Fast-Track Your Enterprise Service Design

IT has a unique ability to see connections across the organization and how information flows through its systems. That makes IT ideally positioned to lead service design – but it’s often brought into the process far too late. To take the lead on this from the beginning, IT must adopt a “service-first” mindset. With our step-by-step guide, IT leaders can design coherent, sustainable services that fully meet the needs of their organization, employees, and customers.

Digitization is not transformation. Simply digitizing services loses sight of what customers really want, frustrates employees who must support and deliver the service and wastes your organization’s precious resources. Don’t just digitize enterprise services – design them to ensure they deliver value. Learn how IT can make that critical shift and evolve from technology provider to enterprise service orchestrator.

1. Avoid disastrous, short-sighted design investments.

Fully assess before you invest; clearly define your service’s context and scope. Start by gaining an understanding of the problem your service solves, the resources it requires, and the stakeholders needed to build, operate, and improve it. If you spend just enough time on this upfront, you’ll avoid making a disastrous investment in the wrong services.

2. Don’t let the customer’s voice get lost.

Whatever service you’re creating, the approach is the same: design your service around the customer’s journey, needs, and experiences. While stakeholder value is important, customer-centricity should be the focal point of your service design.

3. Identify and align key skills, technology, and processes.

Enterprise services don’t operate in a vacuum; they can’t service and support customers without the proper mix of skills, processes, and technology in place. Be sure to incorporate those crucial elements into your service design accordingly.

4. Embrace reusability for faster, better design.

Identify existing components, skills, and processes that are already effective in your organization, then reuse them wherever possible in new service design. This reduces waste, saves money, and speeds up delivery time. Keep the ball rolling by designing brand new components with future reuse in mind.

Use this actionable blueprint to design and orchestrate enterprise services, not just digitize them.

Follow our three-layer service design framework to create resilient, efficient enterprise services.

• Design services to solve real customer problems based on what the customer sees, touches, experiences, and interacts with, including their goals and pain points.

• Achieve enterprise-wide sustainability by aligning service design with the organization’s goals, roles, processes, rules, risks, data, decisions, and internal capabilities.

• Build sustainable systems at the operational level by incorporating the people, workflows, platforms, and infrastructure that support the organization in enabling the customer to reach their goal.