How we tailor design approaches in an Energy company
Discover how to leverage data and technology to encourage human-centered digital opportunities.
This article was written together with Silvia Cardella.
Within Eni’s Digital Factory, the Experience & Product Design team has been effectively applying the design thinking methodology for several years, and this contributes to accelerate the digital transformation process in our company. As an in-house design team, we work closely with our colleagues, who are also the end users of the solutions we develop, throughout the entire design process.
At Eni, we provide support to internal business areas to better define their specific needs and then translate them into digital solutions that benefit their everyday work by extracting the maximum value from technological capabilities.
We provide our expertise by contributing to project development as part of a cross-skilled team of professionals that sets and achieves project objectives. Moreover, we offer expert services for business initiatives that require the application of “Design Thinking” methods or need specific proficiencies in service, product, and user experience design skills for concepts creation.
But we don’t ever work alone. For an initiative to be successful, a team of different professionals, from agile delivery managers, data scientists, IT to other specific domain experts, needs to be formed to work with designers. Each of them provides its expertise to help guide the project development.
Even though we are an in-house design studio, our client base is quite various. We work with and for engineers, technicians, administrative and service officials, IT & tech experts, HR, and training professionals. Our users are scattered geographically and spread through various age groups, besides having different expertise and levels of digital autonomy. For these reasons, our approaches are often unique and tailor-made to assess the needs and attributes of specific stakeholders.
Further in the article, we will elaborate on how we apply design thinking methodology in our company, and we will investigate how it can be leveraged in such a complex organization for unveiling valuable opportunities. Specifically, we will describe below two examples of approaches we have successfully applied by reporting:
- how we leveraged technology to redesign workflows considering the user experience across digital and physical channels,
- how we harnessed the maximum value of our stakeholders’ data to design digital tools for visualizing and monitoring key information in compliance with privacy.
Designing new workflows powered by digital opportunities
Most industries put in place well-defined procedures and workflows to make sure the operations flow seamlessly. Oftentimes, these processes can get cumbersome and somewhat manual. Therefore, a strong need to harness the power of the digital and data comes as logical. The real value of a design approach, and what it brings to the table, is to map and scoop out central needs and solve problems that bring value to the business and thus optimally support the workload. By using the design thinking methodology, we can channel the ideas and needs to a purpose that can be sustained by technology, systems, and people involved in the process. It is essential to understand what things should be left behind and what things should be digitalized and most importantly, to uncover possible technological opportunities.
The aim should always be to make sure that the new process is safer and helpful in error prevention that otherwise could not have been known or done so. On top of keeping everything smooth and efficient time and cost-wise.
The aim should always be to make sure that the new process is safer and helpful in error prevention that otherwise could not have been known or done so.
A lot of times we are talking about replacing outdated applications with new ones. It is important to understand that if we are not harnessing the technology to improve the process, we are not getting the maximum value. As a designer when designing new applications and redesigning the workflows, you should always keep in mind that we need to enable the users to perform better and help them to get and input the information they need to do the work. If we take out the human equation when designing a new workflow, we are not actually designing an efficient process. Ask yourself are we adding non-essential steps that are slowing down the user? Are we unintentionally forcing our users to seek an alternative way of solving problems because they were not enabled by the new platform?
It is important to understand that if we are not harnessing the technology to improve the process, we are not getting the maximum value.
Finally, in the industrial sectors, the user’s experience is not just digital. It is very much physical as well. Therefore, it is important to design and define those intersections and interactions accordingly and with care. If you design a solution you need to consider it in its entirety, because the digital experience might be just a fraction of the entire process and user’s journey. What is the user’s experience on and off the digital platform? When we are talking about product design for businesses where the users are also the stakeholders of the same business, we need to consider the product’s ecosystem (service and product design). We need to think about the interactions between people, people and systems and the level of human intervention in them. It is exactly this balance between these correlations that makes up the ultimate user experience.
If we take out the human equation when designing a new workflow, we are not actually designing an efficient process.
A design approach to unlock the power of data
We see innovation in processes and strategy as a key part of the digital transformation activities we are engaged in. Our digital journey puts our people, their needs, and competencies at the center of the design process and requires that the most innovative digital technologies are made available by tech experts to provide benefit to end-users in optimizing their daily work activities.
When we undertake a design project, we first frame the business requirements to convert them into design challenges to be addressed with the most appropriate approach. Also, by working within the same company as our client-users, we have the advantage of gaining access to a deeper understanding of the context in which these challenges are being developed, and how their resolution will affect them at a strategic level. To assess our colleagues’ work needs, and delve deeper into their goals, we collaborate with a variety of matter experts and digital professionals, including data scientists who provide us with meaningful insights from business data exploration and analysis activities which support us in defining more beneficial use cases for end users, which will ultimately turn into innovative and effective digital solutions based on users’ needs and on the available data. It is therefore imperative for us to ensure that the company’s information assets are valorized to become useful, usable and actionable according to the specific business units who asked us for support.
It’s imperative to ensure that the company’s information assets are valued to become useful, usable and actionable.
Whether our business colleagues are already aware of the technologies they would like to use to support their jobs, or whether this would be the outcome of an accurate opportunities analysis, it is becoming increasingly important for us to leverage the data that our colleagues produce and hold to use it strategically as a design resource during different stages of the design process. This helps us dig deeper into users’ problems and justify proposed solutions.
It’s becoming increasingly important to leverage the data and use it strategically as a design resource.
As proof, we have been able to contribute to the design of a digital monitoring platform to assess the occurrence of risk conditions in advance, by designing the display of key information provided by the algorithms, the interaction with data, and a seamless user experience for people with different levels of visibility. What’s more, as the new user experience was being designed and new features implementation discussed, the algorithms were being revised; this circumstance has created the condition for a strong mutual exchange of value between design and data science allowing us to operate in parallel to carry on both workstreams.
It is therefore of paramount importance for us to capitalize on business data throughout the design process not only to conceive digital solutions that match business needs with the data at their disposal but also to help us develop a better user experience based on direct or indirect users’ feedback that validates the design results.
Conclusion
To uncover valuable opportunities out of technology and data, it is therefore critical to be aware of the needs of those who will benefit from the solution, the questions to answer, and the underlying conditions of their business. If you take the time to examine the right questions during the design process, it will make the search for the most appropriate answer more effective. It will also enable you to capture some interesting insights that otherwise would have been missed. Therefore, we advise investing time in looking into the information assets available to the business, understanding the current experience, and managing the prioritization of the release stages of the solution you want to design.
It is safe to say that the most significant value of being an in-house designer is working with and for colleagues with whom we share the same company values, and we point toward the same strategic direction, which leads us to create greater connection and empathy. Ultimately, we strategically use the Design Thinking methods to give impetus to the company’s innovation and digital transformation across multiple domains, by fostering rooms for dialogue, collaboration, and action between different business functions and other stakeholders.
However, considering the size of the company and the variety of departments we work with, there is no one-fit-for-all approach that can solve all business demands. As a relatively newly formed in-house design studio, we quickly gained the experience, and the holistic skill sets necessary to create specific approaches on a case-by-case basis that best address project requirements.
