Design Thinking

{Excerpt} In a world of continuous flux, where markets mature faster and everyone is affected by information overload, organizations regard innovation, including management innovation, as the prime driver of sustainable competitive advantage. To unlock opportunities, some of them use mindsets and protocols from the field of design to make out unarticulated wants and deliberately imagine, envision, and spawn futures. Design is more important when function is taken for granted and no longer helps stakeholders differentiate. In the last five years, design thinking has emerged as the quickest organizational path to innovation and high-performance, changing the way creativity and commerce interact. In the past, design was a downstream step in the product development process, aiming to enhance the appeal of an existing product. Today, however, organizations ask designers to imagine solutions that meet explicit or latent needs and to build upstream entire systems that optimize customer experience and satisfaction. Therefore, although the term design is commonly understood to describe an object (or end result), it is in its latest and most effective form a process, an action, and a verb, not a noun: essentially, it is a protocol to see, shape, and build. Lately, design approaches are also being applied to infuse insight into the heart of campaigns and address social and other concerns

Business Process Redesign in the Perioperative Process: A Case Perspective for Digital Transformation

This case study investigates business process redesign within the perioperative process as a method to achieve digital transformation. Specific perioperative sub-processes are targeted for re-design and digitalization, which yield improvement. Based on a 184-month longitudinal study of a large 1,157 registered-bed academic medical center, the observed effects are viewed through a lens of information technology (IT) impact on core capabilities and core strategy to yield a digital transformation framework that supports patient-centric improvement across perioperative sub-processes. This research identifies existing limitations, potential capabilities, and subsequent contextual understanding to minimize perioperative process complexity, target opportunity for improvement, and ultimately yield improved capabilities. Dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis applied to specific perioperative patient-centric data collected within integrated hospital information systems yield the organizational resource for process management and control. Conclusions include theoretical and practical implications as well as study limitations

Teaching Tip: Evaluating Visualizations with a Compact Rubric

Students now have readily available and powerful tools to access, manipulate, combine, and visualize data. Acquiring data and visual literacy requires more than knowledge of how to use these tools. Students need to engage with assignments that challenge them to make relatively complex visualizations, interpret them, and explain why these interpretations matter for given problem situations. This paper describes how to structure feedback for these assignments. The few published visualization evaluation rubrics are mainly oriented toward how-to-do-it heuristics. This paper makes a contribution by presenting, defining, and giving examples of the use of an innovative compact rubric for evaluating visualizations (CRVE). This rubric eliminates some of the length and complexity of heuristic evaluation, focusing on interpretation and relevance. In a graduate business intelligence course, students showed definite improvement over the course of the semester in the construction of visualizations, telling a story with headlines, and striving for data exploration. However, higher levels of technical correctness of visualizations did not necessarily correspond to better interpretations. This finding underscores the importance of emphasizing interpretation through a feedback mechanism like the CRVE presented here

Sharing practice, problems and solutions for institutional change

This chapter critiques the roles of different forms of representation of practice as part of an institutional change process. It discusses how these representations can be used both to design and to share learning activities at the various levels of decision-making in a university. We illustrate our arguments with empirical data gathered on change processes associated with an institution-wide change programme: the introduction of a new virtual learning environment (VLE). In particular, we describe a case study of the introduction of the VLE tools in a business course. We focus on two particular forms of representations to describe the essence of the innovation: a pedagogical pattern and a visual learning design. We argue that pedagogical patterns and learning design have emerged as parallel approaches to describing practice in recent years. Despite their very different origins, both provide complementary representations, which emphasize different aspects of the practice being described. We are attempting to combine these approaches. We briefly outline the Open University Learning Design initiative, of which this work is part, and describe its key underpinning philosophies. We believe our approach provides a vehicle for enabling a better articulation of design principles and the discussion of issues concerning the re-use of educational resources and activities

Intelligent Management and Efficient Operation of Big Data

This chapter details how Big Data can be used and implemented in networking and computing infrastructures. Specifically, it addresses three main aspects: the timely extraction of relevant knowledge from heterogeneous, and very often unstructured large data sources, the enhancement on the performance of processing and networking (cloud) infrastructures that are the most important foundational pillars of Big Data applications or services, and novel ways to efficiently manage network infrastructures with high-level composed policies for supporting the transmission of large amounts of data with distinct requisites (video vs. non-video). A case study involving an intelligent management solution to route data traffic with diverse requirements in a wide area Internet Exchange Point is presented, discussed in the context of Big Data, and evaluated.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201

Using Data in Undergraduate Science Classrooms

Provides pedagogical insight concerning the skill of using data The resource being annotated is: http://www.dlese.org/dds/catalog_DATA-CLASS-000-000-000-007.htm

Reflections on developing a tool for creating visual representations of learning designs: towards a visual language for learning designs

Over the past four years we have been developing CompendiumLD, a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It has been developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out a design or learning sequence. CompendiumLD is a specialised version of Compendium, a tool for managing connections between information and ideas, which has been applied in many domains including the mapping of discussions and arguments. As most of the core knowledge mapping facilities provided by Compendium are included within CompendiumLD, it can be used for learning design, and applied it to other information mapping and modelling problems. Evidence gathered since CompendiumLD’s first release has shown the many conditions in which it is likely to be applied and appreciated by users, and that the need for visualising learning designs as a solution to understanding how all components of planned learning and teaching fit together may continue to grow. Furthermore, the use of technology is making the process of creating courses more complex. We explore these challenges and conclude with some reflections on the developments in visual representation needed to further facilitate the modelling of today and tomorrow’s complex learning situations

Visualizing learning goals with the Quail Model

This paper introduces the Quail Model, a device for the classification and visualization of learning goals. The model is a communication tool that can smoothen the discussion within a course design team, support shared understanding and improve decision-making. Its theoretical background mingles contributions from Instructional Design (Bloom, Gagné, Merrill) with the insights of an author of Philosophy (Lonergan). The paper presents a literature review, the Quail Model and some examples. Reference to a demo application is also provided

Constructing e-learning tools from heuristic methods: multiple whys, circle of analogies and stepwise convergence

I discuss various methods which may benefit from online implementation, supporting e-learning in the area of creativity and effective thinking at all educational levels, from kindergarten to graduate programs. All procedures comprise a virtual laboratory, capable of generating actual creative olutions to real problems. Tools for creative thinking may be implemented as online procedures allowing the user to conduct heuristic group sessions. I provide examples of individual-user heuristic methods (multiple Why? questions, circle of analogies) and a group-based method (discussion 66 which involves stepwise convergence of ideas generated by semi-independent subgroups)

Design Thinking: The New Mindset for Competitive Intelligence? Impacts on the Competitive Intelligence Model

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is becoming of essence due to the need for improving firm performance in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (V.U.C.A.) world. The CI model, however, has not evolved to address evolving intelligence needs, highlighting an opportunity for further research on how to fit for purpose the CI process itself. This study found that Design Thinking (DT) mindset and process has potential for the application to the CI model, improving efficiency both on the overall process, at each stage and in CI. This paper focus on researching the CI process and recognizing its main pitfalls, explaining how DT can help fix or improve on these, and propose a new process which incorporates the aforementioned results. The final part of the study analyses the implications for both CI practitioners and the CI discipline, while pointing to future research with the aim of validating this suggested framework