How to Platform-ize existing Processes
Applying Platform Design to rethink processes, transforming organizations into learning systems
One thing we always tell about platform design thinking is that it’s a new and different way to look at things, a sort of new lens. We consider platform thinking as a modern, contemporary and contextual way to look at organizations, strategy and processes, with new design capabilities.
Two essential things should be recognized as pillars of platform design thinking.
The first is acknowledging the continuously disrupted nature of contemporary markets and society: a phenomenon mainly due to the countless, increasingly fast, technological transformations we’re living (first it was social media, then cloud, now machine learning,…). These transformation, as a consequence, create a continuous performance pressure hovering on all the entities that participate in ecosystems: people loosing jobs to robots, organizations hitting the limitations of their bureaucratic structures and failing to embrace digitization and compete, and more.
The second thing to acknowledge is that these technology revolutions are also driving the fall of coordination cost, in parallel with bringing new and growing potential at the periphery of systems: people now can coordinate easily, create new knowledge or artifacts, even manufacture things much more easily on their desktops.
The potential is growing at the edge of systems.
All this calls for new strategies: interconnect, nurture relationships, enable self organization and self development.
Acknowledging this, and designing for this, is platform design thinking.
We can say that platform thinking is designing and evolving the two essential engines of platform dynamics: a set of well designed contexts-channels where relationships in the (eco)system can thrive — and value units can be exchanged (something that we call the Transactions Engine)— and a set of services that the platform owners provides to support the continuous evolution of participants, to help them evolve and thrive in an always changing landscape, the so-called Learning Engine.
Sometimes this evolution helps peer producers — sporadically interacting with the platform — transform into what we call partners — more strategically linked, and professionalized. Other times the evolution generally helps all participants in a platform strategy to get new opportunities they couldn’t even imagine before joining.
When this happens — when our platform strategy is transformative for participants — our platform have some good options to thrive.
Platform-izing a process
We usually welcome the possibility to apply platform thinking on organizations and processes since the two key factors we mentioned, continuous disruption and the fall of coordination cost due to a pervasive technological transformation (made of smartphones, free and open source software, platforms as a service, and more), are affecting and permeating all the spaces of our economic relationships: the inside of organizations is not safe from transformation. Once you realize that there’s no barrier defending the inside of organizations from current techno social trend you wonder: why to leave the platform opportunity just for the ….outside?
Applying platform thinking to existing processes can help organizations:
- Explore how to improve and extend the outcomes of the process itself
- Align the mission of the process with existing incentives and motivations in the entities participating in the process (that should be both “internal” and “external”)
- Improve the quality of the process outputs thanks to the evolutive impact we can have on participating entities
Organizational Learning
As we have explored already in the past, platform thinking can help us design organizations that learn. The nature of platforms makes them a very powerful learning context for participants. Participants are pushed to learn both individually (to compete, accumulate reputation, emerge from the crowd) and in direct relationships (for example through coaching, mentoring and tutoring processes that always have crucial role in supporting participants evolution).
Beyond participants’ learning, platform thinking also provides us with a potential approach to organizational learning: as a “platform organization”, the organization needs to put in place a governance process –inclusive enough to encompass all the participants that create value — that has the aim of evolving all the elements of the platform strategy, for example the channel design, the support services shape and so forth.
When platform-izing a process we can then focus our attention on ensuring that:
- the channels and contexts we design are performing well in connecting the entities and enabling transactions for all roles that can be played around the process
- the support services we provide are used by entities involved in the process and the entities are evolving their capabilities and performances thanks to them
If these metrics don’t show an optimal functioning of the process-platform we can therefore intervene to change the design — imagining for example new onboarding services, redesigning how a context-channel (a software tool, a contract, an event…) works, and more.
The processes that are more subject to platform-ization are normally those that include both internal and external entities. Examples of processes in your organization you may want to platform-ize could include:
- Human Resources development
- Supply Chain & Procurement
- Open Innovation
- Customer Support
- Sales…
Let’s now look into a practical way to apply platform thinking to an existing process — by using the Platform Design Toolkit.
A practical example in using Platform Design Toolkit to rethink an existing project as a platform
First thing we need to do when rethinking processes as platforms is to understand the scope of our work: what is the process-vision we want to achieve? What is the purpose of the process itself?
Let’s use an example: let’s say we work with a fictional company called CONSULTIA, which is doing engineering consulting with hi-tech customers, and let’s say we choose the business development and sales process.
