The importance of a business model

If your business doesn’t keep afloat, will your IT drag you down? 

So, what kind of changes to your business will affect your IT-department?

Let’s start with the Business Model Canvas and se the impact from an IT-perspective.

Focusing on the right side, we see the differences between different lines of businesses and talk about how it affects your current IT-solutions

Customer segments. Are your customer the retailer who sells your product, or is it the customer who buys the product in the store or the user who uses your product? What about partners and other parties involved in the sales process?

In order to be flexible, your CRM system must be able to handle different roles both now and in the future instead of hardcoding a different tables in the database.

Very closely to the customer is the value proposition, i.e. the product or service that he or she gets in one way or another. Today, in order to be competitive, you must be able to bundle products and services into offerings with different price-models.

The channel perspective is also interesting from an IT-standpoint. Your IT should be able to support all products to all customers regardless of channel. Even if it’s a complex personal sales effort that is behind the deal, you as a customer should be able monitor the sales and delivery process in order to improve your operational excellence.

This is the end to stovepipe systems that only supports selling, delivery and invoicing of a few products or a product category.

So what you need is one customer master data system and one product master data system that support multiple channels. These two systems must also be able to handle different roles for customers, as well as a combination of products and services for more complex offerings and pricing.

In addition to single customer and product systems, the invoicing and payment must be handled in such a way that the customer only has one account or one invoice if he or she wants this. The invoice and payment process must also support different roles of customers, with enough detailed information.

One system fits all needs is more or less a utopia, so what is needed a number of software packages that are able to integrate towards common systems.

This article was first published internally within Capgemini in Swedish Architecture Community newsletter, June 2013.