Designing Delivery

Afterword

The post-industrial economy values service over products, processes over objects, change over stability. The accelerating infusion of physical services with digital components makes it critical for IT to undergo the same transition. The deepening complexity of twenty-first-century life and business, coupled with the increasingly disruptive nature of the market, calls for IT to fully transform itself from a reactive servant of efficiency to a proactive agent of learning.

In order to become a digital conversational medium that enables continuous organizational learning, IT must transcend its perspective on itself as an engineering discipline. IT’s new purpose is to help businesses self-steer. To fulfill this purpose, IT must learn to view itself as an agent of design. It must see its role as helping service organizations take Herbert Simon’s definition of design to heart by continually changing existing situations into preferred ones.

Delivering Design

Learning happens when internal mechanisms can no longer adequately control external situations. A system learns by reorganizing itself.¹ In a highly dynamic and disruptive environment, learning must become relatively continuous. Continuous learning requires an intimate relationship between design and operations to the point where the boundaries between them begin to blur.

Design addresses the question of what to do next. In order to accurately answer that question, it needs the ability to observe its environment as well ...