From Start-up to Enduring Enterprise - The DPBoK Emergence Model
Channel: The Open Group
Date: 31/08/2020

An overview of the Emergence Model, based on the Digital Practitioners Body of Knowledge (DPBoK) - the bare minimum requirement for delivering digital value.

Founder: A scenario of one or two founders of a start-up, or a Research & Development team with high autonomy in a larger organization

Team: The start-up or product prototype has met with some success and is now supported by a team.

Team of Teams: As the team-based company grows, it reaches a crisis point in scaling the digital product. One team can no longer cope as a single unit with the increasing complexity an operational demands.

Enduring Enterprise: The organization becomes one of the larger and more complex operations.  There are thousands of employees, with a wide variety of responsibilities. Digital is central to market-facing products and in back-office operations.

How do you do this?  By placing emphasis on different elements of your structure and processes at each stage to maintain focus on: 
- customer needs
- products that fulfill those needs
- remaining lean

Founder Stage
- Digital Value is derived from minimum viable product, with focus on testing, leaning and pivoting in accordance with the results. 
- Infrastructure clearly is required, but this is kept to a minimum viable platform, and infrastructure-as-code, to allow maximum flexibility at the lowest cost point.
- Applications are continually integrated, based on test-driven delivery, enabling fast-feedback so as to be to respond as quickly as possible.

Teams
- Product Management: Taking a customer experience, outcome-based, story-led approach with high-bandwidth collaboration across specialties.
- Work Management: Limit the work in progress to maintain a focus with a "keep it light" touch.
- Operations: Focus on what matters to the customer (interrupt-driven), moving from accountability to blameless environment.

Team of Teams
- Culture & Organization: Adapt and maintain a learning, inquiring culture, with a "let's go and see" ethos.
- Investment: Maintain or move investment to focus on product over project, and from annual to continuously metered.
- Coordination: Focus on adaptive rather than defined processes, and effectiveness rather
than efficiency

Enduring Enterprise
- Governance & Strategy: Automating as much as possible, maintain consistency and auditability, and avoid heavyweight approaches that risk increase of value loss.
- Information: Maintain meaning with domain driven designs, and exploit the use of analytics.
- Architecture: Use appropriate enterprise architecture methods to minimize and eliminate technical debt to stay relevant and maintain competitiveness.

Based on the Emergence Model from the Digital Practitioners Body of Knowledge (DPBoK): https://publications.opengroup.org/c196

For more information, visit: www.opengroup.org/DigitalEnterprise