Digital is the new norm. We are in a world of touchpoints and interactions. Everything is measurable and usually quantifiable. All we want is to understand our customers, their needs and wants, what makes them tick and how to win their loyalty.

What’s more, business has changed over the past 15 years, with a definite shift toward the customer. We’ve started to understand that people want more than one-directional encounters with brands. They want something more. They want an experience.

And as these consumer expectations evolve, tried and tested business models are being put to shame by agile, digital start-ups. A steady revolution is sweeping across the corporate world and those that don’t catch wind are getting left behind.

This digital transformation isn’t something that just happened.

Companies must embody digital inside and out. There is no point in designing a frictionless and award-winning digital customer experience if internally the company is resistant to change or is slow to adopt new technologies.

Only 11% of firms execute digital well.

– Prepare Your Business For The Digital Future, Forrester.

One way to drive digital forward is by implementing a digital center of excellence strategy. This creates a basis for digital excellence across the organisation which makes delivering key experiences and innovating easier in the long run. It will also mean that there is less chance of being left behind as technology inevitably evolves.

What is a digital center of excellence?

Is it a process? Is it a physical space? Is it an aspiration?

In reality, it’s a healthy combination of all three.

It’s a strategy that’s implemented across the business in order to drive effective and efficient digital processes. It has internal implications, given the necessity for free data flow, but at its core is a want to improve the digital experience for all customers and all interactions with the brand.

Quite often the digital center of excellence will be run by a central team that is dedicated to leading the change and establishing precedents for different teams and departments across the organisation. For the strategy to be a success, it must be rooted in collaboration, communication and a dedication to innovate.

Why?

Digital is the number one way people interact with your brand and it’s represented at almost every point of the customer journey. In fact, more and more user journeys are digital-only. As a brand, you need to be optimising across this journey. You need to be looking at the sum of all parts, but to do that you must have a strategy in place. This is when a digital center of excellence comes into its own.

When you think of companies like Airbnb, Spotify, Amazon, or Uber, what do they all have in common? Seamless, frictionless and pleasurable customer experiences, and they are winning market share.

This is now what customers expect. If someone experiences a pain point when interacting with your brand, you’ve already lost.

Given how fragmented the customer journey is and the huge multitude of owned and non-owned touchpoints, it can be really hard to get it right. Things get even more complicated when your bring offline experiences into the mix.

This isn’t to say that if your brand transcends online and offline that you can’t win at digital. The key is to identify the opportunities for optimisation and to avoid shoehorning digital into an interaction.

The combination and balance of these will ensure this strategy succeeds.

Digital Center of Excellence Considerations:

Before embarking on this project or progressing a process already in place, consider these questions and use the answers to shape your strategy to your specific needs and requirements.

• What’s the ultimate goal?
• How mature is the business?
• What level of data literacy exists within my organisation?
• What degree of customer-first processes are in place?
• Who are the key stakeholders?
• What’s the most effective way to initiate this strategy?
• How open to change is the business?
• Do we know what competitors are doing?
• What are the industry benchmarks?
• What will success look like?

Having a digital mindset as a company is no longer a nice to have, it’s an absolute imperative. Your customers expect the highest standards and are the lifeblood of your organisation, so do everything you can to foster their loyalty. Being digital inside and out will help you achieve success while also preparing for the future and the inevitable change that’s to come.

https://www.brandwatch.com

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The pace of development in the digital, biological and technological worlds is changing and disrupting the way we work and live. From 3D printed buildings, to self-driving taxis, to vertical farming, every part of the UK economy will be affected by this ‘fourth industrial revolution’. Tomorrow’s innovative companies and organisations rely on people who can marry subject expertise with skills and knowledge from outside their individual specialisms, and who approach projects with creativity. In short, the companies leading this industrial revolution need design skills.

Modern design is no longer confined to particular sectors or occupations. The skills, principles and practices of design are now widely used across the economy, from banking to retail. Designers, too, have always drawn on a range of different skills, tools and technologies to deliver new ideas, goods and services. This is what makes design unique, and is how it makes products, services and systems more useful, usable and desirable in advanced economies around the world.

Why the fourth industrial revolution needs design skills

Technology is continually changing the way we live and work. To thrive in this fourth industrial revolution, the UK needs creativity and imagination.To lead the way, we must develop a workforce with the right mix of design skills to drive innovation.

The last three centuries of industrial revolution have relied upon design to help make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Mechanisation: 1780s onwards: The First Industrial Revolution used steam power to mechanise manual labour. This revolutionised society, providing access for people to travel, sell goods and design products.

Electricity: 1870s onwards: The Second Industrial Revolution introduced electricity, bringing new machines into the home and workplace. Electricity created the user and product design was born.

Digital Age: 1970s onwards: The Third Industrial Revolution used electronics and information technology to automate production and communication. This shifted design from styling to problem solving.

21st Century: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing significant change, with the processing of information and intelligent machines coming of age. The status of design has been elevated to a field of thinking.

Increasingly companies are building a design-led culture to stay competitive.

Innovation: Businesses with embedded design skills are able to maximise opportunities for technological advancement. They are seven times more likely to generate new products and services.

Productivity: People with design skills are 47% more productive than those without, delivering almost £10 extra per hour in value.

Design embodies the human skills needed to create the intelligent products, services and systems of the future.

Technique: Designers have technical skills specific to their role and the task in hand. They draw lines, write code and build cities.

Thought: Design is a mindset as well as a skillset. The ability of designers to think strategically and creatively to solve complex problems makes design more resilient to automation.

