Digital Transformation - Embracing a Customer-Centric Mindset

In the new year, I have given a bit of thought after my blog on “Storytelling”, there were a few different topics that came to my mind that I think would be important for me and my fellow architects in the year 2024 and onward. The customer-centric design was the one that came at the top of everything else.

Start with the customer?

In the last blog I talked about living with the story, it's equally important to start the story from the customer. Like never before, digital technology has brought customers closer to businesses and service providers. Now, it is very important to emphasize the usability and inclusivity of the solution.

In 10-15 years of my career as a Business Analyst and project manager, where I had to take part in designing CRM solutions, the requirements/business process started with customers calling the call center or standing at the front desk. Well, a human-centric design practice should take into account the demographic and emotional state of the customer. For instance, if we were designing a travel solution, we should have considered that customers are looking for different travel destinations and ticket options from the comfort of his/her couches after dinner, whereas the same customer would be calling to call center or scrolling up and down the mobile app searching for options, he or she is running late for a flight. Without the context of later, the solution would not win customers in the long term.

Similarly, several years back, we were looking into options to improve the customer experience at the waste management site by putting up a self-serve kiosk. Now, think about this, citizens usually visit waste management sites during home renovation, spring clean-up, or moving. And, many of the citizens would not have the luxury of owning a spacious SUV or truck to drive their stuff to the junkyard. An improved customer experience would be possibly to build a digital marketplace of agencies who collect donations or truck your junk for a small fee; or, even look at the data to re-organize waste collection to include pick-up places, allowed items, and schedules so that citizens don’t have to drive to waste collection site. While putting up a kiosk at the front desk or waste management site in this example would not hurt, the big picture of customer-centric needs can be understood only when we start the story from the customer as and when the customer is thinking about the need for a service.

Many great ideas and digital initiatives do not reach their true potential due to a lack of customer-centric thinking and design. In the digital solution space, now it is very important to emphasize usability and human-centric design practices as an integral part of the digital journey. Sometimes, it's impossible to solve all the problems at first, but I often remember that the first iPhone scored high on fresh and modern design with limited features.??

Solve the BIG problem

Several years back, one of my managers said, “In my 30 years of career in Information Technology, this is the most exciting time”. While it took me a few more years to understand that, finally, I realized that architecture and solutioning have gotten a lot more fun lately with the enormous possibilities of mobile, IoT, wearables, cloud, and AI. In many cases, digital solutions abstract the problem space so much, that the problem ultimately ceases to exist. During COVID, many vaccine booking solutions were built around the globe, and the real problem “The Logistic challenges of running large-scale vaccine clinics” literally was solved. None of us might have heard that citizens showed up but could not get the vaccine because the clinic was short of needles. All the logic, constraints, and capacity planning were iteratively built in the booking system so well that the issues were taken care of upfront, and everyone started trusting the fact that if you have got a booking, you will show up and all logistics should be available.?

Iterate and Learn with customers

While looking at what has changed over the years, we are emphasizing more on working solutions than requirement or design documentation; and iterate where necessary.? Over the years, we, the solution architects were spending a lot of time on process flows, data flow, and system design diagrams, not all of them are a waste of time, but, one thing we all have to agree is that many of those flow charts had a limited useful shelf life, like cheese and if those were not implemented soon enough, those were outdated. The other part is that large requirement documents tend to overcompensate for edge cases and misses. This is not intentional as the more face-time and political leaver a particular group within the stakeholders has, the more influence they have, to emphasize minute requirements impacting them. And, guess who is usually not in the room in those JAD sessions, the customer. So, even a solution built as per spec would not meet customers' expectations. Rather an iterative delivery of a working solution provides a vehicle to get customer feedback faster and more often.

Small businesses are customers too

While we talk about the progress and possibilities of making services available to individual customers, small business as a customer is a bit of a different story. With the wave of digital technologies, we possibly do not realize that small businesses now have the latest digital tools to make their business efficient. For instance, a land development consulting firm would submit their plans, and designs in printed form or at best as PDF files to government agencies. While, most of these designs are developed in autocad / autodesk solutions, printing or extraction of the same as PDF reduces the scope of back-and-forth collaboration so much, that simple change required on those designs would take months in business-to-business and interagency communication. While I am very optimistic about the possibilities of AI and 4IR (Fourth Industrial Revolution), inter-agency service integration has left us with significant opportunities.

Customer-centric Mindset in Technology Teams

One of my colleagues coached me to say “Yes, but” more often than “No”. While, I will explain that later, in technology organizations over the year, we have had a culture of high attention to detail, order taking, deadliner and all nighters, etc more like a ‘fast-food restaurant’. As an architect, this also included saying ‘No’ to ideas that don’t conform to budget, current technology standards, and ideas we were not comfortable to start with. While these attitudes helped us to deliver the bedrock technology infrastructure cost-effectively, continuation of the same could lead to missing enormous opportunities that digital brings us, or even, to pay a high price for a misguided digital transformation. A shift in mindset is paramount in delivering best-in-class customer-centric digital solutions.

In many ways, transformation starts within. During COVID days, when the least amount of staff was expected to work from their cubical at the office, many IT folks had to be in the office because of an archaic work process. This possibly gave us a lesson that a group of tech-smart people would not reinvent themselves unless there is a shift in mindset bestowed on them. With the change in mindset, in the architecture office, once we have gotten the hat of a trusted advisor, and partner with an ample appetite to understand business and customers, our job has gotten a lot easier. It opened the door to say “Yes” and “Yes, but”. Rather than saying “No”, now we talk about options, and opportunities, and let the best idea win. A couple of years back, a team contacted me asking what hardware they should buy, for a particular mobile app project. Our conventional answer would have been, the device the group had before. But, with the new mindset, I could confidently ask “What device you would prefer?” and then, explain the importance of the availability of compatible hardware down the line or even replacement parts/warranty for the next 3-4 years. The client was not only happy that they were allowed to proceed with their preference but also, appreciated the insight he got from us on the choice of hardware that he would use when buying devices for personal use. That is about winning trust and building relationships.? That’s what I call the power of “Yes, but”.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

The potential of digital transformation can not be delivered without the touch of innovation and entrepreneurship. Traditionally, IT organizations are cost centers and could focus on governance and cost control with the tools and processes they have. But, this mindset misses on thinking out of the box, building solutions or solutions building blocks that can be re-used outside of the problem space, or even taking a minimum risk for a huge gain. A great example of that is Amazon Web Services (AWS) itself, where the virtualization and on-demand provisioning of services Amazon built for their e-commerce business were later commoditized as an independent revenue stream. In my daily work, I am committing to spend a portion of my time on innovation that could flourish new opportunities in the future and this would be on my to-do list for 2024 and onward.

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