Enterprise Design with EDGY

Together with our core team, workstreams and other practitioners from various disciplines, we develop EDGY: an Open Source tool for collaborative Enterprise Design. This tool covers the essential activities needed to create better enterprises: clarifying and exploring challenges, understanding the current configuration of enterprise elements and collaboratively charting potential futures.

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Why a shared Open Source tool?

We never really understand each other, do we? The process architect ignored your well-researched customer journey map. The executive couldn't relate to your strategic product roadmap. The organisation designer failed to see the impact of that messed up application architecture you found. If this sounds familiar, EDGY is for you. Introducing a simple but powerful graphical language everybody can understand and relate to, EDGY enables designers, architects and change makers to co-design a coherent enterprise by identifying the most impactful perspectives and translating between them. Well-defined, reusable Enterprise Elements turn a complex enterprise into a set of interconnected parts, ready to be designed, mapped and transformed. We all love tools. It's time to make them talk to each other.

Enterprise Design Facets

Facets provide useful lenses to understand why an enterprise exists, what it is supposed to deliver to whom, and how all of this is supposed to work. Each Facet represents a fundamental big picture question behind an enterprise as your ambitious entrepreneurial project:

• What is your enterprise all about? What is its story? Who are the people behind it? What is their motivation?
  This is the Identity of our enterprise; what it stands for and the reason for its existence, as expressed in mission and purpose, culture and community.
• What will you actually provide to people? What are you offering? How is what you offer going to change people’s lives?
  This is the Experience our enterprise aims to create for customers and others, and subject to customer or employee experience and experience design efforts.
• What do you need to realise that? What are the parts that make it work? How are those parts related? What can you achieve with them?
  This is the Architecture that holds our enterprise together, and part of enterprise and business architecture, business analysis and operating model design.

In the past, these questions have been treated separately by specialist functions and disciplines, leading to incoherent, siloed, underperforming enterprises. Elements like a sound strategy, a well performing operating model, or a winning product design are simply impossible to get right if there is no shared understanding of the whole enterprise and no coherence between the concepts of today's siloed disciplines.

These universal facets of Identity, Experience and Architecture apply to all enterprises: large companies, startups, public institutions, or NGOs.

Intersections

Intersections are the overlap between the Facets where you will find questions that are "on the edge" of particular viewpoints and corresponding disciplines present in the enterprise. The intersections (organisation, product, brand) allow us to build integrated perspectives for better conversations, models and joint decision making, they are the connectors between the concepts of today's isolated disciplines.

• How do we organise ourselves as a team? How do we make decisions together and distribute responsibilities?
  This is our Organisation at the intersection of Identity and Architecture, and its design & development, leadership, collaboration and ways of working.
• What do we make and offer to people? What is the result of our work and what is the value it creates for people?
  This is our Product at the intersection of Architecture and Experience, subject to product design and strategy, business models and service design.
• How are we being perceived? What is our reputation and image when people are in touch with us or our offerings?
  This is our Brand at the intersection of Experience and Identity, and subject to branding and marketing, internal and external communications

Enterprise Elements

At the heart of Enterprise Design is the activity of mapping and describing enterprises and their (potential) evolution, in a quest of revealing insight and co-creating a meaningful future. Using the Enterprise Design Facets and their Intersections as a navigation aid, EDGY allows practitioners to chart the Enterprise Elements that make the enterprise. This conceptual model allows us to describe them and generate models and maps to depict and trace their interplay, and express a desired future Enterprise Design.

Get started with EDGY

The EDGY documentation is available for free on the web. There are several tools and templates, by Intersection Group and our partners, most of them free of charge.

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