Design Thinking for Tech Selection, Part 2: Define (Video)
In his presentation at KMWorld 2018, Real Story Group's Jarrod Gingras discussed how to apply the five phases of design thinking—empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing in choosing the right technology for a digital workplace.
After the empathy phase, the next piece is to do some definition. “And when we say ‘definition,’ in this case, we're talking about how to make sure that we have the right short list in place. And so this is where it's also a little tricky, and a lot of mistakes are made. It's very tempting to go out there and try to figure out who are the leaders, the best vendors, in certain areas.”
According to Gingras, people google best collaboration tools all the time, best internet tools, best anything—but that will not get you to where you want to be. “And part of the problem, again, is that there are so many options, and so many options where these lines are so blurry between a community tool or a document file sharing tool, document management tool, CMS.”
The idea, he said, is to not simply look at snapshot views of marketplaces. While diagrams and charts of the marketplace have a purpose, when you're coming up with your short list, if you just look at the upper-right hand quadrant, you're going to be doing yourself a disservice, he explained.
“Instead, as an alternative to that single snapshot view, I want you to turn your attention upon yourselves and ask yourselves, what you are trying to do. Now, I'm going to use collaboration as a use case here and talk through this, but when we talk about something like collaboration technology and helping your organizations collaborate better and helping your users collaborate better in your organization, that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.”
The idea said Gingras is to ask: What are we trying to do? “Think about it from an application standpoint, and then, I want you to go find products that were fundamentally built to solve those applications that you've identified as important to you.”
Many speakers have made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2018/Presentations.aspx.
Learn more at KMWorld 2019, coming to Washington, DC, Nov. 5-7.
Watch the complete video of this presentation in the KMWorld Conference 2018 Video Portal.