Transform Your Organisation With Hybrid Thinking

Most enterprise architecture (EA) initiatives remain trapped in the IT department, and a new approach - hybrid thinking - is required to break EA out and into the wider organisation, according to Gartner, Inc. Adopting hybrid thinking is an excellent way to meld design thinking, IT thinking and business thinking, and achieve transformative, innovative and strategic changes.

“Leading organisations that are driving change during times of rapid upheaval are showing the ability to combine new techniques for thinking critically, creatively and innovatively about complex problems with more traditional, engineering-based analytical methods,” said Nicholas Gall, Vice President, Gartner. “We are seeing several leading companies combining design thinking and other thinking methods, including more traditional approaches, to drive transformative, innovative and strategic change.”

Among early adopters of hybrid thinking are Proctor & Gamble (P&G) and Kaiser Permanente. P&G’s CIO reorganised teams to work on a project-by-project basis rather than on a permanent basis. It transformed the IT organisation into a “flow to work” design shop focusing on the most meaningful work. This flow-to-work approach helped P&G to integrate Gillette in just 15 months. Another example includes Kaiser Permanente. It redesigned shift changes for nurses and the result was higher-quality knowledge transfer and reduced prep-time, permitting earlier and better-informed contact with patients.

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Gartner predicts that, by 2013, more than 20 per cent of organisations will explicitly design their businesses from the outside in – up from less than 5 per cent in 2009.