Enabling Transformation: Digital Operating Model
In a market where technology is evolving quickly, organisations that win are those that have a robust Digital Operating Model, that defines the digital roadmap your business needs and capabilities required to deliver the service levels your customers expect, ensuring that you have the capacity to design the right path and operate with confidence.
Why a Digital Operating Model Matters?
Many organisations struggle to realise value from their digital investments because they haven’t made two commitments explicit:
- What performance is required from their technology investments?
- What service level is expected from their digital teams and trusted strategic partners?
Your Digital Operating Model answers both by aligning your digital function to the organisations operating model and clarifying which digital capabilities sit inhouse and which are provided by trusted strategic partners. This is the foundation for robust planning, repeatable deployment and dependable service delivery.
Decide What You Insourced versus Outsourced
Getting the sourcing balance right is central to a working digital operating model. Decide which competencies you must retain (for example; enterprise and solution architecture, service delivery management, and vendor and commercial governance) and where partners are best for scale or specialism (for example: software and platforms as a service, service desk, and cyber security). Make the decision criteria explicit; risk profile, service criticality, security posture, and commercial leverage, so your digital operating model remains coherent as the business operating environment changes and strategies evolve.
It is important to engage with the current digital team and key suppliers to evaluate their skills, experience, and knowledge across business applications, insight and data, technology infrastructure, cyber security, and ways of working.
Capabilities that Plan the Digital Roadmap
The business strategy needs to be aligned to the digital roadmap, and have the right capabilities to plan and design:
- Strategy and Portfolio Management: Translate business priorities into a sensible sequence of digital change initiatives. Tie investment cases to value outcomes, and ensure portfolio choices reflect capacity and service risk.
- ServiceInformed Architecture: Design digital solutions and roadmaps with operability in mind; availability, security, observability, disaster recovery and supportability. So future services meet agreed key performance indicators, experience level agreements and service level agreement (KPIs, XLAs and SLAs).
- Sourcing Approach: Engage with software and platform vendors, implementation partners, and service delivery providers. Establish how digital products and services will be designed, deployed and supported, and define the required XLAs and SLAs through the entire partner ecosystem.
- Cost Model (ROM): Build pragmatic views of capex, opex and total cost to serve. Link spend to KPIs, ELAs and SLAs so leadership can see the financial implications of digital roadmap decisions.
- People Plan: Manage restructuring, targeted recruitment, graduate and apprentice pipelines, and capability uplift for service delivery roles (for example: service desk and problem management). Keep culture and knowledge retention front and centre.
Capabilities that Deliver Service
Service delivery management capability keeps value flowing after digital change initiatives are deployed, and are core to your Digital Operating Model:
- Performance Model: Codesign the service delivery management framework with business stakeholders. Align business operating hours, KPIs, XLAs and SLAs, runbooks, escalation paths, and monitoring to user demand and customer expectations.
- Operational Readiness and Transition: Treat transition as a design requirement for all strategic change initiatives. Ensure service delivery documentation, handover criteria, resilience testing, and observability dashboards before deploying.
- Change and Incident Practices: Right size controls so low risk changes move fast while critical services are protected. Coach teams to use KPIs, XLAs, SLAs and error budgets to prioritise work across incidents, problems, security and reliability.
- Partner Management: Make trusted strategic partner roles and handoffs transparent. Review KPIs, XLAs and SLAs against business outcomes, not just ticket volumes and response/resolution times, and adjust contracts to match operating reality.
How Searchlight Consulting Can Help
Searchlight Consulting works alongside your business and technical leaders to design and implement your Digital Operating Model. We have a deliberate emphasis through the whole digital lifecycle from plan, to build, and to run, ensuring the right capabilities and capacity are continually available to sustain performance. We tailor our consulting framework to your strategic objectives and digital roadmap, then embed practices that connect planning discipline, to rapid deployment, and to service delivery excellence. The goal is to have dependable digital operations, with clear roles, accountability, responsibilities and measurable outcomes.
Our Focus Areas:
- Capability assessment and gap closure
- Change deployment approach, with initiative justification and prioritisation
- Service delivery management approach, with KPIs, ELAs and SLAs
- Sourcing approach and trusted strategic partner ecosystem
- Financial modelling tied to performance indicators
- People plan for durable capabilities and capacity
Call to Action
If your organisation needs a digital function that plans with clarity, builds efficiently and runs with confidence, Searchlight Consulting will help you shape a Digital Operating Model that reduces complexity, accelerates collaboration, and raises service delivery performance, so your technology investments realise the outcomes that matter.
