Developing the operating model and investment strategy for the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations

We provided the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC) with a rich picture of their value chain and a streamlined strategic vision, based on an “inside-out” and “outside-in” lens. This enabled them to set clear investment initiatives to reach their goals. 

The Challenge 

ORIC is the regulator of indigenous corporations, the organisation seeks to pivot from a regulator to a proactive and supportive enabler of indigenous corporations. ORIC wants to achieve this by uplifting operational, decision-making and corporations’ capabilities through initiatives to become more self-regulating. The decentralisation program for staff and business functions, combined with a reduction in staff numbers and a turnover of registrars, has impeded ORIC from making this business model shift. Common issues include limited organisational knowledge retention, inconsistent application of standard operating procedures, unclear assurance in decision-making, and misalignment of vision and strategies to initiative execution and daily operations.

ORIC engaged Evolve&Amplify for guidance and a better understanding of which parts of its business need to be uplifted and require investment so that it can proactively enable and support indigenous corporations to better self-regulate.

The Approach 

We applied a hybrid design innovation and business architecture methodology and developed a view of the organisation from both an “inside-out” and “outside-in” perspective. The outside-in approach is led by the needs of the customer and how the organisation can best operate to deliver value for them. The inside-out examines an organisation’s inner strengths and how these can be optimised to achieve a sustainable future. Our approach was designed to achieve the following objectives:

• Define, align, and communicate ORIC’s vision and strategic priorities consistently throughout the organisation.

• Gain visibility into customer journeys, pain points, needs and opportunities for improvements.

• Manage a geographically dispersed workforce across Australia.

• Document and adopt organisational processes consistently.

• Understand the opportunities to uplift technology and prepare staff for technology changes.

• Retain corporate and tacit knowledge.

We worked with ORIC stakeholders to create a Business Motivation Model (BMM) that outlines the organisation's vision and mission, breaking it down into measurable goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics. The model was designed to unify ORIC leaders towards a common purpose and to ensure business activities are aligned.

To enable ORIC to better understand its customers and value network, the team increased visibility into the corporation users' customer experience, by creating a corporation lifecycle journey infographic. This helped ORIC assess the alignment between its business strategy through the BMM and the needs of its customers. We also developed a value network diagram to model external public and private sector entities that ORIC interacts with, with a qualitative assessment of their current and future value to ORIC. Further, the Evolve&Amplify team audited ORIC's siloed operating processes and consolidated the information into a standard operating procedures knowledge base.

The Outcomes 

Our work provided ORIC with improved visibility of how their customers can be serviced better and where to invest to make improvements. Moreover, our methodology boosted their visibility into the broader value ecosystem, whom it relies on to deliver value to its customers, and dependencies that exist both up and down-stream from ORIC’s core activities. We provided a rich understanding of their customers’ journeys with ORIC services, including their needs and important touch points. All of this knowledge feeds into the vision, mission, and strategy we developed for ORIC, enabling them to set their own goals and investment initiatives.

On the back of this engagement, we were engaged by ORIC in a sustained ongoing engagement to further iterate and provide ongoing advice. This included additional capability modelling, investment road mapping, and a re-design of ORIC’s operating model to align the organisation to its vision and mission.