Enterprise Scan
A simple tool to improve understanding and alignment around your Enterprise Design challenge.
The Enterprise Scan consists of nineteen [questions] spanning the Enterprise Design Facets and Intersections. The survey helps to bring all relevant co-creators on board, foster a shared understanding of the enterprise, identify an initial focus, guide collaboration and reduce the time needed to achieve a balanced, holistic and sustainable Enterprise Design.
Why and when to use
Most disciplines focus on a few Enterprise Elements only, using mostly discipline-specific mental model(s) and language. This leads to linguistic confusion and unsolvable arguments about the primacy of one perspective or element over another, which makes it hard for people from different disciplines to collaborate.
The Enterprise Scan facilitates cross-disciplinary discussion and collaboration by using a unifying language that ensures all perspectives and mental models are treated as equally valid. It can be performed individually by an enterprise designer, but for the optimum result, it should be conducted with all co-creators needed to address the design challenge. The Scan methodically guides you through all the Enterprise Elements, which helps foster a holistic understanding of the design challenge you and your team are working on. The scan helps focus and orient your explorations and discussions, keeping you on track and ensuring you don't miss relevant design elements. It facilitates a constructive conversation amongst team members, ensuring team alignment around their design challenge, intended outcomes, and steps to be taken to achieve those outcomes.
The benefits of performing an Enterprise Scan are:
- bringing in people from multiple disciplines to make conflicting interests visible early in the process
- expanding each team member's knowledge of the design challenge from the collective perspective of the entire team.
- the identification of focus areas, helping the team to select the elements most relevant and most in need of further work.
This leads to a more holistic understanding and team alignment around the design challenge, which is a prerequisite for later design, decision-making, and realisation activities.