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Define A Vision To Achieve
There are a lot of reasons we might pursue Domain Intelligence, but none will be ultimately more important to business stakeholders than the leadership’s vision for success. If that vision does not permeate the work of the company in a way that all involved can intelligently contribute, then we can assume those visionary goals are at risk.
This article entitled The Best Ways to Communicate Your Organization’s Vision lists a number of ways you as a leader can get that message out to the right people.
The question I pose here is, what is that message?
The concept of Domain Intelligence operationally is has precedent in the world of Marketing in the form of “Integrated Marketing Communications” (IMC). In an insightful article, Tor Goldfield explains the importance and difficulty of creating a unified voice often called One Voice when crafting a marketing strategy.
Integrated marketing communications (IMC) was first defined in 1989 by the American Association of Advertising Agencies as ‘an approach to achieving the objectives of a marketing campaign through a well-coordinated use of different promotional methods that are intended to reinforce each other’. ~ Tor Goldfield
Is IMC a powerful and profitable concept? According to research:
“Competitively, the more the firm is able to build its distinctive IMC capability, the greater its campaign effectiveness, which in turn leads to superior brand market-based and financial performance.”
Capitalize Operationally
Similar to marketing, coordinated operations can do a very similar thing even if there are some differences.
Crafting a Domain Intelligence (DIN) culture, in my humble opinion, would likely provide a competitive edge to all of the operational teams (Logistics, IT, Accounting and more) if they could factually and confidently work in alignment with the key vision of the business. It makes rational sense that operational limitations, service level agreements, organizational objectives, and the list goes on should be well-understood to provide greater efficiency and accuracy as the business units, IT or otherwise, drive solutions, software or otherwise.
Most companies do some of this some of the time “naturally”. However, from my vantage point, there is much more opportunity here if we merge some powerful concepts effectively to generate and maintain this vision more deliberately.
At Scale
When we say the phrase “at scale” we generally mean, does this work if we increase the demand, scope, size of the use of a system. But I want you to consider the reverse this way.
I think the highly successful companies that naturally leverage DIN with a gifted leader are well known. And I have been in corporate environments that want to emulate some of the business practices of these highly successful corporations. At face value this not always right or wrong. It …ugh…depends.
But what may be even more appropriate more often is employing similar practices for managing Domain Intelligence to drive core differentiating solutions.
What if we take quality successful tools that create a driving vision all our own and use that passion to create teams of dedicated, passionate solution providers in the context of the business at it’s root?
Raising the bar to a deliberate discipline by introducing principles of Domain-Driven Design and other compatible concepts we can target DIN and make this a powerful force for corporate unity and still foster autonomy in all of the teams we employ.
I won’t presume this is easy, but the value may be big enough in many organizations, and the savings significant enough that the effort may be well worth it.
Align Starting with the Business Model
If we are going to craft the vision into reusable DIN for the entire company, we need to not leave the important pieces to chance. The best place to start has got to be with the essence of the business – it’s Business Model. One of the best tools I know of to date is the Business Model Canvas process introduced to the world in 2005 by Alexander Osterwalder.
In 2019 at Explore DDD Denver, I had the pleasure of sitting in a Business Model Canvas event led by Zsofia Herendi, a passionate workflow practitioner. We broke into teams and within about an hour we modeled a completely made up business so well, one of the team members wanted to start that business in the real world!
Here is a picture of that canvas that did not get refined into a formal document but could have:
The experience was energetic, mind provoking but doable and definitely eye-opening. During the event, I put forward ideas that people did not like, but instead of fighting it out, we collaborated quickly to a place where we all came to an agreement on how this example business was to be modeled.
The exercise provided concrete answers to all the main questions Osterwalder outlines in his template. Those answers bring into view valuable core business intel, with appropriate specificity, such as:
- What will you deliver? (Products/Services)
- How will you deliver it? (Operations)
- Who will you deliver it to? (Targets)
- How will you fund that delivery? (Finances)
Don’t let that list fool you. The depth is much more than I list here.
The facilitators gave us tips on how to start, what to focus on and more. However, the main thing is that the team was on the very same page with a deep enough understanding about this business that we could have operated on furthering more mission oriented initiatives – in that short period! This felt far more unified than in many business settings I have been in. I am sure we would have done far worse with things like software projects for this fake company if we would not have created the Ubiquitous Language in this context of the various aspect of the Business Model.
What if we were modeling a business that had serious substance and passion from a founder or an all-in representative? What could this do for a start-up?
Imagine if a mature business with a large infrastructure could refocus to solve faded connections with the customer and loss of market share? How would that re-energize the C-Suite in conjunction with the rest of the company?
The Take Away
This canvas is not enough to start writing code. It is the beginning of the DIN we need to more rapidly gather requirements and more. Your event may take 2 or even 3 hours to nail this down and every company will have it’s own identity coming out of this.
I can see the Business Model Canvas,as the tone-setter for the very beginning of the Domain Intelligence a company needs to get that One Voice started operationally by design. Very talented consultants in the DDD community are helping companies do this very thing around the world almost weekly these days.
Do you think a couple hours every 6 or 12 months is worth this level of unity in your world?
There are many other ways to start, but whatever you do for your core communication, be sure to have a very well-rounded defined business model that everyone understands and agrees to support. Without that, we risk profit margin in many ways.
I will stop here and in the next post we will walk through a great next step in your Domain Intelligence process improvement.
Until Then.