This is a chapter from the EDGY Cookbook (load complete PDF version of the EDGY Cookbook from this link).

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Enterprise

“An enterprise is an endeavour of people with a shared ambition” [3]. An enterprise is a human-centric entity of behavior and structure, a coherent whole with something in common. It consists of people and assets for performing behavior for a reason. Typically, we tend to consider an enterprise as single organisation. However, it is often bigger than that: cooperation of several organisations in a network, or collaboration in an ecosystem. In this context, the focus is on people, and on outcomes an enterprise is producing. ‘From people to people.’

An enterprise serves a clear purpose, is useful to people, and delivers on its promises.

Enterprise Design

The Enterprise Design is a holistic, coherent, and human-centric approach for designing better enterprises. Enterprise Design utilizes the EDGY language to enable collaboration between disciplines, leverages on collaboration and encourages to co-design. [3]

The Enterprise Design approach is based three facets: 1) identity, 2) experience and 3) architecture, together with their intersections: a) organisation, b) brand and c) product. All these facets and their intersections exist in typical enterprises, no matter the size or scope. These facets and intersections form the Facet Model, which can be used for asking questions for designing and reframing all kinds of design challenges. The Facet Model can be used as an analysis tool to shift perspectives and reframe challenges into new ideas – from different angles.

Problem space and the solution. As a holistic, coherent, human-centric and collaborative approach, the Enterprise Design tackles the following problems: isolated design disciplines, diverse methods and separated tools, different terminologies, different visualisation languages, lack of communication over practices and organisation units, different substance- and subject matter experts etc. Fortunately, the Enterprise Design approach provides shared understanding with a common language – to innovate and transform.

Enterprise Design facilitates the holistic co-design of enterprises through three coherent facets: identity, experience and architecture.

The Enterprise Design enables people in enterprises to collaborate, communicate and create shared designs, in all the change activities and business transformations, no matter of the scale or size of those efforts, for making better decisions – for creating better enterprises.

Better Enterprises pursue a clear purpose, are useful for people and their lives, perform and deliver on their promises.

EDGY – Enterprise Design Graph InterplaY

EDGY provides an easy yet expressive language that everyone can use. EDGY offers a simple but powerful language that is accessible to all stakeholder groups within an enterprise. Visualisations with EDGY are simple and attractive, and everyone can interpret them intuitively and quickly. EDGY can be used as a common language for different professionals of diverse disciplines (such as service designers, UX- and CX-designers, product owners, business analysts, architects etc.). EDGY is a simple, colorful and appealing language. It has a limited set of concepts, which are easy to learn and easy to use. Everyone can understand EDGY right away, without a long learning curve.

EDGY tool support. The EDGY language is supported by many tools such as Draw.io, Miro, QualiWare, Blue Doplhin, PlantUML and more to come. The EDGY diagrams can also be modelled with the Plain Old PowerPoint. Free EDGY stencils are available via Enterprise Design pages (EDGY Tools).

EDGY is Intersection Group’s Open Source tool designed to help people create better enterprises.

References

1. Intersection Group pages, (intro, tools, learning, events etc.) https://intersection.group
2. Enterprise design pages, https://enterprise.design/
3. EDGY language foundations, book, 2023, (available as pdf), link
4. EDGY 23 Language Foundations, Online course (4 weeks), Milan Guenther & Wolfgang Goebl, 2023 https://intersection.group/learning/intersection-academy/
5. Enterprise Design Patterns, Intersection Group book, 2020, (available as pdf) link
6. EDGY 23 product release, launch on 29th March 2023, webinar recording, Milan Guenther & Wolfgang Goebl, link.

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Enterprise Design Approach

Enterprise Design Facet Model

Enterprise Design approach is based on the Facet Model, which consists of three facets and their intersections.

These facets exist in all enterprises and all types of business. They are characteristics and qualities, that enterprises have by their nature, regardless of the size, whether they are intentionally designed or not. The facets represent the perspectives or viewpoints from which an enterprise can be observed holistically.

The facets are:

• Identity – why do we and our enterprise exist, what motivates and drives us?
• Experience – what people need, feel and want to get done with our help?
• Architecture – how and with what we are running our enterprise?

The intersections are:

• Organisation – how are we organised?
• Brand – what is our reputation and image?
• Product – what do we make and offer for people’s benefit?

The Facet Model scales to different levels within an enterprise (enterprise-level, domain/unit, capability area, product- or service area etc.).

Intersections connect the facets. Intersections are shared between adjacent facets. So the suggestion is: when observing a facet, two intersections on the edges are to be observed too. The facets are interconnected via the intersections.

Facets

Facets are the perspectives which altogether cover the whole enterprise. Faces are the lenses, through which we can zoom into details. When we change the perspective from one facet to another, and then we can observe other aspects and meaningful interconnections between the elements.

Identity Facet

Identity[1] defines what is going on in and around the enterprise [3][4]. It defines what is the mission and purpose of the enterprise, what is story and goals, and beliefs and values. Identity motivates people and drives the enterprise and all its change activities. Identity defines the fundamental, crucial, reason for being.

