Pete Fossick Meet the service designer
For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes caught up with Pete Fossick (Service Design Program Director, GTS Design), to learn about the opportunities afforded to him as a service designer working within global giant IBM, and to hear his thoughts on where service design education should be heading. Pete Fossick is a seasoned design leader in service design and digital transformation with extensive experience of delivering customer-centric solutions for the world's leading corporations. He is currently the Service Design Program Director at IBM.
Jesse Grimes: Your current work at IBM brings you in touch with clients that – in terms of scale – would be the envy of many service designers working in typical practitioner settings. Yet on the other hand, IBM has earned its reputation as a partner for enterprise-wide ‘tech’ (whether hardware or code). How do you help create the opportunity for service design to be included in the consultancy offering of IBM? Is it part of the engagement from the outset, or something “added on” to IT-led projects?
Pete Fossick: At IBM we take design very seriously, as a technology company that has always valued design. From the early days of personal computers to the first mainframe computers to the most recent work in cognitive computing, design is crucial. Recently, IBM has invested in developing a unique approach to design thinking that is used not only by its 1,500 designers, but also by our engineers, developers and throughout the whole 68 Touchpoint 9-1
organisation. ‘IBM Design Thinking’ enables us to focus on developing usercentric experiences and innovative digital solutions by working collaboratively with each other and with our clients. At IBM, we think the systems of the world should work in service of people. At the heart of our human-centred mission is IBM Design Thinking: a framework to solve our users’ problems at the speed and scale of the modern digital enterprise. Service design is a practice that has been adopted and adapted to fit in the design playbook. And service design is particularly useful and relevant when we work with clients that are transforming their services to be ‘digital first’. Whether we’re re-envisioning the customer experience for a multinational bank or just planning a product’s next release, IBM Design Thinking coupled with user experience design and service design helps us focus on what matters to our clients and – importantly – to their users and customers.
