How Deutsche Bank's IT Division Used Design Thinking to Achieve Customer Proximity

Design thinking (DT), a customer-centric approach for integrating end customers in the innovation process, enables organizations to identify customers’ real needs. The full article describes the evolution of DT in Deutsche Bank’s IT division and its role in solving specific problems, better integrating the business and IT divisions, and bringing the bank’s IT closer to its customers, and identifies the lessons learned. A key aspect of customer-centricity is that end customers are continuously integrated into the organization’s innovation process in a way that deepens the company’s knowledge about their contexts, needs and motivations. The DT cycle systematically involves a potential customer in the iterative needs-discovery process.