Public Business Architecture Course July 2011

There has been a lot of requests for delivery of the "Business Architecture An Approach for Effective Business Design" over the last few weeks.

In recent times this unique business focused course has only be held in house within client organisations but many individuals from a variety of companies have requested places; so as a consequence Dever Solutions Limited is scheduling a Public Course Delivery for the 11th- 13th of July at New Place, Shirrel Heath near Southampton.

We can take up to 10 delegates on this course.

http://www.devere.co.uk/our-locations/new-place.html

Please note that Devere venues is a trading name of DeVere Group and is a completely different legal entity to Dever Solutions Limited the business architect training company. It is a pure coincidence that the venue chosen and training company delivering the event have similar names.

The Unspoken Business Model - Phantom Forces

I have been working with developing some business models for clients recently and I came to the conclusion that often there is a deep seated business model that is actually not voiced or declared and in some cases not even understood within the organisation.

Behind the scenes is an unknown or phantom business model that is simply there by default through competitive pressures, external environment and by business Darwinism.

Take insurance as an example most insurers tell us and believe that customer service is a prime driver to their business and particularly in claims. In reality though the market driver is that they make their money from those that do not claim and claims actually are rare in terms of customer contact, well that is how insurance works - is it not.

So bad claims service is not seen by many of the customer base by default and in reality if you loose customers who claim by giving poor service does it matter because does the business really want these people who claimed anyway - people who claim don't make money for insurers do they?

People buy on price and the promise of a good claims service is difficult to justify and sell when people are comparing insurance premiums so the driver is reduced costs not the higher costs of a quality claims service.

Insurance is a commodity based business where you make money by driving down cost and reducing claims so naturally "doing claims" well as an offering doesn't really get supported by the unspoken business model even though corporate mantra say "We pride ourselves on claims".

So, does the unspoken or natural selection based business model actually overwrite the explicit business model in the longer term? It is almost like defying gravity - an unresisting force.

Is there an unspoken business model behind every declared business model and how many organisations are actually planning strategically against those natural pressures with all the consequences of "rowing against the tide" ?

Customer Service Mass Production

In the early part of the 20th century Henry Ford said "You can have a model T in any colour as long as it is black!"

The days of building large volumes of mass produced items in batch have almost disappeared with the introduction of lean thinking. Manufacturing might have reached this state of mass individualisation but has customer service?

Not a week goes by without encountering yet another example of crass service design that end up making this grumpy business architect even more grumpy.

We have to realise that we can't codify everything and sometimes humans have to apply common sense and yet this seems to rarely happen, particularly when activity gets outsourced and off-shored.

Lift and ship to a place that is "cheap"; standardise activity to minimise the need for high levels of 1st language communication skills and pay staff a fraction of what you did before - "Kerching" all in the name of reduced costs and competition.

The result is often a fed up customer, threatened loyalty and renewals but in a culture of management delusion where no-one knows that the service they offer end to end from an individual customers perspective was dreadful; as introspective KPIs continue to "fog" the management that all is well.

Does all this facilitate growth, customer retention or even customer advocacy? ehh... No!

Simple problem really - think and apply common sense and build exception routines into your processes and staff accordingly to flex the requirement for a bit of sensible response.

Mass produced customer service done on the cheap in mass call centres using foreign cheap labour to drive down costs; does this sound a bit like a car assembly plant sixty years or seventy ago!

Maybe in years to come we will see a similar revolution in customer service that can deliver service excellence pulled as customers demand it, individualised and intelligent, rather than the frequently bland, frustrating and cost reduced excuses that we regularly put up with today.

Then we will look back on the noughties and say: "well you could have customer service then as much as you liked, as long as you obeyed the BPM work-flows!"

Will the early 21st century be quoted in future business studies texts as the dark days of customer service before the enlightenment of lean mass individualised service; well we shall see if things improve - there is certainly lots of scope for that in my view.

I will resist the wish to share yet another fiasco I experienced with an insurance company that sparked this post but you really will think I am being grumpy if I did that, so I will spare you!

Well maybe for now- I reserve the right to come back and reveal all!

Applying Business Architecture to Micro Businesses

This week we delivered a morning unit of business design in support of a local FE college offering training for potential entrepreneurs referred from Job-centre plus .

An eclectic mix of nine delegates assembled to receive training on a variety of topics on starting a small business.

I delivered a session on business models using the Osterwalder Business Model Canvas and the group saw the relevance of this type of holistic analysis - not that it was presented as such!

I often wonder about applying business architecture methods and techniques to smaller businesses than we normally get involved with and this event shows that if you carefully choose the material and make it relevant a lot of value can be transfered.

The key benefit seemed to be the recognition by delegates that customer segmentation and client need analysis needed to be linked to specifically aligned propositions with a supporting framework behind them to make it all work.

The approach to all this was a deliberate attempt to remove corporate jargon and not to present method for method sake - the feedback gained from the session was encouraging.

So, business architecture, even though the subject title was deliberately not mentioned at all during the session, is valuable for for big and small businesses a like. You just have to position it in an appropriate manner.

Measures determine behaviours and not always as intended!

Continuing on the theme of measurement several people have mentioned how they do things differently according to the way things are measured.

The "game playing" i.e. the behaviours developing to meet the measures can result in the measurement being totally pointless.

An example is an organisation that needs to collate attendance data and berates its staff for not doing this by close of play that day when in reality the following morning isn't really an issue; so what happens the staff fill the attendance in advance just in case they forget to fill it in especially when they get tired towards the end of the day, so they don't get "told off" thus challenging the actual quality of the data.

The measurement goal seems to be achieved but - oh dear - the data is probably no good now as attendance is always positively flagged by default and if someone forgets to overwrite the present mark with the correct data then it is artificially presented.

A bit of patience, communication and empathy for working practices would have resulted in better data quality and timeliness to boot. A bit of process evaluation might have helped to actually design more appropriate measures; but that requires a bit of structural thinking!

Changing the measure to allow 48 hours for the data to be entered would have been a compromise and resulted in less game playing and then timely data of a good quality would have been the result.

The person receiving the stats probably things his/her management has been excellent - tick- " am I not wonderful" - but in reality statistics blind the truth - the behaviours have now bucked the system because the consequence of the measures haven't been thought through correctly!