An element influences another by passing objects. An enterprise functions through the way its parts influence each other to produce an aggregated result no single part can produce alone. Understanding and improving the effectiveness and ease with which things flow through the enterprise and its elements helps it function efficiently and effectively.
A meaningful structural association between two elements. A link expresses a structural relationship between two elements in terms that explain or illustrate the relevance of that relationship to the enterprise.
What is being done or going on in our enterprise or its ecosystem. An activity represents something happening that is relevant to our enterprise. It can be something done by people individually or collectively, such as work, sports, or performances, for example. An activity can also be used to refer to something that simply happens, without specifying who is doing what. There are many events or processes unfolding within our enterprise that are relevant in themselves, without having to specify any actors involved. Activities capture the behaviours and movements of our enterprise. This enables us to model and map the dynamic nature of our enterprise and its organisation(s).
Employees and other people, together with assets, perform processes to enable capabilities. They are developed by its organisation and are required to make and deliver the products it offers.
An object we need and use to perform our capabilities. Enterprises need to develop, buy and manage a broad range of tangible or intangible assets (such as buildings, machines, raw materials, software applications, financial assets and know-how) to perform the capabilities needed to run their business. Assets as a concept are rooted in economics, strategic management and finance. Buying assets from suppliers connects the enterprise to its supply chain.
Our name and what it stands for. A brand is a symbolic representation that stands for our enterprise and its products. It is designed to communicate our identity, especially how we are different from others. It invokes a set of expectations in people about our enterprise and our products, particularly in relation to people s own needs and desires. People have intentionally designed brand experiences through ads, public communications and their direct experiences with our products. In addition, people s perceptions of our brand is influenced by many other factors any interaction they have with our products, processes and people; any public communication about our brand; any stories going around. Positive expectations about a brand pull people towards the products an enterprise offers, negative expectations push them away. That s why a brand is also a financial asset we invest in and obtain benefits from, by purposely creating awareness and improving or maintaining our reputation with our customers, partners and investors. Brand names are often protected as a registered trademark expressed in words, visual signs or other media representations.
What we are able to do by orchestrating people and assets. Enterprises strive to achieve their purpose by creating products that feature in people s experiences. To do so, they must design and realise their capabilities by orchestrating meaningful combinations of people and assets. Each capability produces well-defined outputs for internal or external business use and contributes directly or indirectly to product creation. Capabilities guide the modularisation of our enterprise by defining boundaries around what belongs together and what is distinct from other capabilities. By deriving the realising processes and assets such as the required organisation and applications a well-designed capability model leads to enterprises and organisations that are adaptive to change. Capabilities can be decomposed into sub-capabilities,usually levels 1 to 3, to create a hierarchy. Each capability must have a clearly assigned business owner to ensure its strategic development and the effective creation of intended outputs.
The means people use to engage and interact with us. Channels are the means of communication between people and the enterprise. They are where moments of interaction between people and the enterprise take place. They includes media, devices, communication systems, or physical environments used to facilitate interactions.
What is being communicated to people. Content refers to the information and data that is being communicated between and to people. Content always conveys messages and clues, both explicit and implicit, that people use to construct their perception of the enterprise's identity. It requires a medium to convey those underlying message and clues to its audiences, such as audiovisual media like text, images, video or accessible alternatives. In an enterprise, various forms of content are being produced and maintained, exchanged and promoted. For an enterprise, content is a valuable asset, vital for its success, both when running processes and when communicating within the enterprise and its ecosystem. On the inside, content represents the intellectual capital that supports all kinds of internal communication and business activities with context and insights. On the outside, it is everything the enterprise communicates in a structured or unstructured way as part of its continuous dialogue and processes involving external parties. The different channels and media reflect the various purposes content is produced for, as part of a communication process in the larger business context. How well an individual piece of content fulfils that purpose depends on its ability to tell a meaningful story and create meaning for the people being addressed. The increasing amount and importance of content requires enterprises to develop sophisticated content strategy, inventory and lifecycle management practices supported by information systems.
People interact with the enterprise via channels along their journeys to complete their tasks. Enterprises reach out to people through their brands, and make products to be offered to them.
perspective or point of view through the prism of which a concept is interpreted. Fundamental perspectives that relate to any enterprise.
Our enterprise establishes shared stories communicated through content to live up to and achieve given purposes. This identity is pursued by its organisation and evoked by the perception of its brands.
The events and activities people experience in their lives. A journey describes what a person does, feels, thinks, or otherwise experiences over time as they live a specific portion of their life, in particular when interacting with our enterprise. It is captured as a simplified sequential and chronological representation of activities and events people experience, and tasks they want to accomplish. Journeys are commonly documented using a storytelling format, describing a slice of life of an exemplary person or persona. Aspects that are typically captured are motivation, activities, tasks, channels of interaction, physical or digital environments, emotional states, first-hand observations and analytics data related to the journey.
