GOAL! Enterprise AI leaders must use design thinking to make IT and business play AI as Total Football

The latest HFS survey data (December 2019) on the state of integrated automation, covering the Triple-A Trifecta of AI, automation, and analytics, shows that in only 24% of cases does senior leadership think that IT and business are working collaboratively in pursuit of targeted Triple-A outcomes (see Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1: Only in less than 25% organizations, IT and business are working collaboratively on AI & automation

Sample: Global 2000 enterprise leaders = 317

Source: HFS Research, “State of Integrated Automation,” 2019

2020 is an inflection point in the journey-map of enterprises’ Triple-A trifecta technology implementation initiatives, when a majority of enterprises are scaling up. This requires a completely different approach—it won’t be enough to run piecemeal pilots and POCs in isolated use cases across tasks and functions in business and IT islands.

In the early 1970s, the Dutch football teams—with legendary players like Johan Cruyff—invented the “total football” concept, which encouraged players to have multiple skills, both defensive and attacking, so that they could play in any position. AI, to be successful, requires a tightly integrated, business-contextualized, and outcomes-focused view across the data, IT, and process infrastructures of an organization. Achieving this view also requires a softer, cultural integration layer This culture is analogous to how Total Football is played where the defenders can also attack and vice versa. E.g. through cross-team knowledge sharing, the IT teams and data scientists understand the business context and the business front line e.g. process owners also have a basic understanding of the underlying technologies.

How to increase the IT-business collaboration in AI initiatives to more than 50% of cases, using design thinking and the Total Football analogy

Transformational, large-scale AI initiatives can benefit from a Total Football approach. Enabling a collaborative, experimentative, knowledge-sharing approach is a key strength of design thinking. Design thinking actively promotes multiple perspectives, ideas and alternative solutions generation; for example, in the analysis phase of the Double Diamond approach in design thinking. Design thinking fosters the culture of looking at the same problem from different IT-business-functional lenses, searching for several value pathways to achieve the same business goals. In the realm of design thinking, IT and business teams should complement each other’s views and not focus on conflicts.

Operations can lead an integrated and intelligent automation-driven process transformation by having combined views of IT and business

During one of our recent interactions with the operations leaders of a global tech company, the leaders were sharing an interesting story of how the IT operations team provided a simple and timely solution to a business process problem. The business process team identified certain efficiency and accuracy improvement opportunities in their process, using AI and automation tools. But, having limited exposure to the technical coding aspects, the process team thought this was going to be an extensive and expensive project that required loads of specialized technical skills and resources and months to build and productionize.

However, by using the design thinking principles of cross-team collaborations, the business process team kept the IT operations team in the loop, while planning for the process automation initiative. Some members of the IT operations team had worked on this business process for several years. They had an in-depth view of the as-is process, across all its nuances, variants, users, and applications. Using this combined view of the IT and business sides of the same process and leveraging its tech know-how of intelligent automation tools, the IT operations team came up with a minimum viable process solution prototype of the target process—within just one day!

This is what the cross-team collaboration approach of design thinking can enable: playing AI and automation like a team sport.

How to play AI like Total Football: Use design thinking as the midfield, bringing the back-end IT skills and front-end business processes together

The following framework presents a design thinking approach of running AI and automation initiatives across IT and business, using football (soccer) as an analogy.

The IT skills on the back-end are to be realized into business process teams’ outcomes at the front (the “goals”), using design thinking skills in the midfield as a technology-to-business value translation layer.

Exhibit 2: IT and business winning in AI together, by knowledge-sharing using design thinking

Source: HFS Research, 2020

To enable this framework for running AI and integrated automation initiatives in the organizations, enterprise leaders should take the following actions (see Exhibit 3):

Exhibit 3: Action items Next Monday Morning

The Bottom Line: To achieve outcomes at scale, enterprise leaders must play AI as Total Football, using design thinking to integrate IT and business

Enterprise leaders must run all strategic AI and integrated automation scaling initiatives like Total Football, with IT and business playing on the same side and against the competition. Design thinking enables the critical midfield to translate AI into practically realized business outcomes in production- enabling organizations to strike their target: GOAL!