Forward thinking CIOs will embrace human-centred design: Forrester
- 10 November, 2015 06:00
Credit: Dreamstime CIOs, CMOs, and customer experience leaders will need to work together to achieve customer-obsessed growth by adopting human-centred design and data analytics to deliver exceptional experiences, reports Forrester.
“2016 will be a pivotal year for companies adapting to digitally savvy and empowered customers. Companies moving along the age of the customer path will begin to thrive, while laggards will begin the slow descent to failure,” says Dane Anderson, vice president, research director and region manager for Asia Pacific, Forrester Research.
“Strong leadership is essential, and collaboration necessary between CMOs, who must step up and lead customer experience efforts, and CIOs, who must accelerate the business technology (BT) agenda,” says Anderson.
To be a driving force behind this agenda, CIOs must show empathy for customers and quickly create effective, compelling experiences, according to a report by Forrester analysts Frederic Giron, Ashutosh Sharma, Charlie Dai, Frank Liu, Naveen Chhabra and Somak Roy.
Companies moving along the age of the customer path will begin to thrive, while laggards will begin the slow descent to failure.
The report states in 2016, CIOs in large AP organisations — starting with business-to-consumer (B2C) firms like retail banks and consumer product goods companies — are expected to train their innovation teams on design methods.
This will help them improve the rate at which both customers and employees adopt their innovations, says Forrester as it reports on the top trends impacting organisaitons in the Asia Pacific region in 2016.
Forrester calls on CIOs to find the designers inside their organisations and learn from them.
“Design thinking or human-centred design approaches are not difficult to understand, but it will take years for CIOs’ innovation teams to master them,” according to the Forrester report Predictions 2016: Business Technology Accelerates In Asia Pacific.
CIOs can start by learning from the experts within their own business. “Find designers or user experience experts in your internal digital team, customer experience team, or marketing team — even in the product development and engineering teams,” the report recommends.
Work with the leaders of these teams to exchange resources and expose your teams to design methods, it states.
“Start small, selecting a design challenge that excites your innovation team and then applying the lessons learned from design experts.”
#designthinking getting rightly recognised as a great framework for tackling #digitaldisruption - thanks @divinap https://t.co/rYjv06DZj5
— Colm Maloney (@colm_maloney) November 10, 2015
Increasing need for companies to adapt to tech-savvy, empowered consumers https://t.co/P38QOYcyfq @CIO_NZ #digital #tech #innovation #design
— Flick Electric Co (@FlickElectricCo) November 13, 2015
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