Thinking by Design: Solve Wicked Problems with Architecture and Innovation

When outcomes fall short of objectives, but the true problem and solution are both unknown, you have “wicked problems” – those that require true innovation, not tweaks to existing process and technology.

Architecture provides context, reference, and a foundation for transformation; without it, the picture is incomplete. Read how architecture enhances each Design Thinking stage: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Intersect Methods to Amplify Understanding

Design thinking, an iterative method focused on immersion in the customer’s perspective, addresses customer-specific concerns. It is a disciplined means to define needs, ideate solutions, develop low-cost, low-effort prototypes to model solutions, and test for strengths and weaknesses – all within the context of the customer.

Business and data architects bring the people, who will be the center of the eventual design, into the discussion. To write the story of how individuals interact to enact business outcomes, they interview individuals, facilitate teams, and document business actions, roles, and information exchanges. They structure understanding of the customer’s operations and unique needs.

Structure Empathy

Design thinking is unique in its focus on empathy, which requires face-to-face interaction, deeper listening, and exploration of individual experiences including feelings. Architects can go beyond cataloging roles, data, and tasks and characterize the work in personal terms. Is a chaotic process overwhelming? Do employees feel successful? Would tools, data, access, or training improve their work experience? Ask about interactions with other business areas and where failures occur.

Empathetic exploration while building structured architectural documentation brings greater insight. Group discussions that combine business areas create common understanding and a sense of being heard that resonates across the organization. Along with tangible details of business operations and data needs, architects capture business vision and work context, pain points, and successes. 

Define the Problem to Plan a Better Future

Transformation needs a purpose – rooted in inefficiency or an inability to meet business objectives. Leverage empathy work to find it. Seed innovation opportunities from recorded pain points and failures in the problem definition stage. Promote best practices from successes and lessons learned. Architects capture these elements in a standard, structured way as subject matter experts relate their work experience. If stored electronically, this structured information can populate problem statements.

Facilitate the problem definition and analysis and link it to architecture sections for context when identifying solutions. Each impacted business group brings unique perspective; work together to identify, analyze, and prioritize issues to address. Reinforce cross-team business understanding.

This work shapes a future-state vision for the transformation, as participants consider where the business stands today and where it needs to be.

Diagram the impact of current-state problems and of removing obstacles to help participants and leadership envision themselves in a transformed business.

Ideate Ways to Architect Change

In the Ideation stage, context is provided by the architectures – knowledge of the business operation, people and data that keep it running, and barriers impeding success. Staff turnover mitigation strategies likely differ significantly for restaurant servers and knowledge workers. Business and data architects are important resources for guiding strategy sessions, the recorded baseline frames ideation discussion and diagramming a future-state provides a solution blueprint.

Brainstorm with impacted business teams; maintain consensus on ideas to pursue or set aside. Refer to architectures for bottlenecks, hand-off delays, data issues, and inefficient processes. Flow ideas before introducing constraints of cost, implementation time, or technological feasibility. Consider training and change management. Invite experts in technology and process improvement techniques to inform discussion.

Design and architecture group participants will own the transformation and identify the requirements for implementation.

Updated vision architectures can show impacts of planned changes.

They represent the current state of the business, the set of constraints that govern the business, and an evolving future vision.

Prototype Solutions with Business Knowledge

In prototyping, business and technology come together to try new ideas. Technology and process experts build limited solutions, relying on architectures already validated by the business teams. Future state architectures define actions to automate, along with information the primary user role needs for each action. Business teams implement process or technology changes in some environments; they monitor development team implementations in others.

Architects collaborate with developers on prototyping tools that require documented activity-role-data relationships, such as wireframes, forms, and data capture or display screens. Technology requires specification of relevant data, its location and structure. Process prototyping requires identification of changes needed and reference to original activities, roles, decision branches, and information hand-offs. 

Prototyping produces a set of specifications and a prototype solution that incorporates a subset of actions and data from the full architecture framework. Data architects specify data sets and structure, and business architects specify the process, people, and information. Successful prototypes grow into agile development of a full solution.

Define Parameters for Testing

Collaboration continues, as prototype solutions are tested using architecture-based documentation. Business users test against business needs. Business architects provide process flows, business use cases and specifications of roles, information, and activities required for each business outcome. Data architects provide test data, along with data structure, data relationships, and data validation rules.

For automated solutions, business users test alongside technology experts. In process-centric solutions, process-improvement experts maintain controls and compare measured outcomes of test processes with current state outcomes to determine change effectiveness. If a test case fails, review the architectures to rule out gaps. Gather experts and update for the next iteration. Architectures in electronic format can be updated in much less time than when initially developed.

Validation or rejection of prototypes determines which merit further development. Testing prototypes built based on business and data architecture documentation also tests the architectures. Testing feeds back into other design stages or moves forward into implementation of the future state.