/CX