Target operating model
A target operating model (fondly known to all as the TOM) is the desired state of an organisation’s operating model.
“Desired”, “wished-for”, in a perfect world.
Desired by whom?
Subject matter experts don’t usually have the time to contemplate the eternal verities, much less the inclination. To the extent they have a desired state beyond going home time, it would be a workplace absent any middle managers banging on about target operating models. Thus a target operating model is the aspiration of she whose role in the organisation is to wish for perfect things: middle managers.
A perfect world
Thus, a target operating model is a kind of Platonic ideal. But we do not inhabit an abstract realm of essential beauty.[1]
No. We inhabit a grubby, tedious cave, and we are chained together and forced to look and the same craggy walls, and the shadows these perfect ideals throw are disfigured. Monstrous. Our world is intractable, messy, irritating and prone to outbreaks of Sod’s law. Life in it is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Desired by middle management, that is. Therefore a TOM trucks in terms of unicorns, rainbows, and popular delusions of the management mob. There is no space in a target operating model for human foible, unexpected contingency, nuance, shade of meaning or obstinacy.
See also
References
- ↑ Well, I certainly don’t.