New Concepts
Innovation begins with designing a new concept or analyzing current concepts. If you as a business professional want to innovate, you can do concept design and concept improvement here on the Dragon1 platform. Generate and Map Your Ideas. Select the Best Ones. Model and Visualize Winning Concepts.
The core of Dragon1 is doing Concept Design. Any concept can be modeled, visualized, designed, analyzed, improved, monitored, and managed by yourself or in collaboration.
Implementing the missing Elements
Every organization, company, business, or enterprise has concepts applied to them. Only most organizations today do not have their concepts documented, have an overview, or have insights into them.
A great benefit of working with Dragon1 is that you can explore, identify, analyze, and redesign these concepts so that you can increase the maturity of the implementation of these concepts. Fill in the missing elements links, so your concepts finally start to work and deliver as they're supposed to do.
What is Concept Design?
Concept Design is about forming, modeling, and shaping a new idea, approach, or abstraction of an implementation.
Examples of concepts in this context are online insurance companies, eHealth, customer self-service, 360 client view, and on-demand book printing. More examples of designs of concepts can be found in the concept library.
Do you want to know more about what Concept Design means? Read about the Concept Design Definition here.
There are three important types of products or diagrams to create when doing concept design: the concept design sketch, situation sketch, and concept principles details diagram. Next, we will describe how Dragon1 can be used for that.
Concept Design Sketches
One of the first things you do as a 'concept designer' is to create a concept design sketch. You draw roughly the basic elements that together create the whole concept. And per element, you note the function it has in the concept and you note the function of the concept as a whole.
On the platform, you can draw like you are using a pencil, airbrush, or chalk, your shapes for your elements and put them in a shape library so you or others can reuse them.
You can create several versions of the same concepts and try out via scenario analysis what version of the concept best fits your stakeholder's requirements.
Concept Situation Sketch
The concept situation sketch is about defining a situation in which the concept must play its role. This important type of diagram brings dynamics into the concept.
Instead of doing a dry run of the concept in your mind, you can use Dragon1 to visualize and play the situation or scenario for you.
This supports you in improving the concept sketch and defining the elements that are needed to cope with the defined situation.
Three examples of situation sketches for the concept of Customer Self Service in a Restaurant would be: Situation 1) Everything is working and the products are in the self-service shop. Situation 2) The payment system is down, and people cannot order the products they can pick. Situation 3) The products are not available in the self-service shop, but they can be ordered.
The ability to create situation sketches, making reuse of the elements in your design sketch, saves you time and money repairing flaws in your design instead of later in a project.
Concept Principles Details Diagram
The next step of working with Concepts is you turn the concept sketch into a Principles Details Diagram. This means you bring more detail into the elements and state what technologies and products you use to implement the element and thus the concept.
Many engineers can make use of a concept principles details diagram to build, implement, or engineer the concept or parts of it.
You as a concept designer can keep an eye on the engineering using your principle details diagram as a blueprint.
Concept Portfolio Management
You not only can do Concept Design the way you want to do it. You can even manage portfolios of concepts.
After creating your first concept design probably many others will follow. All those concepts should be managed in a portfolio to have them optimally used.
Because of this you can scan, compare, link, and analyze concepts across architectures, solutions, and projects. So do some tracking and tracing what concepts and elements are used in what architecture, solution, or project.
Dragon1 helps you keep control of Concept Design in small and large teams.
Because there are many things you can do with concepts, we will provide you with some starting points for working with concepts so you will be efficient and effective in no time.
Analyzing Concepts
Even if you did not design a concept first there are concepts implemented in your organization. If you want to know how well (how mature) concepts are implemented and how you may improve the implementation, you could do an inventory and analysis of the concepts in your organization.
Just take for example the concept of a bike (bicycle). If all the elements of the bicycle are in place but the chain is missing, the whole bike won't function. Use Concept analysis to discover the missing key elements of concepts in your organization.
Dragon1 provides you with templates and reference models for what concepts generally speaking are or could be available in your organization and there are some example concept designs present that help you make a start inventorying and analyzing your concepts.
Implementing and Monitoring Concepts
Dragon1 goes further than only modeling, visualization, and design of concepts. It also supports you in implementing concepts.
This is, for instance, done by the possibility to create a technical detailed design of your principles diagram and also because you can design a roadmap to implement the concept step by step.
Suppose you found some key elements of a concept missing, you create a technical design stating what components and technical products you will be using to implement the missing key element.
Dragon1 provides you with a management dashboard so you can monitor concepts like you can monitor business processes in your organization.
Suppose you did standardize on a certain application platform or shorten the throughput of business activities. In that case, you may want to monitor that a new non-standard application platform enters the organization or that new business activities are taking longer than necessary to execute.
You can create a dashboard consisting of widgets, having every widget linked to an element of the concept. In this way, you can keep track of everything you want to know.
Design Principles and Design Patterns
Design Principles and Design Patterns are things closely related to concepts. Principles are about the way concepts work and produce results. Patterns are specialized concepts. Both principles and patterns can be dealt with in the way concept design can be done.
If you want to create a library of reusable Architecture Principles or a library of reusable Anti Patterns for your solutions and projects, Dragon1 is the collaboration platform for you.
Are you interested in doing Concept Design Services?
The page how to design the concept A Single Source of Truth is also interesting to read.
The presented theory on Concept Design originates from Mark Paauwe, Dragon1 Fundamentals, about Visual Enterprise Architecture (ISBN 978-94-90873-00-4).