Design Thinking for Innovation - Peer-graded Assignment: Reflection

Mind Mapping

Challenge & Selection  I am an Account Director with an enterprise software company. I have been tasked to build an IT  Transformation proposal for a potential customer that is a telecommunications service provider.  The  customer believes that their aging IT systems are holding them back. As a result, revenues are down as  they have been losing market share to the competition, and their customer satisfaction is on a decline.

In the “what is” stage spent several weeks talking to various customer stakeholders across many  departments,  perform audits of their critical IT systems and business processes, researched market  conditions and industry trends. We ended up with a significant amount of data. The challenge now is to  figure out how to use the data to scope the transformation program and build a compelling winning  proposal that is concise.

Since the team working on the proposal is international and from diverse groups (e.g. company  executives, sales, consulting, finance, solution architects and program management), we needed a way  to get everyone on the same page quickly. We picked Mind Mapping because the visualization will  minimize risk for language barriers and we firmly believed the issues uncovered are interrelated.

Application  We got each group to mind map their area of analysis (e.g. consulting mind mapped the business  process challenges; solution architect mind mapped the limitation of the existing system and sales mind  mapped industry trends and the competition). As a group, we then tried to find the link between items  areas and identify central ideas. The objective was to find the current reality of a design challenge  before we get to the “what if” stage.

Insight & Approach  The huge mind map that we produced did help us identify patterns and insights that we could  potentially use as central themes for our proposal. For example, we discovered that across the board  the pain points were related to profitability, customer satisfaction, and increased speed-to-market.

To address these issues replacing existing IT systems was not going to be sufficient. The customer  needed a business transformation instead of just an IT transformation.  They would need a new  customer engagement system that was backed by analytics to drive up top line growth. Operational  processes required to be digitized and realigned to be more efficient and scalable to cope with the  projected business growth. Their business model needs to be relooked to take advantage of the new  digital capabilities that the new systems would provide. This could give them additional revenue  streams.

The best thing about the mind map is that it was an effective communication tool across our internal  stakeholders. Everybody, especially the executives, could quickly understand the rationale of our  proposed approach for the proposal without having to delve into a massive amount of data.

