Design-Driven Digital Organization

Design lifts up the organizational maturity from functioning to firm to delight. 

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talents. Design = forming human-made products or services to be pleasing and preferred by people. Design lifts up the organizational maturity from functioning to firm to delight.

Organizational design is the ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy. Because it reflects the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating processes. The big advantage of being design-oriented is that you prioritize making things likable vs. just making them functioning with the goal to run a high mature digital organization. In fact, the design does need more recognition as a thinking and problem-solving process, even a strategic differentiator.

Interactive design: The digital era upon us is the age of innovation and customer-centricity. Digital leaders with a design thinking mindset can leverage strategic thinking (starting with the end in mind) and nonlinear logic, apply outside-in customers’ lens and loosen up the process to implement interactive design and run business in a creative way. The strategic objective of Design Thinking is to understand what your customers need and help the business orient itself towards those needs in pursuit of its objectives. The more customer-facing innovation is, the higher the customer satisfaction would become.

Design is actually also a critical enabling factor for quality. Being design-driven is when innovation meets the products/services to fit the design proposed as long as costs meet the criteria, not over-engineering with quality and performance meeting expectations of customers. The user interface is not just about wireframes and visual designs. Interactive and intuitive design is critical to improving crucial touchpoints of user experience and close products/services quality gaps.

The matter is that the dynamic digital organization needs to get away from letting things fall through and start creating an “integrated wholes” by utilizing correct processes and harmonizing the underlying business relationships. The good design supports the business strategy for building a people-centric organization.

Robust persona: The persona can be seen as the “public relations” part of the digital role that allows people to interact socially in a variety of situations with relative ease. For example, a customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of the audience, based on the information you've collected from user research. It helps to build great relationships with the end-users that personalize the customer experience. Once you gain insight into your customers, you can better engage them with more effective customer experience. It is about taking structural processes and leveraging the practical tools to design, produce, or improve products, services, processes, or business models that deliver new value to customers or satisfy employees.

To think outside yourself in a customer-centric way requires knowing yourself as a customer-first; as knowing your inner customer help to build an empathetic bridge to understand customers and their expectations. A mindful leader with a robust persona is often open-minded to enjoy “out of the box” thinking, develop problem-solving competency, and directly influence the culture of customer-centricity.

Fluidity, community, collaboration: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating the cross-ecosystem. To function seamlessly, an enterprise has to be linked to many and varying touchpoints between itself and its dynamic environment. The digital era upon us is about customer-centricity.

The emerging enterprise collaboration platforms and tools, cross-functional communication, and social engagement are the new normal in the effective digital workplace. It is a significant task that demands a great amount of proactive leadership and many dedicated practices for shaping a design-driven digital organization by improving organizational fluidity, building the wide user-community to nurture great ideas generation, increasing interaction, and harnessing mass collaboration. 

To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed and holistic digital management is imperative. The customer-centric organizational design has to become much more organic in the sense that it’s melded with business processes, structures, functions, etc, to make the business more dynamic and innovative.

To build a design-driven digital organization, you need to understand the company’s long-term goals, business identity or brand, and the industry realities such as competition or marketing position, etc. The important thing is to identify the common design principles and the shared body of knowledge that will help to raise design thinking from an inwardly focused semantic argument to the truly recognized digital management discipline. It’s also about developing a culture of customer-centricity, and aligning your culture to your brand, and empowering staff to deliver remarkable customer experience.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization,Innovation