A lot of enterprises undergoing digital transformation are by and large geared towards the automation aspect of digital transformation. In fact, there is this general perception that digital transformation is all about automating your otherwise manual tasks for better performance and efficiency. However, the fact of the matter is that digital transformation is an umbrella term for various strategic processes and initiatives, such as business process workflow automation, cloud setups, remote accessibility, customer journey mapping, data analytics, information governance, infrastructure transformation.

Design thinking is a crucial aspect of DT that can leverage the potential and efficacy of all other aspects of digital transformation.

Before we proceed to understand how design thinking can optimize your DT endeavors, let’s get to the basics first.

Understanding Design Thinking as a Concept

Tim Brown, CEO IDEO and the author of Change by Design explains Design Thinking as:

“a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs to what is technologically possible and a viable business strategy (to) convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

Simply put, design thinking is the humanized facet of digital transformation, an iterative, intricate and collaborative approach to getting to the root of an issue, resolving problems, exploring new opportunities and meeting the unmet needs and expectations of your stakeholders. It is an action-driven and solution-oriented thinking methodology that is explicitly iterative, agile, and fuels innovation.

As stated by Ray Wang, Founder, CEO and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research,

“The key part of design thinking working is diversity,” says Wang, “but not in the traditional sense of race, religion, or gender. In this case, it’s about disciplines. Accountants, architects, authors, artists – they all think differently. When you put them in a room, and you’re trying to solve the same problem, they come up with different angles. It’s the intersection of these different disciplines that spark innovation.”

The whole premise of design thinking is weaved around one key objective. If anything is possible, design a solution to make it happen. And, dig down into research and analysis to identify what a great, optimized and streamlined solution would look like.

Implementing Design Thinking – Key Considerations

Design thinking process for digital transformation starts with the following four considerations:

What is?

The first step that sets the course of a design thinking process is to identify the ‘what is.’ This step kickstarts the design thinking process by diving deep into the current reality and developing a deep understanding of the current issues and challenges your stakeholders are currently facing.

This intricate attention to reality, as experienced by the stakeholders, and not just gathered by quantitative numbers, helps unveil unarticulated needs. Something that adds value and gives us new insights into what your stakeholders truly want even if they don’t know. This is the secret recipe for creating innovative solutions. The principal objective here is to identify the point of value creation.

What if?

Armored with all the insights gathered through conducive research and having found the pivot for value creation; the next step is to explore new possibilities, opportunities as well as uncertainties and potential setbacks that might arise. At this step of design thinking process, we see to picture the desired future in our mind by leveraging the possibilities gained through insights gathered in the first stage.

What wows?

The ideas, opportunities, and possibilities for innovation and creating value gathered in step 2 are sifted and scrutinized in step 3 to identify which of them has the wow element – in other, which ideas have the potential to hit the sweet spot, resolve the issue, optimize the flow and also, generate returns. This process involves an iterative scientific method to work through ideas, speculations, hypothesis, and outcomes.

What works?

The final step of a design thinking process is to pick the one best solution that factors in the best of every potential opportunity and creating a low-fidelity prototype. The first prototype is then put up for trial for stakeholders and after soliciting and incorporating their feedback, turned into a high-fidelity prototype. This final prototype serves as a template for developing and implementing an innovative solution. 

How Design Thinking Adds Value to Your Digital Transformation Initiatives

Design thinking and digital transformation share the same focus – optimizing processes and workflows through innovative solutions to meet the unmet, unarticulated needs and deliver value. By employing an empathic and reflective thought process and a solution-focused approach, an enterprise can elevate the potential efficacy and outcomes of their digital transformation initiatives to whole new levels of performance and profitability.

Design thinking is fast becoming the key catalyst for a successful digital transformation. It makes it convenient for enterprises to leverage modern technology to its best and design and implement innovative solutions. It allows an enterprise to interact with their audience in a more sophisticated way and deliver solutions that not just meet their expectations and needs but are up to par in terms of performance, efficiency and profitability. Above all, design thinking in digital transformation initiatives allows seeks ways to deliver value to your stakeholders and makes them feel valued. 

At Infowise, we are serving as a strategic partner, assisting public and private enterprises in their digital transformation endeavors with our scalable, smart and futuristic tools, software and applications. Our product Infowise UltimateForms Power Suite contains more than 20 standalone SharePoint applications developed to give you the power to innovate, automate and scale up your processes. Our products have been designed for optimum interoperability and seamless integration within SharePoint. Altogether, they constitute the structural foundation for digitization and facilitate your transition to digital transformation.