Identity is covering existential matters and questions: why something exists, where it comes from, where it is now, and where it is going. Identity covers the past, the present and the future of the enterprise.

The values and beliefs enterprises exhibit through their messages and actions. [3]

Experience Facet

Experience defines people’s tasks and journeys, and with which channels they interact with the products and/or services of the enterprise. The tasks define what people are doing: what are their needs, what are the jobs to be done, and what they want to achieve. Through journeys it is possible to define what are the activities, and the steps they are taking when they are achieving their tasks.

Experience is a personal view of the enterprise, which is observed from a person’s perspective, focusing on the value created for people. Experience is supported by architecture, which is needed to create products and services, which are supporting people’s tasks in their journeys.

The impact through interactions the enterprise has on people and their lives. [3]

Architecture Facet

Architecture[2] defines how the enterprise operates. How are all the parts working together in the enterprise and around it. With architecture, the enterprise is capable of producing outcomes. This is performed by business processes and assets they are using, those of which together form the capabilities of the enterprise.

Architecture realises the products and/or services of the enterprise. With architecture, the enterprise delivers its products and/or services on its promises.

The structures needed to make an enterprise operate and connect to the ecosystem. [3]

Intersections

With the intersections, the facets overlap and are interconnected. The intersections make the Facet Model complete, a coherent whole, by connecting the dots – the elements of the enterprise. With the help of the Facet Model, the enterprise can be viewed as a holistic system in which the elements are interconnected with each other, either directly or indirectly. This makes it possible to explore and analyse cause and effects, how a change in an element in one facet affects other elements in other facets via intersections.

Organisation Intersection

Organisation structure is needed so that an enterprise can perform its activities that are needed for business operations, and for realizing the products and services for serving the customers. Organisation structure defines how people are organized in units, groups or teams etc. So organisation defines how people communicate and interact with each other, and how the work and responsibilities are shared between the people.

Organisation structure defines how people are organised to perform the activities of the enterprise.

Product Intersection

Products and services are what the enterprise makes and provides to people. Products and/or services are the results of the work of the employees, those of which comprise the organisation of the enterprise. Products and/or services appear in people’s lives, as they go on their journeys when doing their tasks. Products and/or services are realized (delivered) by the architecture. It can be said the products and/or services are the reason why the architecture is needed in the first place.

Why do we need products and services? Customers have tasks to do, they have needs. Products and services are what they can use when doing their tasks. Products and services are what an enterprise provides for people’s benefit. Products and services are important because they concretize what an enterprise offers: what is the added value for customers (customer value) and value for business owners and investors (business value).

Products and services are what the enterprise makes, offers and delivers for people’s benefit

Brand Intersection

The brand represents the identity of the enterprise internally and externally in the business environment. Brand reflects the organisation’s identity in the experiences of people, in and around the enterprise. Brand is an ‘actor’ in people’s lives. It manifests the story of the enterprise and makes its identity visible. The brand is the first impression we get when we see or hear the name of the enterprise or some of its products or services. The brand is the ‘face of the enterprise’ or ‘fingerprint’ with which we can identify the enterprise.

Brand reflects the identity of an enterprise as it is perceived in people’s experience.

Identity covers existential matters and questions related to an enterprise: why something exist in the first place, where it comes from, where it is now, and where it is going? Why we do what we do? Identity defines the purpose of an entity, whether it is an enterprise or any part of it. Identity drivers the enterprise. Identity covers the past, the present and the future of an entity. Every entity has an identity, or identification, characteristics of the purpose, and reason for being. Person, organisation, system, product etc. Identity comes to life in culture. The icon, the thought bubble, referes ro what people are having their heads.

Architecture in this context, refers to business architecture, to enterprise’s operations: how it works, how the business runs in processes etc. The ‘real’ construction architecture of designing buildings is not the focus area. However, the architecture ‘house’ icon symbolises how the enterprise is structured and constructed. The Facet Model can be applied to all kinds of architectures.

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Using the Facet Model

Designing the Enterprise

An enterprise is constantly changing. Everything moves, everything changes, all the time. Conditions in the business environment are continuously changing, which requires infinite intervention: change activities by managers and mandated change agents (e.g. enterprise designers).

Enterprise Design approach with the Facet Model tackles any design challenges *) from strategic challenges to operational change challenges. This helps enterprises of all sizes to innovate and transform. The Facet Model can be used as a tool in any kind of design challenges, problems to be solved, business transformations of any kind, size and scope etc. The Facet Model can be used for asking fundamental questions: why does the enterprise exist, what is its role in people’s lives and how it is working?

The Facet Model facilitates co-design.

*) A design challenge is a need for change (change demand) that can be initiated or triggered by any event or change in the enterprise’s environment. A design challenge can be a problem to be solved, or a desire to make things better. A design challenge can cover any aspect of the enterprise. It can concern new business ideas or innovations, or problematic matters (e.g. complexity or inefficiency of business operations). The Facet Model can be used for reframing the challenge and asking questions in different perspectives to help enterprise designers to find better solutions. A design challenge can trigger change initiative, concept design, problem solving, innovation planning, a business transformation of any size and scope etc.

