Article Series: Design and Technology: Joining Forces for a Truly Competitive Advantage

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Introduction

Disrupt or be disrupted. Traditional approaches to building great software are quickly falling by the wayside. With myriad of smaller, more nimble competitors rapidly entering the marketplace, how will your business innovate, survive and thrive?

This article series offers readers tactical approaches to building software that your customers love. Break down existing silos and create an environment for cross-collaborative teams: placing technology, business and user experience design at the core.

Contents

Joining Forces for a Truly Competitive Advantage

In the first article of the series, Ben Melbourne confronts the divide between technology and design. The list of industries being disrupted by digital technologies is growing. To embrace this new digital world, companies need to change their practices and the way they use technology. The traditional IT focus on systems and infrastructure is fast becoming an outdated approach. Technologists need to be part of the conversation before technology becomes the solution. To get ahead and stay there, Business people, Designers and Technologists have to join forces. Working closely together is the only way to unlock a company’s full potential.

Developing a Collaboration Culture

The collaboration of a company and its multidisciplinary units has never been more crucial than now. Everything we make today depends upon our ability to stay current, move nimbly, innovate, engage and delight. Those things are too difficult to achieve without cross-team collaboration. How can we unlock better collaborative rhythms within organizations that have tried and true processes that have worked for eons, but may not be working any longer? In this article, Jaimee Newberry discusses common challenges teams face, and five mind shifts to help overcome these.

UX - Everyone’s Doing it, Are You?

An estimated 70% of technology projects fail due to a lack of user adoption. Shouldn’t organizations understand their users and product as much as possible in order to prevent this from happening? Ted McCarthy explains how successful organizations emphasize and invest in UX, integrating it into their teams alongside product and engineering, and offers some useful tips along the way.

Interview: When Technology and Design Collide, then Collude

Does design shape technology or does technology shape design? How do these two disciplines work together, and move away from the traditional siloed approach? In this virtual panel Sam Gibson and Ben Melbourne discuss the importance of overcoming adversity between technologists and designers by offering tactical approaches to solving these common issues.

Series Manager

Sarah Howe is a Senior Content Strategist at ThoughtWorks. A born creative, she works to design great user experiences for consumers of digital content -- covering both technical and design audiences.

Originally from Australia, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York, where she enjoys the very hipster coffee shops and the ever inspirational art and design scene the city has to offer.

Find her on Twitter @sarahmariehowe

Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• Culture & Methods
• User Experience
• Design
• Enterprise Architecture
• Article Series
• Infrastructure
• Design and Technology: Joining Forces for a Truly Competitive Advantage
• Architecture

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