The Enterprise Design Hub is a nexus for business design, connecting strategy, operations, and experience design, helping enterprises tackle current and future challenges. The Hub manages all customer- and business-initiated change demands within an enterprise.
The question is: How to make enterprise’s design & delivery process efficient?
The answer is: Enterprise Design Hub.
WHAT, WHY, and HOW? Everything needed is already in place: several professional disciplines. They just need to join forces, which can be achieved by establishing a cross-functional Enterprise Design Hub practice.
Enterprise Design Hub is a virtual team responsible for managing change-related demand(s). It steers work toward multi-skilled multidisciplinary teams that turn validated concepts into concrete solutions – including new digital products and -services and operating models.
A multidisciplinary team (Fusion Team 360) transforms concepts based on customer and business needs into actionable solutions. The work is driven by customer-centricity, multidisciplinary collaboration, and co-creation.
Enterprise Design Hub (EDH)
WHAT?
The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH), or simply the Hub, is a joint force and a practice, organized as a virtual team, that manages all change demands within an enterprise. Change demands can be e.g. customer- or business-initiated. The Hub is a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary and collaborative. All the relevant disciplines are involved, such as service designers, business architects, innovation specialists, security specialists, risk analysts, process specialists, technology experts – to collaboratively drive enterprise change and innovation. They share methods and tools, and utilizes agile practices.
The Enterprise Design Hub is a virtual team, not necessarily an organizational structure. It operates through continuous meetings (e.g. weeklys) and uses a Kanban board to manage tasks, ensuring collaboration and transparency across disciplines. Examples of roles involved are shown in the figure below.
The Enterprise Design Hub is a shared space for collaboration that enables these disciplines to work together seamlessly to address the complexity of enterprise change. A central place or nexus for aligning service design, business architecture and other relevant efforts. This makes all the disciplines meaningful as they complement each other. Their synergy creates value, including emergent value, and drives beneficial business outcomes, ultimately contributing to the creation of better enterprises.
To unite service designers, business architects and other specialists together, the enterprise can establish a cohesive design & delivery process that integrates all the disciplines to address change demands across an enterprise. This practice ensures that all phases, from concept to operations, are strategically aligned, customer-centric, and operationally efficient.
The Enterprise Design Hub:
- Emphasizes experimentation, creativity, and innovation.
- Suggests a collaborative, exploratory environment where new ideas are tested, refined and conceptualised.
- Appeals to enterprises looking to foster a forward-thinking, customer-centered culture and seeking structure for managing enterprise changes.
- Supports enterprise change activities, facilitates design sessions, and creates design deliverables such as concept designs.
- Supports business design by providing a structured, collaborative framework and tools to address the complexities of modern organizations.
Note! The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH) is a pattern for a collaboration framework in an enterprise. The name can be organization-specific, e.g. <Org name> Hub, or Design Office, Design Lab, Design Studio, Integrated Enterprise/Experience Design – or simply just “Hub” or “HUB“.
Enterprise Design Hub role is analogous to the hub in the traditional hub-and-spoke model, where the hub acts as the central point connecting various spokes (departments, teams, or systems). The hub-and-spoke model is a design pattern commonly used in transportation, logistics, and network systems. In this model, a central hub connects to multiple spokes, facilitating efficient communication and coordination. Similarly, the Enterprise Design Hub functions as the central node that connects various organizational units (spokes), enabling:
- Centralized Coordination: The hub ensures that all spokes are aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives.
- Efficient Communication: It facilitates the flow of information between different departments, reducing silos.
- Resource Optimization: By centralizing certain functions, the hub allows for better resource allocation and avoids duplication of efforts.
The Enterprise Hub embodies the principles of the hub-and-spoke model by serving as a central point of coordination and integration, facilitating collaboration, and aligning various parts of the organization towards common goals.
The Enterprise Design Hub is a joint-force practice, operating as a virtual team, for managing an enterprise’s change demands.
WHY?
There are typically many design, development and change management disciplines in an enterprise working in isolation lacking collaboration. Many of these important and valuable disciplines are struggling with their relevance. Many specialist groups feel like they are not understood, and their purpose is not crystal clear for all the stakeholders. Business people don’t understand what those expert groups do, how they do, and why they do what they do.
The current situation is not optimal because all disciplines and practices are working separately, in silos, each using methods and tools of their own. This leads to misalignment, duplicated efforts, and fragmented solutions that don’t fully address the needs of the enterprise or its customers. By not collaborating, enterprise and its teams miss opportunities to create cohesive, efficient, and customer-centered outcomes.
The root causes for needing a more efficient enterprise change process boil down to the complexity of modern business, the pace of change, and the challenges of siloed work. Addressing these issues requires creating a collaborative, integrated, and customer-centered approach to design and change management, like the Enterprise Design Hub, to drive better alignment, agility, and business outcomes.
The Enterprise Design Hub is a solution to the “problem of isolation“, where many different expert groups work separately and independently within their own silos – even though it would be most beneficial for the enterprise if they collaborated.
An enterprise often has many isolated disciplines working in silos, without collaboration.
HOW?
Unified approach for collaboration. The Enterprise Design Hub serves as a central point at the start of the overall development process, where all incoming change demands are managed. The Hub is where experts from distinct disciplines, together with the demand or business case owner, analyze change demands: what the case is, why it is important, and how to proceed.
The Hub enables competencies and perspectives to converge, ensuring alignment between strategic goals and customer needs. For example, Service Designers bring customer- and user-centered design methodologies, focusing on customer journeys, touchpoints, and experiences. Business Architects align these designs with enterprise strategy, business capabilities, value streams, and operating models.
The Enterprise Design Hub is a virtual team composed of specialist roles and individuals who may belong to different organizational structures (e.g., units, groups, or teams). Although they come from different parts of the enterprise, they collaborate within the Hub to align efforts, share expertise, and achieve common goals through regular meetings (e.g. weeklys) and task management (e.g. using a Kanban board).
Cross-disciplinary integration and collaboration. The Enterprise Design Hub isn’t limited to service designers and business architects, it fosters collaboration across disciplines like security specialists, innovation specialists, risk analysts, business analysts, technology specialists, process specialists, Lean- Six Sigma etc., specialists, and agile coaches. Together these specialists can be called simply enterprise designers. They cooperate with other stakeholders such as customers, business owners or product owners, service owners or concept owners etc. This multidisciplinary integration ensures holistic solutions that account for strategy, design, risk, feasibility, and technology. It also ensures that all change demands are analyzed for their viability, feasibility, and desirability – both for the customers and the business.
Collaboration is essential as it ensures:
- Shared Vision: All disciplines align with the same strategic and user-centered goals.
- Holistic Solutions: Cross-functional input ensures solutions are comprehensive and scalable.
- Efficiency: Shared knowledge eliminates redundancies and accelerates delivery.
- Risk Mitigation: Early involvement of risk and compliance ensures secure and compliant solutions.
- Employee Engagement: Collaborative environments foster purpose, trust, and innovation.
- Customer Satisfaction: Seamless, cohesive services lead to better customer experiences.
Holistic change management. By creating a collaborative approach, enterprises can process change demands effectively, avoiding the pitfalls of siloed work and delivering lasting value across the enterprise. The overall design & delivery process (a.k.a. development value stream) with The Enterprise Design Hub in place.
The Enterprise Design Hub provides a structured process for managing enterprise change demands from concept to operations. By combining service design and business architecture (among others), it ensures that changes align with enterprise goals, and solutions are designed with both the customer and the organisation in mind.
Shared design practices. The Enterprise Design Hub formalizes a unified design process, combining service design’s customer-centricity and business architecture’s strategic and operational alignment by utilising the Enterprise Design approach with the EDGY language. This process includes:
- Strategic alignment and problem definition.
- Co-creation of customer journeys, service blueprints, and business capability models.
- Defining how solutions will be built or integrated.
- Continuous improvement based on user feedback and metrics.
- Meetings (such as weekly) and tools like Kanban and methods like Scrum or Scrumban, according to what is appropriate.
