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Monthly Archives: Aug 2018
Accenture's Allen Valahu: The TOP 10 will allow us to have more regular and meaningful interactions with analysts
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.
Posted in: None
Time to kick out quadrants, paralyse peaks and wash away waves. Hello HFS TOP 10
Yes, folks - the rumors are true. HFS is officially out of the quadrant business.
We're done, the whole quadrant craze is starting to smell pretty bad and we know the industry is fed up with it. Increasingly, many of these 2x2 matrices are missing several of the market leaders (who refuse to participate) and having them all stacked in the top right just smacks of pay-for-play (even if the analyst has fair intentions). Let's be honest, noone trusts these matrices and they are harming the entire credibility of the analyst industry. Sure, there are many honest, quality analysts with integrity, but their craft is being soiled by several quacks who are basing their vendor placements purely on vendor briefings, whether they like a particular vendor, and whether some vendors pony up for their research services. There are many "analysts" out there who do not bother to do sufficient customer research and we all suspect who these characters (and their employers) are...
If we don't change, we all - as analysts - might as well admit we're no longer in the research business: we're in the vendor PR business. Yes, it's that bad... and let's stop sugar coating it.
Enterprise executives tell us all the time they get zero value from these grids - they are purely for vendor marketing sales decks (and I talk to a helluva lot of these enterprise folks). However, enterprises desperately need to be informed on vendor performance - they just need a direct ranking that's relevant for their needs, where a credible analyst puts a stake in the ground. That's what everyone has told me, so that is what we are delivering: The HFS TOP 10.
Quadrants, Peaks, NEATS and Waves - and sadly Blueprints - are all sales tools for vendors as opposed to decision support tools for enterprise customers. At HFS, we are not in that business - we are in the research business to support informed enterprise decisions. At HFS, we are not ending our involvement in covering the hottest markets in the industry and producing the best competitive analyses, we are merely making our research more relevant, more timely and more impactful with the HFS TOP 10 and much more simplified to support the enterprise customer. What's more, when some firms take six to nine months to get a quadrant to market, that market has often already moved on, and the data, despite its credibility, may already be stale. We are in a world that doesn't stand still, where enterprise customers are thirsty for timely, credible data that clearly shows the winners, contenders and laggards in a given market.
Customers want rankings where the analyst took a stand, not merely a fuzzy matrix where everyone looks like a winner. Here is an example of how the HFS TOP 10 ranking looks (the RPA Products in 2018), and here you can download a full report example to see for yourself how we get to the point, how we inform decisions and we clearly profile where vendors are strong - and where they face challenges.
HFS TOP 10 reports remove the unhealthy involvement of vendors from the analyst evaluation process and are much more timely, relevant and less cumbersome to produce
The main difference with the HFS TOP 10 is the fact we're running them purely on desk research, support from our research academy and from our vast repository of current user data. We are eliminating the whole laborious vendor lobbying and briefing processes so we can get these reports out the door faster than ever before, without being tied to vendors schedules and relying on references they provide. This does not mean analysts cannot do vendor briefings to support their research (if the analyst deems it necessary, or if the vendor requests a timely briefing), it just means we do the research in a timeframe that can't be moved. It means vendors cannot complain that we "did not do reference calls with their customers" or give them a chance to be adequately represented in the market. Because HFS already has the data! We have reams of data on service vendor performances, or vertical markets, on RPA products, on blockchain platforms, on analytics firms, on FinTechs etc. And where we may occasionally not have sufficient customer data in a niche market, we will invest in gathering it using the HFS network. Yes, we actually set aside funds for user surveys where most of our competitors only perform custom research when their customers are funding it.
Here are some FAQs you probably want answering:
1. How is the methodology of the HFS Top 10 different from the Blueprint? There are several key differences in methodology:
a. We are Ranking vendors, not Gridding them. The HFS Top 10 is presented as a simple and clear ranking of assessed products / service vendors versus the 2X2 Blueprint grid
b. Voice of the Customer, execution success, and innovation capability. The HFS TOP 10 methodology is driven by customer experience with products / services (voice of the customer) in addition to vendor’s ability to execute and innovate.
c. Powered by HFS G2000 network. The primary source of data for the HFS TOP 10 reports is HFS’ extensive network of G2000 enterprise customers. HFS will gather information via surveys, analyst interviews, and ongoing dialog with customers versus relying on data inputs from service vendors. HFS conducts over 5,000 interviews a year with enterprise customers right across the six change agent areas of our research coverage: RPA, AI, Smart Analytics, Global Sourcing, Blockchain and Digital Business Models.
