Enterprise Design is the design of ambitious endeavours. It is about bringing together all the elements needed to make an enterprise successfully deliver, using a holistic and systemic design approach.
Get the free Enterprise Design Starter Kit Learn more about Enterprise Design toolsOur approach to tackling enterprise challenges by design has been pioneered by EDA and our design partners since our company's creation in 2009. In 2012, we published our book Intersection: How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap Between Business, Technology and People with Morgan Kaufmann publishers. Since 2014, we have been running the annual Intersection Conference series.
We are founding partners of Intersection Group, a not for profit association dedicated to creating better enterprises. Since 2020 Intersection Group has taken over the further development of the Enterprise Design approach, building a community of practice, running global events, and developing Open Source tools. Our first joint publication is the book Enterprise Design Patterns.
With any significant growth, the effects of Enterprise Awkwardness appear: silos, disjointed experiences, vulnerability to disruptive competition, complicated IT systems, lack of trust from customers and their own teams. Enterprises lose track of the conversation, get stuck in inflexible procedures, communicate in bits of incomplete information, and fail to deliver what they promised.
Regardless if you are a rapidly scaling startup or an established organization, a public entity or a business, enterprises are challenged to overcome their inherent complexity. The good news: these are mere symptoms, not causes, of bad enterprise design.
Enterprises can and should be well-designed! All you need is a proper tool to navigate a complex environment, collaborate with your peers and make a leap together.
Enterprises are complex environments, both in their internal organization and the markets they address. It’s easy to get entangled in this messy reality, caught up in conflicting goals and unexpected constraints. As a consequence, many enterprise initiatives end up in dead ends, and fall short of the intended impact.
Enterprise Design is an approach for navigating this space, making sense of the various moving parts. It is about triggering key events within the enterprise to make a leap towards a thriving future state, bridging two important gaps:
