Modelling Your Business For Executives
The idea of a Digital Twin is very prevalent in order to provide a digital representation of your organisation. Benefits are:
- Give management insight into operations
- Trace strategy into processes
- Examine the impact of change scenarios
- Communicate processes and systems to staff
- Ensure value of application investments
- Manage technologies most effectively – for cost and benefit
The concept and usage of Digital Twins varies somewhat, and is a concept cited in different disciplines. The context of this article is Business Modelling and business process improvement.
The following progression of models types is one way of ensuring all the connections are there from strategy to process to functional usage and I have found them to be very effective and productive when used together on as as-needed basis.
The Customer End: Personas
Let’s take a very brief look at the world of User Experience (UX) Design.
Customer and User Personas
UX Design has contributed a lot to our modern world. Web developers are able to create pages that appeal to the personas and Customer Service hopefully comes to recognise the personas and how to deal with them.
These examples of user personas are from justinmind.com. Take a look at the linked page after reading this article. User personas tell you who you THINK you are dealing with. Real proof has to come from data mining, which means you need to COLLECT the relevant information to get the insights.
image sources: www.justinmind.com
The Customer End: Customer Journey Mapping
Customer and User Journeys consider a person’s experience over time – ie. their journey as far as their interaction with your product or service. Both of these maps portray basic stages a customer goes through and the way they feel at points in time.
Customer Personas and Customer Journey Maps are genuinely helpful, but there is still something missing as we try to connect them with what staff do!
Customer Service Blueprint
There’s an important connection between Customer Journeys and internal processes. The Customer Service Blueprint is a great way to correlate these.
A Customer Service Blueprint still considers aspects of the Customer Journey, but also notes where that journey has ‘touch points’ on your organisation and processes.
"What is a service blueprint? Service Blueprints focus on how an organization supports the customer journey, keeping customers, staff, and other key players at the forefront. Blueprints depict the business’s processes and operations that occur within the front-stage (customer facing), backstage (internal) and behind-the-scenes! Ultimately, a service blueprint is a business process mapping tool. The main differentiator between service blueprints and other mapping tools? Instead of “swimming lanes” used in traditional workflow diagrams to depict different task owners, we approach service blueprints from a human-centered lens."
quote and image source: https://outwitly.com/blog/customer-journey-maps-vs-service-blueprints/
Functional Decomposition
Let us go to the bottom level for a moment, to the coalface, or is it the top?
Functions!
Functions are something every business understands. Functions are normally arrived at by ‘functional decomposition’ of an organisation into departments and teams. Functional Decomposition works at corporate level, right down to coalface operations.
What is not clear from functional decomposition is how value is passed to the next department or person and what came the function being examined that provides the function with something of value to add to! non the less, I have seen a very good management consultancy in Sydney use functional decomposition workshops to identify what goes on in a department, and then allocate problems and opportunities to these areas before I then modelled the processes inside the functional area.
Just to be straight about this: functional area derived top-down in an organisation or department will eventually have processes that can be mapped, but equally a function may be a very granular activity that is effectively referenced from a business process.
source: www.baeldung.com
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Steve Barnes
The Process Expert
The Process Expert helps Tasmanian and Australian mainland organisations with business transformation, focusing on Customer Service Excellence & Operational Efficiency. I work with senior management and operational staff to identify and target problems with a strategic, framework oriented approach that provides ongoing value to my customers.
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