Let’s talk about business design, operational business modelling and let’s talk about what is traditionally called enterprise architecture – what the heck are all these terms and why do they count?

1992 was nearly 30 years ago can you believe that – I joined a Swiss based insurance business that had multiple locations across the UK .. many of the business processes were paper based with very few systems beyond general insurance processing and finance and payroll. And even less key suppliers beyond stationary and probably travel expenses.

Fast forward to 2020 the business model for all organisations not just the one I worked for back in 1992 has fundamentally changed. There isn’t a business process that doesn’t have a system attached to it, there are very few processes that are solely handled by one business team or solely by the organisation itself. Many aspects of the business model have been outsourced and maybe offshored and automation is key. Plus there have been huge changes in customer experience with paper forms being posted and processed replaced by online self service, call centres and now chat bots

All these changes have created complex business models amidst a myriad of business articles that talk about simplify your business. These business models have evolved and emerged more often than not through projects and programmes. Many have delivered change in a silo and lead to parts of the business model being out of sync and new bottlenecks created in aspects of the businesses model that had not been considered as part of the project scope.

The end result leads to anything but a simplified business in fact it’s lead to a more complex model – with maybe hundreds of applications (depending on how you categorise an application) – a number of core supplier contracts negotiated at different stages – and teams of people trying to adopt new “out of the box” cloud based applications dealing with the many data security issues / risks that this can create.

So back to the question what does a business designer, business modeller and a traditional EA live to do, what are they motivated by, what value do they bring .. well in my experience a good EA, business designer are driven to “join up the dots”, “identify ALL aspects of change to deliver on the opportunity” and “do recognise that it’s what goes on between the silos that often need to change the most” … they look at team accountabilities, how they address business need, how they work together with suppliers, partners and other teams and what they need operationally, from a data perspective and a system perspective to change the results for the business.

The CEO should turn to the design practise to understand the end to end model the pain points and the areas of customer interaction that are key to driving success for their business

The CFO should turn to the design practise to better understand the aspects of business process that drive fixed and variable costs and how to model the business financially and identify financial changes

The COO should turn to the design practise to see all aspects of the operational landscape on a single page, the suppliers, the internal teams, the core systems and the areas of change that the change portfolio is impacting and how this all hangs together.

The HR director should turn to the business design team to help shape the strategic workforce plan – the core capabilities – the need to develop collaborative cultures and to help clarify how the organisation needs to work together through the roles it establishes to get things done

The CIO should turn to the design team to support it it delivering solutions that the business needs to adopt and exploit to drive as much benefit from the investments that businesses make in the IT estate (we are only scratching the surface of the IT benefits at “go live”)

So Have you got a businesss design team? Are you looking at the end to end business model? Who is joining the dots in your business? Does change happen beyond “go live” of a systems project in your business? Do you understand how your suppliers and partners are critical to your business success?

What are your thoughts?