Pattern: Anisotropically Decentralized Organization (ADO)

9.2.1 Business Concern to Be Addressed by the Pattern

Suppose an organization is growing and decentralizing by creating branch offices (BOs) at various locations to serve more customers (e.g., following a re-design of the business model). The BOs have different capacities, as they have different levels of staffing, different availabilities of skills, and different levels of competencies. At the same time, all BOs have to carry out similar core business processes, so the Central Office (CO) should provide adequate support to the BOs.¹

1Alternatively, the other way around, a shared service center is established to support already existing branch offices that were previously fully autonomous.

From an information technology (IT) support perspective, it is practically impossible to automate the activities of such an organization since the work may be dynamically distributed between the CO and BOs; thus, the users cannot provide up-front the full specifications of all variations. The pattern shows how to structure the lower-level business architecture of such a distributed organization (primarily by aligning its overall business processes with the individual capabilities at each business location) to overcome this IT bottleneck.

9.2.2 Logic of the Pattern

This pattern is intended to present formally a business activity as a limited set of combinations of coordinated work between the BOs and the CO.

It is considered that any business activity can be decomposed into four logical steps [similar to the PDCA cycle (Deming1986)] connected as shown in Fig.9.1:

1. PLAN: preparation for the work to be done;

2. DO: execution of an indivisible unit of work;

3. VALIDATE: checking the correctness and quality of the work carried out;

4. REFLECT (or “re-factor”): analysis of the work experience and results to see whether it is useful to propose or implement any improvements for future work.

In a decentralized organization, the participants in each step can vary and may comprise branch office (“B”) and/or central office (“C”) resources. For example, if a particular BO has no experience with the procurement of a particular type of service, then that step should be carried out by the CO. It is assumed that CO resources are capable of carrying out all activities (which includes also any step within any activity).

The possible combinations of participants in a step are:

• C—the step is carried out fully at the CO (i.e., there is no delegation)

• B—the step is carried out fully at a BO (i.e., there is complete delegation)

• BC—the step is carried out at a BO with some post-control by the CO to make sure that it has been done correctly

• CB—the step is carried out at a BO with some pre-advice by the CO to make sure that it will be done correctly

• CBC—the step is carried out at a BO with pre-advice and post-control by the CO

Fig. 9.1 Simple process for any business activity [see OMG (2011) for the BPMN notation]

Only certain of these combinations are actually applicable in each of the four steps:

• PLAN—C, B, BC, CB, CBC (although informal consultations between BOs and the CO resources are always possible, the last three combinations make consultations between the BO and CO explicit and mandatory);

• DO—C, B (the work can be carried out only at a BO or the CO);

• CHECK—C, B, BC (the check can be carried out only after the actual work has been completed; results of the check may be validated by the CO [thus the combination “BC”]);

• REFLECT—C, B, BC (reflection can be carried out only after the actual work has been completed; improvement ideas from a BO may be validated by the CO [thus the combination “BC”]).

These combinations are not independent, and they are combined in a few variants which represent the degrees of decentralization of a particular activity at a particular BO (see Table9.1).

These variants may also be considered as a BO’s “capability maturity level”:

• none (level 0)

Level PLAN DO CHECK REFLECT Description

0 C C C C No BO capabilities are available for a

particular activity

1 C B C C The BO has some technical capabilities for

a particular activity

2 CBC

or BC

B BC C The BO has some management and

technical capability but the staff members need some proactive guidance to carry out a particular activity

3 B B BC C The BO has some management and

technical capabilities but the staff members need some reactive guidance to carry out a particular activity

4 B B B BC The BO has sufficient management and

technical capabilities to carry out a particular activity except for reflection

5 B B B B The BO has sufficient management and

technical capabilities to carry out a particular activity without guidance or technical assistance, and it is capable of continual improvement/optimization via reflection

The crux is how to choose the best variant that should be applied for a particular activity in a particular process instance within a particular BO to be carried out by a particular staff member. The choice can be made using some kind of business decision management (BDM) which

• “knows” processes, activities, and local specifics,

• traces the actual skills and performance of staff members, and

• estimates different risk factors (political, financial, etc.) and degrees of compliance.

Such a business decision management should be systematically consulted

“between” normal activities, since some characteristics of a particular process (e.g., complexity and urgency) may change over time. To some extent, it is responsible for overall planning, control, and guidance during the course of execu-tion of normal activities, and measurement of outcomes. The business decision management should be carried out by central resources, as it should have access to enterprise-wide knowledge.

The business decision management may work together with the DAM pattern described in Sect.9.4.

9.2.3 Implications of the Pattern

The capability maturity level of a particular BO to carry out efficiently and effectively a particular activity depends on many objective and subjective factors.

Enterprise-wide business processes, their activities, and BO locations (thus local cultures) may be considered relatively static entities.²By contrast, there is greater variance with staff members—they can be hired, temporarily contracted, relocated, trained, and guided very quickly. Another variable factor is the provision of adequate supporting tools (HR services, IT environment, logistics, linguistic services, and general services) to staff. Among those, the IT environment should be sufficiently flexible to provide for a BO standard configuration as well as some optional extensions on demand. The latter may improve the maturity level by implementing localized versions of standard processes.

Another factor is the ability to work fully electronically (digitally) within the organization. This implies that staff members are able to exchange in electronic form both information (e.g., data, documents) and actions (e.g., signing an elec-tronic document with an elecelec-tronic signature).

2This is not meant to infer that these factors cannot be changed to increase the capability maturity level (see, e.g., Chap.7for cultural design).

The following topologies can be considered:

• each BO can exchange data and documents with the CO (star communication);

• the CO and all BOs can exchange data and documents (network communication);

• staff members can carry out some types of work from outside offices having a limited mobile communication;

• staff members can carry out all types of work from outside offices having full mobile communication.

As there are many factors that affect the capabilities of a particular BO, it is important to accept that not all BOs will be able to “jump” immediately to the top capability maturity level—they will advance at their own pace.

9.2.4 Examples of the Pattern

The ADO pattern was inspired by the decentralization of an international financial organization known to the author. Historically this organization was very centralized; to get closer to its customers, the organization has started to transfer staff to field offices.

Another example is the introduction of e-government services at local (commu-nal and regio(commu-nal) levels. As some local administrations are less advanced and less capable than other ones, the central administration must support the former during some transition period.

9.3 Pattern: Customer eXperience As A Process (CXAAP)