The operating model becomes live through people. Roles and governance entities define how work is carried out, what competences and skills are required, how decisions are made, and how accountability is shared across business and technology people.
Business Technology Standard (BT Standard) categorises roles into four professional identities. These identities reflect the end-to-end value creation flow and give balanced emphasis to each area of the operating model.
This helps organisations create a balanced and integrated way of working, where business development, solution development, service operations, and governance work together across the full lifecycle instead of operating as separate domains.
The four identities describe how people contribute to value creation. Each identity combines purpose, passion, impact, and competence, helping individuals understand how they contribute and how they grow.
Business excellence focuses on creating competitive advantage with integrated business and technology development. People in this identity are motivated by designing the business, challenging existing ways of working, and shaping new opportunities. They translate business needs into clear initiatives and ensure that business transformation objectives are defined and realised. Typical competences include business understanding, conceptual thinking, facilitation, and enterprise architecture awareness.
Development excellence focuses on implementing business capabilities and delivering solutions. This identity attracts people who are motivated by solving complex problems, delivering outcomes, and improving speed and quality. They manage dependencies, balance trade-offs, and turn ideas into working solutions. Key competences include project and programme management, agile development, solution design, and managing development and business changes.
Service excellence focuses on ensuring that services run reliably and continuously. People in this identity are motivated by stability, problem-solving, and improving operational performance. They manage service ecosystems, ensure continuity, and optimise user experience. Key competences include service management, operational excellence, technical understanding, and end-user focus.
Smart governance focuses on enabling value creation structure, way of working clarity, and effective decision-making. This identity attracts people who are motivated by improving how the operating model works, ensuring alignment, and enabling others to succeed. They define governance, manage risks, and ensure that disciplines function together. Key competences include governance design, communication, financial management, and leadership.
Together, these identities ensure that both the human and structural aspects of the operating model are aligned. They provide a common language for competence, collaboration, and professional growth.
Effective value creation requires combining business, technology and data development competences. Roles are therefore defined based on the activities required to deliver value and outcomes, not on organisational responsibilities. People typically act in several roles even if they hold only one organisational position.
Ideally, teams are built by combining roles from different identities. This ensures that business needs, solution design, development, data, and operations are considered together from demand planning to rollout of the solution in daily use. Clear role definitions support this collaboration. Each role has defined responsibilities and expected contributions, while working closely with other roles across the end-to-end flow.
Roles are combined to form teams that can deliver outcomes end-to-end. A typical end-to-end flow includes:
Data and AI roles should not become a separate silo. They should be represented throughout the value creation flow. By combining roles, cross-functional teams are able to create integrated value from business needs to solution implementation and deployment in organisations with smooth handovers.
Artificial intelligence changes how competence is applied across all roles. The knowledge represented by roles can increasingly be embedded into tools, AI agents, and digital workers that support daily work. This does not reduce the importance of roles. It increases the need to define role knowledge, responsibilities, decision rights, and quality expectations clearly, so that human expertise can be augmented and scaled in a controlled way.
AI agents and digital workers will take on a growing share of operational tasks. They can work continuously, use large knowledge bases, communicate with users in different languages, and complete standard tasks quickly when processes, data, and escalation rules are well defined. In operations and user support, they can resolve requests, guide users, retrieve knowledge, monitor events, prepare decisions, and coordinate predefined workflows around the clock.
This changes the work of people. People remain accountable for business outcomes, judgement, governance, exception handling, and continuous improvement, while AI agents and digital workers execute, assist, recommend, and automate. Organisations must therefore ensure that AI-supported work is reliable, transparent, supervised, and connected to the operating model.
Data and AI capabilities should not become a separate organisational silo. They must be represented throughout the value creation flow, from business design and development to operations and governance. By combining human roles with AI agents and digital workers, cross-functional teams can create integrated value faster, improve responsiveness, and scale knowledge across the organisation without losing accountability.
Ideally, the organisational structure reflects the operating model and supports end-to-end value creation. The visual organisation chart places demand capturing on the left-hand side and service operations on the right, reflecting the same direction as the value creation flow.
Typically, the value creation flow goes across business and IT organisations, and IT has often been seen as a delivery organisation for solutions and services. This often results in unstructured demand planning and an inconsistent focus on value realisation. There are two complementary solutions for this issue: value streams and integrated business and technology development organisations.
Value streams are often virtual structures that bring together business and technology development within a defined scope, such as a customer 360 capability that spans multiple business and IT teams. They coordinate activities end-to-end and apply portfolio management and development governance within their scope. This enables integrated business and technology development without requiring additional organisational changes.
Alternatively, or in addition, business and technology development can be combined into a single business technology organisation. This organisation takes at least a consultative role in planning business needs and leads the rollout of solutions across the business.
Even in this case, value streams play a complementary role by providing focused development scopes and supporting organisational agility.
In addition to the identities, BTS categorises roles into owner, orchestrator and practitioner roles.
When competence, roles and organisation are aligned with the operating model, teams can work across boundaries with clear ownership and shared objectives.
Business and technology no longer operate as separate functions. Instead, they collaborate within value streams and end-to-end flows, supported by clear roles, strong governance and integrated data capabilities.
This creates the foundation for consistent, efficient and value-driven business technology execution with integrated and accelerated time-to-value.
