Systems of Engagement and User Experience Design

We are now well into the decade of Systems of Engagement. Enterprises in all walks of life are waking up to a world where their constituents are digitally armed and dangerous, and they are revamping their market-facing systems to leverage these newly empowered endpoints. The landscape of opportunity is immense as there are pockets of trapped value everywhere that digital interactions can release. Indeed, most CIOs find themselves surrounded by insurmountable opportunity, so the real questions are, where to start, or what to do next?

Here the key is to reframe our view of the landscape in terms of moments of engagement. You can think of these as tiny milestones in the customer journeys you are seeking to engineer. Which ones mark the key inflection points in those journeys? What are your moments of truth?

To get at these questions, the discipline to embrace is called design thinking. It represents a systematic approach to observing your customers in great detail as they interact with your systems, seeing where the little glitches are that interrupt the flow or distract them from the goal, and bringing those observations back to the team for redesign and reengineering. User experience designer is the new job description for those who lead these efforts, but make no mistake, it is a collaborative “wisdom of crowds” as opposed to an isolated act of genius that posts the most successes.

So the IT prescription is, first, work with the line-of-business side of the house to identify mission-critical moments of engagement, then apply design thinking to those moments to see how they can be better reengineered, and then unleash your digital dogs on those moments.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win Book | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube