Our journey into complexity via Service Design
Nearly six years ago, we embarked on our professional design careers by joining IBM. Andrea joined as a Design Researcher, while Izzi joined as a User Experience Designer. Together, we became part of IBM Studios Poughkeepsie in New York. Our initial years were devoted to unpacking, comprehending, and ideally rejuvenating one of IBM’s flagship hardware platforms: IBM Z. Despite limited collaboration as teammates, we bonded over our shared enthusiasm and curiosity for Service Design, a role that was not yet established at IBM.
Practicing design for IBM Z was an eye-opening experience since it’s a highly complex and highly technical domain. It felt like the Powers of Ten short documentary by Charles and Ray Eames. We had to zoom-in and zoom-out, each new perspective prompting questions and dilemmas on how to negotiate between legacy systems and new upcoming technologies and bridge the gaps between past ways of working and fast-paced environments.
While working together on IBM z/OS, the operating system that runs on IBM Z, we understood that creating long-lasting impact would require advocating for holistic experiences, healthy cross-collaboration, and measurable touch points. During this period, we became aware of Sara Brooks, former IBM Design Executive and senior service design expert, and her team’s work on the Universal Experiences. It is a framework proposing specific steps outlining an end-to-end journey which is tailored to IBM’s users, customers, and stakeholders. We adopted this approach and laid the groundwork for teams in IBM Infrastructure (the business unit that IBM Z is part of) to continue advocating for these principles. This work opened our eyes to the world of service design and pushed us to engage with the broader community.
We thought of service design as the orchestration of touch points throughout end-to-end journeys, focusing on employee experiences to improve the customer experience. At the time, service design at IBM was a smaller practice, relative to the larger design community made up of user experience designers, design researchers, visual designers, and content designers. We collaborated with the Universal Experiences team to understand the frameworks they were creating. This allowed us to understand the intent behind service design at IBM and its larger implications.
“We began to operationalize our service design mindset inside IBM within the context of work on digital journeys my team led from 2018 to 2020. The goal was to help IBMers work better together to smooth out those seams that cause churn and devalue our brand.” — Sara Brooks, Working with Complexity via Service Design, 2022
The coordination of thousands of IBMers on the backstage was a key moment for us to dive into as service designers: no other design discipline at IBM was tasked with operationalizing the backstage experience through an end-to-end mindset, let alone thinking of customer experiences in an end-to-end fashion. Service designers shepherding front and back-stage end-to-end experiences was a completely unique opportunity that could allow IBM to be more efficient and create unique experiences that users love.
Through our efforts advocating for service design, the Service Design Guild was born. Due to limited awareness of service design, we had several challenges in front of us: how do we increase awareness of the discipline to get UX designers and design researchers adopting the framework and approach? How do we get non-designers thinking about end-to-end journeys on the IBM backstage as well as the customer front-stage? Both of these questions poked at the need to scale service design within the company. In an organization with 270,000 employees globally, with around 3,000 of those employees being designers, and only a small percentage as service designers, it was clear we had to mobilize the community if we wanted service design to permeate the organization faster. We relied on a broad interest in service design to get people to join the Service Design Guild, but also had much bigger plans for what we wanted to do through the community.
We joined the Service Design Guild two years ago as co-leads to continue growing and shaping the practice of service design in IBM. As it was mentioned in a previous article written by a fellow IBMer, design guilds in IBM take a special role of self-organized entities focused on practices that enhance and expand capabilities, foster teamwork, enable cross-business unit visibility, and drive excellent outcomes for our customers. Co-leading the Service Design Guild was the perfect opportunity to amplify our advocacy. Our goal was to promote the practice, mindset, and ecosystem of service design. Ultimately this is not about service design; it’s about delivering great products and experiences that delight our users. During our nearly two-years as co-leads, Service Design Guild members published six articles. We also hosted more than 15 community calls with ten industry guest speakers.
We believe that education and growth of service design in IBM could allow organization-led initiatives like D&UX reviews and others to have long-lasting impact. Service design supports these initiatives because at their core they look at people, touchpoints, and processes from different lenses, such as the facilitation of seamless holistic experiences, orchestration of touchpoints and processes, and measurement across user journey stages.
While service design has an undeniable impact on the projects it is supporting, there are still challenges to increase awareness and adoption, especially outside the design community. In addition, there are multiple ways service design is executed within IBM. Our business units that utilize service design range from Software to the CIO to Research to Consulting, each one of them using service design in a unique manner. How might we scale the impact of service design across our large organization, but tailor it to be specific enough to each business unit allowing for ease of adoption?
As we move forward in 2024, we continue to support the Guild’s ongoing efforts: hosting community calls, inviting guest speakers, and publishing articles. Still, now more than ever, it is critical for us to accelerate our processes in creating winning products by bridging gaps in experiences and connecting dots all across the company. We believe that we must experiment in the integration of AI tools to service design practices for design to play a leading role in unlocking IBM’s full potential and addressing our organization’s most pressing issues with an ethical lens. As creators of these technologies, we must strive for a safe and equitable future.
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Do you want to continue learning about the practice of service design at IBM? Read the following recommended articles:
Design for change — Highlights from the Service Design Global Conference 2023
Designing for Policymaking: A Reflection
How Service Design can help your team to build accessible and inclusive digital products
What are Service Design Blueprints?
Collaborative Journey Mapping for IBM zCX
Working with Complexity via Service Design
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This article has been co-written by Andrea Burgueño from IBM Software and Izzi Cain from IBM CIO who are based in New York City and Chicago. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
