This standing room only crowd for an industry conference’s AI session, something seen with great regularity these days, is actually from last week’s American Payroll Association event in Orlando. You read that correctly.
While the payroll function and services market likely weren’t among the first AI or RPA candidates written on white boards in innovation labs, this obvious level of interest might suggest a “can’t see the forest through the trees” dynamic operating in some of those innovation labs. Back-office corporate functions such as payroll are in fact fertile ground for RPA and intelligent automation overall, given the preponderance of recurring manual tasks and transactions not dependent on person-to-person interaction.
Innovation labs are now on the case.
The speaker for this session called “Prepare Your Teams for the Future of Payroll: Robotics, Automation & Shared Services” was Brian Radin, President of global payroll services provider CloudPay and long-time entrepreneur in the HR Tech space as well. Brian immediately got everyone’s attention by factually reporting that the number of bank teller jobs did not decrease in the years following the introduction of ATM machines. Teller numbers actually went up due to shifting staff costs to support new, higher value services within retail branches, which ultimately allowed more local branches to open up, tellers in tow.
Using AI in the realm of HR operations, including cognitive computing and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) or bots, has been explored in my blog posts and also a recent POV. Radin’s session focused specifically on AI’s current and future use in payroll operations, including via services providers like CloudPay and over a dozen others to be profiled in my HfS Blueprint Report “Payroll-as-a-Service: 2017” (published this July).
Some Easy Questions, Some Hard Ones
Radin’s talk directly addressed some key questions about “AI in Payroll”; e.g., how can (or will) these capabilities help payroll clients spend less time on manually intensive, routine or recurring tasks, ones that machines can often handle with more alacrity? And are there other tasks where resourcing can be toggled between human and bot staff depending on availability? Here the presenter highlighted examples like data validations and checks pre and post-payroll run (payroll has quite a few of those), machines fixing errors or automating the consolidation of data, and of course, chatbots to answer recurring questions like “what is my accrued PTO?” or “when will I receive my first check?” (Questions which come up hundreds of times per year.) Allowing RPA tools to handle these will benefit clients of providers like CloudPay and any other vendor investing in these capabilities. And as far as highlighting a “resourcing agnostic” (bot or person) type of activity in payroll, the example given was using people or bot staff to train new staff.
One of the highlights of the session for me was listening to questions attendees were posing at the podium afterward, away from the large audience. One gentleman told Radin that training and re-skilling of staff were already going on in his company in areas where RPA would be heavily leveraged, but it sometimes provided only a year or so of “job runway” for employees until RPA would impact their next job. Then re-skilling would have to start again. Radin’s response was both admirable and accurate: “Re-skilling decisions in the RPA era is very much a work in progress.”
Machines that Do, Do and Think, and Learn
CloudPay’s VP Marketing, David Barak, elaborated for me after the session on Radin’s slide which highlighted these three different categories of RPA capabilities: “Do” describes the use of RPA to move and manipulate payroll data without human involvement, as one example. “Do and think” capabilities include the machine flagging and fixing hundreds of data issues pre-payroll run; and while “Learn” is an RPA capability in payroll processing that’s still being tested and improved upon (as with machine learning in most areas), it includes anticipating spikes in payroll processing costs based on time of year, business cycles, new regulations, etc. This information can then guide the customer in optimizing staffing levels.
Bottom Line: Payroll departments and services provider clients will increasingly benefit from emerging RPA and cognitive capabilities. It will probably be a few steps forward and a couple backward until something akin to a “human/bot hybrid resourcing homeostasis” is figured out – in general, and also reflecting specific customer contexts. Predicting how far / how fast with any precision, in any industry or discipline, is almost a total crapshoot. One thing we do know, machines are not nearly as susceptible to errors due to work overload or distractions.
May is one of my favourite months of the year. Not because it warms up and brings milder weather. Not because of the number of bank holidays we get in the UK or that it is National Burger Month or National Innovators Month (who decides these?) – but because of the massive amount of data that becomes available during the month. It marks when most of the annual reports are available, and importantly it marks when National Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its annual occupation statistic for the US. If that isn’t exciting, you clearly aren’t a data junkie like me ????
These statistics are important as they show real job creation and job losses – which comes as a refreshing contrast to the recent obsession we see around the prediction of mass job losses caused by digital and the shift toward more digital operations. This rhetoric is becoming increasingly unhelpful as enterprise organizations navigate the ongoing shift toward digitally engaged commerce. The current mantra de jour being advances in machine learning, the internet of things (IoT), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) will steadily eliminate all kinds of jobs. Economies across the globe will have to brace themselves for massive job destruction.
We’ve all seen the studies that state that half of manufacturing jobs will be eliminated by automation in the next decade. Driverless trucks and trains are set to become commonplace, eliminating many more jobs. Advances in technology are not only impacting lower skilled jobs but also skilled professions. People with advanced qualifications such as lawyers and doctors are undertaking activities that can be automated.
