Design Thinking Reshapes EA For Dynamic Business

Customer-facing business executives are turning to cutting-edge service design firms to help launch new services that tap digital to deliver differentiated customer experiences. Unfortunately, enterprise architects (EAs) remain locked out of initial planning and design of these customer-facing initiatives and are brought in only at the very end to shoehorn new services into the existing enterprise architecture. So how can enterprise architects play a broader role in partnering with customer and product strategy executives? Based on extensive interviews with leading service design firms and forward-leaning enterprise architecture programs, Forrester found that teams first need to take an inside-out approach to embed critical design-thinking practices into day-to-day EA operations. This mental shift provides a backdrop for driving a different way of communicating with and engaging those business stakeholders focused on driving new and differentiated products and experiences.