I seem to be getting into modeling a lot lately. Last week in my post, Business Basics, I offered up a structural model of business. Today I am looking at one layer of that pyramid, Effective Operations. The bulk of a business is operations, everything else is essentially set-up or outcomes.

So if we expand the operations layer, here is what it looks like (to me).

• Develop Offering - The creation of your actual product or service. This is inclusive of R&D and Production.
• Educate - With your offering in hand, you have to figure out how to tell potential customers what it is, in a way that they will want to consider “paying” for it.
• Create Decision Space - This is the time after you have the potential customer’s attention and before they have decided to plunk down their hard earned coin. It is also the mechanism by which you can assist them effectively gather the information they need to make their decision.
• Transaction - The (now) customer puts down the cash and you provide the value (hopefully).
• Maintain Connection - Once you have engaged the customer, how do you keep their attention?

So what is with all of this modeling?

I want to use these models to more effectively show how, and where, Relationship Technology can best be used to improve business outcomes. This is my attempt to overcome the problem I see in most pitches for using “social media” for business, there is no solid business framework upon which claims of value are made; just bold claims that “social media is good marketing” or “enterprise 2.0 will improve collaboration” without any context or explaination of the why or how.

I want to use these models to overcome that problem.