Supply/demand everywhere

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Working  with public officials in Tyumen region of Russia highlighted the still-wider generic nature of the systems that strategy and policy try to design and operate well. Every commercial business serves customers with products or services and do so using capacity of various kinds operated by staff. Customers drive demand (sales and revenue), there may be a cost-of-goods, and capacity + staff drive the supply the business can deliver at some cost.

The surprise in venturing out of the corporate world into other sectors is how universal these relationships are. ...

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Generic architecture = rock-solid theory

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Strategy Dynamics gives confidence because its standard architectures (systems of resources and performance) are utterly reliable. It is no surprise that we find the same factors linked in the same way in any sector … every retailer serves consumers with products through stores operated by staff. But rename or replace these items and you have an airline, a school or hospital. Same applies across service companies of many types, manufacturing firms, banking …

Of course important details must be got right and adapted ...

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Big Data needs architecture

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SD models offer a rigorous enterprise architecture for firms’ data. Pharmaceuticals firms are  blessed with huge amounts of data on just about everything. But a competitive war-gaming project just completed for one of the big players was surprising. Sure, we could get data on things needed to model the firm and its rivals, but this seemed to come from lots of different sources, in many different forms – mostly big spreadsheets and slide-decks.

The data was inconsistent ...

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IT & Enterprise Architecture

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strategy+business explains how IT works best when tied closely to business goals, which using an Enterprise Architecture  helps ensure. Though the article explains little of what exactly an EA is, there’s plenty on the Web about it, including professional training and certification. An EA seems to rely on having a sound foundation of an ‘Operating Model’ of the business, which in turn ties together strategy maps, goals and policies.

But how do we ensure that operating model is indeed rigorous? I would start from ...

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