d. Not reliant on vendor RFI responses. The Top HFS TOP 10 report methodology does not rely on the use of old-school traditional approaches of collecting data through vendor RFIs. We welcome vendors to augment our analysts’ knowledge base through structured briefings, demos, and reference customers, but this not a necessary component in the process. We will not allow vendors to slow-down our research processes.
e. No opt-out. There is no opt-out for leading vendors given HFS is relying 100% on its own network and data sets. We never produce vendor landscapes where half the leading players are absent.
2. Will there still be fact checks with the vendors?
Yes, vendor profiles, including strengths and development opportunities will be sent for fact-checks. However, rankings will not be shared in these fact-checks. An embargoed HFS TOP 10 will be released one-day prior to the actual release of the report, intended to be an FYI versus any negotiation on ranking etc. We are not in the lobbying business, we are in the research business.
3. What data will populate the HFS TOP 10 reports?
The data will be populated from multiple sources of information:
- The primary source of data for the HFS TOP 10 reports is HFS' extensive network of G2000 enterprise customers. HFS gathers this information via surveys, analyst interviews, HFS roundtables and summits, and ongoing dialog with enterprise customers, versus relying on data inputs purely from service vendors.
- Providers can augment our analysts’ knowledge base through structured briefings, demos, and reference customers.
- Note that we will minimize the use of old-school traditional approaches of collecting data through vendor RFIs (unless covering a nascent / emerging market where most of the solutions are still in beta mode).
4. What is the minimum customer data-set needed to be able to guarantee a voice of the customer? What happens, if for whatever reason, there is not enough customer data?
A statistically significant sample set is 30 datapoints for a report across reference checks, our existing data sources, and our own customer conversations. While most of our current research has a significantly higher sample set than 30 there is rarely a lack of available data to use to source the rankings. Where a lack of customer data does occur, it may result in delays of the research publication as we make extra efforts to source customer data.
5. What can vendors do to maximize customer data access?
Real value usually comes through engaging with HFS analysts throughout the year by providing HFS analysts the opportunity to speak with more of their customers, sharing and collaborating on customer stories. As mentioned, we make it our business to do our own customer research - that is our purpose in the industry, but those vendors who can persuade many of their customers to showcase their experiences will benefit.
Posted in: Digital OneOffice
Fired by DXC for refusing to be a nodding dog. Ugh.
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
Don't dog nod your way to unemployment. Read this and get on your soap box
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
Rant Warning: Nodding dogs and vendor marketing – this is all our industry deserves
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
Tinker, experiment, explore, then disrupt: The Hyper-Connected Enterprise will be driven by Intelligent Automation.
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 experimenter – trying out new ideas, methods, or activities. The intelligent automation journey often starts with some maverick individuals in some corner of the organization playing with different technologies. There is no real strategy at this stage, just passion. The objective is simply driven by automating a particular task that is innately boring or transactional but still time-consuming and inefficient. Different experimenters start at different places across the Trifecta. It is not necessary to start with basic automation and then advance to AI-based automation, but experimenter’s automation solutions are typically piecemeal.
- The tinkerer – trying to improve something in a casual or desultory way, often to no useful effect. The early successes from experimentation often result in the most frustrating stages of the intelligent automation maturity model. The tinkerers start to copy and paste what worked in experimentation for everything else. But if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Failures are widespread at this stage, but tinkerers who don’t give up are the ones who eventually succeed to move to the next step. This is the stage where enterprises are trying to find some method to the madness but often with limited success. The tinkering stage is exemplified by rhetoric winning over reality!
- The explorer – charting out new territories. As reality dawns after extensive tinkering, enterprises start to realize the different pieces of the puzzle. They start investing in organizational management (often through COEs and a hub-spoke model), recognize that they need to invest in multiple technologies across the trifecta to solve problems and start tackling end-to-end processes versus individual tasks.
- The disruptor – radically changing the status quo. Intelligent Automation transcends from a program and becomes an enterprise-wide movement at this stage. Disruptors can bring to bear integrated solutions that combine the power of automation, analytics, and AI. Several automations at this stage are scaled up, and there is a high degree of confidence in scaling up others. It is only at this disruptor level when the promise of intelligent automation starts to become a reality.
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
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