Saturday, May 4, 2019

Shape a High Mature Digital Organization by Leveraging Design Maturity Model

Design, when done with rigor, discipline and focused approach in the right way, can be developed into a strategic business capability rather than just a service. 

Digital means change, choice, innovation, speed, and customer delight. Tuning the organizational design and structure, developing and delivering quality products, services or business model to achieve high performance and unleash high potential is the symbol of digital maturity. Organizational design is the ultimate expression of the organization’s strategy because it reflects the resource allocation and configuration of the value-creating business processes. 

More and more organizations improve their organizational maturity from functioning to firm to delight by applying design thinking and leveraging design maturity model. Design Maturity Model is defined as the organization’s relationship with design and the extent to which the organization utilizes design in conjunction with the business products/services/ models design or management practices.

The design maturity model can be used to map and communicate the current and target state of the organization: Design Maturity Model helps the organizations diagnose the level of design maturity at each team or organization, then develop the best or next practices and elaborate an action plan to improve it. Besides products, services, or business model design, organizational structural design is part of the digital strategy management because companies need to keep improving their adaptability and responsiveness due to the increasing pace of changes and continuous business disruptions, as well as the very characteristics of the digital environment such as complexity, uncertainty, velocity, and ambiguity. The goal of leveraging design maturity model is to help communicate and clarify the current and target state of organizational design maturity; make the organization aware of their design competency, identify design capability gaps and develop the target state design capability, as well as what needs to be done to improve it. By assessing the business design capability, the management readily considers multiple dimensions (service, process, information, asset, people, etc.) of the adequacy of the business capability to fulfill their business strategy.

Make design a corporate strategic goal to be known for delivering delightful products and user-centered services or new business models: Design thinking or practice is multidisciplinary in nature, not just about "design" but a collection of tactics and exercise to make design a strategic goal and show how your work contributes to defined business goals and KPIs. The opportunity for building a highly innovative and high mature company is not to launch a plethora of features and products that overwhelm the consumer, but rather, provide a few really value-added products or services that are delightful, well thought out with the end user in mind. Thus, design, when done with rigor, discipline and focused approach in the right way, can be developed into a strategic business capability rather than just a service. It provides new ways of looking at things and becomes a source of powerful insight and solutions for internal and external organizational changes. To improve the overall organizational maturity, businesses need to continue to learn and keep building unique competencies including design and continue delivering delightful products or services. Good design thinking starts with a customer empathy map, provides the simplicity of selection, usage, and incredible reliability. These well-designed products or services help to solve thorny business problems and improve the overall customer experiences.


Assess the needs of businesses and the skills that must be available internally and which skills can be contracted to build design competency: Today, rather than being a mythological trend, design thinking is both a strategic goal and a set of methods and practices. The invention and popularization of the term "design thinking" reflect the emergence of an accessible thought framework, a holistic, flexible and creative way of seeing that anyone can appreciate. To be accomplished successfully, it requires creating a community to nurture design thinking and advocate design as part of the business strategy. Develop the teams composed with seasoned, creative, and knowledgeable professionals who can “think in the bigger box,” and fine-tuned processes to guide the design efforts and cultivate the open culture to encourage design thinking and inspire innovation. Although only a relatively small group of professionals focus on design-driven activities, usually it takes a fairly uncommon interdisciplinary personality type to be interested in this approach. As we are going forward towards the radical digital transformation, design thinking does need more recognition as a “mainstream” thinking and a problem-solving process and practice.

The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary. As an organization's maturity about design increased, design moves from a superficial afterthought to a type of advanced thinking and real competitive advantage of the business. It is certainly critical to building a design-led digital organization by leveraging design maturity model and putting the stronger emphasis on empowering people, the source of knowledge, innovations/adaptations and customer centricity.

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