Intersection

How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap between Business, Technology, and People

Milan Guenther

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780123884350
• eBook ISBN:
  9780123884411
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Many organizations struggle with the dynamics and the complexity of today's social ecosystems that connect everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. Facing challenges at the intersection of business models, technical developments, and human needs, modern enterprises must overcome the siloed thinking and isolated efforts of the past, and instead address their relationships to people holistically. In Intersection, Milan Guenther introduces a Strategic Design approach that aligns the overarching efforts of Branding, Enterprise Architecture, and Experience Design, and sets them on a common course to shape tomorrow's enterprises.This book gives designers, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders a model and a comprehensive vocabulary for tackling such deep-rooted challenges. The Enterprise Design framework cuts through the complexity of Strategic Design work, showing how to navigate key aspects and bridge diverging viewpoints. In 9 case studies, the author looks at the way companies like SAP, BBVA, IKEA, and Jeppesen (a Boeing Company) apply design thinking and practice to shape their enterprises. Moving from strategy to conceptual design and concrete results, Intersection shows what is relevant at which point, and what expertise to involve. - Teaches how to align business strategy with Brand Identity, Customer Experience, and Enterprise Architecture initiatives as part of a consolidated enterprise-wide design practice to achieve stakeholder value - Provides a framework for designing systems, products and services as the building blocks of a consistent and coherent experience for all stakeholders in the wider enterprise, joining strategic considerations with the delivery of tangible outcomes - Explains how to make results such as websites, apps, objects, platforms, or environments part of a larger system that orchestrates enterprise touchpoints with people

Part 1

Thoughts on Enterprise Design

Introduction

1 THE RELATIONSHIP CHALLENGE

2 BLURRING BOUNDARIES

3 THE DESIGN-MINDED ENTERPRISE

The first part of this book discusses the nature of enterprise-people relationships, as well as some of the challenges with which an enterprise is confronted in considering and managing these relationships. Their strategic significance is what sparks the need for a holistic design approach, to reshape the enterprise and make it meaningful to people.

To benefit from those relationships, enterprises must take into account insights from multiple disciplines to envision a way to integrate them into their long-term visions, daily operations and communications.

They must leverage the contributions and interrelationships of different sciences, disciplines and practices from engineering and technology, the human condition and society, and bridge these silos to tackle complex challenges.

This part portrays strategic design as a way to synthesize new solutions in a space of constraints and rapidly evolving opportunities, and to foster innovation starting with human relationships.

1

The Relationship Challenge

Enterprises are ubiquitous in our lives, fusing our days with products, technologies, brands and services. However, most times we deal with companies or other organizations, they behave rather strangely, leading to frustrating experiences. Regardless if as a customer, an employee, a supplier or a job candidate, they seem to be slow, rude and non-human. They fail to listen to people's needs, they lose track of conversations, they reduce us to a mere number in their database, and they get stuck in inflexible procedures to ultimately fail to deliver what they promised. Such relationship failures lead to dissatisfied customers and, lost opportunities, and lost talent. While digital Information Systems get more important for every business, more data or automation will not solve the problem. Instead, the relationships to people have to approached as strategic assets, to design the enterprise around their needs and employing technology in the service of human needs.

Digitization, Information Systems, Customer Relationship Management, Information Technology, IT, AEG, Peter Behrens

Enterprises are everywhere, playing a vital role in our lives. Basically all human endeavors have reached a level of scale and complexity that makes them depend on an ecosystem of interrelated organizations and technology. Most of us rely upon enterprises several times a day, even for the most fundamental tasks of daily life. They are ubiquitous in our world of consumer brands and services, and visible in the mass of organizations of all sizes we are in touch with as consumers, employees, investors, or in other roles.

When dealing with enterprises, we are used to strange and often quite frustrating experiences. They seem to make even simple transactions awkward and complex. Straightforward activities such as booking tickets for a journey, paying your taxes, subscribing to health insurance, or resolving a problem with your energy supplier require customers to embark on a laborious journey, jumping between call centers, online forms, and missing information. They make us shift between different contacts, tools, and communication channels. They lose track of the conversation, get stuck in inflexible procedures, and often fail to deliver what they promised. Most of us have had a lot of such experiences, be it with companies, government institutions, or other types of enterprises, making them appear slow, rude, and inhumane.

When looking at the big picture of human-enterprise interaction, there are numerous examples of failed relationships. While most of them are simply annoying and just make you go somewhere else, some examples of failed relationships have a profound impact on people's lives. They result in lost customers, demotivated employees, or even scandals being echoed in mass media.

Example

As an example, think of the advent of digital media and the fundamental shift it caused in the music industry. with the virtualization of information, long established business models did not work anymore. This development required companies to reinvent their business models from scratch, to incorporate new technologies and distribution channels. the line between content producers and consumers has become blurred. New market players reflect the changed behaviors and preferences of their customers by delivering a wide range of niche content purely online.