Empathy: Designers are well attuned to the needs of their customers. This deep understanding has a profoundly positive effect in creating successful services, products, processes and systems.

We have a unique opportunity to mobilise our design expertise to create a society and economy fit for the future.

Accessing skills: Demand for people with design skills has grown at twice the rate of UK employment. We need to drive the brightest talent into the design industry, while also developing the necessary design skills within the existing workforce.

Design + STEM: Design methods, tools and approaches should be incorporated into STEM subjects. This will develop the necessary complex problem-solving, critical and creative thinking abilities, and boost the skills required in the future economy.

We need to recognise design skills as one of our strongest economic assets, contributing £209 bn to the UK economy each year.

Design sectors: The design sector contributes £70.1bn to the UK economy. This is an increase of 42% since 2011.

Non-design sectors: Design skills create considerable value right across the UK economy, generating £139bn in non-design sectors such as aerospace, banking and retail.

Demand for design skills is accelerating, but a widening skills gap is limiting opportunities for growth.

Access to Talent: Design is in high demand across the UK, but employers struggle to find the required skills and competencies.

Skills Gap: One in eight employers state they have staff who are not fully proficient in their current jobs. This costs the UK economy an estimated £5.9bn per year.

The pipeline of design skills is being threatened by a reduced emphasis on design and technology education.

Narrowing pipeline: In 2017, just under 166,000 GCSE students took Design and Technology subjects, a 61% decrease from the year 2000. And the number of people leaving higher education with undergraduate or postgraduate qualifications in design subjects has fallen by 7% in the last four years.

Lifelong Learning: Action is needed to avoid the UK experiencing a resource crisis in one of the most productive and valuable parts of the economy. Government, educators and employers need to work together to equip people with the design skills required for the future.

As the country looks towards the future, it’s never been more important to harness #designskills.

Read the full report:

https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/research/designing-future-economy

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Based on data from around the world, we can demonstrate that businesses that use design are more profitable that those that don’t. And if design is made part of the innovation process, the return on investment is even greater than if design is just used for styling.

The results can be seen at a national scale. Household names, from LEGO to Velux, have established Denmark’s reputation as a centre for innovation, so it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that 93% of Danish companies use design. And with good reason too: a study by the Danish government found that companies using design achieved additional growth of 250%.

The companies investing in design were also able to sell their products or services far more effectively abroad, with exports representing an average of 34% of their turnover, compared to just 18% in companies that did not use design.

Where design is made integral to a company’s business strategy, it has been shown to consistently yield long-term success. Researchers tracking the performance of the US stock market demonstrated that, over a ten year period, design-driven companies outperformed the rest of the S&P index by 228%.

In many European countries, companies can access mentoring, support and subsidies to invest in design in order to increase turnover and boost exports. For participants in the UK’s Design Council’s Design Leadership programme, for every £1 invested in design, the business can expect over £20 increased revenue and over £5 increased exports.

The greatest overall returns on investment are achieved where design is an integral part of the innovation process – rather than just a way of styling, packaging or branding a product as an afterthought. When it is fully integrated into the innovation process, design can add value at every step of product or service development – this includes idea generation, user and market analysis, concept development, prototyping, production and promotion.

The Design Ladder is a simple tool to assess the level at which companies use design – from styling, to process, to a strategic level where it’s an integral part of company culture.

A study of Swedish businesses showed that when design was only used for styling, the average growth in turnover was 6.5% – whereas in firms where design was used as part of the innovation process, growth was 9%.

There’s nothing in these findings that suggests the effectiveness of design is limited to a particular national setting or even a particular industry sector. But our growing body of evidence demonstrates that companies that use design are more profitable than those that don’t – and where design is used strategically, it produces an even greater return on investment.

Inspired by this evidence, governments across Europe are increasingly supporting businesses to use design, so it’s worth finding out if companies in your region are able to access mentoring, subsidies or tax credits.

By Anna Whicher
Head of Design Policy, PDR Wales

designforeurope.eu/news-opinion/value-design-business

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Exceptional design systems scale design’s impact by allowing product teams to build better products, with limited design resources. Ben Blumenfeldco-Director, Designer Fund

Do you have this problem? Think…

• Are you always happy with the speed of product development?
• Do your interfaces share the same design patterns, colours, typography and other styles?
• Do you always have enough time to deliver a quality product to meet KPIs?
• How much time and money do you spend on redundant design or code tasks?
• How much time and money do you spend cleaning up design or technical debt?

What is a Design System?

A scalable framework of decisions & team behaviours across a product portfolio to converge on a cohesive experience. Nathan Curtis

Why is a Design System important?

• Design systems bring order to chaos. Everyone is kept on the same page, so the entire product remains consistent and polished throughout.
• Design systems improve the user experience through the repeated use of familiar and proven patterns. Designing anything from scratch leaves room for error, so try to use what already works.
• Design systems improve workflow efficiency. Product teams know exactly how components of new features should look and how to implement them.

Is it worth it?

• What shade of blue are we using?
• Can you redline this for me?
• Can you redesign this, we can’t build it?
• Where’s our logo?
• Where are approved stock photos?
• Was this pattern used somewhere else?

Design System ROI for the Design Team: $50 per hour. Team of 20 designers. 2.5h/week * 52 weeks * $50 * 20 designers = $130,000/year UXPin Inc.

Design System return on investment for the Development Team: Design systems also save time and money. Just by eliminating code redundancy, more than 20% of a developer’s time can be regained. For a team of 100 developers, this means around $2 million per year. projekt202 Managing Architect Drew Loomer

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