Elevator

Enterprises can create new products and services, customize them, and be have services configured for use.

Concerns

When designing enterprises there is a focus on strategies that favor one of these methods (creating, customizing, and configuring) over another. A franchise, for example, may be designed to optimize configuring its services to its customers rather than thinking about customizing parts of its business or creating new products or services.  A centralized company might customize its departments to operate in a cohesive manner, but forget that one can configure an outside service to reduce the load of work, or not take the opportunity to create newer services and products.

Guidance

The designer must balance the between these three methods.  If one is chosen to the exclusion of the other it will be difficult to take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace. If can be inefficient to consider all three as equal. Imagine the franchise owner focusing on creating new services rather than operating as a franchise.  There are benefits tin time and cost to being a franchise and that is the ease of configuration,.

These opportunities can be seen in the long term strategy of the firm.  Aligning-to-the-strategy will help determine when and where these methods make sense.  Creating-the-charter provides a template that simplifies the creating of a new service. Developing-a-pattern-language can turn the creating process into customization reducing the cost to creating a product once that category of the product is determined. Building-the-menu transforms the creating and customization of products and services into configurable units.

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