Moving the fulcrum over with Service Design
IT services have a large lever on business results. How those services are managed has a huge impact on the agility of the business and the contribution of IT to the options a business has to generate value. The relationship between business and IT has to evolve beyond demand/delivery to co-creation of services in order to keep abreast of changing demand and competition.
Traditionally, IT departments are organized along the lines of a demand/delivery organization. This enables IT services to be in line with current demand in terms of quantity, quality and functionality. What this arrangement does not facilitate is co-creation of services to customers.
Therein lies the rub. This approach is fundamentally reactive. Customers have new demand, which leads the business to develop new services. Once those new services are fairly fleshed out the business approaches the IT department to implement new functionality in order to deliver the services.
The speed at which services are developed and delivered in every sector is increasing very rapidly. Information technology, judiciously applied, enables a ridiculous time-to-market and upsets the status quo every time. Upstarts are flying, incumbents are dying.
A reactive way of dealing with external change inevitably leads to sub-par performance vis-a-vis the competition. In order to take a pro-active role in shaping the market and exploiting new opportunities a business must be much more closely intertwined with its own IT capabilities. The rapid pace in such fields as C2C services in the sharing economy, big data, AI and robotification demands it, as all of these fields are very much about technological accelerators of business outcomes.
One way to put such a close alignment between business and IT into effect is by practicing Service Design together. This is a rapidly evolving discipline encompassing everything from user-experience oriented design approaches in the B2C space to thoroughly validated ways of creating new services that enable certain business outcomes in the C2C space. I recently had the pleasure of attending the ServDes conference in Copenhagen, Denmark where the state of the art in this field was presented.
By involving customers, business stakeholders and IT experts and suppliers from the outset it is possible to create revolutionary services that set the bar for the market you’re in. Examples include municipalities going virtual (Gemeente Molenwaard in the Netherlands), online conflict resolution for divorcing couples (Hiil Rechtwijzer) and a medicine distributor tuned healthcare service provider (Mediq).
Service design is very much an up-and-coming field that is having a huge impact in absolutely every sector. Use it to your advantage and move the fulcrum over from a demand-delivery relationship with IT to one based on co-creation. The smartwatch is ticking.
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