Centralized Governance. The Enterprise Design Hub ensures that all changes are processed systematically, using a design governance model that prioritizes strategic goals (viability), operational feasibility, and customer value (desirability). This avoids duplication, misalignment, and silos.
Scalable and adaptive. The Enterprise Design Hub is flexible enough to accommodate:
- Small-scale service innovations.
- Large-scale enterprise transformations.
- It can evolve to include new methodologies, technologies, or disciplines as the enterprise grows or volumes and frequencies of changes increase.
Shared language and artifacts. Service designers and business architects (and others) use shared tools like service blueprints, capability maps, and journey maps to collaborate effectively. All the disciplines can easily learn to use the EDGY as a common language (in tools like Draw.io or plain old PowerPoint).
The Enterprise Design Hub is a collaboration enabler for enterprise change activities.
Advantages of the Enterprise Design Hub:
- Alignment: Ensures that design solutions align with enterprise strategy, goals, and business capabilities.
- Efficiency: Centralizes efforts, reducing silos and redundant initiatives.
- Customer-Centricity: Keeps the customer at the core of all design and change initiatives.
- Strategic Impact: Enables changes to deliver measurable business value.
- Collaboration: Encourages cooperation and teamwork across traditionally siloed disciplines.
The Enterprise Design Hub isn’t just a practice – it’s a philosophy for uniting service designers and business architects in a collaborative, structured, and impactful way. It enables them to work together effectively while integrating other critical disciplines, ensuring that enterprise changes are strategic, customer-centered, and operationally sound. This makes it the ideal answer for enterprises seeking to bridge strategy and execution.
The Enterprise Design Hub supports and enhances Demand Management by providing a structured, collaborative approach to handling change demands across an enterprise.
Demand Management is a business capability that focuses on capturing, analyzing, prioritizing, and balancing customer and business needs with available resources, strategic goals, and operational constraints. It ensures that the organization invests in the most valuable and feasible initiatives by managing competing demands effectively. In this relationship, Demand Management is the business capability, and Enterperise Design Hub is the doer. By integrating Demand Management with the Enterprise Design Hub, enterprises can ensure that change demands are handled proactively, strategically, and efficiently, reducing wasted effort, improving alignment, and driving business value.
Use Cases
Here are some example use cases for utilising the Enterprise Design Hub:
These use cases show how the Enterprise Design Hub can help solve common business challenges in a structured, collaborative way, ultimately enabling improved operational efficiency.
The Enterprise Design Hub is a nexus for business design, connecting strategy, operations, and experience design, helping enterprises tackle current and future challenges.
Changes
Implementing changes is crucial for enterprises to adapt to continuously changing business environment. Enterprises perform business transformations or digital transformations, and lots of change demands of any size and scope are continuously handled to be implemented.
When changes in an enterprise are not processed in a collaborative way, significant problems can arise at every stage of the design and development process. These problems often stem from misaligned priorities, poor communication, and the inability to address the complexity of enterprise-wide initiatives
An enterprise is constantly changing. Everything moves, everything changes, all the time. Conditions in the business environment are continuously changing, which requires infinite intervention: change activities by managers and mandated change agents – such as enterprise designers.
Change is only constant in life – [Heraclitus]
Drivers
There are many change drivers and business events in and around enterprises. Drivers affect the business operations (operational business) of an enterprise that sets goals to implement changes. Change activities are structured efforts and tasks designed to transform the enterprise, its processes, applications, or culture to achieve a desired state – according to goals. These activities are typically part of change management, ensuring alignment between strategic goals, operational capabilities, employee readiness and customer needs.
There are many change drivers and business events in and around enterprises.
Disciplines
There are many important and valuable disciplines in enterprises, but many of them are struggling with their relevance. Many specialist groups feel like they are not understood, and their purpose is not crystal clear for all the stakeholders. Business people don’t understand what they do, how they do, and why they do what they do.
Many of these disciplines, diverse groups of specialists, are working in silos, each having their own methods and tools.
