Designing means modeling

Because of its inherent complexity, exploring the enterprise as a field for design requires looking at it from different angles. In design theory, this activity is known as framing. The rationale of taking a certain perspective is to generate a frame, a particular viewpoint on a given context and environment, in order to make sense of it and develop a model of elements to consider—either implicitly as a mental model, or externalized in a visual representation or other artifact.

Creating models from different perspectives (also known as framed models) is part of any design activity. In the most general sense, models are representations of something—such as a given situation or context, an idea for a new or evolved state or system, or visible objects like a new building or website. They can be represented in drawings, diagrams, physical models, or written scenarios. Usually, models are either a simplified picture of reality or an illustration of a potential future. They are used to make thoughts and ideas explicit and create maps of related elements, as communication vehicles, and to gain insights into the expectations and needs of stakeholders.

Externalized in documents or other artifacts, framed models help us exchanging with people relevant to the design project, and to develop an understanding of their particular views. Those perspectives enable them to judge what is important, and what change to consider as a success. Driven by facts observed, personal experience, and our own thinking, frames in design combine objective and subjective reasoning. As abstractions, they concentrate on certain elements while deliberately leaving out or radically simplifying others, providing ways to look at a system from different perspectives and through different lenses.

Beyond just exploring the existing, models are used in the process of design synthesis and ideation to connect different aspects of a problem, and to explore and elaborate possible future states to resolve it with regards to these aspects. They permit us to make change visible as descriptions or prototypes that concentrate on one particular viewpoint while keeping other things abstract, and to try out and share different directions and options. They help us make difficult decisions in a space of concerns, become aware of tradeoffs between those decisions, and uncover opportunities for innovation. Furthermore, they are used to define the result of a design process, and to make detailed plans for implementation or production.

Design viewpoints on the enterprise

To understand the enterprise in a way that allows picturing the impact of a purposeful transformation, designers need to deeply explore it and envision its possible future states. Because of its inherent complexity, this means working with a particularly ill-defined problem setting. Any approach to gain insight and develop understanding therefore involves creating several simplified models of the enterprise as a system, with the concerns to be addressed guiding the choice of frames.

The aspects covered on the following pages help us to think about a given problem setting, in determining things to consider in design research and subsequent phases of the process. They enable us to envision potential outcomes with regards to stakeholder concerns, and the target state of the enterprise as a system. They are universally applicable to any kind of strategic design project, and provide a solid basis for custom, project-specific models.

The four framing aspects used in the Enterprise Design framework suggest a set of fundamental perspectives which have their origins in design and systems thinking. they guide conceptual modeling and help when deciding on a direction according to strategic choices:

BUSINESS FRAME

captures how market actors create value, operate, and interact, and allows expressing in business terms the objectives the client or business owner intends to accomplish with a design initiative, the customer value gained, and the change desired.

PEOPLE FRAME

captures who in the enterprise is being addressed with a design initiative, and permits grounding all design decisions in the individual goals, characteristics, needs, expectations, and context of individuals and groups in a human-centric way.

FUNCTION FRAME

captures the purpose the enterprise fulfills and the behaviors it exhibits towards its stakeholders. The functional viewpoint helps the understanding, prioritization, and selection of a set of requirements the outcomes of a design initiative is expected to meet.

STRUCTURE FRAME

captures the objects and entities relevant to the enterprise, how they interrelate and form a structure. It enables an exploration of the problem domain in conceptual models and the transformation of those models in the course of a design process.

Understanding the Business Context

In our experience, the most common reason for failure in a design project is not related to the quality of the ideas or the execution, or the talent of the design team. Many projects fail because the business objectives and the strategy driving them were unclear or misaligned with the design process. The Enterprise Design framework makes the business frame a core part of design research and modeling activities.

A thorough understanding of the business context behind everything a client or owner wants or considers necessary is an invaluable resource for designers. It allows us to align proposals according to the priorities and perceptions of stakeholders, tracing back requirements and wishes to business concerns, and coming up with solutions which pertain to this environment. More than just integrating into a given context, it allows for modeling and communicating a potential future in business terms, and envisioning the transformation triggered by the outcome of a design initiative. Modeling a business context is a process of inquiry, of capturing the existing, deriving constraints and chasing opportunities for improvement. It is an expression of the business contribution of a design.

