Blog 16.7.2020

Organisation design creates the basis for customer-oriented operation models

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Bringing hard-paced technology into an organisation’s operations is demanding. Despite the changes in the organisation and its core business and the day-to-day work, organisations must also be able to ensure the excellence of its customer experience.

In order to succeed in change, strong change leadership is needed. Understanding of the structures and processes of the organisation and its various stakeholders is needed to support collaboration and joint development. Organisation design is required to implement the changes.

Customer-oriented work on organisational change

Organisation is a system in which all components are more or less interconnected. As a result, changes in the organisation will also affect its operations in areas that do not seem obvious at first. Therefore, organisation design is a tool to construct a framework, which provides the synergies of the system (and ensures customer orientation), during the organisational design process.

Organisation design is work on change, based on design thinking, with the aim of developing a strategy that guides the organisation, its management system or structures, and its operating models, in a human-oriented manner.

Instead of service design that focuses heavily on customer experience development, organisation design focuses on the “big picture”, whereby the resulting operating models, process descriptions, or concepts linked to the system framework, create the foundation for the organisation’s operations and also its operating culture.

Collaboration and research in the core

Strategy-based organisation design always looks beyond the internal functions of the organisation, as well as at the outside world. We need to form a common understanding of what matters to our customers and how well it meets their needs. Therefore, one of the key dimensions of organisation design is gathering information through collaborative work and research.

Organisation design is both a human-centred and a quite economical way to develop organisation structures, processes and operating models in a direction that supports its transformation in a holistic way – in a customer-oriented direction.

Support for scaling customer experience

In order to create an excellent customer experience by designing an organisation’s operating models, deep customer understanding is required during design work. In addition, it remains to be determined how the varying expectations of a large customer base will first be exceeded, before the customer experience is scaled in a way where value is determined by experience.

Value is always relative; it is important to consider whether scaling such a deeply based experience into the structure, processes and operating models of an organisation is possible – and if so, how.

Could it be possible to support the scalability of the customer experience by combining customer-driven structures, technology opportunities and deep customer understanding through organisation design?

Soile Roth

business design

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