A new solution is needed for companies to operate successfully in a rapidly accelerating world.

Starting with the industrial revolution and accelerating dramatically with the digital revolution, the pace of technological innovation has enabled increasingly sophisticated, powerful, and expansive business models.​  Almost every sector of the economy is evolving incredibly quickly resulting in new industry models, frequent changes in the ranks of industry leaders, and even entirely new industries emerging on a rapid basis.  Every incumbent player is challenged with finding ways to evolve more quickly or risk quickly becoming obsolete. 

At the same time, even as they have become far more powerful, the sheer scope and pace of new technologies have made them increasingly harder to incorporate, particularly for incumbents who cannot afford to lose focus on delivering the business.​  And, while technological innovation is driving complexity, a host of other external factors such as pandemics, geopolitics and rapidly evolving consumer preferences are driving even more change.​  All of these forces have combined to push companies to the breaking point as even the most successful and fastest adapters have had to increase internal complexity in order to stay ahead of the curve at the same time increasing the risk of fragmentation and inefficiency.​ 

As businesses have become more complex to scale and compete, so have their operating models to deal with the greatly increased complexity.  The traditional way of addressing myriad new processes and more extensive organizations has often been to create organizational units that assigned smaller spans of control.​  The downside of this is that few people have a comprehensive view of how the business works in terms of the end-to-end value chain and even their own role in it.  Changes made in individual spans of control are often done with minimal understanding of the broader impact.  In addition, barriers are often built between spans unknowingly resulting in debilitating fragmentation.  Since few have a comprehensive view of how the business operates, the ability to significantly evolve the model in aggregate is often lost, making the business susceptible to disruptors with new models. 

There needs to be an asset - a living model - at the center of the business that encapsulates and guides how it is intended to operate and creates a cohesive framework that enables the flexibility to evolve without breaking the cohesion needed to deliver the business.

What is a DOMA based digital Operating Model - the key to organizational resilience.

Operating Models are defined by three interlinked dimensions:  Process (what activity is performed), Roles (who performs the activity), and Metrics (how the performance of an activity is measured).  The first Operating Models were Artisanal in nature with a few simple activity steps completed by one person who largely only measured final completion of the product or service.  While simple to manage, the artisanal model was not repeatable in a consistent manner and certainly not easily scalable or replicable.  While Artisanal Operating Models may have fit the needs of the time early in mankind’s history, their limitations have become more apparent over time as the world technology advanced, the world became more complex and aspirations expanded.

Modern approaches to dealing with complexity and change tend to make a tradeoff between two extremes of structure versus agility.  On the one hand, businesses can attempt to “hard code” in every element of the value chain.  While this “assembly line” approach may have been very beneficial in the early stages of industrialization, the complexity of current businesses and the accelerating pace of change has increasingly exposed this approach as being far too rigid. To gain greater agility, some businesses have moved to the other extreme by loosening organizational integration elements which can limit their ability to achieve seamless flow affect change in an integrated manner.  The accelerating pace of change in the world exposes both these approaches as too limiting.  A new approach is called for that simultaneously delivers BOTH structure and agility.     

A DOMA (Digital Operating Model Atom) Based approach mimics nature in that it creates integration between the processes, roles, and metrics of an organization at an “atomic level”.  In turn, the linkages between each DOMA is explicitly defined.  This approach mimics the type of atomic level integration that occurs in nature with these atoms then being able to form complex systems which are both structured and adaptable to enable business optimization and resilience.  Since DOMA Based operating models are integrated across multiple dimensions at an atomic level they have the ability to scale, flex and adapt without losing cohesion. And, in the instances where radical reinvention of the value chain is required, the rewiring requirements across the all the elements of the business are easily understood upfront and straightforward.  DOMA Based operating models achieve higher levels of performance and adaptability with complete visibility to every employee.  ​The implications for scaling, adapting, and evolving are profound.

How to create a DOMA based digital Operating Model.

The first step is to set the strategic context against which the operating model must deliver with a mutually agreed upon definition upfront of what success looks like. The full context includes items such as the Vision and Mission, Products and Markets, Goals and Strategies.​ Once the Operating Model is in place, it will likely improve capabilities such that it will relieve many constraints to growth providing opportunity to revisit the strategic context.

The second step is to gain agreement at a high level on the operational process flow to act as a beginning skeleton for the Operating Model development process.  To do this, the leaders and stakeholders of the company need to agree on the end to end high level process flow for the main business value chain from opportunity to product delivery. This needs to be articulated by the business in its own words.  Since a major purpose of an Operating Model is to have a common platform for the entire company, creating a common agreed upon set of terms and definitions is critical.

You can’t build out the entire Operating Model all at one so the third step involves deciding which focus areas to start on and the fourth step entails creating the model content for that area.  Typically, the initial focus areas will represent significant pain points and/or opportunities for the business.  Starting with the initial focus areas, the ideal process pathways are defined within the business piece by piece.​  The responsibilities and metrics for each process step are also assigned.  Pathways should be defined only to the level of detail that delivers the desired outcome, e.g., instruction level is not required in every case.​  

The fifth and sixth steps entail weaving the content as it develops into a model structure in order to ensure cohesiveness.  The DOMA model is created as each three-dimensional node is defined, as are the linkages between nodes.  ​Each DOMA, can have other information tagged to define the nature of the DOMA valuable for future analyses, e.g., amenable to AI. The DOMA based Operating Model is captured in an Operating Model Library which is a core OM Asset of the business.​  It stores all the relevant parts of the business on a multi-dimensional basis (processes, responsibilities and metrics) and integrates the elements with all interlinkages made explicit.  It is a tangible business asset against which performance can be visualized and managed in ways understandable by all employees.