A Business View on the Enterprise

As explored in Chapter 3, design is used mostly within the context of the products and services provided to the customers of an organization, or the communications around those offerings. As a strategic competency for responding to complex problems, it can be used for a much broader range of areas beyond product development. With all the actors and things going on in the enterprise, there are numerous opportunities to drive change by design, following the strategic direction of a Big Picture view on the enterprise.

Exploring the enterprise from a business viewpoint provides tactical direction where design initiatives as investments in transformations can have the most significant influence to help a business strategy come to life. It changes appearances and behaviors, initiates different ways of doing business, and uncovers new opportunities to generate value for people. This also involves introducing new elements, removing others, and rearranging their interplay in business activities.

The business frame focuses on how a business works and how it engages with the markets it addresses, driven by two considerations:

DIFFERENTIATION

the way a business creates value for its customers, and fosters and sustains relationships to them, and makes a unique and distinguishable proposition to the market.

EFFICIENCY

the way a business maximizes profitability, manages resources and infrastructure, and achieves its objectives with the least possible amount of monetary engagement and human effort, and achieving a sustainable development of the enterprise as a whole.

in exploring the drivers behind design initiatives, we found the following elements to be particularly relevant to the business context:

VALUES

pertaining to the fundamental idea of what the business is about, what it stands for, and how stakeholders see it now and in the future. The goal of design synthesis is to capture and express this idea, to help developing a vision of the future by making it visible.

STRATEGY

related to the way a company seeks to achieve competitive advantage over other market players by differentiation of its offering and maximizing efficiency. An awareness of how it contributes to these efforts makes a design initiative strategically relevant.

OBJECTIVES

or goals related to the business success as well as metrics suitable to measure whether those goals have been reached. They form the business case of a design project, describing the goals and, if possible, quantifying the return on investment.

POLICIES

are constraints and rules either self-created by the business following strategy and values, or imposed on it by regulation or law. They state the way things have to be done by the business, so that they affect design decisions and should be clearly defined.

when modeling from a business perspective, the following elements are often of interest to research activities and solution definition:

MARKET

the larger environment to be addressed, with competitors and substitutes, customers to be served and offerings for them, prices and cost structures for customers, as well as market trends and issues. Design outcomes should achieve a better positioning for the organization on a market it is engaged on, or enable it to address a new market.

ACTIVITIES

activities carriend out thoughout the business, that span organizational units, people and tools for automated processing, exchanges via channels used to interact with customers or other organizations, transactions, and flow of revenue. design outcomes should enable faster, simpler, and more robust and reliable processes.

RESOURCES

assets important to the business and the cost they produce, technical or physical infrastructure elements used as platforms to automate and manage work, external partners involved in business activities, communication channels, and tools. design outcomes should achieve more with fewer resources and less cost.

As a starting point for the business frame applied, look at the enterprise as a whole in therms of its big picture aspects. this allows identifying opportunities for innovation and improvement, and developing the key qualities that help an organization pursue its strategic direction in daily business:

IDENTITY

the identity conveyed by the organization, brands, and informal and personal identities, and the way these identities are reflected in image and reputation are essentially how the enterprise creates trust toward its stakeholders. brands are organizational resources and assets, and should be designed to help do business and develop it.

ARCHITECTURE

the combination of formal structures put in place and managed to execute and opera- tionalize the business strategy. The business focus looks at the role of these structures for its activities, how they are maintained and developed, and how to improve business performance by achieving better results with less effort.

EXPERIENCE

the way the business appears in the lives of its customers and other stakeholders as a service provider, employer, or in other roles, and the noticeable value it creates and provides to them. Exploring the experiences of people in touch with the enterprise allows identifying business opportunities to provide more valuable benefits.

Anatomy elements that form relationships in the enterprise are the necessary ingredients to do business:

ACTORS

stakeholders and the business roles they play in the market and the enterprise, most importantly customers, but also investors or (potential) employees. Depending on the level of design, they can be further segmented into different customer segments, investor types, or organizational divisions.

TOUCHPOINTS

channels used to reach actors, offer, deliver, or acquire products and services, and exchange money, information, and goods. They provide the interface to do business with people, both as consumers or representatives of customer organizations, and can be of physical or virtual nature, direct or indirect.

SERVICES

business activities that generate a value that can be expressed in monetary terms, and create or sustain relationships to customers or other actors. This includes the offerings produced and made available for sale and consumption, as well as the ongoing processes creating or supporting stakeholder benefits.

