Contact

Operating Model

Does your organisation have trouble understanding how your strategy is linked to everyday activities? And how everyday activities bring value to customers? If so, then an Operating Model can help!

What is an Operating Model

An Operating Model is the bridge between strategy and operational capabilities. It links the strategy to day-to-day operations and provides the framework that enables people to work towards achieving the strategy and vision of an organisation.

An operating model provides a clear guide for staff to follow and enables people to understand how all the different systems in their organisation fit together.

A common challenge Operating Models face is understanding how the different technical standards within an organisation fit together and allowing different experts to talk to each other.

The Business Technology Standard overcomes this common problem by providing a holistic approach that recognises the value of different specialist standards and allows people trained in them to understand each other and work together.

The Business Technology Standard Operating Model

The Business Technology Standard Operating Model defines how business value can be created with technology management. The Operating Model has five value adding disciplines: demand, development and services, complemented with the two overarching disciplines: strategy and
governance, and sourcing and optimisation (see the picture below).

Specifically, it consists of planning, building and running the value streams with common strategy, governance, sourcing and optimisation.

Value streams have end-to-end objectives to create business value via the Operating Model. Each value stream has a business owner, mission statement, financial plan and portfolio visibility to Demand, Development and Service disciplines as below:

  • Demand captured in development initiatives
  • Development implementing products, solutions and services based on development requests
  • Services keeping business running by managing service releases and operations.

How can it help my organisation?

The purpose of an Operating Model is to provide structure for individuals within an organisation to understand and implement the business strategy. A well-articulated Operating Model creates a common language and approach to planning, building and running the business.

The challenge that most organisations have is that they either do not have a clear Operating Model or that their operating model tries to redesign existing standards instead of recognising them and making them work together.

The Business Technology Standard can help with this.

The Standard is an open-source management framework to plan, build and run information technology in today’s technology driven world. It has been constantly developed and renewed during the past ten years with global companies and public organisations. The Business Technology Standard provides a clear and unified management model overlaying different technology management areas. It utilises specific management models such as SAFe and DevOps for digital development and ITIL and IT4IT for service management in new and innovative ways.

What this means is that the business has a unifying framework with a clear shared language that both IT experts and other members of staff can understand. This allows the business to fully adopt the most relevant technology available to support its growth.

Where and how do I start?

A challenge organisations face when trying to build and implement an Operating Model is, how do I start? This is because to get started on your own organisations normally have to utilise a great deal of internal resource.

An alternative approach is to use the Business Technology Standard as the basis for your Operating Model. You can start implementing any area of the Business Technology Standard and can go for a full implementation approach or start with successfully implementing one area of the standard and then look to implement further area.

The standard is open source and the high level information in it is freely available to the general public. Information on the standard can be found here. What often happens is that an organisation will learn about the standard and will then decide to contact Xonetic for help with expertise to support the implementation of the standard as and when they need it.

In the UK and Ireland Xonetic are the only organisation approved by the Business Technology Forum (who own the Business Technology Standard) to provide consultancy or training to help the adoption of the standard. When adopting the Business Technology Standard organisations need to be willing to play an active role in leading the implementation, however Xonetic can support you at every stage of the implementation process. The benefits of having a clear operating model based on the Business Technology Standard make this something that is well worth doing.

To Find Out More Contact Xonetic

Contact Us

More to Explore

8 October 2020

King’s College London Journey into Business Technology

ings College partners with the Business Technology Forum
19 September 2020

King’s College London Partners with the Business Technology Forum

11 January 2020

Think like a start-up! How fast are your decisions?

21 May 2019

Are you controlling the data or is it controlling you?

Stay up to date with Xonetic

Linkedin Youtube

Privacy Policy

© 2024 Xonetic. All Rights Reserved
Coach & Facilitator

ELENA VAN LEEMPUT

I like my work best when I can motivate and help other people. I constantly strive for excellence in everything I do and I’m open to different ideas that challenge my views. I believe in constant change which drives my innovative mindset. My background is both in technology and business with more than 15 years’ experience ranging from demand, development to service management. I enjoy taking initiative and carry out new ventures.

I try to keep things simple and bring my skills when I coach and facilitate to inspire people and help them innovate. I’m passionate about all forms of facilitation and coaching be it face-to-face or virtual facilitation. I also enjoy creating different e-learning training, holding innovation workshops and design thinking hackathons.

I also find it very important to nurture my creative side along the way (visual arts: photography, sketching, videography and all areas of design) through both my work and hobbies – which I’m happy to say I get to do often enough.

elena.van.leemput@sofigate.com

Coach & Facilitator

THOMAS HUGHES

I work as coach and facilitator in the Business Technology Academy. My focus is business simulation games such as the DevOps simulation. I consider myself a full-stack Business Technology professional of sorts. During the past 20+ years, I’ve worked in wide range of various IT and business management roles in and with organizations ranging from global enterprises to startups in a variety of industries.

I enjoy looking for new perspectives to phenomena and challenging myself and others to continuously develop ourselves and to expand our thinking. Being in the discomfort zone is the way to grow. As a coach I like to cross breed theoretical frameworks, practical examples, illuminating stories and humour. I see simulation games as a perfect way to combine these into an engaging and fun day.    

I enjoy exploring life through various projects and experiments. Some of these involve focused self-development both physically and mentally, while others focus more on creative aspirations related to areas like photography, writing and digital media.