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Asking Questions, Considering and Thinking Differently

The Facet Model can be used to ask questions from different perspectives and take a holistic approach when co-designing solutions.

Reframing Design Challenges

Perspective switching. Reframing means changing the perspectives, thinking differently and holistically to clarify what needs to be done and why. The Facet Model can be used for reframing, thinking differently from different perspectives. The perspectives refer to facets Identity, Experience and Architecture.

Any of these perspectives can be taken as a starting point, depending on the case of the initial design challenge. A challenge is what has been given to be designed.

Design Challenge is a certain matter or issue to be resolved. It can be anything from the strategic level to the operational level. For example, to “design a new digital-first strategy based on a vision”, or “define strategic goals and course of actions for business transformation”, or “plan product portfolio roadmap for digitalization”, or “consolidate complex application landscape for digital transformation” etc.

Reframing encourages co-designers to think of other aspects instead of only considering the most obvious perspective. Typically, we tend to think of the most obvious solution first [1]. However, reframing enables us to think of other ways to solve the problem. We can challenge ourselves e.g. by using the how might we (HMW) -technique to find alternative opportunities to think and do things differently.

The Facet Model can be used for asking questions from different perspectives to analysing and finding alternative designs & solutions for creating better outcomes. The facets answer to questions of why, what and how things are happening in and around the enterprise.

Holistic thinking. Reframing with the help of the Facet Model makes it possible to see the whole enterprise at once, and change the perspective for exploring the adjacent facets and/or intersections. The Facet Model broadens and inspires us to think holistically and creatively, eliminating the need for distinct ‘boxes’. The perspectives can be used in any order, according to what is appropriate in the specific case of the design challenge. With the Facet Model, we can change the thinking from the enterprise level (Identity, Architecture) to the personal level (Experience). The Facet Model helps co-designers ask the right questions to get the best insight. Such deeper questions help co-designers find the fundamental reasons and root causes behind the design challenges, which in turn leads to better designs. The Facet Model is the best available tool for reframing.

Reframing is looking at a challenge from different perspectives and thinking holistically.

Shared understanding. Different perspectives are relevant but restricted, meaningful but have limited scope (an sich). Some may focus on customer experience, some may focus on business insight, operations or organisational structures etc. However, these specialised approaches of different disciplines are somewhat overlapping: they share the same elements but use specialised terminology. Reframing the design challenges with the EDGY Facet Model helps co-designers to change perspectives, discuss, and find common, shared understanding

Our way of thinking or understanding of things can change when we shift our perspective.

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Co-design

By definition, co-design is a collaborative approach to designing products, services, applications, or experiences. In co-design, stakeholders such as users, customers, designers, and other relevant parties actively participate in the design process. The goal of co-design is to ensure that the final outcome meets the actual needs and preferences of the end-users.

Enterprise Design and the Facet Model enable, encourage and facilitate co-design, which is a collaborative, conversational, coherent approach for design challenges of any kind. Co-design integrates and involves people from different disciplines (co-designers) and stakeholder groups (co-creators) to work together and speak the same language, the EDGY.

Co-design integrates co-designers to collaborate and speak the same EDGY language.

The Enterprise Design Facet Model can be used to evaluate if the enterprise is well-designed, and if is it producing well-designed outcomes, according to these principles (figure beside).

The facets can be used as ‘lenses’, in any order, through which people can get into any design challenge when co-designing. This can be done e.g. by zooming into a specific perspective first and then switching to another. This helps people to consider all the aspects at once, without covering them separately. All the elements of an enterprise are interconnected to each other, directly or indirectly, they interact simultaneously and continuously. That is why the Facet Model can help people to analyse design challenges, change their perspective and communicate when co-designing and re-designing the enterprise together.

The facets can be used as ‘lenses’, through which people can get into any design challenge.

Boost Agile Development *). Enterprise Design is a human-centric, holistic, coherent, conversational and collaborative approach. This encourages and improves agile development, as people start discussing all the aspects right from the start together. The Enterprise Design facilitates co-design sessions at the beginning of design challenges. This shifting focus from “Big Design Up-Front” to collaborative co-design improves the overall end-to-end development and building cycle from ideas to production, as there is more time for high-value collaboration, and less need for producing documentation needed for organisational handovers and knowledge transfers. In addition, co-design increases cooperation over organsational units and silos.

*) Agility is the ability to easily and quickly respond to change. Agile methods cover a wide range of tools and methods such as Scrum, Kanban and SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).

Co-designers. Enterprise Design involves and influences several stakeholder- and interest groups, practices, professions, and disciplines, that are communicating and/or working together as co-creators.

An example stakeholder map of co-designers, partners and other interest groups is illustrated beside. Some groups are at the heart of co-design (inner circle), and some groups are somewhat involved or influenced (middle circle), some groups are just interest groups (on the outer circle).

