Pervasive Excellence across IBM: Three ways design can make it happen

Before I joined IBM this summer, I asked the former GM, Phil Gilbert, how we were doing with design.

“We have pockets of excellence,” Phil told me. “We need pervasive excellence.”

I’ve been thinking about that comment for months.

What would it look like to deliver pervasive excellence in design across a global Fortune 100 enterprise? IBM has more than 3,000 designers embedded in every part of the business — hardware, software, services, brand, marketing and even sales and HR. While we are one IBM design team, the reality is that these designers report into their various business units, all aligned to the goals and incentives of their part of the business. How might we ensure that all 3,000 designers are consistently delivering excellent hybrid cloud and AI experiences to our customers?

Before I continue, I should probably define “design excellence.” Much ink has been spilled on this concept, but for the purposes of this post, let’s define it as this:

Design excellence = Solving the right problems for customers, and solving them in a way that exceeds expectations, differentiates us in the market, and is consistent with our company brand and values.

Obviously, this begins with hiring and retaining talented, diverse, engaged designers — people with the skills and the drive to make great things and make things great.

But that’s not enough.

“Great” designers in a bad situation will not produce great work. I’ve seen all the ways this can go wrong in the 20+ years I’ve been leading design. Perhaps that will be the subject of another blog post, but for now, let’s talk about some of the conditions that lead to great design:

1. Access to CUSTOMERS.

At IBM, we design software, services, and infrastructure for people with highly specialized skillsets, from offshore reliability engineers to medical practitioners to autoworkers. We can’t possibly guess what experiences will meet their needs. We have to talk with them, watch how they work, look at the tools they use, and try to understand their motivations and pain points. In doing so, we must consider not only the people who buy and use our products and services, but the entire ecosystem of people engaging with the experiences we design, including partners and IBM employees.

What this means for IBM Design: A renewed focus on our research practice; removing barriers to access to customers; providing tools and resources for anyone conducting research to hit the ground running.

2. Strong ALLIANCES with our business and technology counterparts.

It’s about checks and balances. For example, on a healthy product team, designers champion the needs of customers, product leaders champion the business strategy, and engineering champions the technology opportunities. We must have an equal exchange between these three voices to make smart tradeoffs between customer, business, and technology goals. This is not a new idea. We’ve been talking about this for years. Now we need to infuse this approach throughout our company.

What this means for IBM Design: Empower designers to speak the language of business. We can also empower the business to speak the human-centered language of design, which will help all of us articulate the value of our offerings in the market. And we can get designers and design executives involved earlier in product ideation, to help shape and validate concepts cheaply and efficiently, without incurring technical debt.

3. An environment of CONTINUOUS LEARNING.

Quick story: When I first started practicing design, the internet was basically a bunch of hypertext pages. My job (information architect) was to draw a lot of boxes and arrows, sitemaps and wireframes. After a year or so, this started to get pretty boring. I thought maybe it was time to find another way to make a living. Maybe nursing school?

And then the technology got better. Suddenly, we could create more complex, client-side interactions. We could introduce rich media. We had at our fingertips massive amounts of data. The challenges our designers face today are infinitely more complicated than the brochureware I was designing in 1999. It requires new and emerging skills, such as how to design for valuable, ethical AI interactions. Or how to design for complex, cross-channel, end-to-end experiences. Or how to design to minimize impact on climate change.

What this means for IBM Design: As technology evolves, we, too, must evolve. This means continuing to invest and improve our best-in-class training programs like Patterns and Enterprise Design Thinking (which is for all IBMers, not just designers). This is our delivery mechanism to offer new skills and training for everything from journey mapping complex interactions to how to design for artificial intelligence and sustainability.

These are early thoughts and they will continue to evolve as we define our vision for the next phase of IBM Design. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. What have you seen — either at IBM or at other companies — that has been successful at driving pervasive excellence in design?

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The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.