Operating model setup

This page is for admins and core team members setting up the AI Operating Model for your organization. It covers how the map gets built, and the two settings you control that decide what each person sees: their position and their home unit.

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How the map gets built

There are two routes, and which one you are on changes what this page means for you.

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Built with your Kowalah team

On an engagement, the map is created with your Kowalah team during discovery and the Vision Map Workshop, where your leaders and Kowalah map your org tree, your key processes, and each step’s current and target disposition. You arrive at a populated model rather than a blank one. From there, ownership shifts to you and your Kowalah partner together:

• Your Kowalah owner on each process helps keep it true, as part of the managed service.
• Your core team and process owners maintain the map between reviews.
• Everyone with the right position keeps the processes they own current.

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Built by you, from empty

You do not need an engagement to start. Installing the Kowalah Plugin and signing in creates your account, and if nobody from your organization is here yet it creates an organization for you with you as its admin and an empty model waiting to be filled. As an admin you are a cross-cutting editor in your own organization, so you can author the whole map: add units under the root, add the processes each one owns, and capture the steps. You do it in conversation with Claude rather than in a form, one function at a time. See Your operating model in Claude. This is the usual route for whoever owns AI delivery inside a business before a programme exists. Build coverage before depth: a shallow map of several functions tells you more than a deep map of one. What a map built by one person cannot do is check itself. It is your account of how the business runs until the people who own those processes confirm their own, which is what adding them to your organization is for.

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Positions and altitude

Every person on the operating model has a position, which sets their altitude: where they land and what they own. Positions are assigned by you, the admin, on each member. Position is separate from a person’s role (admin, core team, member). Role decides what someone can do across the platform; position decides where they sit on the operating model. A person can be a senior leader by position and a member by role, or a manager by position and core team by role. See roles and permissions for what each platform role can do.

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Home unit

Alongside position, each person has a home unit: the part of the org tree they belong to. Together, position and home unit decide where someone lands when they open the operating model, and which slice of the map is “theirs.”

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What people can do once set up

With positions and home units in place, the three operating model permissions decide what each person can do: How ownership and editing are governed in detail, including granting direct-edit rights to specific people, is covered in ownership and governance.

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What’s next