Challenges
Challenges to be solved, and causes why the Enterprise Design Hub is helpful and advantageous. So what are the problems in the design and development of an enterprise if the changes are not processed collaboratively? Problems and impacts:
Benefits
Having disciplines such as service designers, business architects, security specialists, risk analysts, business analysts, technology specialists, and others join forces in a collaborative environment like the Enterprise Design Hub is critical and extremely valuable for the following reasons:
The Flow – Enterprise’s Development Value Stream
The organization’s development process (a.k.a. development value stream) consists of several key phases that transform needs and ideas into delivered value. These phases typically follow a structured flow, ensuring that change demands are effectively processed from conception to implementation.
The development process can be effectively divided into three high-level phases: 1) Design (Plan), 2) Implementation (Build & Deliver), and 3) Operation (Run). The Enterprise Design Hub is positioned primarily in the Design phase, but its influence extends into the Implementation phase as well.
The development process is divided into three high-level phases:
- Design (Plan)
- Focus: Conceptualization, strategy, and feasibility analysis.
- Activities:
- Capturing and managing change demands.
- Defining customer and business needs and aligning them with enterprise goals.
- Designing solutions (e.g., service design, business architecture, capability modeling).
- Assessing viability, feasibility, and desirability.
- Delivering concepts
- Aligns with: COBIT’s “Plan” phase and IT4IT’s “Plan” and “Build” phases (early-stage).
- Implementation (Build & Deliver)
- Focus: Development, testing, and deployment.
- Activities:
- Translating concepts (designs) into working solutions.
- Developing and integrating features, products, or services.
- Testing, validation, and iterative improvements.
- Deploying and transitioning solutions into production.
- Aligns with: COBIT’s “Build” phase, and IT4IT’s “Build” and “Deliver” phases.
- Operation (Run)
- Focus: Managing, maintaining, and continuously improving live solutions.
- Activities:
- Monitoring performance and measuring success.
- Providing support, incident management, and ongoing optimization.
- Gathering user feedback and feeding insights back into the Design phase.
- Aligns with: COBIT’s “Run” phase and IT4IT’s “Run” phase.
Why does this three-phase structure work?
| A. Simplicity & universality | The three-phase model aligns well with widely used frameworks like COBIT (Plan, Build, Run) and IT4IT (Plan, Build, Deliver, Run) while keeping it simple. |
| B. Clear handoffs between phases | Ensures structured transitions from idea to execution to operation. |
| C. Adaptability to Enterprise Design Hub | The Enterprise Design Hub plays a key role in the Design phase, supporting demand management, concept development, and alignment with business strategy. |
This Design-Implementation-Operation model is both practical and industry-aligned, making it a solid approach for structuring an enterprise’s development process.
How the Enterprise Design Hub fits into the three-phase model?
- Design (Plan) – The core of the Enterprise Design Hub
- The Enterprise Design Hub plays a central role in this phase by:
- Capturing and structuring change demands from customers, business units, and strategic initiatives.
- Aligning business, technology, and customer/user needs through co-creation and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
- Defining solutions conceptually (e.g., customer journeys, service blueprints, business capability models).
- Ensuring feasibility, viability, and desirability before moving to implementation.
- Positioning: This is where the Hub has the strongest impact, as it sets the foundation for successful execution.
- The Enterprise Design Hub plays a central role in this phase by:
- Implementation (Build & Deliver) – supporting development teams
- While the primary ownership shifts to development teams, the Enterprise Design Hub still plays a supporting role by:
- Ensuring strategic alignment between teams and stakeholders.
- Providing guidance on design intent to development teams.
- Helping refine and iterate solutions based on user feedback and testing.
- Positioning: The Hub remains engaged to prevent misalignment and ensure that the original design vision is implemented correctly.
- While the primary ownership shifts to development teams, the Enterprise Design Hub still plays a supporting role by:
- Operation (Run) – feeding insights back into design
- While not directly involved in daily operations, the Enterprise Design Hub plays a continuous improvement role by:
- Gathering insights from real-world usage to refine future designs.
- Identifying emerging change demands based on operational feedback.
- Ensuring iterative improvements to the enterprise’s systems and services.
- Positioning: The Hub captures learning from operations and feeds them back into the Design phase for the next iteration.
