How to Green-Print Your Platformized Business

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We all have been blueprinting for decades now. From technology stacks to systems architecture to workflow designs to enterprise data lakes, blueprinting has been a done and dusted technique that has successfully combined design skills, technology know-how, and domain/ functional/ process experiences. 

But, Digital has brought in Disruptions. Now the winning businesses have been 'platformizing' themselves rapidly and aggressively, leaving their competitors far away, in these games of speed and agility (flexibility, ease and quickness to change).

Platformizing your traditional businesses and operating models requires fresh, green thinking. Add to this strategic requirement, the need to incorporate the renewed focus on carbon-sensitivity and neutrality, the Green of ESG, for sustainable, ethical, digital businesses. These fundamental changes in business practices have triggered an urgent need to rethink and recreate the very ways businesses are imagined, designed, built and run. Hence, the need to evolve from the well-established blue-printing practices, to fresh, new Greenprinting capabilities. 

What is Greenprinting? How is it different from Blueprinting?

Green-printing is the set of practices that start with the freshly imagined, designed and created current and future states of platformized neo-digital business and operating models, with clean slates and fresh, new approaches. 

These practices aim to be legacy-light and lean, rather than trying to incrementally modify or retrofit all the previous business processes, workflows and practices into the neo-digital models, that were captured and considered in blueprinting. 

Green-printing practices focus on agility and speed, with the core assumption being that all digital businesses are dynamic thanks to the ever-changing hyper-personalized experience delivery requirements. These aspects of rapid change and speed of execution are typically not the focal areas of technology, workflows or systems blueprinting practices used in traditional, non-digital or semi-digital (e.g. 'digital' is just an incremental, additional channel) businesses. 

Blueprinting evolved from static architecture design concepts, e.g. blueprints of buildings and structures. All these physical structures are static in nature and durability-focussed by design, whereas digital businesses must have platform architectures that are dynamic and rapid change-focussed by design. Therefore, blueprinting practices are more legacy-incremental, rather change-averse and static, whereas greenprinting emphasizes on speed and ease of change, in businesses, workflows, systems and experiences/ service outcomes. That's why, greenprinting approaches are much better suited for digital business platforms design and execution, than the existing blueprinting practices. 

Why is Greenprinting a must-do for the winning businesses that are platformizing and reinventing themselves?

Businesses that are winning the digital race, are winning on just one parameter: SPEED. They remember the Key Theme of Digital at every moment of their value delivery and operations/ service models, that truly digital businesses are all about Delivering Hyper-flexible, Hyper-personalized "Digital Business Moments", to millions and billions of customers, every second, every day. 

For example: Uber, Amazon, Lemonade. If all these digital-native mega-disruptors in their own operating industries had to retrofit their unique digital business models and all its underlying technology mesh,  on top some existing logistics provider, retailer or insurance business operational infrastructure, could they ever achieve the speed at which they scaled and disrupted their industries?

The writing on the wall is very clear on this question: NO.  

This is why- the need for speed to win the digital business race, in any and every vertical/ industry, demands a fundamental rethink and reimagination of their operating model and business ops infrastructure, across the processes, workflows, practices. 

How to Greenprint your digital business platforms?

1-2-3 Steps:

1. Green-print your targeted digital business model workflows/ business operational architecture: Design your net new agile business workflows and operations infrastructure (Functions-Workflows-Controls, Role-skill maps for each) first. Start with the simple new digital business plan (i.e. What exactly you're going to offer, and How it is different and disruptive). Build the core operating model, its features and functions, the operations modules that are must-have's- to be able to deliver the targeted features and functionalities of your neo-digital business model.  
2. Green-print your digital technology architecture top-down, from the business operational architecture: Don't try to create/ update existing blueprints of systems and legacy infrastructure. Take a clean slate approach. Start with the digital business model and operations infrastructure greenprints, and identify what digital technologies are best-fit to deliver which of the features and functionalities and workflows, in your neo-digital business greenprint. Take a machine-first, autonomous/ bot-first approach while deciding and designing the technology solutions to deliver the features and services of the new business greenprint. Remember that the speed that's needed to deliver truly digital Business Moments, cannot be achieved in a manual-first or manual-only mode. Human controls, visibility, responsibility and oversight will be necessary, but the actual service operations and delivery need to be as algorithmized as technically feasible. Also, while greenprinting your neo-digital business technology infrastructure, factor in the ESG expectations from the regulators and customers, in your target operating industry. 
3. Green-print your talent infrastructure: Once the business and delivery technology greenprints are all ready, then prepare the human greenprints- the roles and skill-maps necessary to manage, maintain, upgrade and supervise the machine-first delivery channels. This talent infrastructure also needs to be uberized for speed, i.e. on-demand/ temporal need-based pay-per-use sourcing of new talents and skills, from external, internal or partner talent clouds and crowd-sourcing platforms like Kaggle and Topcoder, rather than taking time to upskill/ reskill large chunks of your existing/ available resource pool or workforce. Taking the uberized talent cloud sourcing route, you can also avoid the unsurmountable problem of Change Resistance.