Your operating model is the set of guidelines and expectations that allow you to monitor and manage day-to-day execution. The operating model defines what processes are needed to get the job done, but not exactly how those processes are performed. It tells you what role in your organization has decision-making power over a process, who is in charge of making sure that process is performed well, and exactly how they will know the process is doing what it should.

In short, it’s a map or a plan that is used to help you focus when you’re deep in the details of the operating system. It also lets the organization stay healthy over time without requiring everybody to know every detail of every area.

You’ve heard of “strategy” — and you’ve certainly heard of “execution.” But have you ever wondered how an organization figures out exactly what it’s going to do every day to execute on its strategy? Or why so much of that day-to-day seems like it comes straight out of an episode of The Office or a Dilbert cartoon? Or if there’s anything we can do about it?

Your strategy — the problem you’re trying to solve, who you’re solving it for, and why — shapes every decision that happens in your organization. Clarity of what the organization does and does not do, and commitment to that clarity, are required to ensure that the daily activities can be performed well and managed for quality over time.

Every 23 seconds someone, somewhere, asks for “a new field” to be “added to the database.” Several times per month I am the lucky recipient of such a request. I often wonder about my role in hoarding so much data that if every human who will ever live works frantically until the heat death of the universe we won’t be able to make meaningful use of it all. I also sometimes wonder if we are tearing small holes in the space/time continuum in our race to coerce ever-tinier bits of matter into storing All! The! Photos! of adorable wombats.

But I digress. I want to talk about fields in databases.