This sparks the need to consider people relationships much more profoundly, making them central to the enterprise. At its heart, every enterprise is about its relationships to people. This includes customers addressed with its activities, employees carrying them out, and other stakeholders involved in or impacted by their execution. By approaching stakeholders with a strategically relevant relationship to the enterprise as what they are—as human beings with needs and demands to be met—businesses can uncover tremendous opportunities by intentionally addressing their concerns.

This book is about employing the approach and the discipline of design to do just that, turning relationships into viable business assets. By taking a creative and deeply humanist approach to problem solving, design can be used to tackle strategic relationship challenges and make visible a desired future state of the enterprise.

Designing Enterprises

Today's enterprises are deeply embedded in hyperconnected and constantly shifting economic and social environments. This confronts them with numerous challenges in their management, planning, and daily business execution. Some of these challenges are related to large-scale transformation processes such as digitization, globalization, or shorter production and consumption cycles, while others are the results of shifts in specific industries, regions, or markets.

The transformation of the music industry shows how a shift in an industry not only means new technology, but also changed business models that disrupt and transform the existing order. Every change also alters the mindsets of people involved, consumers and market players alike. It is their new interests and goals, interactions and exchanges, values and beliefs that drive the transformation process. Even if triggered by some external influence, like the invention of a new compression algorithm for audio data in the example above, it results in new or evolved relationships between people, and between people and enterprises.

For any enterprise, this translates to concrete business challenges to be addressed with a coherent strategy, in order to survive and succeed in the marketplace. It involves achieving and maintaining competitive advantage, establishing new operating models, transforming organizational structures, and turning new technologies into useful business differentiators.

While established management approaches offer a large variety of tools to tackle these challenges, they seem to do so thinking in silos. They address topics such as improved operational efficiency, better product quality, or reaching new target groups with Marketing efforts. Seen from a human perspective however, they fall short of addressing relationships as what they really are—the key driver behind any business strategy. This section outlines some of the fundamental challenges enterprises face in creating and sustaining their relationships to people, those being the foundation of a strategic design initiative.

Designing to Create Value

To survive in the marketplace, enterprises constantly seek to differentiate themselves against other market players. There are different ways to approach this challenge. Businesses make use of research to envision innovative products and leverage technologies, they examine and optimize work methods and processes to increase operational efficiency, or outsource parts of their business in order to excel at their core activity. On the customer side, they aim for new and better products and services, faster delivery, or lower prices. The success of these approaches has made them a common practice for many business executives. But while in theory every customer would prefer to buy from the best and the cheapest, reality shows a different picture: that we are different, enterprises and people alike. People make their choices on where to buy, who to work for, or what to invest in based on a wide range of influencing factors like brand identity, values, trust, and always in a unique individual context.

Therefore, it is crucial to any business to differentiate itself by shaping and sustaining its relationships with people. This thinking has resulted in initiatives like Customer Experience management, Investor Relations or Talent Management, applying an outside-in view on the enterprise through the eyes of its key stakeholders—customers, investors, and staff members. Instead of just differentiating on product features, performance, or abstract notions of quality, they aim at expressing the value an enterprise provides to the people it is related to, in a way that makes it unique just for them.

A design approach as an integral part of the business strategy enables enterprises to systematically create value propositions for the people they address. It allows us to integrate stakeholder-specific approaches in an overarching vision, and to design artifacts and systems that are useful and meaningful for everyone in touch with the enterprise. It fosters relationships by exploring, meeting, and exceeding real human needs and turning them into business initiatives, products, and services.

Designing to Connect and Exchange

Today's dynamic business environment requires enterprises to connect to a fluctuating, highly interconnected group of people, reaching beyond organizational boundaries. They need to establish strong links to customers and to collaborate with business partners in loosely bound networks along the value chain. They have to enable their employees to make the decisions needed for business development and daily operations, and exchange knowledge and information with colleagues and external contacts.

In order to gain trust and thrive in their ecosystem, they must drive an open exchange with employees and business partners, and conduct authentic conversations with customers. They have to be visibly engaged, communicate consistently and behave appropriately in virtual spaces, where they can exercise only limited control over dialogues between individuals. The way a company interacts with and through people such as employees, clients, applicants, or investors shapes its identity and image, regardless of whether an exchange takes place in person, an online portal, or on Facebook. Even the voice of a single customer or employee can have a big impact on an entire enterprise, being amplified by the dynamics of people connected in global ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Part 1: Thoughts on Enterprise Design
• Part 2: The Enterprise Design Framework
• Part 3: Enterprise Design Approach
• Outlook
• Index
• References
• Image Credits
• The Team
• Acknowledgements