Most organizations can describe their strategy. Fewer can explain who decides what, how work moves, and how a good idea becomes a repeatable outcome.
That ambiguity accumulates as meetings, rework, slow approvals, and systems that no one trusts. A clearer operating model is often the highest-leverage digital investment a company can make.
Ambiguity is a measurable cost
The cost of unclear rarely appears as one line item. It appears as duplicated analysis, escalations that should have been decisions, emergency changes, inconsistent customer answers, and leaders who cannot tell whether a program is late because of execution or because the organization has not agreed what “done” means.
MIT CISR’s research on digital operating models frames the issue as a design choice: leaders need an explicit logic for how business processes and technology capabilities are integrated and standardized, while digital offerings also demand speed and agility. Clarity is therefore not an org-chart exercise. It is the operating logic that lets a portfolio decide where to integrate, where to standardize, and where to preserve local variation.
Turn the fog into a control surface
Our operating model diagnostic looks for five kinds of ambiguity:
- Mandate: what outcome is the work accountable for?
- Decision: who has the authority to choose?
- Handoff: what information must cross the boundary?
- Measure: what proves the system is improving?
- Change: how does the organization learn from the next release?
This is where our decade of ITIL change management experience becomes useful. The point is not to add process. It is to make the moments that can damage service visible enough to manage.