- While not directly involved in daily operations, the Enterprise Design Hub plays a continuous improvement role by:
The Enterprise Design Hub is primarily positioned in the Design phase, with a supporting role in Implementation and a feedback loop in Operation.
How does the Enterprise Design Hub fit within SAFe, ITIL4, IT4IT frameworks?
| Framework | Integration in Development Process | Role of Enterprise Design Hub |
| SAFe | Prioritizes Epics & Capabilities in Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), supports PI Planning & Agile execution | Connects business strategy with Agile teams, ensuring enterprise-wide alignment |
| ITIL 4 | Contributes to Service Design, Change Enablement, and Continual Service Improvement | Ensures IT services align with business needs and are iteratively improved |
| IT4IT | Supports Plan, Build, Develop & Deploy, and Run & Consume value streams | Ensures structured IT-business alignment and optimized IT investments |
The Enterprise Design Hub plays a critical role in:
- Bridging the gap between customer and business needs and technology execution
- Enhancing cross-functional collaboration across teams
- Ensuring alignment between enterprise strategy, customer experience, and implementation
- Delivering measurable business value, business outcomes, not just outputs.
By integrating Enterprise Design Hub into these frameworks, enterprises can improve agility, optimize resources, and drive innovation while ensuring that all change initiatives align with enterprise objectives.
The Enterprise Design Hub acts as a central integration layer that ensures business demands are structured, prioritized, and effectively executed within SAFe, ITIL 4, IT4IT, and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM).
The Role of the Enterprise Design Hub Within COBIT
COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) is a governance and management framework that helps organizations ensure that IT and business processes align with strategic goals, risk management, and compliance requirements.
The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH) plays a key role in bridging business design, IT governance, and enterprise change management within COBIT’s structure.
COBIT is structured around Governance (EDM – Evaluate, Direct, Monitor) and Management (APO, BAI, DSS, MEA – Align, Plan, Organize, Build, Acquire, Implement, Deliver, Support, Monitor, and Evaluate).
| COBIT Domain | Enterprise Design Hub’s Role |
|---|---|
| EDM (Evaluate, Direct, Monitor) | Ensures that business and IT strategies align by capturing and structuring change demands. Provides strategic design oversight for decision-making. |
| APO (Align, Plan, Organize) | Supports Enterprise Architecture, Portfolio Management, and Risk Management by ensuring that change initiatives are designed holistically with cross-functional input. |
| BAI (Build, Acquire, Implement) | Facilitates solution design, feasibility analysis, and implementation oversight to ensure that new solutions align with business needs and compliance. |
| DSS (Deliver, Service, Support) | Ensures that services are designed for usability, performance, and security, minimizing operational inefficiencies. |
| MEA (Monitor, Evaluate, Assess) | Captures operational feedback and continuously improves business design strategies based on performance metrics. |
Integration of the Enterprise Design Hub Within COBIT’s Plan, Build, Run Model
COBIT’s Plan, Build, Run structure aligns closely with the Enterprise Design Hub’s role in enterprise change and service design:
- Plan (Align, Plan, Organize – APO):
- The Enterprise Design Hub ensures that business objectives, IT capabilities, and risk considerations are factored into enterprise change planning.
- Facilitates demand management and enterprise architecture alignment.
- Build (Build, Acquire, Implement – BAI):
- Supports the design, validation, and governance of new business solutions, IT services, and enterprise changes.
- Ensures that projects align with business goals and compliance requirements.
- Run (Deliver, Service, Support – DSS) & Improve (Monitor, Evaluate, Assess – MEA):
- Ensures continuous service improvement, feeding real-world insights back into design.
- Helps monitor change effectiveness and refine strategies for future initiatives.
Benefits of the Enterprise Design Hub in COBIT
- Bridges Business and IT: Ensures business needs are translated into IT and service management frameworks effectively.
- Improves Governance & Decision-Making: Provides structured insights for evaluating and prioritizing enterprise changes.
- Enhances Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Ensures that security, risk management, service design, and business architecture teams collaborate effectively.
- Ensures Compliance & Risk Mitigation: Supports regulatory alignment by integrating governance and risk considerations into early-stage solution design.
- Drives Continuous Improvement: Captures performance feedback to enhance design strategies and optimize IT investments.
The Enterprise Design Hub acts as a central enabler within COBIT, ensuring that business strategies, IT capabilities, and governance frameworks are aligned. It supports structured decision-making, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous improvement, ultimately leading to more effective enterprise change management and digital transformation.
The Role of the Enterprise Design Hub Within Enterprise Architecture Frameworks
Enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks, such as TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), provide structured methodologies for aligning business goals, IT strategy, and operational capabilities. The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH) plays a critical role in bridging enterprise design, strategy, architecture, and execution, ensuring that architectural changes and transformations are well-integrated and customer-centric.
How the Enterprise Design Hub Aligns with TOGAF’s Architecture Development Method (ADM)
TOGAF’s ADM (Architecture Development Method) consists of phases that guide organizations in planning, designing, and implementing enterprise architectures. The Enterprise Design Hub integrates within these phases as follows:
| Preliminary Phase | Establishes the Enterprise Design Hub as a collaborative mechanism for aligning business and IT stakeholders. |
| Phase A: Architecture Vision | Ensures business and user needs are well-defined through service design, business modeling, and co-creation workshops. |
| Phase B: Business Architecture | Helps create business capability models, value streams, and customer journeys, ensuring that enterprise transformation efforts align with user needs. |
| Phase C: Information Systems Architecture | Facilitates cross-disciplinary collaboration between business, IT, and data architects, ensuring that data and application designs support strategic goals. |
| Phase D: Technology Architecture | Ensures that technology decisions align with customer / user experience, business needs, and operational feasibility. |
| Phase E: Opportunities & Solutions | Supports the prioritization and validation of architectural initiatives, ensuring that changes create measurable business value (business outcomes). |
| Phase F: Migration Planning | Helps structure the enterprise change roadmap, ensuring smooth transition and stakeholder alignment. |
| Phase G: Implementation Governance | Ensures that changes align with strategic goals and business outcomes, reducing architectural drift and misalignment. |
| Phase H: Architecture Change Management | Supports a continuous improvement process where feedback from real-world implementations informs future architecture refinements. |
The Enterprise Design Hub ensures that architecture is not just IT-driven but business- and customer-centric, making TOGAF’s ADM more adaptable, agile, and aligned with organizational objectives.
How the Enterprise Design Hub Enhances Other EA Frameworks
Beyond TOGAF, the Enterprise Design Hub supports other enterprise architecture methodologies:
| Enterprise Architecture Framework | Enterprise Design Hub’s Role |
| Zachman Framework | Enhances collaboration across Zachman’s six perspectives (Why, What, How, Who, Where, When) by integrating business, design, and IT views. |
| ArchiMate (Modeling Framework) | Helps visualize enterprise architectures using EDGY-style visuals, making complex architectures more understandable for stakeholders. |
| FEAF (Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework) | Supports government and large-scale transformations by integrating customer experience, security, and compliance into EA planning. |
| DODAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework) | Ensures that defense and security architectures consider human-centered design principles, operational usability, and business objectives. |
Benefits of the Enterprise Design Hub in Enterprise Architecture
- Bridges Business and IT Architecture
- Ensures that enterprise architecture efforts align with real-world customer and business needs, customer journeys, and value streams.
- Enhances Stakeholder Collaboration
- Brings together business leaders, architects, designers, and technologists to co-create enterprise solutions.
- Improves Change Management & Governance
- Ensures that architecture changes are well-governed, strategic, and iterative, reducing project failure risks.
- Drives Agile & Human-Centered Architecture
- Introduces design thinking and iterative testing into enterprise architecture planning.
- Supports Continuous Feedback & Adaptability
- Ensures that architectural models evolve based on user feedback and operational insights.
The Enterprise Design Hub serves as a crucial enabler within enterprise architecture frameworks like TOGAF, ensuring that architectural initiatives are business-driven, customer-centric, and adaptable. It transforms traditionally rigid, IT-focused architecture planning into a dynamic, collaborative, and value-driven approach, making enterprise architectures more agile, relevant, and impactful.
Executive Summary
The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH) is a united joint force. A practice that integrates specialists from different disciplines to collaborate for creating better enterprises.
By joining forces in the Enterprise Design Hub, all disciplines collaborate effectively to deliver strategically aligned, customer-centered, and operationally feasible solutions. This integration eliminates the inefficiencies, misalignments, and risks of siloed work, while fostering innovation, accelerating delivery, and enhancing enterprise agility. In today’s complex and fast-changing business landscape, this joint-force approach is not just valuable, it’s essential for long-term success.
The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH) is a unified joint force – a practice that brings together specialists from different disciplines to collaborate in creating better enterprises.
Summary
The Enterprise Design Hub (EDH) plays a crucial role in holistic demand management, ensuring that Enterprise Design Facets- Identity, Experience, and Architecture are seamlessly integrated. This approach strongly emphasizes the connection between customer experience, strategic goals, and enterprise operations, which are foundational elements of enterprise architecture.
Key emphases on the Enterprise Design Hub’s role:
- Holistic demand management across enterprise design facets
- EDH does not treat business, customer, and operational needs as separate silos. Instead, it integrates them into a single, structured approach that ensures balance and synergy between:
- Enterprise Identity → Who we are and what we stand for.
- Enterprise Experience → How we engage with users, employees, and stakeholders.
- Enterprise Architecture → How our structures, processes, and technologies support value creation.
- EDH does not treat business, customer, and operational needs as separate silos. Instead, it integrates them into a single, structured approach that ensures balance and synergy between:
- Strong focus on customer experience, strategy, and operations
- Unlike traditional demand management, which often focuses solely on operational efficiency or IT alignment, EDH ensures that customer experience (CX), strategic intent, and enterprise architecture are treated as interconnected parts of business transformation.
- Human-centric, collaborative, and perspective-shifting approach
- EDH is inherently human-centric, ensuring that people – customers, employees, and stakeholders – remain at the core of enterprise transformation efforts.
- It encourages perspective-switching and reframing, ensuring that business, design, and technology experts do not work in silos but instead co-create solutions that balance business value, usability, and feasibility.
- Powered by Enterprise Design approach and EDGY language for structured enterprise thinking
- EDH is strongly supported by the EDGY, which provides a structured way to explore enterprise change from different perspectives:
- Enterprise Identity → Aligning purpose, vision, and differentiation.
- Enterprise Experience → Ensuring customer and employee-centric service and interaction models.
- Enterprise Architecture → Structuring business capabilities, processes, and technology to enable transformation.
- EDH is strongly supported by the EDGY, which provides a structured way to explore enterprise change from different perspectives:
Key differentiators of the Enterprise Design Hub:
- Not just IT or business-driven – EDH balances strategy, experience, and operations.
- Encourages organizations to rethink challenges through perspective-switching and reframing.
- Ensures every demand is assessed holistically—aligning identity, experience, and architecture.
- Facilitates structured collaboration, leveraging the EDGY framework to ensure clarity and cross-disciplinary integration.
Note! Gartner’s Fusion Teams and the Enterprise Design Hub share the same core principles: cross-functional collaboration, business-driven innovation, and agility. However, EDH extends the concept beyond individual teams and projects, creating an enterprise-wide collaboration framework that integrates business strategy, customer experience, and operational execution.
The Enterprise Design Hub is not just a demand management tool – it is a holistic, human-centric, and collaborative framework that ensures enterprises can manage change effectively by integrating customer experience, strategic goals, and operations into a single, structured approach.
The Enterprise Design Hub as a collaborative framework for aligning strategy, operations, and experience design. It emphasizes overcoming siloed work by uniting disciplines such as service design, business architecture, and technology experts.
The Hub fosters innovation, customer-centricity, and operational efficiency through shared tools, governance, and co-creation practices. By addressing enterprise change demands holistically, it enables businesses to manage transformations effectively, reduce redundancies, and deliver measurable value.
The Hub supports enterprises in tackling both current and future challenges through strategic alignment and multidisciplinary collaboration.
— Eero Hosiaisluoma