I’ve talked before about how Phil Gilbert – the former President and
CTO of Lombardi Software who joined IBM when it bought his company – now
has a role to develop a cross-company design practice in IBM. IBM
Design is centred around a lab in Austin TX but with plans to spread
wider. It’s the centre of excellence for IBM’s own take on Design
Thinking, and is hoovering up design talent like you wouldn’t believe.
What I hadn’t realised – until I saw Gilbert present at last week’s
Analyst Insights event – was the full extent to which IBM Design is
really a kind of rediscovery of the company’s industrial design
heritage.
Starting in IBM’s Software Group, Gilbert’s IBM Design group is
applying IBM Design Thinking to existing and new products. This variant
of Design Thinking – which itself might be roughly characterised as “an
approach to design that’s focused first around the experience that the
user has, rather than a product; and that takes an ‘outside-in’ approach
to analysing problems and opportunities” – is being retooled in a way
that enables IBM to scale the approach to very large teams and
communities. The approach is being spread through IBM product teams
through week-long intensive “designcamps”. The IBM Design group is
focusing in particular on dramatically improving six areas of customer
and user experience: find/install/setup, first use, everyday use,
upgrade, API use, and maintenance.
Not content with spreading the religion amongst those building and
improving products, IBM Design is also running distilled versions of its
designcamps for senior executives in IBM’s Software Group. And Gilbert
makes no secret of the fact that the ambition is to take IBM Design
Thinking beyond the Software Group to other groups in IBM.
Well, this is all very nice. But so what?
The first part of why this is so important to IBM: one of the very
legitimate ways that its competitors have in recent years been able to
score points against IBM is to highlight how complicated its
technologies are to navigate, implement and use. As Gilbert himself
says: “too many users are working for our products; we want to turn this
around.” From what I’ve seen of IBM Design’s work, it’s already started
to have a pretty radical impact on the intuitiveness of some of IBM’s
products look and feel.
The second part is more forward-looking. It relates to the ways in
which technology vendors large and small are currently investigating and
investing in Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (“SMAC”) technologies
and platforms for their customers, to augment the infrastructure
platforms they already have and help to deliver on a Digital Enterprise
vision. Every vendor has to have a story about how SMAC technologies
affect them and how they’re taking advantage. This is all well and good;
but the truth is that there’s a very real danger for enterprises as
they embark on explorations of the new platforms being assembled for
them.
The danger is that enterprises will slide into platform investments
that bring *many* more moving parts and more integration points; and at
the same time more control-point tussles between vendors with each
trying to make sure that their own social front-end, or application
development/design repository, or device management toolset, or whatever
becomes the ‘master’ in the customer’s environment. Make no mistake,
this will happen. Just as it always has when new business technology
platforms have emerged.
This is where I think the power of IBM Design has the potential,
possibly, to strengthen IBM’s strategic position. Note that IBM Design’s
mission is to “design an IBM that works together, works the same, and
‘works for me’”.
It’s that last part that really resonates in today’s environment, I
think. In Phil Gilbert’s own words: “The only platforms that matter are
the platforms in our customers’ organisations.” If this turns out to be
more than words, then it will be very powerful indeed.
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. IBM Design is
off to a great start but it’ll be another year at least before we can
say for certain the impact that IBM Design Thinking is having on IBM’s
business and its customers’ businesses.
By: Neil Ward-Dutton
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