Design meets military defense strategy.

In partnership with a special operations organization, our team’s objective was to strategically manage, organize, and deploy a sophisticated 2.0 version of a data lake structure for both internal and external military operations.

Leveraging human-centered design methodologies, the team worked collaboratively with our client to deliver user-driven insights, future-focused technology strategies, and a usable prototype that laid the foundation for the development of this pivotal data lake.

Client

Department of Defense

Duration

3 months

The Design team

2 interaction designers

1 business designer

1 visual strategist

Deliverables

Competitive analysis, user research report, personas, business strategy, visual data-lake artifact, illustrative future-state comic

Approach & process.

Our client faced challenges in providing accurate and timely data to team members, impacting their ability to generate insightful reports integral to organizational success. Despite prior attempts at implementing a single source of truth data lake, the issues persisted. Accenture Federal was brought in to reevaluate the system and address the fundamental data challenges.

Our cross-disciplinary team, consisting of developers, data scientists, and design strategists, adopted a balanced approach, intertwining research and implementation efforts. We successfully organized and facilitated multiple client-facing workshops and stakeholder interviews, resulting in actionable insights.

As part of the design strategy team, I led all visual communication work, ensuring that our approach and proposed strategies were clearly communicated to the client.

Research.

Engaging in 20+ stakeholder interviews, three client-facing working sessions, and a two-day workshop, we synthesized actionable insights that informed our deliverables and addressed the needs of our client. I led workshop facilitation; production of all visual communications; and synthesis efforts, capturing activities digitally, and synthesizing insights within three days to produce future state artifacts presented to the client and key stakeholders. These artifacts have become instrumental in upselling work and integrating the firm’s rapid prototyping and data science crafts into other projects.

Deliverables & artifacts.

Directing the visual language of the final prototype, I collaborated with interaction designers and developers to create a tool that serves as both a data governance and data visualization tool. The result was a modern process for reviewing datasets, reducing the number of legacy systems and streamlining the user experience for data managers and stewards.

The team also delivered a comprehensive visual artifact of how this product will come to life. This artifact addressed how data concerns, business viability, and user needs might come together in the future data lake solution. Leading the artifact creation, I worked closely with data scientists and development teams to understand their thinking and accurately represent the future state in an evergreen artifact.

Throughout the project, we mentored an undergraduate intern. She shadowed much of our work, including workshops and synthesis efforts. From this, she created a comic book that illustrated the future state data lake solution. All illustrations were unique and created by our intern; our client used this book as a supporting material for selling this work to fellow members of the Department of Defense.

Impact.

Our design strategy paved the way for a transformative solution that not only addressed immediate challenges but positioned the organization for future success in managing, organizing, and deploying data effectively.

Our team's findings were effectively communicated through both print and digital channels, largely contributing to winning an RFP (request for proposal) valued at $150M+ for future work between Accenture Federal and the Department of Defense.Our objective.

Reflections.

This was one of the more impactful projects I have been part of to date. The scale of the client ask, strength in team dynamic, and intensity of project timeline all contributed to our team’s success. It was one of the largest client engagements and team collaborations at Accenture Federal, and with this, we set the standard for collaborative best-practices for teams to come. It was a crash course in cross-disciplinary working styles and I took learnings from this into future large-scale strategy engagements.