Blending Business and Design with Sudhindra V.(IBM)

11 min readNov 18, 2020

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of design in business. However, a strong approach to design has a significant impact on a brand and comes with profound business benefits. Design thinking is used for everything from new product ideas to finding out more about your target audience. Hence design decisions dramatically impact the future of your business and your profitability.

In the 29th episode, we interact with Sudhindra Venkatesha Murthy, Chief Design Officer at IBM iX. On the digital canvas, Sudhindra crafts positive experiences for people armed with insights, empathy, and behavioral understanding. As an Experience Strategist, he helps craft vision for partners to see their worlds in action. As a Design Leader, he designs environments conducive to creating meaningful, game-changing, and award-winning designs. He has been recognized for his work through many awards, including the Most Innovative Product award by NIA in Singapore. Let’s know more about his journey and experiences in the latest episode of “Avantika Designeering Series,” “Blending Business and Design.”

Rohit Lalwani: One of the other interesting things is when we talk about IBM iX, there are so many interesting projects that are developed. Some of these include Fortis Healthcare, Hyundai, heavy industries, etc., The question that I have is, How do you develop this multi-domain understanding approach? I mean, a bank is very different from a railway and a heavy industry and a healthcare organization. How do you build an understanding of all these domains?

Sudhindra: IBM works with all of these different industries and the company has been around for hundred-plus years? We have been reinventing all the time. And during that process, we have had some deep expertise in all of these different industries. I have access to some of the most reputed people who represent their industries and domains. Be it banking and healthcare, they all work in IBM and I have access to them.

So the way we develop this multi-domain understanding is by a combination of all of these approaches and by getting them into our mix. So if you want to redesign an airport experience, you are going to speak to people who had that experience before you are going to speak to technologists who have worked on the various aspects that you need in the airport, the baggage, the security systems, and all of that stuff. So you have access to all of them and we have been doing this for such a long time that we have a knowledge base that is unparalleled in the world. I am fortunate that I have access to them. We call them in when we are doing this kind of thinking and this kind of work, what we bring to the table is a fresh approach.

As designers we are not biased by, some of the past as well. We bring in a fresh approach.

Our technologists bring in the possibilities and these domain experts bring in the various relevant perspectives, the deep knowledge. When you combine all of them, you have a great, breakthrough outcome.

Rohit Lalwani: When you mentioned the way you work; I got a question. Every company works hard to develop a unique culture, processes, and habits that drive their success. What I wish to know is what makes IBM work creatively?

Sudhindra: IBM’s culture has gone through hundred-plus years of a journey. We stand for being essential in the world, In the societies and the geographies that we serve, and so on. So that is the culture. IBM has been doing this for over a century is testimony to the very fact that you need a strong culture in a business. The design itself came about when the visionary leader Thomas Watson jr. proclaimed in a memo that good design is good business. This was back in 1966 to all his senior-most leaders. We have been fortunate enough to be with the world of design from that time. We have come up with some innovative pieces of work. Trendsetters that have moved the world forward. That is what we stand for even today.

Coming to 2012–2013, when we started using the design thinking methodology slash framework in all that we do. There is another moment that happened at IBM, where we made it a conscious intervention in all of our stuff that we do.

The design thinking approach that we take today, permeates the HR world, the learning world, the procurement. Even a redefinition of the organization, construct the units of the organization, all of that uses the design thinking approach.

Now to make that happen in such a large organization is amazing and that is the culture that we have today. The stuff that we do to connect the dots between different kinds of people that are there, different stakeholders, different experts and that is what keeps IBM creatively competitive as you call it and on the top of the game, we have defined the career paths for designers, we have given the focus on the kind of work that we do in IBM iX or the overall IBM design. We have given a lot of focus on what we do, we have given importance to the human-centeredness of things and we have always brought in new ways of working new facets of design like service design, speculative design, etc., We brought in all of those concepts. So all these different aspects, especially on the design side are the means that you are constantly evolving and that is our culture as well.

To evolve and to be remaining essential in all that we do. That is what I believe makes IBM at the top of the game and ahead of the curve.

Rohit Lalwani: Interesting. That brings me to our last question. While we understood some of these elements we coined this term at Avantika University called “Designeering”, which is the base ideology that we follow, in terms of coaching our students, a blended approach of the world of design and engineering. I see that at IBM iX you follow the same philosophy. Do you think that in the next decade and more times to come ahead, this blended approach is where a very interesting, action point lies in the future? What is your view on that?

Sudhindra: Absolutely. I agree with that. So when we say design, the whole point is about action. Design is doing as well, but it is as important to do as it is to think. Empathy alone, without it, does not combine with the prototyping, it does not do much. It is about doing, so I am completely aligned with this thought. This blended approach where in fact, in our design thinking approach we call it the “Observe, Reflect and Make”

You observe, then you think about what is going on, you reflect upon it, you connect all those dots and then you give life to those ideas and then you go back again. That is the design thinking loop that we propose in IBM as well. It is absolutely the doing part that combines what is the thinking part that makes a lot of difference. We do it all the time in the work that we do when we want to give, when we are working with our clients, when we want to show them how we are, thinking about it, we create stuff and show to them, we make stuff and that is the best way. We have a lot of maker spaces within our studios as well. Now, all of that goes back to the importance of doing, and that is the heart of what we do. It is the thought plus action. That is the design philosophy.

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Blending Business and Design with Sudhindra V.(IBM)

Written by Kappaladin