CONTENT

messages and communications with regard to business decision making, within the organization as well as with other actors in the larger enterprise. This includes customer communication along the commercial process, as well as information used for management decisions for management and operations.

Designing Business

Approaching a design challenge from a business perspective requires designers to think like an entrepreneur, or—in the case of an established business—like an internal or external investor in a business transformation. Key to this is the concept of business modeling, the practice of understanding and redesigning the way an enterprise creates value and generates revenue. Based on the business view of the enterprise and individual business context described before, it involves modeling the business and its potential evolution.

Although applicable for any design challenge, the business frame is often considered only superficially in today’s design practice. In order to make an impact on a strategic and enterprise-wide level, it is crucial to develop a deep understanding of the way business is done, both currently and in a changed future setting. A strategic dialogue with business leaders that have commissioned the design work is only possible with a design practice that aims to inform strategy. Designers have to do so in business terms, making explicit their plans to transform enterprise qualities, and how design outcomes can contribute to business success.

A prerequisite for such a dialogue is to have the design team work closely with business stakeholders when preparing and running design initiatives, especially those working on a plan or vision for the future of the enterprise—entrepreneurs and executives, strategists and Marketing experts, owners of projects and programs, investors, customers, and suppliers—essentially anyone tasked with innovation and change, both inside and outside the organization.

Applying the business frame thoroughly is essential for design teams to position themselves, as innovation drivers in the enterprise instead of as merely executors of what others have defined. But this also results in new challenges. It requires discovering business opportunities in design research, and generating choices as investment options. These options have to address how the outcomes of the design process will contribute to business success by generating customer value or improving operations, requiring both analysis of the current business and operating model and a quantification of success conditions. Likewise, they have to be grounded in a well-defined business strategy, translating values, strategy, objectives, and policies into design principles to be applied.

Developing knowledge and Empathy

In our daily lives, we encounter people we know well and others we do not, people we do or do not understand when we talk to them. We consider some people friends and are indifferent to others. This aspect of social reality is closely related to design work and the role of the people frame. People are special—addressing them requires designers to appreciate and embrace what makes us individual, to come up with concepts and ideas that fit.

The people frame is based on a straightforward assumption: if we take the people that a design is made for into account and relate to them on a human level, it is much more likely that we will meet their needs and expectations, with the objective of making them happier than before. This in turn is an implicit goal of any design project, since making these people happy means engaged employees, satisfied customers and investors, other stakeholders to the business. While this principle sounds quite simple, holding to it in real life turns out to be somewhat complex. It means making people and their lives an integral part of our creative thinking process, people who in many cases we do not know much about.

The focus of the people frame is to make the outcomes of the design meaningful to people, driven by two key aims to be achieved:

USEFULNESS

making the outcomes of the design process useful in that they help people achieve their goals, addressing the very personal reasons they have to engage in activities or tasks. This involves making things usable, findable, accessible and, useful for the audience.

ENGAGEMENT

making the design outcomes compelling and desirable by addressing people on an emotional and subconscious level. Going beyond pure usefulness, engagement involves elements of stimulation, persuasion, and personality, to generate attraction and build trust.

The Enterprise as a Social Space

The people frame perceives the enterprise as a social construct, as a group of persons. It enables a design team to think of the people targeted, involved, and affected by their outcomes. It allows them to immerse themselves in people’s daily life, and to develop the knowledge and empathy that are behind good solutions and great ideas. As a strictly human-centered viewpoint, it reduces the challenging problem settings of a complex enterprise environment to the everyday reality of people and the personal and social factors that influence it.

in order to develop knowledge about the people you address with a design initiative and gain deep insight into their lives, take into account the following dimensions in research and modeling:

CHARACTERISTICS

demographic data such as their age and profession, but also aptitudes and skills, habits, and attitudes.

ACTIVITIES

looking at the nature of tasks, frequency and duration, tools or artifacts used, and interactions with others.

GOALS

what people want to achieve, immediate and long-term goals, reflecting rational or practical issues related to feeling happy.

SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT

groups, roles and identities, cultural norms and beliefs, local particularities, and the nature of relationships.

CONTEXT

both physical environments and states of mind in which people carry out activities and interact with each other.

 Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand.

 Don Norman

Elements of relationship Anatomy are about the very concrete manifestation of the enterprise in a person’s daily life:

ACTORS

the roles of a person in social terms. This relates to the individual reflection of the relationships to others in the enterprise space, responsibilities, and the expectations, leading to a certain self-image and behavior. Engaging actors as people means designing for individual aspirations and motivation with regard to their role.

TOUCHPOINTS

the situations someone experiences across the journey of interactions with and within the enterprise, and the particular physical and psychological contexts in which they appear. This refers to the environment, time, duration, and intensity of those contacts, and the factors to be considered to address that context.

SERVICES

the activities carried out in the enterprise to support people and generate benefits for them. Services appear to people only in the effects they produce, and the communication processes and exchanges happening around them. Looking at services from a people perspective allows exploring their role and how they are perceived.

CONTENT

information and messages being exchanged between people in the enterprise, relevant to people only as knowledge that is useful by informing choices and supporting decision- making, or otherwise considered of interest or entertaining. Content is the essence of any exchange, to be designed to fit and make sense to people.

when looking at the Big Picture of the enterprise from a people perspective, it presents itself as a dynamic social space of people interacting with each other in a multitude of different ways:

IDENTITY

identities that appear in the enterprise space and the way they are perceived by people, and lead to certain images in their minds. To people, brands and informal identities are meaningful symbols expressing organizational identity and culture, connected to the enterprise as a social and cultural system, having manners and beliefs, language and rituals, and following behavioral norms.

ARCHITECTURE

the way the enterprise works for people and the role they play in the way it is structured and executes activities. From a people perspective, architecture refers to organization and formally defined responsibilities, individual tasks that contribute to the running enterprise (not restricted to staff, think of customer tasks), tools and systems used, and the human factor in business operations.

EXPERIENCE

while the experience quality of the enterprise is inherently people-centric, looking at experience with an individual’s eyes is all about their overall personal context and condition. it allows examining the meaning of the enterprise of people in touch with it and important to its success, and the role it plays in their lives.

Designing with the people frame is applicable for research, design, and validation activities. it is taking into account multiple distinct but intertwined psychological qualities, and addresses them by applying both factual knowledge about them and subjective conceptualization in an individual context:

PERCEPTION AND FOCUS

are about the impressions of the human senses, what a person sees, hears, smells, tastes, or touches. People fi lter what they perceive to direct their attention on messages and things they focus on, guided by emotion and cognition. Design works with these elements to direct the focus and facilitate comprehension.

COGNITION AND EMOTION

refer to thinking processes and feelings, and their complex interrelationships. This includes expectations people have with regards to an activity, associations they apply to develop conceptual models of the world, and questions of memory and learning. Design considers both aspects of the mind, conscious and reflective thinking as well as affection and emotional reactions.

MOTIVATION AND BEHAVIOR

are about what makes people take an action, to what kinds of activities and conduct that leads them, and how they adapt to the world around them. Understanding motives and intentions in the context of a design problem provides the basis to discover and address the hidden and unexpressed needs of people, by predicting situational change and motivating new behaviors.

Designing for People

Applying the people frame requires investment in research and collaborative work with the audience being addressed, and with the stakeholders considered important. Beyond just knowing the raw facts, working with actual people enables us to walk in their shoes, experiencing the struggles of activities first hand, and to empathize with the people we are designing for. In our design projects, that deep understanding gathered about people has proven to be an important source of ideas, and enables the team to re-frame a given problem in a way that it guides all design decisions. This however requires translating the findings into actionable insights.

The implications of following an HCD principle seem to be interpreted very differently among the various fields where the fundamental paradigm is applied. While practitioners of usability or ergonomics work with analytic approaches driven by metrics, such as task efficiency or cognitive load, methodologies used by design professionals strive to empathize with people, or to engage in co-creative design exercises. Still, all of these different interpretations share a common goal: making people a central consideration in every design decision, and actively involving them in the design work.

In the enterprise context, the people frame connects the design process to the human reality that it seeks to influence—applicable not just to the target group the designers are focusing on, but to the whole range of actors identified as relevant. This helps to expand the human-centric focus beyond an individual outcome. Instead of considering people just as users of a website, customers addressed by a service, or other predefined roles, it allows looking at people first and foremost as human beings with needs and aspirations.

Designing for the enterprise as a social space means considering personalities, individual meanings or roles, and offerings to key stakeholders as persons. This view goes beyond usability and satisfaction, concepts which basically strive to make things less bad—delivering what is expected to not disappoint people, and avoiding needless hassles and efforts. The people frame aims for the big goals: engaging people, helping them to have fun, or making their work a smooth flow. It allows adapting the result of enterprise activities to their lives, their problems, and what makes them happy.

Eliciting and Modeling Functional Requirements

In the most general sense, function refers to everything related to the rationale behind a design project. It is about the meaning the outcomes will have for persons and groups, the client or owner commissioning the work, and other potential stakeholders, and about planning the resulting system’s behavior in advance in a way that anticipates that meaning. In the end, it is not determined by the designer or developer—it is the user who attributes function. Therefore, predicting function and specifying features usually requires taking into account a large amount of different facts, stakeholder opinions, and observations made in the environment of the project and using this knowledge to elaborate a set of requirements.

In our consulting practice, we found this part of the design process to be particular difficult to get right. While it is necessary to get together with the customer and the people addressed to ask for their needs, in isolation such an approach often leads to failure. It risks producing a large wish list of features and trendy topics, and neglects the potential of hidden needs, ideas available in the project team or among stakeholders, and insights gathered from applying the other perspectives described in this chapter. While having a clear picture of what is wanted is of high value for design decisions, a feature-driven approach bears a great danger, known as feature creep: adding more and more to the list under the assumption that more is always better, or under pressure from the client.

The function frame looks at how something works or should work to serve a defined need, taking into account two main considerations:

PURPOSE

what the project is about, making outcomes of the design process respond to actual requirements and expectations, including goals to be supported and qualities or constraints to be addressed.

BEHAVIOR

how its outcomes should work as a system to accomplish a goal, supporting activities, tasks or business processes, defined as a behavioral description of interactions with the environment.

The elicitation and analysis of requirements means understanding and modeling the functional context in which the resulting system will be working, considering a set of distinct elements:

GOALS

either explicitly expressed by stakeholders or otherwise becoming apparent, that can be translated into a function the resulting system has to fulfill. Models about goals are informed by conversations with stakeholders or research, but also by ideas that might unveil a hidden need.

PROCESSES

representing any form of organized and predictable activity corresponding to the fulfillment of a certain set of goals. A functional process model is a detailed description of what is going on, in order to determine the functions required to support and improve those processes. it might also detail the flows that appear in the system as movement of information, money, value, time, or physical resources, and how inputs are transformed and turned into process outputs.

COMPONENTS

are conceptual objects that group a set of related functions as part of the overall system, acting in a process to support the achievement of goals. components are a mental construct to allow decomposing sets of functionality into systems and subsystems, as well as external and internal parts, helping to determine the working structure and behavior of a system.

 Requirements are often just laundry lists: someone makes them up, they are arbitrary, out of context and just plain wrong.

 Sally Bean, Enterprise Architecture Consultant

Even if the functionality selected is based on a clear understanding of the stakeholders and the concerns the enterprise needs to address, there is a chance that we will end up with a big list of unnecessary, arbitrary, or conflicting requirements that make the results needlessly complicated and ill-suited to solve the key problems. It is essential to distinguish between the functional context of the goals and processes to be supported, and the components designed to perform a function, again looking at both the current state and a potential future.

A thorough modeling of the functional context lets us capture what is expected of the system resulting from a design process in terms of the purposes it has to fulfill, instead of resorting to subjective and arbitrary lists of features. This in turn is a suitable basis from which to deliberately address function in a design process: once the required functions are known to the design team, it can proceed by elaborating a system of components to perform them. Such a systematic approach to function might lead you to completely different functional requirements than originally envisioned, but helps to identify and solve the actual problems behind vague wishes expressed by stakeholders.

Functions of the Enterprise

Any enterprise is created around a sense of purpose shared by its members, which makes it play a certain role in their lives. Applying the function frame allows us to undersand that role in detail by analyzing processes and corresponding stakeholder goals, and lets us capture and document the functions it must perform to fulfill its purpose. This general purpose the enterprise fulfills for its community of actors drives the decision of which functions to address with a design initiative. It is based on the idea that any function made available as a product or service contributes to that purpose.

Therefore, developing functional models of the enterprise forms the basis to elicit, select and justify the requirements and qualities to be met, and to agree on the functional components and features to be included in the scope of potential outcomes. By applying the functional frame beyond the scope of an individual project, the potential results can be considered part of the larger functional context of the enterprise in order to identify redundancies and integration needs, and to seek opportunities for functional gaps to be filled.

