In today’s hyper-competitive and digitally driven world, transformation is no longer a distant aspiration – its continuity is a business imperative. Organizations are under immense pressure to evolve rapidly, whether in response to market disruption, shifting customer expectations, regulatory demands, or internal inefficiencies.
But transformation without clear direction isn’t a strategy – it’s chaos. Too often, change initiatives start with energy and ambition, only to stall due to misalignment, unclear priorities, and fragmented execution. That’s where a strategic operating model becomes essential.
A strategic operating model provides the structure, clarity, and real-time visibility needed to guide your organization from vision to value – connecting strategy with day-to-day execution, and empowering leaders to make faster, smarter decisions at every level.
“I often ask customers: ‘Do you understand your business operating model?’ And they all say ‘yes’. Then I ask: ‘Can you show it to me?’ That’s when the room usually goes quiet.”
Terry Roach
Founder of Capsifi, now part of Orbus Software
Why transformation fails without a strategic operating model
Even the most well-intentioned transformations can fall flat without the right foundation. When we transform a business, we are actually transforming the operating model. It follows then that without a clear articulation of how a business operates and how all the moving parts are connected, a transformation initiative will be – at best – a guess. Common roadblocks include:
- Poor visibility of bottlenecks and pain points in key value streams
- No traceability to identify root causes of performance issues
- Inability to effectively prioritize optimization opportunities
- Fragmented documentation across knowledge sources, and disconnected tools
- Siloed teams working from different versions of the truth
- Slow, assumption-based decision-making that delays momentum
- Lack of transparency into current operating conditions and readiness
These issues introduce risk, duplication, and misalignment – resulting in initiatives that overpromise and underdeliver. Without a strategic view of the organization, change becomes inefficient at best – and actively harmful at worst.
“Successful transformations realign the organization to a singular vision; failed endeavors typically do not. In short, an organization has a far better chance at succeeding when an operating model – or how an organization creates value – is aligned to strategy.”
So, what is a strategic operating model?
A strategic operating model is a digital blueprint of how your business runs and delivers value. It maps the critical interdependencies across people, processes, capabilities, and technology, giving you an end-to-end view of your operations. As Deloitte defines it:
“An operating model represents how value is created by an organization – and by whom within the organization.”
The strategic operating model acts as a connective tissue between strategy, execution, and transformation delivery, ensuring that every initiative, investment, and innovation directly supports business goals.
Example of a strategic operating model
Consider a model where each part of the business is aligned to the enterprise’s strategy through skilled leadership teams, tailored metrics, investment profiles, and tight coordination across the value chain. A sample operating model might include:
- Centralized strategic planning functions to set unified direction
- Customer-centric functions, combining marketing, account management, and experience teams
- Business lines (e.g., consumer, SMB, enterprise) with end-to-end responsibility
- Product-aligned sales teams working in close collaboration with product leaders
- Dedicated incubators with direct C-suite access to drive innovation
- Service overlays for targeted customer segments (e.g., SMB, enterprise)
- Digital enablement centers of excellence (CoEs) to accelerate tech adoption
- Centralized (often offshore) ops teams for efficiency
- AI and robotics CoEs to automate mid- and back-office tasks
This level of structure ensures consistency, agility, and alignment across the business – enabling transformation that is both scalable and sustainable.
The business value of a strategic operating model
A strategic operating model removes those roadblocks by providing a stable, governed framework that underpins analysis, planning, and execution Here’s how:
Make faster, smarter decisions: The strategic operating model offers a comprehensive view of your operating structure – capturing how business capabilities and their corresponding people, processes, technology, and information interconnect. This consistent model allows leaders to:
- Assess optimization opportunities using structured, contextual insights
- Evaluate risks and returns of proposed business capability uplifts
- Support evidence-based planning and prioritization of transformation scope
- Establish a foundation for downstream scenario or performance analysis via a digital twin overlay
Align business and IT strategy: By documenting the business from a shared structural perspective, the strategic operating model:
- Unites enterprise, business, and solution architects around a single model
- Establishes traceability between business strategy, operational execution, and IT systems
- Provides a stable reference point for aligning investment decisions with strategic goals
Accelerate transformation with confidence: With a strategic operating model, you can anticipate the implications of change before execution. It supports:
- Clear impact mapping across business functions and capabilities
- Scenario modelling when paired with digital twin of an organization (DTO) capabilities
- Greater consistency in execution across multiple initiatives
Improve operational efficiency: A strategic operating model supports powerful optimization tools, including:
- Heatmaps to spot maturity gaps
- Pain points identifying underperformance and bottlenecks
- Ideation tools for designing effective feature enhancements
- Scope prioritization for maximizing investment returns
- Capability-based planning to realign resources effectively
Demonstrate strategic value: A strategic operating model creates a transparent foundation for demonstrating how transformation efforts contribute to enterprise goals. With compelling visualizations, it enables:
- Clear mappings between initiatives and business capabilities
- Better stakeholder engagement by showing alignment with strategic priorities
- Ongoing validation of whether operations support the strategy
Support compliance and risk management: The SOM helps organizations map regulations and risks to the operating structure, providing a reference to:
- Identify control gaps
- Ensure that compliance obligations are covered across processes and systems
- Simplify audit and regulatory reporting
Strategic operating model vs digital twin of the organization (DTO)
A strategic operating model is a structured, static view of how your business operates – capturing the roles, processes, technologies, and capabilities that deliver value. A digital twin of an organization (DTO) builds on this foundation, overlaying the strategic operating model with real-time data and analysis to simulate performance, model scenarios, and guide adaptive decisions.
While DTOs are still emerging, Orbus and Capsifi are helping organizations put the right foundations in place now – ensuring that when the time comes, the value of a DTO can be realized quickly and confidently.
The foundation of strategic transformation
A strategic operating model is not a luxury; for transformation leaders, it’s a necessity. It gives your organization the structural clarity to align teams, the agility to navigate disruption, and the confidence to act with purpose.
With OrbusInfinity’s Strategic Operating Model, powered by Capsifi, you can build this foundation from day one. It’s purpose-built to meet the needs of today’s business and enterprise architects, delivering out-of-the-box value and seamless integration with your strategy, architecture, and execution workflows.
“Our vision is to establish the concept of the ‘operating model-as-an-asset' – a precise and holistic representation of a business operation.
This outcome is a tangible, enduring, dynamic explanation of how the moving parts within a complex enterprise interact, enabling organizations to continuously optimize, innovate, and transform.
It serves as a shared, integrated, conceptual perspective for both business and technology stakeholders, empowering them to make proactive, intelligent decisions for continuous innovation. After all, if you can’t clearly articulate what you do, how can you hope to transform it?”
Terry Roach
Founder of Capsifi, now part of Orbus Software
Ready to connect strategy with execution?
Catch our webinar ‘Unlocking Strategy Execution Through Business Architecture’ to hear from experts Terry Roach, Founder of Capsifi (now part of Orbus Software), William Ulrich, President of Tactical Strategy Group, and Whynde Kuehn, Managing Director of S2E Transformation, to see how a Strategic Operating Model can turn transformation from a buzzword into a business advantage.