Design Thinking To Launch IOT Initiatives

Article Goal 

I wanted to share this article to support the idea that  DesignThinking is applicable for scenarios where you need to better understand customer problems, needs, and also the ideas they generate to solve them. As a Solution Architect and Digital IT Professional, our roles should be to provide our customers with building blocks to realize their ideas. On a separate note, I want to #share this story to inspire others, specifically from my organization, to start their own Design Thinking Journey. And, if they need help, I am here to assist where I can.

Credits:  NNGroup for the picture on Design Thinking that you can find here and ComputerWeekly for the IOT picture

Background

Tell me if this sounds familiar to any of you working in IT in the client. There is this new trending technology and solution that is being hyped up by Gartner and IDC. Everyone from consulting companies  to hardware manufacturers (Intel, Cisco, etc), are saying that it is game changing and they provide this capability. You are at your team room with your team, and you've been asked by management to prepare a design architecture and create the long range plan for this capability.

What do you do? That's where I was at the start of the year when I was tasked with delivering the Internet of Things (IOT) design architecture and create a plan for realizing its benefits. I did not just want to create something on my own that is pure IT focused with something as gamechanging as IOT. There must be a better way.

After speaking with our implementation partner and reading about it from stories about Lean Startups, I decided executing a workshop for design thinking and innovation was the way forward. This workshop needed to focus around problems/challenges/opportunities from the business that can be addressed by IOT. The rationale was that I can create awareness and, at the same time, create interest and plant seeds for future disruptive business ideas.

I'd like to share how each part of the design thinking method helped to address concerns and generate a thought process.

Empathize

Empathize states that you need to conduct research to better understand your users. I needed to find a way to be able to understand who the prospective users for IOT would. I needed to find a way to reach out and understand the audience from business function. Luckily, we had our Regional IT Account Managers and Country IT Heads who work closely with the management from the business functions - sales, marketing, operations, HR, and Finance.

My goal in Empathize was to actually share the story about the goal of the workshop and get the buy-in from the Regional and Country IT Heads to involve the business functions. Between creating a slide deck, and having different meetings, it took around 1 month to get the IT Heads to empathize. They became the driving force reaching out to their business function contacts. And, we asked the different business functions to come up with problems and challenges they foresee. In the end, there were 20-30 representatives from IT and business functions that wanted to join the workshop.

Define

As part of the preparation for the workshop, along with our partner, we began to cluster the different problem/challenge statements based on common characteristics. We created groups assigned to each challenge statement. The groups comprised of the business function representative, IT representative, and expertise from our partner.

When the workshop began, we shared the nominated challenge statements we clustered and the groups that we nominated. From there, the groups changed members based on feedback from some of the senior management and interest areas. Once we had an agreement on the groups and challenge statements, we began the session.

We started our day with showcase and inspiration with a sharing session of how other industries use IOT, hands-on experience with some IOT solution available in the lab, and a demo video of various solutions. Note: really loved the Amazon Dash button and the Disney digital band. The aim of the session is to generate insight and open the minds of the participants on what can be possible.

After showcase and inspiration, we started with the stakeholder mapping to note down the stakeholders and how they interact with one another in the context of the problem/challenge they are facing. After we identified the stakeholder with the most pain and impact, we determined their characteristics to create a Persona.

Once Persona was determined, we created the customer journey mapping or user story mapping for the activities that specific persona does in the context of the challenge statement. We then began to identify the pain points for different steps in the customer journey. After clustering and voting on the pain points, we found the specific pain point for that customer that we wanted to  focus on with new ideas.

Ideate

In the #ideation phase, we asked the groups to develop ideas based on #IOT technologies to address the pain point. We then also shared the pain point with other groups, and asked them to add and share new ideas. Once the ideas were gathered and prioritized, they began to develop their ideas and develop a pitch for their idea. It was existing as there were story boards and prototypes shared that creative and no one would have thought about.

IOT Outcome

Wait, how did this help me in my IOT project? Actually, the entire design thinking process showed me insights on what is important from the human perspective and how people on the ground (sales force, machine operators, etc) would behave. The ideas they generated showed the different ways business functions would use IOT. And for me, it helped me to determine the setup to meet the business needs now and for the future. Finally, it simplified what the creation of Project Agreement and determine the deliverables with our partner. 

Quick note: Our  architecture framework ended up being inspired by Legos because I saw how participants in the workshop used and moved sticky notes, and different props. What better way than to say "Let's design our architecture with a Lego Approach".