Phil Gilbert faces a big challenge. He needs to change the way his company thinks from a process-orientated engineering mindset to more creative design oriented model that invests in a delightful-to-use customer-centric experience. It would be much easier if his company had 50 products in its portfolio, even 500. But Mr. Gilbert is General Manager of IBM Design responsible for the significance of Design Thinking across the entire company, its global span across all industries, countries and, most of all, 1000s of products. How does a business leader comprehend enterprise transformation with such broad responsibility?
I spoke to Mr. Gilbert several weeks ago on the progress of IBM Design per the occasion of the launch of their new Design Studio facility in Austin, TX. The former chief executive of from IBM acquisition of business process modeling (BPM) vendor, Lombardi, brought an award-winning design approach for a fairly complicated technology product.
Per lore, a few years before Thomas Watson, Jr. became the second CEO of IBM, he walked down Fifth Avenue in New York past the Olivetti typewriter store and had an epiphany as he saw their bright colors and sleek designs in contrast to the dimly lit offices and drab products from his company. It led him to hire architect and former curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Eliot Noyes, to create the first design program for its products, buildings and marketing material. In this effort, Noyes hired some of the iconic designers of the period such as Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Paul Rand, and Isamu Noguchi. With its massive growth over the intervening decades, design on a practical level moved out to the edges into the divisions and product teams. They were still creating award-winning products, but with disparate features sometimes driven towards engineering optimization.
Rawn Shah: So how did the new IBM Design get started or restarted should I say?
Phil Gilbert: We created this division about 15 months ago. We had great design in our Comms. & Marketing group. We still had great design in our mainframes— z/Enterprise [mainframe] won product of the year award for Industrial Design [for its approach to] heat transfer through the baffles of the cabinet. We also had great digital design out of IBM Interactive for clients such as Wimbledon, the US Open, the Masters Tournament, and Coca Cola.
When my company got acquired 3.5 years ago, it was prototypical acquisition. We didn't bring anything new compute capabilities to IBM. What we were known for in the BPM market space was a really thoughtfully designed product that more people could actually use. We applied the same design principles as we had done in Lombardi and turned 40 IBM products into 4 products and made them in a sense delightful to use.
About 18 months ago, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and the Senior Leadership Team started talking about improving the user experience around our all of software products. We have now brought these techniques and approaches to the entirety of IBM.
We see it in the broader context of a holistic way to engage with our clients. From the moment a client discovers on us Google, to coming to IBM, to contacting a sales person, … We are redesigning all of our systems of engagement. Our perception is holistic, end-to-end.
RS: Who do you have on your IBM Design team?
PG: We've got to figure out a scalable way to hire a 1000 people over the next few years. There is a huge constraint on great designers. Some good part of our hiring is going to come from universities. We also have to bring in fresh perspective into IBM, a moderate design perspective.
The head of our studio location in Austin is award-wining designer Adam Cutler (from IBM Interactive). Adam is also head of the virtual studio across IBM globally. Under Adam, we intentionally brought in a team of 8 studio leads across multiple of the design discipline all from outside [the company].
Denise Burton, from Frog Design for 20 years and a Fellow, was so inspired by our mission that she has been with us for 6 months. For first camp classes, Denise was one of the everyday instructors.
Doug Powell joined us five months ago. He was the past president of the American Institute of the Graphic Arts and also a TEDx speaker. When we went to an AIGA convention to recruit, graphic artists were lining up to have their picture with Doug.
We also have Brad Becker former Chief Designer for Microsoft Silverlight and Azure; Liz Holt, also from MS as Chief Designer for MS Outlook. We go for world class talent from where we can find it.
We found Todd Wilkins, former Chief Design Researcher at the Mayo Clinic through a referral. He moved down to Austin just to be part of what we are doing. We are doing a lot in [the medical and healthcare] world. For example, we are using Watson as one of the particular human interface guidelines that we are getting ready to design.
While the world was moving to everything being done by software, what we haven't done is [to build] a great scalable ethos.
RS: Having personal experience with IBM’s many permutations of teams, language, products, and also its traditionally engineering, process-oriented background, isn’t this just as much a cultural transformation?
How do you see this transformation happening?