Designing with Function

In everyday practice, the function frame plays an important role in almost any design project, since it relates to the purpose and goals driving it. In Enterprise Design, it helps to envision the enterprise as a functional system, and to design in terms of the functions it fulfills for its stakeholder community. When looking at function on an enterprise-wide level, designers often face a mass of conflicting, overlapping, and intertwined needs. To address these usually requires a certain degree of complexity in the solution. In order to choose and prioritize the functions to address, they have to systematically manage requirements.

Modeling function relevant to the design project and to the larger enterprise is a valid basis for establishing requirements, because in the end all requirements — including those describing qualities rather than behavior—pertain to function, to the purpose to be fulfilled by the project’s results, and to the anticipated usage and value generation. It allows us to ground the vision of what the outcomes should do in the goals and processes to be supported, and to design components to fit into that functional context. Such a shared definition of functional models and solid requirements in turn is the basis for working with engineers, system designers, and technologists, for mapping out the scope of the solution to be built, and for ensuring that it is actually feasible.

The choice of requirements is informed by many sources of inspiration — findings from applying the other perspectives, competition or similar projects, new technologies and their possibilities, as well as the free flow of ideas that emerge in a multidisciplinary project team. Applying the function frame enables the design team to agree on what the outcomes should be, to reduce the functional scope to support the most relevant goals and processes, and to provide relevant input to engineers planning the technical part of the project.

Modeling the Structures to be Designed

One of the particular strengths of the structure viewpoint, despite its subjectivity, is its ability to align and integrate different conceptual models into a coherent representation. The interrelated objects expressed are shared between many different conceptual models of a system, and allow for comparison, prioritization, and alignment.

For the creation of structural models, virtually any noun that people use might qualify as an object to be included. These could be physical and virtual things, people or organizations, representations and symbols, activities or processes, as well as mental constructs or categories—the important question is not the type, but the relevance and accuracy of the model for the design process. It can also help to deepen the analysis by exploring different relationship types such as generalization, instantiation, cardinalities, or by including attributes of objects and the tasks associated with them. Working with structural models enables the designer to externalize and study the different models based on research, prior knowledge and experience, as well as logical implications of the respective model.

Expanding on an early definition from Don Norman and Stephen Draper in the context of designing user interfaces for software products, there are a number of conceptual views on a system that can be subject to structural modeling in an Enterprise Design context. They can be mapped to the actors addressed and the roles active in the project, and aligned with findings from other perspectives:

THE USERS’ MODEL

describes the enterprise’s structure the way they are understood by its target groups. in most cases this type of model understands the enterprise as a black box, with only a certain parts of the overall structure being exposed to the people it has been created for, embedded in an existing context. The focus is to capture the mental model of people, so that such models often are incomplete and incorrect, being constructed in a person’s mind based on observations, experience, assumptions, and superstitions, and embedding the system into structures from the individual environment it is used in.

THE OWNERS’ MODEL

contains the structures important to the enterprise as a system, based on the views of business stakeholders—actors involved in making the enterprise work. This might include various concepts such as units, offerings, activities, events, competencies, or key partners, focusing on assets, resources, and infrastructure that ensure the viability of the business. it often has a significant overlap with the corresponding users’ models, but includes also background structures invisible to the outside world of customers.

THE DESIGNER’S MODEL

is a conceptual representation of a system as it is designed by a designer, someone envisioning and planning its structure. it describes the system, its components, and their relationship as the designer intends them to appear and act. The focus of a designer’s model is to structure things in a way that they make sense for users and owners as a coherent whole.

THE IMPLEMENTER’S MODEL

captures a system in the way it is built or developed, detailing the technical, operational, and organizational structure in sufficient scope and detail to plan its implementation. The focus being feasibility of a new or evolved system, an implementer’s structural model describes the technical components and operational details put in place to bring the design to life, usually widely hidden from the system’s users.

The Enterprise as a Structure

In an Enterprise Design project, the diversity of stakeholders makes an overarching structural representation very valuable when seeking alignment of their various concerns and ideas. The structure frame captures the enterprise as a system to be understood and transformed by rearranging and modifying its constituent parts. Any outcome of a design project is an evolved structure, introducing or removing elements and changing their associations. Such a redesigned structure can be described explicitly in a designer’s model, including references to the way the enterprise is structured as a whole. This is again where the ubiquitous qualities and elements described earlier come into play.

