Unbundle Your Business for Business Agility
Since joining the Enterprise Strategy Team at Microsoft, I’ve had to shift gears and focus more on business, business architecture, and strategy patterns. Luckily, there’s no shortage of material on business design. The trick is finding the useful nuggets of insight and action.
Here’s an example of a useful nugget regarding how to think about the three core types of businesses …
In the book, Business Model Generation , Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Patrick Van Der Pijl, and Tim Clark suggest unbundling your business by splitting it into three core types:
- Product Innovation – Develop new and attractive services.
- Customer Relationship Management – Acquire and build relationships with customers.
- Infrastructure Management – Build and manage platforms for high volume, repetitive tasks.
While the three types can co-exist within a single corporation, you can avoid conflicts or undesirable trade-offs by unbundling them, into separate entities.
When your business is bundled, it’s tough to streamline things or make it more effective, because the focus is fractured.
When you unbundle your business, you can gain clarity, focus, efficiencies, and effectiveness. You can also make it easier to innovate in your processes, platforms, and products because of the clarity and focus.
As you can imagine, this is crucial for any significant cloud plays and business transformations. I’m in the business of business transformation now, as well as connecting business with IT (Information Technology), so it’s helpful to fill my toolbox with business strategies and business design methods, and I’ll share my toolbox with you as I go.