Built for Human-Scale Digital Enterprises
The Enterprise Operating Model is designed for Human-Scale Digital Enterprises: organizations that continuously develop, operate, and evolve digital products and services while remaining small enough for relationships, trust, and shared understanding to scale effectively as the organization grows.
In practice, this typically corresponds to approximately 5 to 1,500 engaged people, inspired by Dunbar’s research on social relationships.
As organizations grow, the way they operate often becomes dependent on local practices, individual expertise, and organizational craftsmanship. The Enterprise Operating Model addresses this by engineering how the enterprise operates, making effective ways of working explicit, repeatable, and continuously improvable.
Why Digital
The focus on digital products and services is deliberate.
Unlike physical products and services, digital products can be reproduced, distributed, and evolved at negligible marginal cost and with few physical constraints. There is no factory capacity, material supply, transportation network, or physical production process standing between an idea and its realization. As a result, the knowledge, judgment, creativity, and capabilities of the people within the enterprise can be converted into outcomes with unusually little friction.
When physical constraints are reduced, organizational capability becomes a primary constraint on what the enterprise can achieve. How effectively people understand problems, make decisions, collaborate, design, build, and learn translates directly into differences in speed, quality, adaptability, and ultimately business performance.
This makes the way the enterprise operates particularly consequential. The Enterprise Operating Model therefore focuses on engineering the organizational system through which human capability is converted into reliable, repeatable, and continuously improvable organizational performance.
Related Thinking
The model builds on positions I have worked out in the open: that enterprises are systems too and can be designed as such, that you should design your operating model or it will design you, and that positions, roles, and capabilities are three different things that organizations routinely conflate.
The architectural metaphor that dominates enterprise design has real limits, which is why I went looking for better ones, and why one mode and five types is where I landed on organizing teams.
Team sizing runs through much of it. The science of team size covers why too big and too small both break performance, right-sizing your teams covers what to do once you have a size problem, and working in pairs covers the structure underneath the team itself. Structure does not carry it alone, though. Intrinsic motivation is what decides whether any of it holds.
Still Developing
The model is not complete. The intent is for it to stabilize as it matures rather than keep changing indefinitely, but it is not there yet. It develops alongside the organizations that adopt it. Real adoption surfaces what it needs next, and early adopters get a more capable foundation with each iteration.
Made operational, it becomes the EO Platform. Put to work inside an organization, it becomes Enterprise Architect (Interim) or EO Team Enablement. Where the model itself does not quite fit an organization’s structure or constraints, that is EO Model Custom Adaptation.
The model is being built in the open. If this resonates, follow along via RSS as the thinking develops, or get in touch if you want to be involved from the beginning, whether as an early partner, a contributor to the model’s direction, or simply someone who wants to help shape what this becomes before it is finished.