What. Co-design with EDGY enables a common language for different disciplines. With the same terminology, people can understand each other better.

Why. People from diverse practices and backgrounds have their focus on different areas. They have somewhat restricted views of the enterprise. Each discipline has interpretations of its own about what is important. Every group has specialised language and jargon of their own. This is causing suboptimal decisions and designs, unclear communication, inefficient knowledge sharing, general unawareness of the problems, and misunderstandings because of the different names for the same things…

How. Enterprise Design with the EDGY is a collaborative co-design approach to be applied to design challenges of any size and scope. The EDGY provides a comprehensive Facet Model, which is a useful and practical tool for changing perspectives to get the most out of the cooperation of various disciplines. The EDGY provides shared vocabulary and easy, colorful notation that everybody can understand.

EDGY provides a language that encourages specialists and experts to explore and communicate together to enable a coherent enterprise co-design.

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Enterprise Design Elements

EDGY is based on four elements called Base Elements:

1. People
2. Outcome
3. Activity
4. Object

With these four base elements *) only, it is possible to describe all (!) enterprises. Using these base elements **), it is possible to describe any enterprise and everything that is going on in and around them in an ecosystem, with sentences like this:

• People perform activities, using and creating objects to achieve outcomes

*) The classification of the generic base elements is inspired by the FBS (Function, Behavior, Structure) ontology. 

**) Shapes of the elements: rounded elements are outcomes (functions), arrowed elements are activities (behavior), and square elements are objects (structures). These shapes are used in base elements, facet and intersection elements.

EDGY Base Elements

EDGY Identity Elements

EDGY Experience Elements

EDGY Architecture Elements

EDGY intersection elements: Organisation, Brand and Product Elements

EDGY Relationships

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Tags and Metrics

There are two kinds of labels to add to any EDGY element: Tags and Metrics.

Tags can be used for differentiating elements of the same type. Tags can be used for depicting additional information about the elements, e.g. priorities. Several tags can be added to an element when appropriate.

Asset types can be defined according to what is appropriate and fits the specific case in context. The minimum set of types (the shortlist below, the MVP) consists of types as follows: application, system software or data. These are the most common types that are enough for 80% of the cases. It is good practice to add some of these Legend -boxes into the diagrams that contain different types of assets. The suggestion is to create context-specific common tags that are used in all the diagrams for the sake of conformity.

Metrics are quantitative and qualitative attributes of the elements, which can be depicted with colored labels. Typically the traffic light coloring is an easy way to indicate certain metrics of elements.

With metrics it is possible to add extra information to elements. Here are some examples of the legend boxes that can be added into diagrams to explain what criteria is used. A N/A (not applicable) metric can be used e.g. when we want to show to from which elements we have no information yet.

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Facet and Intersection Elements pre-defined Relations

Generic and Specific Depiction

All the base elements have specialised, faceted and colored counterparts in the Facet Model. A similar basic syntax and structure (activity-object-outcome) occurs in every facet. This makes it easy to translate and shift the focus from one facet to another, as the elements are related to each other. Such correspondence elements in all the perspectives make the Facet Model consistent, which eases co-design efforts.

EDGY introduces specialized variants of the base elements. This makes the EDGY language simple to learn and use, as the same triple of elements can be found in all the facets. It is possible to use the same analogy in all the perspectives:

• People perform activities, using and creating objects to achieve outcomes. [3]

From which sentence we can formulate versions such as follows:

• Customers experience journeys, using channels, to achieve tasks
• Organisations perform processes, using and creating assets to enable capabilities
• Enterprises and its initiatives communicate stories, producing content to achieve purposes.

The same generic observations can be turned into specialized elements, whenever it is appropriate to change the perspective in a design challenge. This simplicity of the EDGY language’s syntax, and its vocabulary of limited concepts and relationships, and its small number of relation types, make the EDGY easy to learn and use, but expressive enough.

Specialisations

The core of each facet is the outcome, as the whole idea of the enterprise design is to produce well-designed outcomes. The outcome elements, Purpose, Task and Capability, are the most crucial elements, as they represent what is essential in the enterprise. The shape of the outcome element is rounded rectangle.

The behavior in the enterprise is depicted with the elements that represent activities, Story, Process and Journey. The activity is arrow shaped element.

The structural objects of the enterprise are the facet elements, Content, Channel and Asset, and also the Intersection elements Organisation, Brand and Product. The shape of the structural object element is sharp-angled rectangle.

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EDGY in nutshell

EDGY is:

• Simple and easy, so that everyone can quickly become familiar with its structure and meaning.
• Beautiful, colorful, and aesthetically appealing and comfortable for people to work with.
• Flexible enough, to leave space for people to interpret and extend it with their own elements, so they can focus on what makes the most sense in their design challenge.
• Expressive, rich, broad and comprehensive enough, so that all disciplines to hook into so they can tie their specialised insights into the holistic top-level views that hold them together.
• General-purpose to keep the conversations broad and to encourage more specialised languages to hook into it to provide the required specificity when needed.
• Common, multi-purpose language for all the various disciplines and stakeholder groups to support collaboration, cooperation and co-design.

