Digital Information Design (DID) – A Practitioner Guide

We DID IT; so can you. DID is Digital Information Design.

IT is of course the ubiquitous Information Technology that is so simple, so easy to design and change that it (sorry, IT) never goes wrong and all you need to do is to teach a few people a bit about coding, implementing and a best practice.

More seriously, if all of IT projects were successful, Digital Information Design would be a waste of time. However, the failure rate of IT outsourcing deals is around 40%, and hiring a sourcing consultant increases the odds of failure. IT-enabled enterprises thus need to know themselves how to govern the IT function. DID is the only best practice that recognizes that to do just that. You need more than best practice; and inevitably more than one best practice as well as people who understand that there is no such thing as simple easy to design IT that never changes. Therefore, to support your work, Digital Information Design (DID) guidance has been developed as a good practice to get it actually governed and done!

People working in IT rarely have proficient domain experience like working as a user/customer in the line of business that is employing their IT services to perform what once were manual activities. Vice versa, people working in the line of business are rarely well-versed in designing complex IT systems and processes, but times have changed. The DID framework aids in bringing together the right mix of IT and domain expertise, thereby helping to connect both views of the same, albeit complex, IT-enabled world.

DID recognizes complexity, demands inclusivity of all stakeholders in design and provides a simple yet useful model to identify key resources. And it recognizes that you cannot do everything using a single governing concept. If you want to come to grips with designing business services that can be relied upon, try using DID.

This book is about the design and functioning of enterprise-wide business information management using intelligent customer principles, with particular regard to digitization. The DID framework is used to describe, position and provide tools for the design of the intelligent customer function focusing on the enterprise information assets. This framework has been set up to effectively shape business information management within an enterprise, with the aim of ensuring a better use of information and technology in the enterprise.

DID Practitioner guide is part of the DID library and specifically deals with the ability of an enterprise to manage and control data services from a practical viewpoint. The principles are written so that they can be used in various disciplines of supporting services and the primary processes of both for-profit or not for-profit enterprises.