A structure that is relevant to the enterprise. An object is a tangible or intangible multi-part structure such as a machine, building, application or data. Objects can have behaviour, such as performing automated activities, or support people that are doing activities. Objects consist of parts: objects that combine to form an object of a higher complexity and function. For the purpose of enterprise design it is important to understand that not every object can be engineered and predictably (re-)produced. Some objects like machines or software applications are complicated and deterministic and can be engineered to exact specifications. Other objects like plants or social structures are complex and unpredictable and may be influenced to a certain degree only, because much of their form and function emerges through their interactions with each other and with their environment.
A group of people working together. An organisation is a complex social structure. People form organisations to collaborate and co-create outcomes they cannot achieve alone without explicit agreements about membership, responsibilities and behavioural rules. Organisations are fractal: they are made up of nested structures (e.g. business unit-department-team) that have similar attributes on each level, such as purpose, goals, capabilities and hierarchy. Organisations are complex adaptive systems. This means they display attributes and behaviours that are designed and managed, as well as emergent attributes and behaviours that arise more or less unplanned out of people's complex behaviour. This emergence means organisations are never fully predictable and deterministic, making organisational design always a mix of design and influence. Organisational aspects that lend themselves best to be designed are organisational structures, roles, responsibilities, formal collaboration and decision-making processes. Aspects that are much harder or impossible to design are organisational culture, responsiveness to unexpected situations, adaptability, resilience and robustness.
A result or change that occurs within our enterprise or its ecosystem. Outcomes are the results of activities. These can be intended results such as goals, objectives or more generally the purpose an enterprise strives to achieve. Outcomes can also be unintended, when events unfold unexpectedly and results can only be seen after they appear. Outcomes can be direct outcomes of our activity, or an impact further down the chain of outcomes outside of our direct control or influence. As such, any outcome is a state change we can observe in our own organisation, with our customers or co-creators, in our markets or ecosystem. An outcome represents a state change in or around our enterprise, to be pursued in advance or measured after it can be observed. Such a change can be represented as a variable, such as yes or no, present or absent, good or bad, more or less, or numbers.
A set of related activities our enterprise carries out. Processes are the flows of activities needed for product creation (either directly or indirectly). They transform a set of inputs into a set of products or intermediary outputs and consist of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organisational or technical environment. A process is composed of activities connected by flow relationships. It can be strictly structured (the sequence/flows stay more or less the same in every process instance) or less structured (activities may be omitted, the sequence/flows can vary). Processes can run across several organisational units or can be performed within one organisational unit only. Well-designed processes lead to enterprises that operate efficiently and effectively across all required organisational units.
What we make, offer and deliver for people's benefit. Products are the result of our enterprise activity and encompass physical things manufactured and delivered, or services rendered to people. A product can be composed of any combination of physical goods and other tangible and intangible objects. It also includes the activities performed that lead to the production of outputs, and ultimately outcomes desired by the customer or user. They usually refer to something we make, market and deliver to commercial customers, but can also refer to something we make for employees, co-creators or other people. A product helps people complete a task, and thereby adds value to their lives when used in the right context. It can be physical, digital, and deliver practical, emotional or monetary value. Creating products requires product planning, management, design, engineering and provision. This typically results in a product strategy and portfolio composed of hierarchical product categories and products, which in turn are broken down into product components or features.
A reason why an enterprise exists and what people pursue and believe in.
The way we make sense of our enterprise and communicate to people what it does. An enterprise story is a narrative with our co-creators as protagonists, the enterprise as the setting, the ecosystem as context, and the co-creators' activities as actions. Stories help us make sense of complex ideas, concepts and situations and share that sense with other people. Stories about past or future events can illustrate shared values, assumptions and beliefs and what people can expect when interacting with an enterprise. People actively construct their own mental imagery and meaning when listening to stories. This causes the imagery and meanings to be more closely interwoven with people's internal narratives about the world. Creating a story is a co-creative process, bringing together a group of stakeholders and helping them tell the story from their own perspectives. Such a story should not just describe what happened or will happen but also convey – as much as possible – why that matters and what it means to the protagonists in the story.
What people want to achieve and get done. People have numerous tasks they want to accomplish every day: getting up in the morning, working together with a colleague, visiting a friend or relaxing in the evening. Those tasks are about the outcomes people want to achieve, not the means to get there. Tasks can be seen as a stable expression of people's needs, motivations and intent. Enterprises appear in people's experiences as brands offering products to help them accomplish their tasks as they go through their journeys. A coffee shop, a train company or a video streaming service all offer solutions to serve the tasks mentioned before. Achieving clarity on people's tasks, ideally backed by evidence through research, offers our enterprise a chance to focus on people's most important needs and motivations. This provides opportunities for products to make a difference by making valuable offerings to customers. It also helps with understanding the needs of employees, partners or other important people and can be used for the design of job roles or partnership offerings. This helps our enterprise improve the role it plays in people's lives.
The individuals co-creating the enterprise or using products. People are individuals with an identity, motivation and intent, skills and expertise, background, story and personality. They have the unique ability to have ambitions, find meaning and purpose in the world, and share those with other people. The roles people play in an enterprise (for example customer, partner or owner) relate to the activities they are expected to be involved in. A weakness of people is their unpredictability. A strength is their resilience, especially in unexpected situations. These human characteristics enable people to recover gracefully from disruptive situations, learn from mistakes and produce new enterprise value, where automated systems tend to fail and stay broken.