PG: I spoke to David Kelly [of Stanford University Institute of Design and founder of legendary design company, IDEO] once about this. He said that the great thing about a corporate transformation project is that you really only have to convert a quarter of the people to get it all going. But then he admitted, for IBM that still meant converting over 100,000 people.
First, we are looking to increase designer headcount by 1000 over the next five years, and build a shared culture within our design community. We then have to work on the other 429,000 of us.
Then we hold Design camps [for product teams] in several places, primarily Austin. [It’s a] 1-week experience in design thinking, vocabulary and mindset in IBM. We also reach out to the Sales and Marketing people involved in those products. Next, we have Executive Design Camps to show how it can help them in their jobs and how the IBM Design Thinking integrates, sales, marketing and executive leadership very early in the product lifecycle.
RS: Can you explain what you mean by IBM Design Thinking?
PG: Quite frankly our language is rooted in the needs and desires of our users. Making stuff simpler is what we want to do. But in the enterprise space, some of the stuff we are doing is very complex. We are less about wanting to present the face of everything as Apple-simple.
Let's take cloud [computing]. We're spending a lot of time on cloud. In the past, generally speaking, you would have heard IBM talk about Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and a lot around the architectural underpinnings. What we are trying to get through is to say that it is about the developers who want to consume the platform, or about the users of a [Software as a Service] offering. This pivot to a user-based language is what we are trying to get into the DNA of IBM.
In the past you would hear IBM say, “We are going to create an API store.” Today, we would focus on a "place where developers can experience the best interfaces in the world."
Our goal is to get IBM product teams to focus on what are you really going to do really well in this release, [rather than implement a long list of features]. Great designers say "No" a lot. We talk about ‘the hills’ as a way to focus a release, or some time box of a release. These hills are destinations or goals for the release that represent a very focused design language rooted in our users. We are making user-centric software, not enterprise buyers [such as, CIOs etc.]
One of the notions is that of "sponsor users", a very specific set of [customers] that intimately engages with our product managers and others from the beginning to the end of the lifecycle. The sponsor users play a very specific role within the playback of the design cycle. That is a very big foundational shift away from talking about technology first.
RS: There is a new view in product development for the cloud that there no longer needs to be large releases, product upgrades and migrations. What is your view?
PG: You have to separate the notion of delivery from the features [released]. I talk about release vehicles. They can happen every day, week, or month, as necessary. If you get into the mindset of release vehicles, your design functionality is running on a different path. When you have achieved some amount of design quality—let’s call it the Minimum Viable Product—then, you drop that it into the next release vehicle.
We stop focusing on it coming out on this date or another date. We want them to focus less on the track of releases and more on the innovations (design) that they are actually working on.
RS: What do you think of the statement ‘Perfect is the enemy of Good’?
PG: Our capabilities are industrial strength … there's a lot of complexity under the hood of our products. We're not going to the perfect human interface in 201 or 2015, or even 2050, but from a design perspective, everything is a prototype. We are always evolving and if you adopt this, it is core to how we are implementing this.
If you believe in that, there is always a next version. There's always a way to move something into the next release. We ask them to focus on only three really interesting things in a release cycle.
Afterthoughts
IBM Design continues to build up its team hiring Visual Designers, Design Researchers, User Experience Designers, Design Developers, and Leads to build a few hundred at a time through the next few years. Finding the right talent will only be the beginning of the challenges they face.
Per my piece on the Fourth or Stakeholder-Focus era of Brands, we now face a time when the brand of a product or organization is defined increasingly by the experience of community of users around a product. The interaction experience between users, even from different companies (across customers), may do more for customer success than the interaction with the vendor. This kind of social proof and peer interaction is a double-edged sword, amplifying both the good and the bad in any product, and the source of power of a user community.
IBM Software Group has three things going for it in this respect of product design. First, it has already integrated the shared social experience between users into some of its software products such as Rational and Cognos. Then, it has created a massive online community for developers and users in developerWorks. Finally, it has a core middleware of social software that it can leverage into other products. It is a clear indicator that there are many designers on board familiar with this forward trend for software. What matters now is to see if IBM can expand this uniformly across their huge portfolio of products.
