At least some of you know I worked at the Environmental Protection Agency in the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP).  At one point I and a colleague created a Business Canvas for our office; this concept comes from Alex Osterwalder’s book, Business Model Generation.  Below is what I can remember of our canvas (we did this about 5 years ago and I did not take it with me, so this was reproduced from memory; it’s mostly correct).

These high level items allowed us to identify quite a few useful things. I’m not going to go through every box at the moment, but what we found we could do with this was identify weak spots (our IT contractor at the time was a weakness for us) and the primary activities to leverage to create our value propositions.  We did some postulating on new possible customer segments and thought specifically targeting farmers (one of the largest users of pesticides) may be a good thing to call out.

We then did an analysis on various trends. One trend stuck out; while we were a monopoly, we still were subject to market forces. The economy at the time had been in recession for a couple of years, a pretty severe one at that.  PRIA registrant fees funded much of our work. If the economy is tanking, less pesticides will be purchased (farmers in particular will try and get with less to lower costs). This in turn normally lowers the amount companies will invest in R&D. Without R&D, less new pesticides will be rolling out for registration, meaning less funds and work for OPP. There isn’t anything magic here, but the canvas had us postulating on it.  We went to talk with our IT Director as we wanted to find a way of testing this hypothesis as it would have a severe impact on the work we do; he showed little interest.

Later that year, the Office Director for OPP announced we were going to have the least number of registrations on record since the Office was founded. I can only envision had we tested our hypothesis we would have had a leading indicator as opposed to the lagging indicator of watching the number of registrations trend significantly lower than expected.

Most Government organizations have only appropriation.  Even so, thinking in terms of the value propositions being delivered to customer segments and the activities and partners needed to do this can be really advantageous.