In my previous article I discussed what an operating model was and what value it brings. I also said that I would go through approaches to building your operating model.
First lets go back and state what an operating model is:
Generalised manufacturing
Enterprise Financials
I really like the operating model canvas by Andrew Campbell, Michael Gutierrez and Mark Lancelott. They have an excellent website at https://operatingmodelcanvas.com/. The following is the basic template:
There is an associated website ashridgeonoperatingmodels.com which has lots of useful information.
Another good resource is the book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by David Robertson, Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill, out of MIT Sloan, which despite its name is about execution rather than strategy.
Defining the design and operating principles will be a key governance and guidance task. It will be complicated by the need to gain agreement from quite a few stakeholders. This leads on to understanding that defining or changing your operating model is as much about communication and buy-in as anything else, as the people change can be significant.
The organisational model is likely to be fairly specific to your organisation however skills profiles for various job families are available for areas such as IT, HR, Finance etc.
Business architecture courses can be a good way to get in to the understanding of how to start building value chains and operating model, but does not provide the whole story by any means. There are not that many business architecture courses; Enterprise Architects run one as well as a number of other companies.
A number of the large consulting organisations, e.g. McKinsey, Strategy& (ex Booz), Boston Consulting (BCG), etc., have good articles on operating models but less on the actual implementation. This is probably because they want to do this for you! But you can glean good direction. My caution is that they can be very high level and not entirely practical – good for the board but not so good for the execution team.
Are there any operating models bases I can just use?
You may be wondering if there is a way you can shortcut some of this work by using pre-existing models and there is, but you have to be sure that the model you are taking on does not impact your competitive advantage. Generally within IT this is not an issue unless you are selling IT products or services directly. Below is a list of models that you could use, some of which you may well be already familiar with.
Conclusion
I have provided a view of the steps needed to create a basic operating model, some tools and techniques to help you along the way and finally a couple of shortcuts (pre-done operating models) to give you an idea of what they should come out like or, to adapt for you own needs.
Your operating model will not be exactly the same as someone else’s as, while there will be some commonality (especially in IT), the combination of organisational culture, organisational maturity, size and the focus of outcomes will alter each end result.
My final word is: don’t try this yourselves if you have not had any experience. It takes existing knowledge and a consulting mindset to make this successful. This is often not a skill that IT teams have, especially in smaller organisations that do not have dedicated strategy and enterprise architecture staff. It is also not a typical project management role; your standard project manager will flounder, direct focus to the wrong areas or need too much detail. So again get some professional help if you are looking at this for the first time.
- An operating model describes how the business is run. It describes how the business deliver value and enacts its strategy.
- Processes
- Organisational structure
- Roles
- Some technology
- Define your operating model design principles
- Define your operating model operating principles
- Understand and document the value chain(s)
- Understand and define the capabilities required to deliver the value chains including supporting capabilities
- Understand and define the processes that make up the capabilities
- Organisation and roles and skills of the people
- Organise the resources and location to support the people doing the work
- Identify the information and systems to support the capabilities and processes
- Define the management systems supporting the planning and performance tracking of the work




- ITIL – the well-known service framework model about identifying, running and maintaining services. To my mind it is less on the build and more about the run, but the concepts have applicability outside of IT
- COBIT – Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology
- eTOM – Telco based operating model that can be adapted for IT
- IT4IT – OpenGroup IT operating model
- BIAN – Banking Industry Architecture Network
- IAA – Insurance Application Architecture (IBM)
- IFW – Information Framework (banking framework from IBM) – this has been adapted to a number of industries and has IT specific sections
