Managers as designers (part 2/3)

Next to the focus on designing better, more innovative alternatives (Managers as designers: part 1/3), design also has a more formal and systematic side. With this side of design managers are more familiar as organizational design and business process design are traditional management issues.

For example, redesigning organizations with a functional structure into business units per product type or customer segment. The design of organizations covers higher-level issues related to the design of organizational units as well as lower-level issues related to the design of subunits and individual jobs (e.g. Nadler & Tushman, 1997).

Mangers have also been designing and redesigning business processes to improve the customer focus of their organization and to increase the operational efficiency. Davenport and Short (1990) define business process design as the analysis and design of workflows and processes within and between organizations. They differentiate between business processes on the basis of the entities (inter-organisational, inter-functional or inter-personal), objects (physical or informational) and activities (operational or managerial).

Managers as designers (part 1/3)

Managers are, or should be, involved in design activities related to managerial and organizational issues. We will take a closer look at different ways in which managers are engaged in design activities.

Managers are confronted with organizational problems: mismatches between the desired and the actual situation of their organization. So problem solving is a core concern for management. Managers can approach these problems with a decision attitude or with a design attitude (Boland & Collopy, 2004). Imagine having to decide upon the introduction of a new service that can either be of low quality at low cost or of high quality at higher costs. Would you do user studies to find out what the customers prefer? Would you calculate the business case for both alternatives? Or would you try to devise an alternative with high quality and low costs? Traditionally, managers are often inclined to pursuit a decision attitude: assuming it is easy to come up with a number of alternative solutions but problematic to decide upon the right solution (Boland & Collopy, 2004). A design attitude to problem solving, in contrast, assumes it is difficult to design a good alternative, but once a truly good solution had been developed, the selection of the alternative becomes easy. For example, for the introduction of tele-health services it may be more useful to design innovative business models, such as a model inspired by the rising interest in wellness, then to calculate an expected ROI based upon current health insurance practices. While managers need both attitudes, the capabilities of managers as designers are often not addressed and also design tools for managers are relatively underdeveloped compared to the decision-making techniques.

The Design-Oriented Enterprise (DOE)

Coming from an IT background I perceived an increase in the scope of design activities. Starting with the design of information systems, the scope expanded to the design of business processes. Thereafter, the scope expanded even further to the design of the business itself, referred to as the business model.

I would like to raise the question how an organization could (or should) maximize the opportunities offered by a design approach. For this I came up with the concept of the ‘design-oriented enterprise.’ As I see it for now, the objective of a design-oriented enterprise should be to increase their performance by design motivation and ability (see also figure below). (I think the ‘design-oriented enterprise’ is not used yet in this way, see also the Google search.)


For design motivation it is possible to differentiate between ‘ambition levels.’ I based the following ambition levels partially on Investing in Design by Rosa Wu and Jess McMullin (adapted it to an IS context):

• No Conscious design effort: Design has no perceived value for the organization.
• Design is the gateway to automation: Design supports the automation of business activities.
• Design makes things better: Design makes things work better than they did before.
• Design as problem solving: Design finds new opportunities by solving existing problems.
• Design as problem framing: Design redefines the challenges facing the organization.

For design ability it is possible to differentiate between a number of maturity levels, as is done in the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and CMM Integration (CMMI).

These are just some early ideas and these ideas would benefit from your comments!!!