Design Thinking for Innovation

university of the valley

Assignment

5 March 2018

Challenge and Selection  I run my own Digital Transformation company and one of the challenges I face is explaining to  customers our approach to creating a cloud adoption roadmap specific to their environment.  Visualisation is an excellent tool that we use to ensure that all stakeholders understand the  approach as well as the outcome. In my experience many stakeholders in IT operations are quite  siloed in their thinking, for example, the storage guy will only think storage and the mainframe guy  will only think mainframe.  So, getting all stake holders representing business and IT, in a room  together and explaining the process through a simplified diagram delivers excellent results.

Application  In convincing customers to start their cloud journey with a cloud adoption roadmap, I needed to  explain the approach and how it would benefit the organisation to work with us. Many organisations  understand the ‘what’ around cloud but are very confused around the ‘how’ and the first few steps  to be taken. Explaining that the approach starts with a questionnaire that identifies their level of  virtualisation in the areas of infrastructure and applications and assesses the as-is of organisational  structure and services that support this doesn’t make too much sense unless I draw it on a white  board and discuss it with the relevant stakeholders.

I explain in detail with pics that:

•  we assess the level of virtualisation on the infrastructure (1).

•  Then we assess the level of virtualisation on the application (2)

•  we review the Organisational structure that supports this (3)

•  Finally, we review the services that support the current structure (4)

Application (2)

Infrastructure (1)

Organisational Structure (3)

Services (4)

Once I draw the above diagram I find that there is a collective understanding of what our approach is  and then I am able to talk through what we deliver as the outcome.

Insight and Approach

Without the use of the white board and /or any other visualisation tools it is difficult to explain the  value of the cloud adoption roadmap. The minute I stand up and start drawing, people seem to sit  back, listen, pay attention, understand and support the idea.

People are inherently visual beings and I have learned that when we align to the natural rhythms  and designs of the basic human make up – things work better.

I myself am a very visual and tactile person and the course has taught me to use tools that not only  assist my customers but myself and my team as well. We will continue to use visual aids in  discussions with clients as this work well.

Another tool that could work is rapid prototyping. This involves building rough models or story  boards to make the concept real to customers.