Although there is some truth in this – technology is taking on increasing amounts of low skilled and mundane work, the largest inhibitor to the continued digital transformation of businesses and whole industries is, and will continue to be, a lack of skills. Yes, it is a shortage of talent that will slow down the adoption of new technologies such as robotics, AI, big data analytics, and the IoT.
The truth as you can clearly see below, automation doesn’t kill jobs – wider economic issues kill job creation – recessions and stagnation. As you can see from labor statistics in the US – in spite of the growth of automation there is still a net gain in jobs over the last 5 years:
Although automation will impact jobs, the rate at which jobs will be eliminated will be limited by the availability of skills that can implement and manage this technology. Which tends to self-regulate the creation v destruction trend and help, at least with the timing of any job market adjustment. As we have seen in past industrial revolutions, these shifts in jobs end up creating more work than they eliminate. We saw in the 18th century industrial revolution massive shifts from agricultural work – we expect a similar trend with this current wave of disruption.
New jobs will need to be created to enable automation, and to engender the innovation facilitated by new technology. Skills required for these new jobs are in extremely short supply. We maintain that a lack of people with appropriate skills, will slow any shift in operating models toward driverless trucks, driverless trains, software defined factories, connected health, smart grids, smart cities and so forth.
So what will these new roles be?
The biggest change will be a shift from specific functional roles to more blended multilayered job. With more complex skill sets being required. Organizations will need to acquire talent which blends technical skills with operational skills (industry specific skills) as well as softer skills such as critical thinking, adaptability, continuous learning, active listening and other non traditional capabilities. Education and training from technology professionals needs to be much more holistic, given that technology is transforming many aspects of our lives. With education and training institutions having to adjust offerings so they develop the required blended and holistic skill sets for the needs of the emerging job market. These new jobs emphasize skills, knowledge and willingness to learn, over traditional highly specialized degrees, and the rather narrow scoped careers that gave people their early work experience.
Valuable workers will soon be those who can adapt and learn new skills as and when more automation is embedded within their role. To stay ahead in the talent game, businesses should focus on:
Hiring for potential. This means hiring staff based on their inherent ability to learn and adapt to situations rather than their experience, particularly if it is narrow.
Learning not education. These two things are not the same – if you hire people who are able to learn, you must provide a continuous learning environment and incentives based on learning. Just hiring people with Stanford or Harvard degrees won’t necessarily give you people who are able to learn on the job long term.
This means looking outside of the norm when hiring. Traditional MBA courses may not provide you with people who have flexibility to operate in today’s multidisciplinary world.
Work with external education establishments to make sure students have the skills you want. Better to invest in helping universities develop the skills you need in people rather than focus on competing for them. Demonstrating a willingness to invest in young people is likely to engender loyalty and being part of university programmes provides more opportunity to demonstrate that commitment than the usual milk round and job fairs.
The Bottom Line – We must focus on generating value for customers, not protectionism and panic-mongering
There needs to be a shift in emphasis away from set task based skills to more blended and soft skills where technical and business skills combine. Without an increase in the supply of these kind of people the transformation to more digitally driven operating models will be slowed. Hiring policies need to look to the future, without the right people the step into the digitally enabled world will slow to a crawl.
It today’s swirl of gibbering noise around the social media presses, it’s the responsibility of leading analysts, advisors and academics to be the voices of sanity and reason, when it comes to topics as critical as the future of work elimination through Intelligent Automation technology. The automation vendors love the hype as it gets them attention with clients, but analysts who like to take money from these vendors have a responsibility to articulate the realities of these technologies to their clients. They are great at augmenting work flows, and even aiding medical discoveries, but this is the real value – it’s not about sacking people. It’s about making operations function better so people can do their jobs better. The real “roboboss” is the human enterprise operator who can use smart Intelligent automation tools to enhance the quality of their work.
Net-net, industry analysts, advisors, robotics vendors, academics and service providers need to engage with clients around how all these disruptive approaches will affect talent management as well as organizational structures. Even without these apocalyptic scenarios, some job functions are likely to either disappear or be significantly diminished (as our automation job impact forecast reveals). Equally, we need to talk about governance of these new environments, touching upon ethical, but also practical, issues. This is not only a necessity for the broader adoption, but also offers high value opportunities.
Last year we couldn’t help ourselves revealing our lovely Gartner analyst friends, via the voice of Chief of Research and Distinguished Analyst, Fran Karamouzis, declaring, “3 million of us will be supervised by robobosses by 2018“.
