Modelling the Enterprise

Whenever we examine an enterprise with a view to addressing issues, seeking efficiencies or assessing the impact of change, we need a model of the business that is simple enough for us to understand, but accurate enough to be useful.

I’ve mentioned previously that I have a background in strategy consulting – transformation in particular. On many occasions, preparing a client business case would depend on mapping out the current reality and the proposed new way of doing things. Understanding the current state – or “As-Is” model would be vital as a baseline for the projected cost savings and added-value delivered to the customer in the future-state model known as the “To-Be”.

But where to start? For a functional viewpoint, Org Charts tell us who does what, where the reporting lines are and – in theory – who has what power in the organisation. In theory… We’ll come back to this in another post. And what about the process side of things?

You’ll have heard of time and motion studies. F.W. Taylor is linked to the ‘time’ component of these studies, but it is another ‘guru’, Frank Gilbreth, the father of ‘motion studies’ whose work interests us here. Almost a century ago now, he presented his ideas on how to describe processes. Gilbreth’s process chart – a device for visualizing a process as a means of improving it – was concerned with finding ‘the one best way to do work’:

 Notably, Gilbreth specified:

“Process-chart notes and information should be collected and set down in sketch form by a highly intelligent man… who need not necessarily have been previously familiar with the actual details of the process…To overcome the obstacles due to habit, worship of tradition and prejudice, the more intelligence shown by the process-chart recorder, the sooner the hearty cooperation of all concerned would be secured.”

So not only had the concept of process modelling been born, but so, too, it would seem, had the external expert with no prior knowledge of what he (almost certainly in those days) was looking at.

This poses an interesting question. Is it true that people outside your business should be the ones to model your future?

I believe there are some elements of truth in that supposition, but there is also something fundamentally flawed. Yes, external, impartial partners can see things about your business that have become so ingrained as to be invisible, and yes, they can cut through the politics of decision making. But at Innovation Arts we do not believe that the intelligence of those partners is the critical factor. Rather, it is harnessing the intelligence, knowledge, expertise and energy that already exist in your organisation, to create meaningful, insightful models of the current and future states, which go well beyond Organograms and process maps.