Sociust engineers experience ecosystems for continued organisational evolution
Experience ecosystems and organisations are one and the same
All organisations offering digital products and services have to solve ecosystem challenges, every day. That’s because digital experiences depend on an ecosystem of underlying processes, people and technology working together. Most ecosystems are messy, having grown organically over time, with different departments owning each part while having different goals and motivations. Yet before an organisation can improve, replace or introduce a new experience, how it plugs into the ecosystem and how it will ultimately change it must be understood.
Changing how an organisation works
To map an experience ecosystem, a combination of specialists develop diagrams and documents in different tools. CX specialists develop journeys and personas in tools like Figma that help the organisation understand what their customers need. Project leads map the feasibility and viability of building something, often in Powerpoint, Miro and Excel. Technologists look at enterprise architecture, often using tools like PlantUML, Confluence or draw.io. Business analysts use spreadsheets and a variety of process mapping tools to show how processes make each part of those ecosystems function.
What should happen is that all these elements align into an experience ecosystem map or dynamic service blueprint that everyone can understand. But there are no existing tools that enable strategists, researchers, designers, technologists, analysts and project leads to map the depth and breath of that information into a unified and shareable format that can adequately illustrate a live experience ecosystem.
It takes a combination of advanced technical and people skills to track down and map silo’d information correctly, as well as decent pattern recognition to see experiential and platform patterns. Design skills are needed to visualize an ecosystem so that it's easy to comprehend, accompanied by copywriting skills for succinct labels and descriptions. As organisations change priorities, practitioners also need to show the changing impacts of each ecosystem decision. These practitioners exist but they are rare and expensive, also needing a shared tool to work with.
The cost of poor ecosystem engineering
In reality, organisations get into a pattern of hiring expensive consultants that create static documents, only relevant at one point in time, before having to rehire and remap, again and again. Acting on these maps can be difficult when the teams who have to execute on the resulting insights aren’t involved in the mapping process or don’t have the skills to decode complex and dispersed documentation.
A 2021 BCG study of 850 organisations found that just over a third were able to achieve their digital transformation objectives. In 2023 McKinsey said that 7 in 10 business transformation projects fail. Gartner believes digital transformations fail to deliver against expectations 80 per cent of the time. So, while figures may differ amongst leading transformation consultancies, the message is the same; digital transformation is a costly business that may offer substantial rewards eventually but not before most organisations fail repeatedly. With transformation programs costing $30 million on average, the cost can decimate an organisation if it fails, not to mention the cost impact on employee retention and investing in poor solutions.
The key reasons are poor governance and unrealistic expectations based on a lack of understanding on how to map and implement ecosystems, as well as the change management required to ensure it works in the long run. This is what Sociust can do.
Opportunity
Sociust is an enterprise-level tool that helps organisations to map experience ecosystems and diagnose the issues that prevent holistic solutions. It allows complex ecosystems to evolve in real time, with gaps perpetually visible and actionable. It makes tried and tested service blueprinting methods fit for the future, accessible to so many more team members, aiding the kind of collaboration required to support growth.
It will enable organisations to create a live central menu of all their customer types, all systems, all teams and the processes that connect them, which they can use to map unlimited ecosystem skews as the organisation evolves. It overlays prioritisation frameworks so that organisations can adapt their focus as they need to.
It is beautifully designed and easy for varied specialists to map. It uses beautiful information design so that everyone in the business can view and understand ecosystem maps.
It mitigates the substantial cost and the risk of consultants having to redo the same work over and over, as well as the frustration and time it takes for stakeholders to have to repeat themselves in protracted meetings, every time a new initiative begins. It will also mitigate the cost and the risk of making expensive procurement mistakes and focussing on the wrong priorities, repeating work in silos across many teams. It will provide a platform for making data more actionable across the business.
Making it happen
The originators are a duo made up of a highly experienced executive-level CX strategist and an enterprise architect. Both have been consultants for many years and would love to offer their clients this exact tool. The concept is born out of their mature understanding of the ecosystem issues that every industry faces and clarity about how to map and fix those issues.
The initial wireframes have been created for the MVP, enough to estimate the technology and design time that would be required to build Sociust. However, both investment, business and operational support is needed to make it a reality.
If this sounds like something your organisation would like to hear more about, please get in touch.