Structure in Threes: Service Design\Service Quality

 

This morning I started some R&D prototyping on measuring Services Quality.  Started with SERVQUAL  model by Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry.  Put together a simple spreadsheet model for GAP #1.  The approach is similar in format to Peter Marks’ [Design Insight] measurement of customer perception of product desirability.  Since Services are purchased and experienced similar to products the approach is sound to use once adapted using service attributes.  The addition I’ll be modeling the next week or so will be to tie together all the gaps in the SERVQUAL model to the enterprise asset hierarchy I’ve been working on as well as create a correlation / traceability matrix.  The model will be posted online in the additional materials folder one I finish and publish the book.

Structure in Threes: Organizational Design

Business Structure verses Organizational Structure

One of the interesting issues that came across my desk today as I was discussing a colleague’s new venture was the taxonomy and ontology of our conversation.  She wanted to cover multiple concepts in the same conversation which is a notable goal regarding economy of one’s time.  However, it became apparent that the terms being used were being overloaded during the conversation.  Example: Discussing the Business Structure and Organizational Structure both terms were used interchangeably.  However, when I hear the words Business Structure I think of the legal form in which the business is established (Corporation, LLC, Partnership, etc.).  When I hear the term Organizational Structure I consider whether it is centralized or distributed; a partitioning along functional, product, customer or geographic lines.  As I continue to develop the Business Design Tool (see below) the question becomes how-to ensure that the dimensions are orthogonal to each other while retaining the interconnectedness of these dimensions.

Organizational Development Tools

Many of the recent texts define various dimensions such as complexity, market, size, etc.  However, the interconnection is only a Infographic.  Perhaps these interconnections are only a probabilistic connection leading one to only heuristics.  I will make a interesting systems dynamic study at the Center for Understanding Change when I have some spare time.  In the meantime I continue to develop the Org Design and Modern IT Portfolio Management tools which are looking more and more like an enhancement to the Business Analysis System and Environment (B.A.S.E.) application built in 1994 on MS Access V1.

B.A.S.E. at that time performed a variety of management consulting analysis:

• Porter Competitive Analysis which has been advanced by Slywotzky’s Value Nets and then further by Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas which the Org Design tool is working to further advance into a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool for Organizational Development and Management Consultants
• BEAM which was created by Parker and Benson is being advanced through the R&D to a Modern IT Portfolio Management methodology
• MBA Product Planning which has been superseded by Design Insight’s (Peter Marks) Customer $APPEALS

This application will eventually become the basis for the semi-automated workflow for several of Intellectual Arbitrage Group’s practices and services

 

Structure in Threes: Design Strategy

Spent last night using the methodology I’m developing for the book to analyze the Data Insights and Business Intelligence line of business.  While I like Business Model Canvas  (Osterwalder, et al) for its visualization I find it lacking on the analytic side.  There are no metrics in the approach so the business model analysis subjective.  As such I’ve started to integrate Miles and Snow’s work and Peter Marks (Design Insight) -who’s methods I’ve used before for my major reengineering projects- and adapted these to provide a more metrics based approach.  Peter’s work was originally based on Product Design strategy which from my perspective from years ago and the basis of my R&D over the years is that an Enterprise is a product.  It happens to be a product with emergent behaviors; so the General Systems Theory and Industrial Dynamics research I did before and during my career at IBM has led me towards pushing the envelop in looking at Enterprise as a multidimensional exercise. Which became the topic of hours of discussion with my mentor John Zachman when we discussed expanding the framework.  We were looking for exemplars for Time and Motivation to ensure these were valid for inclusion.  The problem arose regarding behaviors which are motivation/intension but not.

I immediately though of my old drafting days and considered those perspectives auxiliary views. [For those who are not design engineering or architecturally knowledgeable, an auxiliary view is where to combine dimensions from two other views to create as third view that gives you another perspective]  Unfortunately, in the Enterprise Architecture space, we’ve not been keen on creating a dimensional coordinate system which is where my research activities have been leading.  While the metrics I’m proposing in my book are not as robust as those in the physical world (length, width, depth, and time) I think they’ll be consistent enough to be useful in analyzing an enterprise.

The one easy dimension which seems to always get placed in the corner is resource, specifically finance.  I think this is because its both resource and measurement system which is confusing without context.  However, I’ve taken a page from Markowitz on Portfolio Management and think I’ve got a holistic approach that integrates with the rest of the methodology well.  Well back to office remodeling this morning.