Quanta Value Network

QVN is a new set of architecture guidelines and approach to business model design and transformation that focuses on the positioning and linking together of services within a more open, collaborative and boundaryless digital world, supported by three foundational digital frameworks.

What is QVN?

Quanta Value NetworkSM fundamentally looks in a different way at the services being offered in the market. It questions which services are truly differentiated, which services are shared/commodity and where new innovative service opportunities exist.
Its objective is to provide clarity of strategic thought and decision making in service positioning. It will improve the competitive positioning of organizations through optimizing current commodity/shared service costs. It will also maximize future revenue potential in two areas: the improved and extended differential positioning of existing lead services and the recognition of net new innovative services that can be introduced.
Its design principle is to look at the world from a collaborative outside-in view and not through an inside-out ‘own environment’ only position.
Quanta Value Network provides architectural guidance to a new approach for business model design – Value PathwaySM. This includes strategic, collaborative and detailed views across three framework perspectives to give a complete 360 degree context: from a user consumer and personal point of view; from an organization point of view; and from the newer collaborative broker/industry opportunity view.
From an operations sense the approach allows for continual service monitoring, adjustment and learning to maximize successful usage.
This approach won the global architectural excellence award when used with a world leading Pharmaceutical company.
Today’s business environment is getting more complex. There seems a ‘perfect storm’ of many initiatives and trends all requiring answers and immediate attention. These include:

Increasing standardization on common/commodity ‘shared’ services
Everything innovative and digital
New ecosystem and business model development
Big data and improved insights from analytics
The proliferation of the ’Internet of Things’
New customer experience engineering

Simply put, QVN provides a context in which to cover these items and make the necessary strategic decisions.

How can QVN help?

Businesses are beginning to review exactly what value-add and differentiated services they provide in light of competition from multiple directions. Innovation is always high on the agenda and competition, in the form of new niche services is flooding the market – a situation that isn’t going to go away anytime soon!
Adding to this complication is that today we are faced with multiple emerging technologies. Everywhere we look we see evidence of new services embracing social media, cloud, mobile, big data, analytics, and intelligent devices. New smart applications are providing strong value services driven by new customer demands and expectations.
IT is no longer an afterthought of enabling technology capabilities. Technology is at the heart of driving these new digital business models and ways of working and we now need new ways to architect the design of this next generation landscape.
So how can we make sense of all this complexity? QVN is a set of architecture principles with Value Pathway a new approach to business model design and transformation that encompasses the new trends and understands the importance of strategy as a more dynamic and continual refinement exercise.
It analyzes the business through three levels of detail: the strategic 40,000ft view; the 20,000ft collaborative view; and the sea-level specific quanta service detail. In a world of constant change, executives can use QVN design thinking to architect their competitive advantage on an ongoing basis.
Traditional strategy methods and approaches are not geared to attack these issues head-on so we need a new way of thinking. QVN covers strategy/business architecture, technology architecture and delivery/change all aligned to the existing maturity of thinking.

QVN Design Principles

For each design program/project we have a set of architecture design principles and guidelines. These cover a number of important dimensions which help the architects navigate the complexity of the digital world. Architecture principles are used to capture the fundamental truths about how QVN will assist in designing the future landscape. The principles are inter-related, and need to be applied as a complete set and not just individually. At times a decision will be required as to which principle will take precedence on a particular issue. The rationale for such decisions should always be documented. Although specific penalties are not prescribed in a declaration of principles, violations of principles generally cause operational problems and will inhibit the ability of QVN to fulfill its design mission.
We need to look at how businesses can be more flexible in order to handle the scale and speed of change. Continuous evolvability is paramount and the quanta granularity of business process/service architecture design thinking is critical. The diagram below highlights the top ten guiding design principles at a summary level, behind each is a much more full description on how to interpret.

