Building Your Distributed Technology Operating Model

In this chapter, we will be putting pen to paper by walking you through the process of creating an operating model. By the end of this chapter, and as part of building your operating model, you will have covered the following aspects:

• How to assemble your stakeholders and how to group them in relation to your operating model tasks and the tools you can use for stakeholder management
• Practices that you can employ to run workshops and achieve the desired outcomes
• A way to slice and dice a multidimensional task, such as creating a distributed technology operating model

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Step-by-step instructions to build your operating model for the distributed future
• Using open practices to build an open culture and create ownership
• Stakeholder management

Building your operating model for the distributed future

It is common to see organizations implementing different operating models for different environments. That again is mostly due to different change cadences, data sensitivity, and access requirements.

The following different environments can be observed:

• Workplace/modern workplace – for example, Office suites, document storage, knowledge management, and policies
• Backoffice environments such as service management
• Revenue-generating, customer-facing, front-office environments

While the approach provided in this book can be used across all environments, the dimensions examples are geared toward cloud and edge native customer experience (CX), improving revenue-generating services.

In the previous chapters, we have used the term hybrid cloud and edge or hybrid multicloud and edge for clarification purposes. From now on, we will refer to hybrid, multicloud, and edge concerns generally as distributed...

Summary

In this chapter, we provided a comprehensive approach in terms of defining your own distributed technology operating model. We listed many concerns and posed even more questions for you to consider, which you hopefully find suitable for your organization.

You are now equipped not only with open principles and practices that help create a high-performance culture but also with a structure that you can apply to define your organization’s best-fit operating model.

In the coming chapters, we will show you how to create your operating model based on an example, while also covering some of the challenges you can encounter and how you can address them.

As a final note, whatever implementations, tooling, or engineering you do within any of your operating model dimensions, I invite you to consider contributing back to an active open source community. That not only establishes you and your organization as a cloud and edge leader, but it also helps raise the tide and hence...

Further reading

Refer to the following links for more information about the topics that were covered in this chapter:

• McKinsey on operating model iteration: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/how-to-start-building-your-next-generation-operating-model
• Ron Westrum – culture topologies: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1765804/pdf/v013p0ii22.pdf and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1765804/
• Cultural practices – Ron Westrum’s research applied: https://itrevolution.com/articles/westrums-organizational-model-in-tech-orgs/
• Dan Young and hybrid cloud shared responsibility models: https://www.redhat.com/architect/shared-responsibility-model-srm-hybrid-cloud
• Making Work Visible, by Dominica De Grandis: https://itrevolution.com/product/making-work-visible/ and podcast https://podcast.andreasspanner.com
• Team topologies: https://teamtopologies.com/
• The four golden signals of observability...