Posted in: None
When you do something to change the status quo, you usually expect those who love the status quo to resist. So why on earth would Accenture's global leader for analyst relations, Allen Valahu, laud the emergence of the HFS TOP 10, when his firm is already hitting top right corners of all the analyst quadrants on a (seemingly) daily basis? Well, Allen publicly submitted to us his viewpoint:
"Good news. I believe the TOP 10 will allow us to have more regular and meaningful interactions with your team throughout the year. It will put less pressure on our clients as they will have more lead time to talk to the analysts. Finally, the ability to update HFS through timely structured briefings, demos, and reference customers as the opportunities arise throughout the year, is a much more targeted and strategic approach. Look forward to interacting with HFS in a more strategic way going forward."
In short, Allen is seeing the HFS TOP 10 as not only presenting the voice of the customer in a more meaningful way to customers, but it also enables analysts and vendor executives to engage in a less stressful - and political - manner. Where quadrants force a "lobbying" situation, where the outcomes of the matrix dots are entirely dependent on the analyst getting served up their vendor references within tight deadlines, dictated by the analyst firm, the TOP TEN frees up all parties from these stressful processes and interactions, as the analyst firm isn't 100% reliant on those vendor reference calls. This also refocuses the analyst/vendor relationship more around valuable conversation and strategy, and less around the "he said, she said" tactical bake-off, which the legacy quadrant model forces.
Bottom-line: Goodbye quadrants... it was nice while it lasted, but the industry has moved on
I have been overwhelmed with messages of relief and encouragement from many people right across the industry who are delighted to see a change to a practice that is tainted, tired and viewed negative by all and sundry. Only one vendor executive voiced objections, based more on the fact that their job is tied to quadrant management, and the HFS TOP 10 threatens to impact their cosy existence.
Full credit to Allen, who runs a tight ship of analyst relations executives to communicate their performance effectively. While the current system works for Accenture, it clearly impacts the quality of relationships with analysts, their own clients and their under-pressure executives. It's too stressful, drives far too many negative, defensive conversations, and, quite frankly, degenerates the whole balance and value of analyst/vendor relationships. While am sure it will take time for many people to fully get used to the more strategic methodology the TOP 10 brings to the table, having the market leaders immediately voice their support (and relief) is heartening.
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Posted in: Digital OneOffice
Yesterday, you may recall we discussed the comments made by Nigel Barron, who spend 13+ years at CSC before the merger with HP (when DXC was formed). After nine months at DXC, Nigel was sacked. I was sad to see him go because he was one of the few folks in CSC who pushed hard to persuade its executives to spend time with HFS analysts (as opposed to Gartner, IDC etc). I remember Nigel would frequently share our work with his team and would put out some pretty cool insights.
Firstly, I would like to thank Nigel for excusing the behaviour of many people for acting like "nodding dogs" to keep their jobs. Secondly, I would personally like to apologize to Nigel for inadvertently portraying him as one of the nodding canine family, when, in fact, he is anything but. Nigel asked me to publish his explanation that he was actually sacked by DXC because he was fired for refusing to conform to the nodding brigade, daring to challenge a firm that (let's face it) is in danger of drifting into insignificance.
"Hi Phil, thanks for the mention. I was the antithesis of the nodding dog at CSC/DXC, so much so that it probably contributed to my being laid off last December. I was a top five company internal blogger on the company’s collaboration platform writing blogs such as ‘The end of management’ and ‘Nowhere to hide’. My bosses kept the faith until the second round of layoffs occurred after the merger. My then boss had an easy choice to make when told to find someone to cut, although there were other circumstances that I won’t go into here (Mike Lawrie refers to ‘Pyramid corrections’ in earnings calls). I do sympathise with analysts who have become nodding dogs for the reasons I mentioned in my comment, but that doesn’t mean its the right thing to do. I’ll be 54 in a couple of weeks, I’ll never, ever be a nodding dog but I’ll always be a supporter of HfS, you and your team. Nigel"
If anyone from DXC is reading this, you need a few characters like Nigel who can shed some light on what your firm is trying to accomplish, as we - at HFS - are flummoxed with the whole premise behind this merger. Why remove the only people who can challenge you, just because you can? Good luck Nigel - feel free to share any of your views with us in the future, you are developing quite a sympathetic following. DXC is poorer for your absence and you deserve better, my friend. PF
Posted in: Outsourcing Heros
After yesterday's slightly risqué rant, I received an interesting comment from Nigel Barron (pictured) this morning, an avid follower of HFS over the years, who spent much of his career with CSC and subsequently DXC before recently going independent (and clearly off the leash and wagging his tail!):
"Since 2008 every job has become a hustle and analysts are no different. Authenticity is not a winning attribute. To survive, being the nodding dog is the difference between having a paycheck and not having a paycheck and when they’ve got mortgages to pay and kids to put through college truthful, honest and clear research might not be the best bet. That’s not to say its the right thing to do, just an observation. I speak from experience also."
I refused to become a nodding dog. It's simple if you keep at it...
Well, Nigel, I also speak from experience here. I used to work for Deloitte Consulting back in the day, and my lead Partner demanded I take my blog offline (having initially been fine with me continuing with it, during the interview process). The firm literally could not tolerate one of its consultants having freedom of thought and bypassing its painful thought police (aka "risk") process. I eventually left the firm after that... I just couldn't stomach an employer putting the muzzle on thought leadership. Especially mine!