EDGY is a simple, beautiful, flexible but expressive general-purpose common language.

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Enterprise Design Methods, Techniques, Tools and Patterns

Enterprise Design In Practice

Enterprise Design is a holistic and people-centered approach. It integrates customer-, business- and operational perspectives.

Enterprise Design covers all that is meaningful in the context of an enterprise. Here are some examples of different design disciplines done by certain professional and competence groups of people, that are incorporated in the enterprise design.

Enterprise Design practice is the cooperation and collaboration of different disciplines that work together. Enterprise Design practice is a way of organising people to provide overall design and planning support for business owners at the enterprise level. Enterprise Design practice provides service(s) such as facilitating co-design, providing tools and methods for enabling, inspiring and encouraging to ideation, innovation, analysis and concept design, as well as visualising the design with the appropriate tool(s) by using the EDGY as a common language.

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Enterprise Design Perspectives

All the examples introduced here are mixing and matching together the elements of different facets and intersections of the Facet Model.

The relations between the elements help designers to catch the connections with adjacent facets or intersections. The figures on this page introduce the elements and their relations per each facet. These facet-driven models can be used as starting points for all the modelling cases, and especially for reframing design challenges.

Identity Perspective

When exploring the Identity elements Purpose, Story and Content, it is useful to include Brand– and Organisation -elements in the picture too, for getting the most extensive overview.

Experience Perspective

When exploring the Experience elements Task, Journey and Channel, it is useful to include Brand– and Product -elements in the picture too, for getting the most complementary overview of people insight.

Architecture Perspective

When exploring the Architecture elements Capability, Process and Asset, it is useful to include Organisation– and Product -elements in the picture too, for getting the most comprehensive overview.

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Changing the Perspectives

Perspective switching enables us to consider other aspects than the most obvious one. Usually we tend to have a preconception, an initial idea, of how things are. We all have our mental models into which we typically set all the things what we see and experience. By changing the perspective by utilizing the Enterprise Design Facet Model as an analytical tool, we can easily shift perspective from one to another. This encourages us to consider other aspects and recognize all the impacts in the enterprise, even those we didn’t pay attention in the first place at all.

Why changing the perspective? The first impression usually tight us with our existing conceptions (because of several cognitive biases we have, such as anchoring- and confirmation bias). We typically see only one part or some parts of the whole enterprise. Sometimes we can’t see the “forest from the trees”.

It is just advantageous and practical to think differently, change the perspective and consider other aspects than the most obvious ones. This brings up new aspects, both positive and negative, and makes further decisions better. The fact is, that all the facets are involved, implicitly, anyhow, as “everything affects everything”. By reframing we can consider all the parts of the enterprise, and all the things that affect or are affected. The is holistic view of the Enterprise Design Facet Model helps with this.

The facets are interconnected via intersections:

• The business purpose affects to customer experience, operations and delivery.
• The customer experience is affected by identity and architecture.
• The architecture exists because of the purpose and goals of the enterprise and customer needs to fulfill.

The reason for reframing can be e.g. an event that has occurred in the business environment, which has changed some conditions or circumstances. Such an occurrence can be either internal or external, either positive or negative in its effects. An occurrence can be e.g. a new disruptive technology innovation, increased/decreased market share, or decreased customer satisfaction etc. Such a reason causes the need for change in the enterprise. By reframing we can consider all the parts of the enterprise holistically – as “everything affects everything”.

The Enterprise Design Facet Model can be used as an analysis tool for perspective switching.

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Reframing

By reframing with the Facet Model, we can take a holistic approach and figure out the most beneficial end results (outcomes) for the entire enterprise. Reframing involves asking questions from all perspectives to identify the behavioral or structural elements that can impact solving the initial design challenge or enable achieving the best possible outcome. Finally, everything is interconnected and related in one way or another, either directly or indirectly. The holistic approach considers all perspectives.

• By utilising the Facet Model we can change perspectives and ask “how might we do this and that” from other perspectives.
• By changing the perspective, we can ask other questions that take another viewpoint to the design challenge.
• By asking questions from different perspectives, we can discover new solutions and potential impacts – positive or negative.

Reframing is about asking questions from all perspectives to find solutions.

The change demand in the initial brief of a design challenge typically concerns certain aspects and elements only. Matters and issues are clustered around certain preconceptions or the most obvious choices. We tend to jump straight to conclusions quickly. However, maybe the given problem is not the real problem at all, and/or the solution is not the most successful for the enterprise. When further analysing and reframing the challenge, we can observe different causes and find completely new solutions. At least, we can find other elements that affect or are affected by the initial one.

Reframing, and shifting perspectives, help us consider alternative solutions to find the best one for this specific situation, for this problem, based on the information at hand.