Value Pathway

Enterprise DIgital Framework

Enterprise Digital Framework

One on the twelve vectors of the Value Pathway approach is the Value Pathway frameworks – of which there are three. Here we look at the Enterprise Digital Framework.
The framework defines logical services that sit between the business needs and the vendor actual deployable platform solutions.
Think of EDF as the central digital services exchange framework for an organization that is secure, scalable and trusted. This is essentially the digital glue coordinating all the enterprise digital entities.
The framework supports moving from insideout to outside-in thinking to link to the next generation of platform partnerships.
The EDF contains nine components which are grouped together into three main categories of: touch-points (the components connecting with the edge devices and people); data (all aspects of digital data manipulation); and applications (the provisioning and handshake integration to digital assets).
Although the framework describes nine components these all work collectively and the value is in this interoperability and interchange between the various components.
The framework below is a summary of the nine components – much more detail exists behind each of these areas and examples of linkages to real world vendor platforms.

Personal DIgital Framework

Personal Digital Framework

Another of the three Value Pathway frameworks is the Personal Digital Framework. The framework defines logical services that sit between the business needs and the vendor deployable solutions.
The PDF looks at the emerging convergence of digital assets from an end user point of view. Think of this as a user centric view covering connectivity and integration of all the smart devices and smart applications the consumer has today. In addition it looks at the issues concerning the data/information that people have at their disposal and the changes in architecture design that will enable more self-control of the same.
The PDF has seven categories and is still evolving. Its individual elements have been around for some while but in fragmented pieces – such as home security systems, cars, smart phones, tablets, etc. New innovation is still expanding into this framework such as the new breed of wearable devices and ever increasing smart ‘Internet of Things’ appliances.
The framework supports both an individual device and a customer holistic view where the world is becoming much more consumer centric and where the consumer themselves defines their own personal value pathway scenarios. The PDF will support a new world of more consumer centricity and personalized services and higher trusted expectations (meaningful experiences).
The framework below highlights the main areas for consumer centric service design thinking – more detailed information is available and will be the subject of future papers from Vincigravitas.

Collaborative Digital Framework

The last of the three Value Pathway frameworks is the Collaborative Digital Framework. The framework defines logical services and modeling ideas that sit between the business needs and the vendor deployable solutions. The CDF comes in two parts, firstly the view from a detailed quanta service perspective and secondly from an end-to-end pathway view.
A key part of QVN and Value Pathway thinking is the loose coupling of quanta services that are more dynamically linked through new orchestration type engines. So what are the various types of configuration options for quanta services? And what are the new options for collaboration across the value pathways?
The CDF service detail view describes eight configuration possibilities for your quanta services. The key questions you need to ask, for each service, are: Who will own the service and be responsible for its strategy and iterative change? Who will be operating the service – my company, a 3rd party or the customer? Who will own and manage the data? The framework below describes the various options for consideration when doing the business architecture design in this area.

Some of the options are not new, such as business process outsourcing, but what is new is a new innovative way to expand the thinking in these areas. Technology and the Internet now provide more opportunities for collaboration and connection than ever before. Another key consideration is scalability. Do you have the resources and capabilities to truly provide the scale you may need for your services?
Information is now a major asset in its own right. How will you configure your services to provide discoverable data in a more open fashion? Again have you the resources to continue to store all your own information with increased ‘big data’ feeds coming through each and every transaction from the field? The above framework is meant to serve as a discussion piece when doing the architecture design of services at the detailed level.

The CDF pathway framework looks at the various new collaborations across the value pathway landscape. The digital era provides numerous ways to design new business models. We have been talking about new ecosystem developments for some time and ‘marketplace’ was a past topic which today can re-emerge with new spins. Some of the key questions from this view include: What is the role of an orchestrator and to what level of detailed control does this need to drill down to? With the improved knowledge of consumers, will they drive their own value pathways and orchestration of services? Where will open data fit and what considerations do you have for compliance?
The framework below describes a number of business model ideas for consideration when doing the business architecture design.

QVN Fusion