Taking back control of enterprise design: intention before tools

For a long time, it was believed that efficiency would come from tools, and sometimes even from tools alone, so we piled up platforms, workflows, and assistants, and eventually, the business began to resemble its information system. This produces speed and consistency, and sometimes real savings, but too often, it erases the raison d’être of the service provided. Taking back control of the design of your business does not mean slowing down modernization, but rather reinstalling intention as the starting point before freezing the organization into technical choices.

In short:

• The accumulation of technological tools in businesses has sometimes replaced in-depth reflection on service, leading to a loss of meaning despite apparent gains in efficiency.
• Excessive automation, particularly in customer relations, can degrade the perceived experience despite good performance indicators, as cases such as Klarna and certain retail chains have shown.
  • The business’s identity and promise must guide organizational and technological choices and what works for one brand may be detrimental to another.
• Enterprise design consists of defining intentions, human priorities, and trade-offs upstream to prevent technology from taking over without consistency with actual objectives.
• The arrival of AI highlights structural weaknesses linked to a lack of design; it can improve or worsen things depending on whether or not the business has thought about how it operates.

A business that works and customers who drift away

In customer relations, the consequences can be dramatic. The metrics are good, response times are falling, volume is being maintained, as is the cost per contact, but in the end something breaks. At Klarna, AI support quickly absorbed a large portion of conversations, and the official line praised the massive productivity gains and impressive multilingual coverage (Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month). Then the first cracks appeared: criticism of the quality of responses, less satisfied customers, and ultimately a reversal of the decision to fully automate the service (Company that sacked 700 workers with AI now regrets it — scrambles to rehire as automation goes horribly wrong). We can debate the storytelling aspect of each approach’s proponents, but the fact remains that the core promise, namely a simple, transparent, and trustworthy relationship, cannot be measured solely in terms of average processing time (Business Tech News: Klarna Reverses On AI, Says Customers Like Talking To People). When the tool imposes a model and standardizes practices, you can lose what was previously a competitive advantage (AI will not create a competitive advantage).

This is not an exception. In retail, stores that had made self-checkouts a symbol of efficiency are backtracking, limiting their use or reintroducing cashiers to restore the experience (Retailers Scale Back Self-Checkouts to Curb Irritation—and Theft). The problem is not the tool itself, but rather that it has been made to deliver a service promise that it cannot fulfill on its own: fluidity yes, consideration no.

When it comes to customer experience, but also employee experience, we must not believe that we are talking about a race to the top—quite the contrary. Doing things well is important, but you have to be consistent with your DNA and your identity, which shape your promise and customer expectations. Just because a system works well doesn’t mean it will deliver the expected results, and no one says it better than the CEO of Mercedes Benz USA: “The customer experience is the brand” and “The customer experience follows the employee experience” ((Mercedes Benz CEO: Customer Experience is the New Marketing).

Reading this, it’s easy to understand that anything that automates, standardizes, or dehumanizes can kill your brand and disappoint your customers. I really emphasize the word “can”: it all depends on your brand, your DNA, and your promise. In one case, it will be valued and appreciated; in another, the consequences can be dramatic.

This is why it is so important to adopt an approach that makes identity one of the pillars of how we conceive of a business and how it operates (EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations).

In the cases I mention, companies eventually recognized the limitations of the model: customer irritants, declining loyalty, increased losses. They reintroduced the human element, restricted usage, and created new systems. In other words, they corrected the configuration because the design of the experience and, more broadly, of the business had never really been established.

When configuration replaces design

All these stories have one thing in common. We start with a vague intention (“serve faster, at lower cost”), choose a solution, and then reorganize around it. In doing so, we confuse improving the tool with designing the service. The result is a technically flawless business that no longer knows what it wants to offer its customers. It’s not technology that decides, but the absence of design that lets it decide instead.

It doesn’t make things worse or better, it just makes them inconsistent with who you are, what you promise, and what is expected of you because, as Deming said, “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it achieves“. The problem is not technology, but design.

This risk can be measured on a large scale when operational architecture takes precedence over understanding the work. What happened at Southwest clearly demonstrated this: a system designed to keep to the schedule could not cope with complexity, and the entire organization ground to a halt. The loss was not only economic: it revealed an organization incapable of absorbing the unexpected and taking care of the customer when it matters (DOT Penalizes Southwest Airlines $140 Million for 2022 Holiday Meltdown). Here again, the cause is not the technology, but an inadequate design of operations and crisis management.

Because, and this is where approaches such as EDGY, which I mentioned earlier, come in, being clear about your promise is one thing, but you still need the operational capabilities to deliver on it, and Southwest learned this the hard way.

Rethink before implementing

Taking back control of design means bringing to the forefront questions that, strangely enough, are not always addressed in project committees: What constitutes good service for us, here and now? Where do we place people, and why? How much of an interaction requires attention, and therefore cannot be compressed into seconds?

What risks do we accept and which do we reject, even if the solution promises gains? These questions do not belong to the IT department but to senior management, business lines, and teams in contact with customers. Technology responds then and only then. Design is not an upstream phase that slows down execution. It is not speed that counts but continuity of meaning.

Design ensures that every change is in line with the same intention. A well-designed business does not seek to automate everything, but decides what it wants to leave to the machine and what it wants to continue to do itself, and in each case, what experience is expected.

What AI changes

AI isn’t reinventing anything, but it simply shows where the business has stopped thinking about how it works. It forces us to clarify what we really want to do, otherwise it decides for us. Where we are clear about the service provided, it speeds things up and stabilizes them, but where we have cobbled together an experience, it brings inconsistencies to the fore. The issue is therefore not about putting AI everywhere, but about deciding where and for what. The rest is then a matter of configuration, not design.

Conversely, the race for “AI everywhere” without prior thought about design can lead to industrial disaster. I would even say that after years of being on a slippery slope (How management let systems do the thinking for them), the arrival of AI may be the salutary event that will allow businesses to seize the opportunity to ask themselves the right questions for the last time. After that, it will probably be too late and the opportunity will not come again.

Bottom line

It is not technology that causes a business to lose its DNA, it is the absence of design. Enterprise design does not oppose the tool: it determines its place. It reminds us that every architecture, every automation, every model must reflect a clear intention. Reviving enteprise design means putting thought back where there were only settings.

To answer your questions…

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Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)

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