Some of us work in "the business." Some of us work in "tech." Some of us work in both...some of us in neither.
Regardless of your role, function, or worldview for that matter, after centuries of humans launching, growing, and maintaining commercial enterprises, we have enough observable and documented history to construct shared mental models of how businesses operate.
As a designer of "socio-technical" systems, I have to break down highly abstract and usually ill-defined concepts, balancing the human and technical elements to achieve some sort of equilibrium and structural cohesion among all of the moving pieces within (and sometimes external to) the system.
With the "alignment" of Information Technology and "the business" being a typical objective for clients who choose to engage with me, my approach to the concept of "Enterprise Architecture" is to break both technology services and business functions into "capabilities" that represent what the enterprise can do, and how well it can do it.
So my approach to Business Thinking is to first understand the "mechanics" of a typical commercial enterprise. How do the people, processes, and technologies work together to create customer, employee, and shareholder value?
And once broken down into atomic elements, how can these concepts be reconstructed in a way that is understandable not only to the people working on "the business" side or the "tech" side, but anyone involved in the creation of stakeholder value?
The specific audience that I have in mind for this is highly technical or creative individuals who struggle with understanding business concepts, or tying their efforts to specific, tangible outputs.
The business world can be mystifying to those of us who think outside of neuronormative constraints.
I Do Not Think it Means What You Think it Means
It's unfortunate, but we are currently living through a period where what Clayton Christensen refers to as "The Church of New Finance" is optimizing away the value of human creativity (if not our humanity entirely).
Being able to "speak the language" of the business matters, and understanding how your work leads to the emergence of value creation is essential - especially if you're not a normie.
When you know how everything ties together, you can better justify your existence the next time your organization catches the "efficiency" bug (you know what I'm talking about).
An Attempt at Language Ubiquity
Out of frustration with finding a baseline vocabulary for communicating complicated concepts, I went through a phase a few years ago where I found religion in Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
Specifically, the concept that Eric Evans describes as "Ubiquitous Language" is what really demonstrated the potential in adopting core principles of DDD in my own design and delivery methodologies.
I saw how a shared, standardized cross-domain vocabulary could be the solution to a number of problems I was experiencing in the enterprise at the time - problems I gave super clever names like the "Tower of Babel Problem" and "Everyone Singing from the Same Hymnbook Using Different Words."
Understanding and making sense of systems is hard enough. Trying to communicate abstract concepts to each other using different words, or using the same words in different ways, is a daunting task.
Business Thinking is one way in which I am trying to fill the vocabulary gap and find a way for everyone in an organization to stay on the same page. Language-wise, at least.
What's the Bizness, Yeah?
I said, I said give me the business that business could work through.
Tune-Yards “Bizness” (2011)
The structure of Business Thinking mirrors how I typically break down the domains within an organization when I engage in system design initiatives, in addition to cross-cutting concepts such as how businesses typically create value.
Again, my reasoning for this is to consolidate and focus thinking about "the business" in a manner that allows me to break down the capabilities, knowledge, and relationships of a given business domain, and reassemble them using comprehensive models and standardized language that can be understood across functions and thinking styles.
To that point, here is how I am currently structuring Business Thinking:
- Business Operations - The Bizness gotta keep business-in' y'all.
- Business Value Creation - How do businesses create and exchange value? I am continuously amazed by how many people can hold a job at an organization without being able to answer a basic question: How does the business make money?
- Enterprise Technology Management - This is my attempt at thinking about the "tech" side of the house from the perspective of "the business." (So meta, I know)
- Financial Management - Almost as exciting as HR. But not quite.
- Human Resources and Talent Management - I don't spend a lot of time on HR, just like you never want to really spend much time with HR.
- Marketing - Marketing is not manipulation, marketing is creating opportunities for buyers and sellers to exchange value in a meaningful, structured, and mutually beneficial way. I would say of all of the business domains, I am strongest in marketing. By happenstance only.
- Organizational Strategy - Although I maintain a core Strategic Thinking pillar in my knowledge ontology, Organizational Strategy focuses on different ways of applying strategy or strategic thinking within commercial enterprises.
- Product Management - I have kind of a weird obsession with the concept of Product Management, not necessarily managing products per se, more that I see there being so many parallels with how I view the optimal enterprise technology delivery strategy.
- Revenue Operations (RevOps) - Full disclosure: I loathe the concept of "RevOps." F**king hate it. Boo hoo, sales and marketing can't figure out how to get along, so someone figured they could just control everything by adding an abstraction layer and giving it a dumb name they could own. Regardless, it has become a thing, and because it's a thing I have to understand it, so I am tracking my knowledge of the thing.
- Risk and Compliance - I'm sure there could be something sexy about risk and compliance out there somewhere. Not sure where or what that might look like, but it has to exist...right?
- Sales and Business Development - Selling isn't the dark art you might think it is. At the heart of selling is understanding and fulfilling a customer need with a solution that meets or exceeds expectations, while negotiating an exchange of value that all parties in a transaction find fair and reasonable.
- Supply Chain and Logistics - Who would have thought logistics and trade management would now be keeping executives up at night? The once-sleepy subject of supply chains has now moved to the forefront of executive focus as we learn just how fragile and prone to geopolitical influence they are.
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