With the help of the Facet Model, we can view the challenge through different lenses. We can change our way of thinking and perspective, leading to a solution that might be entirely new and completely different from the first, the most obvious one. Reframing can be started from any facet or intersection, depending on the case of the initial design challenge.

Reframing forces us to change our perspective, consider other aspects, and think differently.

The Facet model can be used as an analysis model or common theoretical framework to start discussions with diverse stakeholder groups. Most people can relate to the perspectives and intersections of the Facet Model, making it a good starting point for collaboratively examining design challenges.

It is important to analyse what is really needed – behind what has been asked. To find the real needs behind the desires. By reframing with the Facet Model, we can take a holistic approach and figure out the most beneficial end results (outcomes) for the entire enterprise.

The Facet model serves as a holistic, common and general analysis model in co-design.

Reframing Pattern Examples

Example patterns using the EDGY elements to illustrate the reframing procedure.

Pattern Example 1: Reframing Identity to Experience and Architecture.

Given that a challenge is initially concerning the Identity perspective, formulated e.g. “create a vision for digital transformation”. Then reframing starts from the vision statement, which is modelled with the content element. That expresses the purpose, after which the perspective can be changed via intersections of Brand and Organisation to other perspectives a) to Experience with Tasks, and b) to Architecture with Capabilities. Finally, the offered products and/or services can be evaluated.

Pattern Example 2: Reframing Experience to Architecture and Identity.

Given that the challenge is related to the Experience perspective, the initial brief could be e.g. “design enterprise’s channel strategy for better customer experience”. Then reframing starts by identifying the channel(s), after which the tasks that customers are trying to achieve are evaluated. Then the perspective can be changed via intersections: a) Product(s) can be evaluated and then changed to the Architecture perspective to evaluate concerning capabilities; b) analyse the Brand and change to the Identity perspective and analyse the purpose(s) of the enterprise. Finally, the organisational structures can be analysed.

Pattern Example 3: Reframing Architecture to Identity and Experience.

Given that the challenge is covering the Architecture perspective, the initial design brief could be for example “consolidate complex legacy application landscape for digitalization”. Then reframing starts by identifying the application assets, from which we get into the capabilities that lead us to concerning products and organisation structures. Then we can change the perspective via these intersections. We can a) analyse purpose(s) and change to the Identity perspective. And, we can b) evaluate the tasks and change to the Experience perspective. Finally, we can end up analysing the brand of the enterprise.

Reframing with the Facet Model. Reframing can be started from any facet or intersection, from any element. The Facet Model can be used as a “checklist” for identifying all the affected adjacent elements when considering possible and potential cause-and-effect relationships.

Goal-orientation. It is always good practice to accurately formulate the need for change by setting clear goals and defining desired outcomes. To facilitate goal setting, it is practical to identify the drivers of change – what motivates us to make changes. Drivers, goals, and outcomes help clarify the challenge and provide a solid starting point for taking action. A table format can serve as a useful tool, from which a visualization can easily be created when needed.

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Business Design

Business is what an enterprise does. Typically, business is all about providing products and/or services for the benefit of customers. A business, or enterprise, is run through business operations. Business operations are the day-to-day activities that a business undertakes to produce, deliver, and manage its products or services, as well as to achieve its goals (objectives).

Understanding what customers value is a good starting point for business design. This is the customer insight, which relates to people’s experiences and the role the enterprise plays in their lives. It also relates to the identity of the enterprise, explaining why it is meaningful to people and how the enterprise runs its business operations through its architecture.

An enterprise exists to create value, serve customers, deliver services, fulfill its mission, and achieve its vision. Technology is just a tool that enable the fundamental purpose.

The Enterprise Design Facet Model can be used to design and describe the core business in which an enterprise operates. The Enterprise Design and the EDGY language can be applied to design what the enterprise does, how it does it, and why. All the facets and their intersections together form the enterprise’s business. Business is at the heart of the Facet Model, as shown in the figure beside.

When we design and develop the business, we address all these facets and their intersections. Conversely, when focusing on any of these facets or intersections, we are designing the enterprise’s business.

An enterprise exists to create value, serve customers, deliver services, fulfill its mission, and achieve its vision.

Business

What is a business all about?

• A business refers to an enterprising entity or organisation comprised of people working together to achieve common goals, aligned with its identity and promises. These entities engage in commercial, industrial, public, or professional activities. Some businesses are for-profit, while others are non-profit, fulfilling a charitable mission or furthering a social cause. These promises explain why an enterprise exists and why it operates as it does, motivating and inspiring the people within the organization.
• A business runs operations that produce products (items, goods) or offer services, making them available to customers (consumers, business actors, etc.). This aspect covers the structure and behavior that explains how an enterprise runs its business operations.
• A business is focused on meeting the particular needs of people. This aspect defines the needs that an enterprise aims to serve, fulfill, and support.

These fundamental elements of business can be translated into the core components of the Facet Model: Purpose, Task, and Capability. Purpose defines what people believe in and strive for, Task defines what people aim to achieve, and Capability defines what the enterprise can do. These are the outcome *) elements of the facets. Business design can be simplified using these outcome elements, representing the outcome-driven view of the enterprise.

