What is Business Operations (BizOps)?

Business Operations (commonly abbreviated as BizOps) is:

• A decision-support mechanism that helps to better connect business functions together and enable the smooth operation of a company
• A key business function which helps to drive the company forward and support partners by outlining future priority objectives
• A desirable career move that gives exposure to everything a company does
• An internal-facing group that broadly aims to create more value for the company and to improve the profitability of the business
• coordinates and aligns operations and strategy across an enterprise, helping executives focus on hitting goals and planning where their business units need to go.

BizOps teams have unrestricted access to the data of every business unit, they are able to perform both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and use their findings to create decision-support mechanisms that allow them to optimize the day-to-day operations and answer important strategic questions. BizOps could be viewed as a countermeasure to any ego- and intuition-driven decision makers within the business.

BizOps coordinates and aligns operations and strategy across an enterprise, helping executives focus on hitting goals and planning where their business units need to go.

What is (Corporate) Strategy?

Especially in smaller technology companies and startups, Business Operations and Strategy can have significant overlaps and/or be covered by the same team. However, there are lots of technology companies with their own, dedicated Corporate Strategy Teams (e.g. Adobe, Splunk).

These corporate strategy teams are typically small, focused units in which former management consultants think about the long-term strategy of the company, often times directly interacting with the C-Suite.

Compared to pure BizOps teams, Corporate Strategy is more concerned about questions like:

• How can we stay competitive in the long-term?
• Should we invest into a new geography or technology?
• How can we maintain our growth trajectory?
• How do we avoid being disrupted?
• How to we unlock opportunities to further grow our footprint?