Organizations are a Jungle of Journeys

The simple idea of selling a product or a service for a price to make a profit is still the underpinning of most organizations. Still, it's gotten more sophisticated and intertwined than even five years ago. Many organizations participate in broader contexts like value and supply chains while dealing with dynamic change and emerging scenarios are driven by geopolitical or environmental trends/events. For continued organizational health, organizations will need to understand the journeys that exist and interact in their footprint of impact, learn the levers that can adapt their jungle to changing and in some cases, practice the response to the emergent conditions of "NOW." Listed below are the typical journeys that organizations need to participate in or manage in no particular order of importance:

Customer Journeys

The journey that a customer takes is a crucial journey to manage as it defines your organization's contribution to that journey that leaves an indelible memory of good or bad for all steps involved. It is essential to understand the customer's real journey, not just where a customer might touch your organization. Getting customers to be attracted and stay loyal to your organization depends significantly on your understanding of their real journey, not just the optimization or automation inside of your organization for cost savings. 

Work Journeys

Work arrives, gets assigned and moves through your organization, and is the key for cost and timing outcomes. Understanding where work gets stuck, deep in the innards of your organization, is essential for cost optimization and customer satisfaction improvements. It could be a competency skill deficiency, a data deficiency, an overburdened shared resource, or just a situation never contemplated for in the work design. These are some of the thickest vines in the jungle.

Employee Journeys

Employees are some of the most critical and expensive resources an organization manages. Making sure their time is optimized and used correctly is crucial for resource leverage with optimization reasons. Concurrent with employee participation with various journeys, they must be augmented and have enhanced/expanded skills. Assistance may occur through bot augmentation or knowledge turbocharging, but investment in employees is the often forgotten sub-journey. Lack of investment in employees is an easy way to lose in the long term.

Product/Service Journeys

Every product or service must be designed with the greatest of care and the best knowledge/ skills available. The journey from design to production should be planned, managed, built, and tested with the greatest of attention as they are often the competitive differentiator along with the customer journey and experience. Organizations tend to be very good at these kinds of journeys except when they become out of touch with trends or their customers, partners, and employees. 

Infrastructure Journeys

Organizations have to build and establish the infrastructure necessary to support the business. Service software has to run somewhere and needs to be built/maintained and supported by infrastructural software. These are part of the infrastructure that must be carefully and made promptly and retired if necessary as time progresses. The support will need to be built, maintained, or outsourced to other organizations if it is a product. Managing the portfolio of infrastructure during the building and maintenance periods are journeys to manage.  

Capital/Funds Journeys

Organizations are usually very concerned with money, how it is raised, how it's used, and what becomes of excesses or losses. While these journeys are better established and repeatable, they often try to dictate the level of investment in the other journeys. Visionary management will satisfy short term results expectations along with building for the future, thus fund incrementally in various journeys. Having a proper governance journey or two is essential for the investors. 

Community Journeys

All organizations participating in physical and logical communities that can affect them positively or negatively, the reputation and the operation of an organization. As organizations join in legal frameworks, the best are necessary to plan and execute the journeys that fit those contexts. The results will affect the kind of outside direct or indirect governance for organizations and may set the policies or rules for other remarkable journeys or processes.  

Net: Net:

Each journey must be thought through and managed collectively and individually. Traditionally only portions of individual journeys participated in digital optimization or automation. For organizations to thrive, these journeys need to be served digitally from one end to another. The interaction between these journeys will show where organizational friction will occur over time. Also, the interaction within these journeys must be orchestrated in the context of continuous foresight with emerging expected and unexpected scenarios.

The good news is that new digital business platforms(DBPs) are emerging to integrate digital functions to service journeys better. Some will help with process fabrics; others will manage the intelligence well for better decisions, or reaction/guidance; some will manage data integration, and still, others will work at the edge to manage emergence.