Focusing on these outcome elements when designing a business, we are:

• describing the identity of the enterprise in terms of the purpose, which reflects the promises that we have stated in the form of stories and content – via the brand,
• defining the architecture that is comprised of capabilities as composable business components, with which the business operations are enabled, and executed by the processes and supported by the assets and employees of the organisation, and
• influencing the experience, specifically regarding tasks that represent customer needs. The experience is shaped by how well the customers’ tasks are fulfilled during their journey, as they interact with the enterprise’s products and/or services through various channels.

Business value can be created by delivering customer value on the promises of the enterprise. This simplification of the business fundamentals clarifies how the Facet Model and its core elements, the outcomes, can be used for analysing and modeling the basic essence of business.

The purpose of the business is to provide goods (products and/or services) to customers, to fulfill their needs. The figure above illustrates how business capabilities deliver value on enterprise’s promises according to customer’s needs.

The purpose of the business is to provide goods to customers, to fulfill their needs.

Business basics. Customers have task(s) to do, which are served by the products and/or services that are produced by the capabilities of the organisation, which have a clear purpose that is made visible to customers via brand.

*) Outcome elements are goals or end results that we want to achieve. An outcome is a purpose to be served, or a task to be supported, or a capability to be performed. While an output is a product or service that we create or deliver, an outcome is the actual end result, the benefit or advantage that can be achieved. An outcome is the concrete experience that we have at the end of the day. In addition, an outcome could be a demand to be served or a problem to be solved with the products or services and a set of activities. Outcome elements of the enterprise comprise the heart of business design.

Business Core. Business operations, the actual operational business, is defined by the business architecture, which defines how we run our business, and how are we produce our products and services to help customers accomplish their tasks throughout their journeys. Capabilities represent composable business components, with which the products and/or services are produced. Capabilities combine behavior and structure that belong together.

Business design is an approach to creating and improving businesses that emphasizes innovation, customer-centricity, and holistic thinking. It focuses on the strategic design of a business model, organisational structure, processes, and customer experiences to achieve better results and adapt to changing business environment (e.g. market) conditions. The goal of business design is to align a enterprise’s strategy, operations, and customer value proposition in a way that creates sustainable competitive advantages. Here are key elements and principles of business design:

• Customer-Centric Approach: Business design places a strong emphasis on understanding the needs, preferences, and pain points of customers. It aims to design products, services, and experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. Customer-centricity conretised in customer-driven design.
• Design Thinking: Business design often incorporates design thinking methodologies, which involve empathy, problem-solving, and iterative prototyping to create innovative solutions. It encourages a creative and user-centered approach to business challenges.
• Business Model Innovation: Business design focuses on rethinking and innovating the fundamental aspects of a business model, including revenue streams, value proposition, customer segments, distribution channels, and cost structure. Tools & methods: Business Model Canvas (BMC).
• Process Optimisation: It involves analysing and optimizing business processes for efficiency and effectiveness. This can lead to cost savings, improved customer experiences, and faster time to market. Tools & methods: e.g. Lean.
• Organisational Design: Business design may include redesigning the organisational structure, culture, and talent management strategies to support the desired business outcomes.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: It encourages collaboration between different departments and functions within an organisation to break down silos and ensure a holistic approach to solving business challenges. Tools & methods: co-design, Enterprise Design with EDGY.
• Prototyping and Experimentation: Business design often involves creating prototypes or conducting experiments to test new ideas, strategies, and solutions before implementing them on a larger scale.
• Adaptation and Resilience: Business design acknowledges the need for businesses to be adaptable and resilient in the face of changing market conditions, disruptive technologies, and other external factors.
• Sustainability and Social Responsibility: Many business design approaches consider sustainability and social responsibility as integral components of a business’s strategy and operations.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: The use of data and analytics plays a significant role in business design by providing insights for informed decision-making and continuous improvement.

Business design is employed by organisations seeking to remain competitive and innovative in a rapidly changing business environment. It is often used in industries where disruption and adaptation are essential, such as technology, retail, and finance. Design thinking and human-centered design principles are often integrated into business design processes to ensure a focus on the end user and their evolving needs.

Business design from the organisation perspective, is covered by the elements shown in the high-level simplification below. Customers use products and or services, that are produced by the capabilities of the organisation.

• Products and/or services are what is provided to customers.
• Capabilities represent the core operations of the business: what is required for creating and delivering products and/or services, what is needed for executing the business in which the enterprise operates.
• Organisation *) makes products and/or services. There is an organisation behind every product or service.
• Employees belong to organisation structures, and they are acting in capabilities (to be more precise: employees are actors in the processes of capabilities, or employees play roles of certain profession, skils and competencies).

Capabilities represent the core of the business operations and delivery.

