IBM IS NOT a design company, but for almost four years, IBM has been working to reinvent itself as a design-led business. All-told, the company is investing more than $100-million in an effort to become a design-centered corporation.
Design thinking is a framework for conducting business that puts users’ (i.e. customers’) needs first. To that end, IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines. It's a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.
In fact, the movement’s watershed moment, as a business methodology, came in the late 1980s, when David Kelley of Ideo popularized the idea of “user-centered design.” But Kelley’s strategies seemed best-suited to smaller, creativity-focused companies—not corporate titans, which tend to think of design as more "waterfall-y." Read the article from Wired and the link to IBM's design guidelines. IBM can't just follow what everyone else is doing in Agile, they have to create their very own logo framework and then offer a boot camp so that 10,000 other IBM employees follow it.
Thoughts?
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ReplyDeleteI thought this article and the design thinking solutions were excellent examples of company reinvention. They demonstrate the importance of focusing on specific customer needs in order to create products that will be effective in a user's real day-to-day scenario, instead of just in a conceptual test room.
ReplyDeleteAlthough not the focus of the article and I am largely drawing from my own experiences, I couldn't help but imagine the introduction of "the loop" from the perspective of an employee undergoing the reformation of company culture. The main purpose of the loop was to transition away from being "waterfall-y" or "tossing something over the wall," as described by Jez Humble in his video, in order to promote design thinking. However, I also believe that the loop will have other positive externalities not included in this article, such as fostering creativity and a sense of accomplishment for IBM's employees. With IBM's prior corporate design, it sounded as if the coders were simply responsible for working on the current problem at that time and cycling through different projects without any real connection to a specific product. However, I believe that the continuous loop model will allow the coders to take more interest in the project because they will be able to revisit the prototype again and again and develop a sense of connection and importance to each product. If my assumptions are correct, I predict that design thinking would be advantageous for both the end users and IBM's employees.
I agree with you that it is important to be connected with the end result of product in order to find the best design.
DeleteI also see how this technique works well in combination with DevOps. With the loop IBM allows the designer to go back to the product and to improve it. DevOps promoting the involvement of both development and operations the developer is provided instant feedback from users. This will allow faster integration of fixes and features making design iterations substantially better.