DBOs 101 or “What Color is Your DBO?”

For each of us going from day to day within our own particular realities, we experience a world in which objects exist and each of them have varying degrees of same and/or differing properties.  These properties are what give them identity.  Facts are realities because they don't require interpretation by anyone for validation.  Perceptions, on the other hand, are facts about the world flavored by our feelings and thoughts - the stuff of our realities.

In turn, our perceptions affect our realities and areas of influence.  The point is that to perceive and relate to things that we have in our minds; we all must have had some experience that corresponds to our basic understanding of these things.  This in turn, is why two people can come away from a meeting with very different interpretations.  The challenge then is to normalize our mutual understandings.  Doing this we can then come to a common sense approach to doing business with full understanding of expectations and responsibilities.  This is a where DBOs will prove extremely effective - communications.

What makes any business any better than any other?  Don't know and can't tell you.  What I can tell you is what it will take to better organize your business regardless of what it is you do.  The secret to this is "Don't organize everybody the same way."  Pure and simple.

What I will try to do now is tell you what, why, how, who you do it with and who you do it for.  Before dealing with that though, it's a sure thing that you use some outside services for some or part of your process to bring what it is you do to market.  Even if it's something as basic as stopping off at a Postal Annex or Mail Boxes Etc. to mail a package.  There's some basic reason why you do this whether it's more convenient or you just happened to be in the neighborhood.  You used their services or products, and guess what? -- You didn't have to organize them in order to get the task done did you?  In this exchange you exercised a level of choice, drew up a contract and then let the business take its course.  You told it what you wanted.  You didn't tell them how to do it - nor would then have listened to you in that instance in any event.  You then monitored the items of the contract to make sure you got what you paid for, but otherwise you had other and better things to do than to mess with their process.

Surprise.  This is exactly what you should do with your company.

To begin the process, a list of 13 activities that every business needs to do in order to call itself a business is provided.  All businesses do them one way or another.

• Research - capture, analyze and evaluate
• Assess - valuate, project, codify and decide
• Invent - design, create, convert/modify and assimilate
• Manufacture - build, assemble, mix/merge, disassemble/decompose and test
• Market - entice, educate, sell, channel and present
• Support - maintain, repair and clean
• House - store and archive
• Manage - plan, catalyze, manage, track, count, account and compute
• Remove - destroy and deconstruct
• Communicate - communicate and document
• Deliver - dispense, place and transport
• Acquire - procure and exchange

Next, figure out which of these you want to do and which you don't.  If you want to make things but hate to sell them, look for someone else to Market.  If you don't want to make sure they stay as good as new, and then look for Support.  Remember that the decision can be reversed later on, so don't get hung-up on it.  You can start at either extreme - totally in-house or totally outsourced - and move towards the middle as things progress.

If everything goes well: the group(s) will survive; get better at what they do; get more contracts; and life will go on.  If they don't, then others will get the contract and they will die.   Either way they will change when they need to and organize as they need to and you will let them do it.  After all, you need their work and they need your money.

In terms of putting this all into an understandable context more easily digestible, a formalism was developed - the Dynamic Business Object.

So what does this have to do with business organization? I want you to start treating your business for what it is - a framework on which you have hung your business objects. The framework part is of course, both the easiest and the hardest part. It's easy, because many successful frameworks already exist as retail sales, manufacturing, highway construction, for example. A whole bunch of people have been working very hard for a long time to perfect these frameworks for you. It's hard, because most of these frameworks haven't been architected very well. They've mostly evolved to where they are, and quite frankly could use a good going over,

If you come up with a good framework, most of your work is done.  Many companies have good frameworks. In fact, it's probably the only thing that keeps them alive.  They can make stupid decisions, hire rotten managers, or suffer severe losses, but they still make it through to the next quarter with their shares intact. A bad framework and the company would have collapsed immediately. But a good framework by itself isn't enough.  You must fill it with the proper business objects.

Remember those 13 activities I told you every business must do to be a business?  Those are the basis of business objects.  Each activity must have a spot in your framework. You don't need to perform them yourself, you could hire them out, but they must be present and accounted for.  Is each of them a business object?  No, not necessarily.  They can be dealt with many different ways. For example, you could form a business object called RESEARCH and give it the charter to capture, analyze and evaluate everything and anything.  You could base another object, MARKET RESEARCH, and on it, give the charter to perform research only as it pertains to the marketing of a product.  MARKET RESEARCH would have all the abilities of RESEARCH, but would be further refined to apply only to a certain area of research.

You must allow a business object to be dynamic, It must be able to create, grow, shrink, and die if need be, without your butting in, Just as your business needs to be able to change to meet new challenges, so does a business object. If your business needs a new service, see if one of the business objects can supply it. If not, can one of them modify itself to supply it? This might just lead to a new product or service that your company could offer to others, you may decide to outsource something you do.  Do you still need the business object that was performing that service? It may depend on other services the business object was supplying or could supply

You need to stay loose in this new world. You need dynamic business objects.