This is an excerpt from the upcoming Designed Analytics Report : Business 4.0: Building Technology-Driven Organizations. The report will be published on 06/01/2024.

In Chapter 2, we postulated that the core aspect of the platform view is to act as a conduit for actions and decisions (from a systems perspective) that help enhance customer experience, thereby increasing profitability. To understand why platforms are critical to achieving this, we also need to understand the dynamics between the various functional blocks highlighted in Figure 3. This chapter will explore this aspect with an example.

Let us explore an example of one of the many dynamics between the key frontline blocks. An E-commerce company consistently receives feedback on damages to units found by customers upon delivery. Customers provide precise feedback in terms of reviews and pictures, which are shared with the manufacturer. Figure 4 highlights how this dynamic touches upon various functional blocks.

Please remember that Figure 4 is just one example. Hundreds of dynamics like these come into play in your organization daily. Certain decisions and actions may occur within the high-level dynamics shown in Figure 4. We are looking at this from the perspective of system flows only. The platform allows the flow of data and information ( like analytics), driven by certain event(s).

We will deep-dive into these dynamics in Chapter 5. But before we do that, it is important to understand that these dynamics have different layers. This means that the decisions that the organization needs to undertake fall into different categories. These categories, or layers of hierarchy, have been shown in Figure 5.

The tactical level is the layer where these dynamic touch points are immediate. Revisiting our example, if a customer finds damage, they initiate a return. The E-commerce company has the policy to direct such returns to the seller, which is the manufacturer in this case. The flow of information from the E-commerce company initiates the dynamics within the platform, as shown in Figure 6. The deliverables resulting from these dynamics are almost immediate or near-term, and any analytics involved are rudimentary.