As an example, the process-vision we may want to achieve with our process is in this case:
“To allow the best creative minds in the company to propose credible projects that fit customers’ challenges and allow customers buy with no fears”
The next step in your platform-izing process is that of mapping the process ecosystem: start from the process as it is today and try to identify both the internal and external entities. As an example in the Business development and sales process for CONSULTIA we have at least three roles we want to map: one external to the organization, the Customer Buyer, and two internal, the Business Manager and the Pre-Sales Consultant.
We can consider the Pre-Sales consultant as a peer producer, just because normally, in this kind of companies the consultants involvement in pre-sales is sporadic and based on their specific competences, on single specific projects: if I’m an expert consultant in naval electronics I’ll be mostly engaged in pre-sales in projects related to this engineering context, when the opportunity arises.
Now, what to do after ecosystem mapping? One key step would be to understand the entities’ context at best: as you may remember we recently presented a user research tool that is perfect for this, the Entity Portrait (now also integrated in our Toolkit download).
Here’s an example of how an entity portrait for the CONSULTIA Business Manager would look like:
What to do next? Normally our Platform design practice would call for the analysis of the participants’ potential to exchange through the Motivations Matrix. On the other hand, to analyze an existing process, you could also go straight to tracking the existing transactions with the Transactions Board: normally, we use the motivations matrix to look for the potential in the ecosystem and later formalize this in a series of hypothetical transactions.
When a process is existing, by the way, you may know already the transactions that are happening in the system and choose to focus on them. Here’s an example of the transactions that we could track in the Business development and sales process for CONSULTIA:
For those familiar with the world of consulting this is quite a simple process to identify: a customer expresses a need — normally intercepted by the Business Manager — then the manager relies on technical experts, consultants, to formulate a technical solution proposal and this proposal gets qualified and evaluated by the customer until…acquisition.
Even if — for the sake of simplicity — in this example — we didn’t apply motivational analysis to the entities involved in the process (going right to the model of existing transactions), this type of analysis can give you strong insights regarding how to increase the outcomes of the process, by looking at any unexpressed exchange potential between parties.
After having identified the whole set of transactions, it will be the moment for you to focus on the learning engine. Being the object of the analysis an existing process, we want to figure out if the organization is already producing the support services needed to help the ecosystem evolve, and how this set of existing services can be somehow complemented.
The objective of the learning engine is to help participants (in the process) grow their capabilities within time, achieving their objectives more easily, potentially eventually evolving into different and more capable roles within time.
As an example, in our CONSULTIA case the Experience Learning canvas — and the learning engine — could look a bit like this:
As you can see from the canvas, a healthy learning engine for CONSULTIA business development process, should definitely care about helping Consultants (C) have the opportunity, within time, to evolve and become Pre-sales consultants (PC), being involved in an actual customer proposal.
The same healty learning engine should then allow pre-sales consultants, that succesfully developed a customer proposal, to accumulate reputation — maybe related to a specific topic of expertise — and be easily findable from all the business managers dealing with customer opportunities related to their area of expertise.
In the end, pre-sales consultants that demonstrate strong capabilities could even evolve into business managers themselves, and leverage on their network of relationships with other consultants and experts.
Applying Organizational intelligence
As we anticipated before, beyond caring about participants’ learning, platform-organizations also need to learn at the organizational level: the organization’s governance process needs to identify the key metrics regarding the efficacy of channels and support services and carefully evolve them so that these metrics are maximized. The key questions to answer are:
- what are the key metrics we are interested in measuring, regarding transactions?
- what are the key metrics we want to measure regarding support services for learning and improvement?
The identification of metrics should be done by merging the process vision elements with the current transactions and with the support services making up the learning engine. In the case of the CONSULTIA, an example series of key process metrics could then be:
- Number of proposals produced by the Pre-Sales consultant
- Number of customers conversions (sales)
- Number of active Pre-sales consultants (onboarded)
- Number of active Pre-sales consultants evolving into junior Business Manager role
Your role as a platform-process designer would be then to monitor these metrics and rely on an inclusive governance process to evolve the transaction and learning engine, with the aim of improving the process metrics, to eventually meet your process-vision.
Remember that Platform design thinking is a way to look at things, and that everything can be designed as a Platform. Platform design could be easily applied to existing processes as well.
This example and post was basically extracted from the preparation of a 4 hours Masterclass we’re giving in Paris on July the 7th, for the OuiShare Fest 2017.
Remember that Platform design thinking is a way to look at things, and that everything can be designed as a Platform.
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