As an enterprise team, you face complex challenges. You work across silos and juggle competing requirements—all while racing to meet rising expectations. That’s why we can use Enterprise Design Thinking, a framework that aligns multi-disciplinary teams around their users’ real needs. When teams apply these scalable methods, they can move faster and deliver differentiated outcomes over and over again. The supporters of this technique believe that the world’s systems should work in the service of people. At the heart of our human-centered mission is Enterprise Design Thinking: a framework to solve our users’ problems at the speed and scale of the modern enterprise.
In this individual activity, we will practice the design-thinking technique to solve a real business problem. The principles which guide us in this exercise are to see problems and solutions as an ongoing conversation. Each student can come up with a new way to solve the given problem. Then, each student needs to submit a report highlighting how they used the design-thinking technique to solve the mentioned business problem.
Background:
Information systems (IS) educators at universities face a number of challenges in the current environment, including dealing with declining enrolments, preparing students for the changes in the profession, and updating the curriculum to integrate new ideas and technologies. These challenges make sharing IS education-related knowledge and practices especially critical.
Scenario:
A large university recently announced that the number of applicants for Master’s degree programs in Information Systems (IS) has declined by 50% in 2021 and 55% in 2022
There are some speculations and assumptions about the reasons, but the university does not use a traditional problem-solving approach
Use the design thinking technique to solve the issues.
Write the report using the following steps. Responses to each step will be assessed:
1- What is the business problem?
2- Do a “5 Whys” to find the main cause (dig deeper).
3- Who are the Users (main user identification)?
4- What is the User-centered problem statement (Problem statement from the users ‘ perspective)?
5- Do “As-Is” analysis: What is their current struggle today? Their daily work? Their needs?
6- Do “to-be” analysis: Propose some User-centric Ideas to solve their problems?
Format requirements:
– Please mention each question followed by an answer
– Each student may find different “users,” which is acceptable in this approach
– To answer Q5, try to deeply analyze the current situations that “users” may face
– To answer Q6, try to come up with at least three solutions.
– Page limit for the report: Minimum 3 pages- Maximum 5 pages
– The font should be Times New Roman 12pt and double-spaced.
Design Thinking
This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome
1. Statement of business problem
Report clearly and accurately articulates the problem the business is facing.
10 pts
2. 5 Whys
Report conducts the “5 Whys” technique to find the main cause of the problem.
20 pts
3. Users identification
Report accurately identifies the users involved in the problem.
10 pts
4. User-centered problem statement
Report formulates a logical user-centered problem statement.
10 pts
5. As-Is Analysis
Report includes an “As-Is” analysis exploring the users’ current struggles.
25 pts
6. To-Be Analysis
Report includes a “to-be” analysis and proposes user-centric ideas to solve their problems.
25 pts
Total Points: 100