Capabilities are the basic building blocks of the business, the business DNA, Capabilities are composable business components from which the business is made of. Capabilities ‘compose together what belongs together’, e.g. processes and assets. Capabilities cover both business and IT aspects. To be more precise, capabilities are realized by processes that require assets (such as applications, data, technologies, devices or facilities etc.). Capabilities combine certain people, processes and assets, that are required so that the enterprise can do what it needs to do according to its purpose. The capability “wireframe pattern” shown below.

*) Organisation can refer to e.g. the whole enterprise, or some of its parts such as business unit, group or team.

Capabilities are composable business components.

Architecture *) in this context, refers to business architecture, which encompasses an enterprise’s operations: how everything works, how the business runs through processes, how assets are utilized, where and when, and how the organisation functions as a whole.

• Business Architecture refers to an enterprise’s operations and how it runs its business. In this context, architecture primarily covers the fundamental aspects of the business: people, processes, and assets, working together as a coherent whole of interconnected behavior and structure. Business architecture encompasses everything relevant to running a business. People, processes, and assets are organised into capabilities, which are carried out by organisational structures to produce products and/or services for customers. In contrast, IT architecture focuses primarily on applications and technologies, while business architecture addresses everything meaningful from a business perspective.

*) Architecture and ‘architecture’. The ‘real’ construction architecture of designing buildings is not the main focus area here, but it can be covered with the Enterprise Design approach and the EDGY Facet Model. The real estate, facility properties and assets are parts of the ‘architecture’ facet of the Facet Model. These elements of enterprise can be modelled with the Asset-element of EDGY. The EDGY Facet Model is flexible and expressive enough so that it can be used in all the use cases of when designing an enterprise. The Asset-element of the Architecture facet can be used for modelling any tangible or intangible object or resource or artifact in and around the enterprise, e.g. device, equipment, tool, instrument, switch, component, communication network, construction, building, location, electric system, lightning, heating-, plumbing- and air-conditioning (HPAC) systems, drains, software, hardware, applications, data etc.

Business architecture covers all that is relevant to run a business, including the alignment of people, processes, and assets to effectively produce and deliver products or services.

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Systems Thinking

“Systems Thinking is an approach of making inferences about behavior by developing an increasingly deep understanding of underlying structure.” So it is more like a learning method of getting insight of the enterprise’s behavior and structure, both are sides of the same coin.

Behavior and Structure. A system consists of both behavior and structure. At a large scale, an enterprise (or organisation) or an ecosystem is a system.

A system, such as an enterprise, exists for a reason. The reason, purpose, the outcome, the system itself, can be associated with the output(s) it produces.

A system shares the same characteristics as each of its parts, making it fractal by nature. An enterprise is a system of (sub)systems that belong together.

In the enterprise context the behavior can be associated with the stories we tell about us, it can be associated with the journeys our customers experience, or it can be associated with operational activities such as processes. Structure can be associated with organisation or assets (of type such as application, data, facility or device).

Behavior and structure in the form of the EDGY base elements (figure below).

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Design Thinking

Enterprise design is heavily based on the Design Thinking approach. The relationship between enterprise design and design thinking is rooted in their shared focus on solving complex problems through a human-centered, co-creative, and iterative process.

Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative problem-solving methodology used to innovate, develop, and refine products, services, or solutions. It emphasizes empathy with users, creativity in generating ideas, and a hands-on approach to prototyping and testing. This process helps teams focus on user needs, generate diverse solutions, and refine ideas based on real-world feedback. The core of Design Thinking is a deep understanding of the needs, behaviors, and motivations of customers (users). Solutions are designed with empathy to ensure they address real user challenges. Design Thinking encourages multidisciplinary andinterdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together diverse perspectives from different fields or areas of expertise to generate more creative and comprehensive solutions.

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EDGY tools

The Enterprise Design language, EDGY, from the Intersection Group, enables people to design well-designed outcomes for better enterprises!

EDGY diagrams can be created with several tools, such as:

• Draw.io (available as Confluence plugin, which enables lots of features for combining diagrams, text and tables)
  • Draw.io net (web browser based tool, Windows, Mac)
  • Draw.io desktop client
• Miro
• QualiWare
• BlueDolphin
• Powerpoint (stencils from EDGY tools)

More to come.

EDGY stencils (+ lots of information) can be found on the Intersection Group’s Enterprise Design with EDGY pages:

• Enterprise Design with EDGY
• EDGY Tools (stencils for Draw.io, PowerPoint etc.)
  • E.g. for Draw.io, just drop stencils XML-file to Draw.io user interface, and you will see this on the tool palette:

References

[1] Intersection Group pages, https://intersection.group

[2] Enterprise Design with EDGY pages, https://enterprise.design/

[3] EDGY language foundations, book, 2023, (available as pdf), link

[4] EDGY 23 Language Foundations, Online course (4 weeks), Milan Guenther & Wolfgang Goebl, link

[5] Enterprise Design Patterns, Intersection Group book, 2020, (available as pdf), link

[6] EDGY 23 product release, launch on 29th March 2023, webinar recording, Milan Guenther & Wolfgang Goebl, link

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— Eero Hosiaisluoma