What Was Never Written Down
Customer journeys and business processes describe the same mechanism observed from opposite sides, but most organisations treat them as separate concerns owned by different functions. The disconnection means no one owns the transitions where work actually fails.
A retail bank decides to map its mortgage origination process. Three departments are involved: the digital team that owns the online application, the credit risk team that owns the decisioning, and the operations team that handles document verification and disbursement.
A workshop is convened. Within twenty minutes, it becomes clear that the three departments are describing different processes.
The digital team presents the customer journey: a user fills in an application form, uploads documents, receives a provisional offer, accepts, and receives funds. They have analytics. They know where users drop off. They have optimised the funnel.
The credit risk team presents a decisioning flow: application data is ingested, scored against a model, reviewed by an analyst if the score is marginal, and either approved or declined. They have SLAs. They have audit requirements. They have a regulatory obligation to explain every decision.
The operations team presents a fulfilment process: verified documents are matched to approved applications, compliance checks are run, funds are released to the notary, and the mortgage is registered. They have checklists. They have exception queues. They have a backlog of applications that are “stuck” for reasons no system tracks.
Each team's description is internally coherent. None of them connect. The digital team does not know what happens between “provisional offer” and “funds received.” The credit risk team does not know what the customer experiences during the decisioning window. The operations team does not know why certain applications arrive with missing documents, because the upstream systems do not enforce completeness.
The workshop is meant to last two hours. It runs for four. At the end, the facilitator produces a diagram that connects the three views. Everyone agrees it is useful. The diagram is saved to a shared drive. It operates independently of any underlying system and entirely lacks formal versioning. It is not updated when the digital team redesigns the application form six months later.
When the redesigned form collects data in a format the scoring model cannot ingest, a manual workaround is created. The workaround introduces a two-day delay. Customer complaints increase. The delay is attributed to “operations.”
...
Continue reading in the interactive reader
Read this chapterSee also: Full contents · Preview chapters · Illusions in the Boardroom