Abstract:

Top concerns for IT leaders for the last 30 years include becoming/remaining relevant to the overall business, developing a strong and healthy relationship with their end-user community, being viewed as the organization’s innovation thought leader, and delivering systems that surpass end-user expectations, on time, and within budget. Adopting an intrapreneurial mindset within IT is one way to address these concerns. The premise presented in this paper is that design Thinking—or more specifically “Human-Centered Design’’—is a process and mindset that will help create a more intrapreneurial culture in pre-existing large organizations. In the paper we outline the major tenets of design thinking: a focus on human values, radical collaboration with the end-user, empathy-driven requirements determination, a relentless focus on the end-user‘s point-of-view, and rapid prototyping/story-telling in close proximity to the end-user coupled with user testing, and we present a chronology of how Human-Centered Design has shaped the innovation process at a large consumer-based pharmaceutical firm, and how design thinking is now serving as the basis for energizing the company’s IT organization and its end-users in driving real business value.