Designing with Structure

Modeling the objects relevant to a design challenge provides a powerful foundation for a design project. It allows us to document every relevant object and its relationship to other objects, and even to include the potential results of the design process as a part of that structure — exploring how the world is represented in the design, and how its outcomes integrate into the world.

Applying design on an enterprise level means dealing with a problem setting that shares many characteristics with that of software development in a specific domain. Therefore, the core principles of DDD described by Eric Evans also apply to any difficult design challenge in the enterprise context. The enterprise can be seen as a special case of a domain — especially in large organizations, the jargon used, the constraints imposed and the hidden structures to be considered form a core area of interest for the designer. The creation of structural models in close collaboration with experts helps us find out about the issues, rules, relationships, and concerns.

The outcomes of a design project, all of the things that have been envisioned and produced, have to blend with the real-life context where they are introduced. The structure frame in Enterprise Design helps us explore that context and make structures visible, and to consciously decide on the objects introduced, their designation and attributes. This forms the basis for defining a new state that fits with the conceptual and mental models of people addressed with the results and other stakeholders.

Closing the Gaps

A strategic design project in the enterprise context rarely starts with a blank page. There is always some context and a range of external factors to take into account even when defining the problem to be solved. Applying a frame to a design challenge, such as one of the aspects portrayed in this chapter, is a common way to formulate the problem setting that is to be subjected to a design process. Frames are means to reduce the scope of an exploration or solution definition phase by consciously leaving out other aspects. A frame makes it possible to work on a potential future state, as a redesign applied to just that limited subset of elements and factors.

Because all frames consider the same elements, just from different viewpoints, any change in one model also implies changes in other views. Rather than building detailed individual models in isolation, an exploration of the the relationships, transitions, and dependencies between the different aspects provide the most interesting inputs to a design process. They enable the project team to push the boundaries of their work beyond a single frame, to encompass the greater enterprise context.

To close the gaps between the different models, aspects have to be approached by considering their relationship to each other, in a process of iterative inquiry and constant adaptation. This is applicable in all phases of the design process — framing allows us to explore the concerns to be addressed and the tradeoffs between them in research activities, generating ideas for potential solutions to address them while dealing with divergent views and needs, and validating them against the different concerns identified.

Design Themes

Regardless of the frame applied, the choice of issues to be tackled and possible ways to go forward is a difficult one. In order to make progress, a key task is the identification of suitable design themes to guide the direction being taken. Themes are present in any design activity, in the ideas followed and the decisions made by the team, often based on a rather intuitive selection informed by client demand, personal priorities and research results. If made explicit, such a theme is usually expressed as a broad statement that conveys a very basic idea to drive a design process.

All design work is deeply concerned with choice and priorities. Working with the four aspects as thinking devices enables a design team to identify the major factors that drive the enterprise, being also the drivers behind a design initiative. Business concerns and market developments, issues, and opportunities discovered by immersion in people’s lives, potential structural and new or evolved functions envisioned—these framed insights provide the necessary input to choose and articulate a set of suitable design themes for further steps.

Themes guide the activities carried out in a design project by imposing a strong core idea to the thought processes, creative work, and decisions being made. They respond to the major topics identified and prioritized during modeling — instead of attempting to deal with everything with equal measure, designing with themes means reducing the design choice according to priorities and central goals. It means addressing these issues with consistent principles and individual, dedicated solutions, while allowing compromises and generic solutions for other topics.

This is the basis for the six aspects introduced in the next chapter, a set of cross- cutting areas of choice in the enterprise which span the space for all conceptual design decisions.

AT A GLANCE

Designing at the enterprise level requires working in a complex space of underdetermined problems. It involves working with people with varying views and ideas of the future, understanding different conceptual worlds, framing the problem from different angles, and translating findings into principles that guide the design work.

Recommendations

Understand your client’s business model and define how investing into a design process and subsequent transformation significantly contributes to business success

Understand the people addressed, their lives and what makes them tick, and develop empathy to make their lives better with your design

Create models of the functional context to be supported and conceptual structures that will play a role in your design, using these to map the enterprise now and in its desired target state

Work with models that apply different frames on the enterprise environment, to define the challenge to be addressed and to identify the central themes that span the design space