Companies need to increase revenues, lower costs, and delight customers. Doing that requires reinventing the operating model. A simple way to visualize this operating model is to think of it as having two parts, each requiring companies to adopt major changes in the way they work:
- The first part involves a shift from running uncoordinated efforts within siloes to launching an integrated operational-improvement program organized around customer journeys (the set of interactions a customer has with a company when making a purchase or receiving services) as well as the internal journeys (end-to-end processes inside the company). Examples of customer journeys include a homeowner filing an insurance claim, a cable-TV subscriber signing up for a premium channel, or a shopper looking to buy a gift online. Examples of internal-process journeys include Order-to-Cash or Record-to-Report.
- The second part is a shift from using individual technologies, operations capabilities, and approaches in a piecemeal manner inside siloes to applying them to journeys in combination and in the right sequence to achieve compound impact.
WHY IT MATTERS: digital transformation often requires profound changes to operating models. McKinsey proposes a simple way to derive a target digital operating model by looking at key scenarios that need to be supported with digital. This is especially true when considering new technologies such as 3D printing which not only introduce new capabilities but also have ripple effects into every function in the organization.