A couple of years later, I was working for AMR Research (now part of Gartner) and a huge debate ensued among management whether "Phil should keep his blog up". Many of the clients insisted one of the reasons they stuck with the firm was because of my blog, so money eventually spoke - they felt they got some real views of the industry and wanted to call me to discuss as part of their research contract. In fact, our Chief Research Officer, Bruce Richardson,
Posted in: Global Workforce and Talent
As an analyst, you spend your time with a lot of other analysts - for better or for worse. And, recently, worse is taking up more than its fair share. It just seems like, as an industry, we've lost our collective teeth, our ability to question, challenge and find out the truth. We'd even go as far as questioning whether we've lost out soul.
When HFS launched ourselves onto the market over eight years ago, the cornerstone of the firm was a blog that was revered as one place you could get the real truth about the industry, where people were safe to make a (gasp) controversial comment where we could all call a “spade a spade”. One industry leader (from IBM of all places) even went as far as describing this blog as the “Wall St Journal editorial section of the industry”. More recently, we've been called “Blue Collar” research, which I guess we’ll take as a compliment. Anything is better than being seen as fully paid and played by the dirty vendor dollar... which is sadly how so many recent pieces of "research" have been described.
Today, most analysts and advisors use hype as their comfort blanket – even if they don’t understand it, they just circulate it because it makes them feel relevant
Sadly, at HFS, we doubt we’d have succeeded with our honesty and bluntness if we launched today. The industry is too controlled by vendor marketeers who shower their lovely budgets at analysts and advisors alike to keep them all in line… where most just regurgitate the same hype as each other because they just don’t care anymore. Most barely understand the hype, but
Posted in: None
As business operations have advanced through several inflections points over the last three decades, the core component at the heart of these changes has been the emergence of digital interactivity driving the hyper-connected global business – only made possible by intelligent automation.
Digital connectivity has transformed both front and back offices over the last three decades. The key now is to integrate and automate these activities to place the customer at the core of business operations
As you can see in our (below) "voyage to hyper-connected, interactive enterprise" we have leveraged digital connectivity to drive productivity and innovation across both the back and front offices of our organizations. Offshoring and outsourcing became a huge bi-product of digital connectivity to run business processes and apps remotely to save Western businesses huge costs through global labor and centralization of resources.
However, until recently, most of these activities have been restricted to improving efficiencies and reducing costs. At the front end of the business, the advent of ecommerce hit its stride in the late '90s, where customers could communicate digitally with organizations to make purchases, make genuine inquiries and get connected with others with like-minded business interests. Where automation comes into play is being able to pull together these disparate front and back office activities into one single office (aka the HFS Digital OneOffice), where customer needs are placed front and center across all business processes, where staff performance can be measured on delivering customer driven outcomes, where the entire business operations are in-tune with their customer needs... and superior to those of their competitors to stay ahead of the game.
The urgency to be Hyper-Connected dictates why we have to drive Automation with real Intelligence
“Basic digital” capabilities (where most companies are today) make it possible for business operations to respond to their customers as those needs happen. Emerging capabilities in data analytics tools, machine learning and cognitive computing are making it possible to anticipate changing customer needs before they happen, where shifts in global supply chains, market and competitive dynamics, economic or political changes, compliance or regularity issues, all combine to change customer behavior.
The more intelligent your business operations, the more you can stay ahead of the game, but none of this is possible if your processes are not automated effectively to create this knowledge for your business operators:
Once the digital baseline is created, enterprises need to create more intelligent bots to perform more sophisticated tasks than repetitive data and process loops. This means having unattended and attended interactions with data sources both inside and outside of the enterprise.
From Experimenting to Disrupting: Cracking the Intelligent Automation code in Four Stages
The industry is struggling to solve challenges around the process, change, talent, training, infrastructure, security, and governance. There is deafening noise and hype around Intelligent Automation, but there are very few enterprises that have cracked the code of driving transformative impact by leveraging Intelligent Automation at an industrial scale. Why?
Our research and ongoing conversations over the last six years (remember our ‘Greetings from Robotistan’ in 2012?) in the automation space has allowed us to interact, help, and follow automation initiatives at several global 2000 enterprises. And we leveraged this extensive experience to develop HFS’ Intelligent Automation Maturity Model (see exhibit below). Our experience suggests that the organizational maturity and the resultant impact from intelligent automation typically follow four stages of evolution:
The Bottom-Line: The more hyper-connected we get, the more this is about people, purpose, and planning - and less about whichever shiny new gadget is the flavor of the month
While the industry is busily adding fancy new words to their résumés and job titles, we have to remember that our technological journey is gradual. Change comes slowly and incrementally and you can't just rip off the proverbial BandAid, hire a bunch of Millennials and Gen-Z kids... and it's mission accomplished. As the Hyper-Connected journey illustrates, it took 30 years to get where we are today - and that's because both front and back offices needed to go through major, secular changes to become efficient and digitized.
But the next phase is not a trade-secret - this "Future of Work" is merely a phased transformation of the present. Dumb robots evolving into intelligent assistants... ineffective supply chains plagued with manual breakpoints becoming fluid, autonomous and intelligent - with the ability to interact with other supply chains. Quantum computing and blockchain emerging to challenge the very logic of TCP/IP and computing architectures. But to get there, we need to be experimenting, tinkering, exploring and disrupting with the kit that available today to get our organizations in a place where all these far-flung innovations can have some real possibilities.
So let's have less talk about the future of work and focus on the present... we know where we are and what we need to do. So let's do it!
Posted in: Digital OneOffice