Before we define BizOps, it’s helpful to define “Business Operations.” Wikipedia sums it up as “the execution of your business plan: the process of getting your product made, delivering it to customers, and getting paid.”
As Lee Iacocca said, “In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product and profits. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.”
So if that’s business operations, what is BizOps?
BizOps is the digital transformation of your business plan.
As noted by Gartner in 2014, companies must digitally transform their business operations. As companies create and expand their digital presence, they need to behave more like digital-native software companies. They need to unify data and processes, and coordinate and measure all of the moving parts that make up a modern, omnichannel customer experience.
Who usually gets tasked with managing the end-to-end customer journey? It differs at every organization, and often departmental silos get in the way of delivering an optimized, personalized, real-time experience.
BizOps teams break down those barriers between marketing, sales, product, customer success, and finance to align all those team’s processes on the customer journey. They measure success at the level of complex business entities like products, customers, and partners, rather than with functional metrics like leads, tickets, or opportunities.
Who does BizOps?
Creating standalone BizOps teams with their own budgets and developers has only been possible for companies with substantial funding and engineering resources. This creates a huge competitive advantage: It allows you to launch products or enter a new market at lightning speed, creating full lifecycle experiences from scratch.
Speed to market is a core differentiator in the modern business world. That’s why building out a BizOps function has been championed by leading tech companies like LinkedIn, NerdWallet, New Relic, and Dropbox.
How the heck do WE do BizOps?
So what do you do if you’re not a unicorn startup with millions in VC money, and armies of engineers?
If there are innovators inside your company that want to embark on a BizOps effort — even without the resources or investment capital to create and maintain a custom BizOps function — the first step is to align marketing ops, sales ops and finance ops around common definitions and processes.
When your business processes align by function, and align with actual customer lifecycles, half the battle is won. And as more tools and best practices emerge, it becomes less daunting to consider transforming business operations with automation, measurement, and optimization.
With an available BizOps platform like Usermind, we hope company BizOps initiatives will become the norm, allowing you to break down the barriers of traditional org charts, connect the silos of customer data that prevent you from delivering a relevant customer experience, and rapidly experiment and optimize end-to-end business processes.
Originally published at usermind.com.
