The COVID-19 pandemic brought several challenges for enterprises and their employees, as business aims to keep productivity high while working from home. “Design Thinking” is one strategy IBM is using to figure out solutions to these problems, according to Arin Bhowmick (pictured), global vice president and chief design officer, IBM Cloud, data, and AI platforms at IBM.

“Design is really an expression of intent — an intent to help solve a problem and overcome everyday challenges,” Bhowmick said. “So, we at IBM are basically focusing on helping our users and partners and customers be more productive.”

Bhowmick spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed the role of design in making solutions easier to consume, IBM’s approach to addressing business needs, and the growing importance of a culture of design at IBM and industry-wide. (* Disclosure below.)

The enterprise is the key element

With a focus on developing a culture of design over the past decade, IBM created the Enterprise Design Thinking framework, which is essentially the company’s take at human-centered design built to scale for the enterprise.

“The enterprise is the key element here,” Bhowmick said. “And the practices we have developed using those frameworks helps our team collaborate better, keeping the users and their needs at the center of everything we do.”

Businesses seek help from IBM to resolve issues from data management to automation, modernization, and the adoption of the cloud or artificial intelligence. The way to find solutions is to understand customers, check their environment, and analyze the context in which they work, Bhowmick explained.

Designers also need to keep up with the fast pace of technology evolution. “We really need to think out of the box and be a little bit ahead of the curve to design for collaboration and adoption of these emerging technologies, without adding a huge learning curve,” he added. “That’s a challenge as well.”

To understand the innovations, IBM designers rely on the IBM Research organization, which works to predict the advancement of technology. This is a huge advantage for IBM, according to Bhowmick, because it helps Big Blue look forward and anticipate future tech.

When IBM started to react to COVID-19 early on, the designers also took action.

“One of the things we did was stick in a design solution to improve human-computer interaction, where we were using AI technology like Watson Assistant in children’s hospitals to help answer the huge number of questions coming in around COVID-19,” Bhowmick concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE