Talk
Bridging EA and BA with lean startup and innovation techniques at Euroconsumers
Friday, June 10
10:30 – 11:15
Lecture Room
Filip Hendrickx
Business consultant & Founder, altershape
How do you transform a consumer rights organisation that is completely optimized around a business model it has been continuously and successfully improving for over 50 years? How do you keep it relevant in a world where information is freely available and many of its services can be quickly recreated by online niche specialists? How do you guide its transformation despite the lack of a clear mission statement from management, that has plenty ideas but is equally searching for a new success formula, somewhat impeded by the still successful old model?
Recognising there is no single to be or even a set of possible scenarios to work towards, seems to be a first step to success. Through a shared enterprise design model, propagated from within PMO and Enterprise Architecture, we trigger conversations with and between business and IT. In these conversations, we introduce two layers on top of the established enterprise operations: a consumer engagement layer making us look at our services from a consumer point of view, and a consumer owned layer demonstrating how the consumer is master of his own behaviour, deciding if and when he will interact with us. This helps in identifying challenges and opportunities in the way we offer our services to our consumers, both from business and technical viewpoint, explicitly building upon the still relevant but insufficient existing enterprise operations.
Detailed models (like a service model, a touch point and interaction model and a consumer information model) and supporting facilitation techniques (like benefit maps, idea blueprints and consumer validation techniques) are used to help concretise abstract concepts like customer experience or personalisation, into tangible service and journey improvements that can be deployed, tested and fine tuned. Existing validation capabilities as well as newly created ones support this iterative approach. The focus is not on specifying and implementing a fixed to be business model or architecture, but rather on facilitating the continuous conversation on and discovery of new opportunities at different levels, from generic business models to highly specific service improvements. This way, the models help translating strategic intentions into action, forcing a conscious selection of the parts of the consumer life cycle where we want to appear.
Our work is by no means finished, and it never will be. It’s a never-ending story in which we are slowly moving into constant renovation mode. But the conversations are slowly nudging business and IT people from different roles towards co-discovering the future of the organisation. Both successes and struggles will be shared during this presentation.