 Always wanted to know what the relationship is between digital transformation and service design. Make sure you stick around because at the end of this video, you'll know how these two fields can benefit from each other. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to build organizations that put people at the heart of their business. Now before we dive into digital transformation and service design, I just want to do a quick disclaimer. This video isn't about which one is better. That's a completely irrelevant question as you'll discover in this video. This video is really about understanding the relationship between the two fields. So what's the problem here? Well, on the outside, digital transformation and service design can look quite similar. We share a lot of the same tools and methods. We talk about customer experience a lot, but just because we're similar on the outside doesn't mean we're similar on the inside. And what I see happening is that we miss a lot of opportunities to actually learn from each other and benefit from each other's strength. And even I see happening that people are sort of guarding their own field, their own silo. And that's usually never a good thing. Let's get the obvious thing out of the way first. I'm not an ultimate expert on digital transformation. There are much more experienced and smarter people out there that can talk about this topic. But I know one or two of these people and have seen digital transformation projects close enough that I think I can say something about it. From what I see happening is that digital transformation is a lot about digitizing existing services and products to work smarter, to work more efficiently, and yes, to improve customer and employee experience. That's the ultimate goal. And it's often also about the organizational culture and changing that. For instance, allowing people to work remotely and providing the technical infrastructure to that. It's not just a technological change. It's also a cultural change. So yes, there is or at least there should be if done right, a lot of emphasis on the user needs and the user experience in any digital transformation project. But here's the big clue. Anything digital transformation touches is a service 100% of the time. I don't care if it's about digitizing services for customers or for employees. It's always about a service. It can be a service about digitizing the ordering of a meal or it can be about digitizing an analog form and making a digital version. All of it, all of the time, is part of a service. Now, when you know that and when you realize that it's not so strange that you see a lot of service design tools and methods being applied in digital transformation projects. So how do we then relate to each other? Well, digital transformation, it's already in the name is about tech. It's the focus is on using modern technology to find ways to work smarter, find ways to deliver services in a more efficient way. Well, service design is all about finding the needs of the users, finding the needs of the business, and applying a design, the design approach, the design toolkit, that design mindset. So, which means it's all about co-creation, prototyping, visualizing, all that you know of design. But it's not the starting point. It's never technology. So with service design, you might end up actually removing technology and making things analog again. Just think about, for instance, the AVR machines where you call and you have to go through a menu. Maybe you should replace it by a human who connects you to the right person. Or think about your to-do list in Post-its and digitizing that into a tool like Trello. Yes, it might be smart to put it in Trello for to collaborate and archive it. But you also lose some of the personal relationship with your teammates. Maybe getting back to the question, how can we use each other's strength to actually create something that's even better? I think adding more service design to digital transformation projects would make the process even more user-centered. I often feel that digital transformation is about doing existing things better while service design is much more about finding the things, the better things you should do. So rather than actually just digitizing existing processes, existing services, existing forms, service design, questions more, should we work in this way? Is this really the service we should be delivering and then moving on to maybe digitizing it? So that's the way I think we can use each other's strengths, learn from each other, and make the process even better. What do you think? What is the relationship between service design and digital transformation and how can we use each other's strength in the most optimal way? Leave a comment down below. Let's continue the conversation over there. Now, one of the most important ways to understand what service design is and being able to explain it to the people around you is by actually having a really clear picture of where it fits in, for instance, compared to digital transformation. So in the next video, we're going to talk about how service design relates to design thinking. If you're interested in that, make sure you check out this video because that's what we're going to talk about over there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you over here.