Illuminate — Business Model Exploration

One of our world-class Salesforce Enterprise Architects, Jonathan Laudicina (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-laudicina/ ) has done amazing work on Business Model Exploration. I want to highlight some of his work and I think you’ll find it useful.

As a reminder, Illuminate is the Enterprise Architecture Methodology that we use inside Salesforce as well as with our customers. The overall Illuminate methodology is depicted below.

You will notice that Business Model Exploration is the first step in Illuminate. Business Model Exploration is the methodology we use with customers to articulate:

External Forces pushing on the business

Internal Forces pushing on the business

Customer specific Business Model Canvas

At the heart of Business Model Exploration is the Business Model Canvas. It is the place in which you capture key factors about a company’s specific value proposition, partners, customer segments, cost structure and revenue streams.

Our approach to Business Model Exploration is described in the five steps below:

The external and internal forces are fleshed out with questions like the ones below:

• External Forces: “What are the things outside your control are you worried about?”
• Internal Forces: “Are organizational design elements optimized for the business model?”
• Business Model: “How does your business create, deliver and capture value?”

The Business Model Canvas is an industry model that you can find a lot of information about online. We didn’t create it, but we find it to be tremendously valuable. Below you can see how each component of the Business Model Canvas provides valuable insight into details related to a company’s customers, revenue models, partners, cost structure and value proposition.

The questions below help flesh out the answers to each canvas box:

Business Model Exploration feeds into Illuminate and provides the essential insight to a company’s specific situation.

Above, you can see how the Business Model Exploration flows: step 1 is evaluating external forces affecting the business; step 2 is evaluating internal forces affecting the business; step 3 is leveraging the Business Model Canvas to capture details; step 4 is applying SWOT analysis to the canvas; step 5 is the transformation step which applies a “Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, Create” filter to the canvas.

The first 3 steps of the Business Model Exploration actually feed into Illuminate (they feed into step 2 and 3 of the Illuminate methodology). You can see how the Business Model Exploration informs Illuminate below:

I hope this gives you a high-level view of the power of Business Model Exploration using Business Model Canvas.

Thanks again to Jonathan Laudicina for his deep knowledge in this framework and approach.