Not the Usual (Service Design) Suspects Exploring how a team of enterprise architects discovered and apply service design in a large organisation Dutch bank ING has been recognised recently for its innovative approach, both with its banking app, and for the radical internal transformation it underwent in 2015. Ron Kersic and his team of four colleagues represent one of the foci of innovation within the bank. Relative newcomers to service design, they’ve dived Ron Kersic is CTO at the Enterprise Architecture department of ING Domestic Bank Netherlands.
in enthusiastically, and are applying aspects of the discipline to their day-to-day work. What makes them unique - however - is their location within the bank. Ron’s team are a mix of developers, interface designers and economists, sitting within the Enterprise Architecture group, and formally focussing on APIs and client-facing applications. Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes recently sat down with Ron to learn more about this instance of service design gaining a foothold in an unexpected part of an organisation.
Jesse Grimes: Perhaps more than any other sector, banking and financial services have seen the widespread application of service design. What specifically has triggered your team's interest in the field, and what are you doing to apply it within ING?
Ron Kersic: We started out as practi tioners of the agile mindset, and specifi cally the Scrum framework. Scrum describes how to get from a Product 76 Touchpoint 8-2
Backlog, an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product, to a valuable increment of that product, and how to get there repeatedly. It’s really a nice framework. It does not, however, prescribe how to get to that Product Backlog and how to keep it in such a state that the resulting increments are not only feasible and viable but also desirable. So we set out to find a framework to precisely do that and do that repeatedly. What we found was the Agile Inception