So, while many of us are counting down the last few months enjoying our last experiences of having human bosses (or maybe some of us will actually prefer a robot), we can now breathe a huge sigh of relief that a whopping “96% of clients are getting real value from RPA” (Robotic Process Automation). And not only that, RPA is thriving at a “satisfaction level greater than anything Fran has seen in her 17 years at Gartner”:
I personally would love to meet this incredible cross sample of delighted clients Fran has had the good fortune to interview, seeing as we’ve been covering the emergence of RPA for nearly 5 years and this space is still at a very early phase of (sometimes) painful RPA experimentation, as enterprises figure out how to scale these tools, govern them and learn how to integrate them with other applications using scarce technical skills, while dealing with very challenging change issues.
At HfS, we just came off a very intense day with 60 enterprise clients tinkering with RPA, and can officially declare that 96% of them are definitely not in love with their experience. In fact, only a handful are making real progress, while the majority lack a cohesive governance program to get this stuff working on even a few rudimentary processes. At HfS, we estimate, from our extensive ongoing research, that about half of today’s RPA implementations are, so far, making some progress, while even Ernst and Young’s new RPA report declares it has seen 30-50% of initial RPA implementations fail. (And this McKinsey piece entitled “Burned by the bots: Why robotic automation is stumbling” has since been published… well worth a read).
Why claiming 96% of RPA customers are seeing real value is plainly ridiculous
Several of the RPA solutions vendors are painting an over-glamorous picture of dramatic cost savings and ROI. RPA software firms are claiming – and demonstrating – some client cases where ~40% of cost (or more, in some cases) is being taken off the bottom line. While some of these cases are genuine, there are many RPA pilots and early-phase implementations in the industry that have been left stranded because clients just couldn’t figure out the ROI and how to implement this stuff. This isn’t simply a case of buying software and looping broken processes together to remove manual efforts… this requires real buy-in from IT and operations leaders to invest in the technical, organizational change management, and process transformation skills.
Several RPA clients cannot scale their solutions and are aborting implementations. One solution in particular, which featured high in many analyst scatterplots, has recently suffered the ignominy of not being able to scale at the level it needs, with several of its clients and projects being either aborted or moved onto other solutions
Buyers are backed into a corner with broken delusions of automation grandeur as their CoEs fail. Buyer leaderships are being fed all this rosy information and are under incredible pressure to devise and execute an RPA strategy, with some sort of set of metrics, that they can demonstrate to their operations leadership. Many are quickly discovering they simply do not have the skills inhouse to set up automation centers of excellence and are frantically turning to third parties to help get them on the right track.
Outsourcing consultants are selling RPA before they can really deliver it. Sourcing advisors are claiming they are now “RPA experts” who can make this happen, while struggling to scale up talent bases that can understand the technology and deal with the considerable change management tensions within their clients. RPA is murky and complex, and not something you can train 28-year-old MBAs to master overnight. Meanwhile, we are seeing some advisors simply do some brokering of RPA software deals for small fees, only to make a hasty exit from the client as they do not have the expertise to roll-out effective implementation and change management programs.
RPA specialist consultants few and far between. Pure-play RPA advisors are explaining this is not quite so easy and requires a lot more of a centralized, concise strategy. There are simply not enough of these firms in the market, especially with Genfour having been snapped up recently by Accenture. With only a small handful of boutique specialists to go around, these firms can pick and choose their clients and command high rates.
Service providers are setting the pace, but will destroy each other in the process, making it challenging to source the right RPA capabilities. Service providers are claiming they can implement whatever RPA clients need, but are not willing to do it at the expense of reducing their current revenues. Meanwhile, smart service providers are aggressively implementing RPA into their own operations to drive down their delivery costs and reduce their own headcount, and many are already claiming 10-20% of their delivery headcount has been reduced. So we can expect to see providers aggressively attacking competitive clients with automation-led solutions that should create unbearable pricing pressures for service providers looking to retain the talent they need to implement this stuff. Hence, services providers will be hell bent on destroying each other and the winners will be those who eventually succeed in winning more work than they lose amidst all the destruction.
Half of enterprise buyers want help from their service providers when it comes to RPA and cognitive. When we privately polled 60 senior outsourcing buyers, at the recent HfS New York Summit, on what would improve the quality and outcomes of their current services relationships, the answer was pretty conclusive – half want to work with their providers to rollout their automation and cognitive roadmaps, begging the question why half of this famous 96% of RPA customers feel they need help from third parties if they are already so satisfied with their current RPA experiences?
The Bottom-line: It’s time to stop pandering to the hype merchants and get real about the true challenges of RPA
The biggest issue threatening the real progress of RPA is the sheer deluge of misinformation that is being churned out to the poor unsuspecting customers. I cannot tell you how many have called us up at HfS bemoaning the fact their CFO has just returned from a conference and wants a piece of this 40% savings from recording manual processes in a digital loop.
Now, it may simply be that Fran has been lucky enough to have been spoon-fed references from only those highly successful clients of RPA, hence her unadulterated exuberance of its proven value. Sadly, I don’t get to wallow in such a haven of client success, and seem to have all the clients who are struggling to get this stuff moving call us up and come to our summits to share war stories. However we conclude this latest little debacle in the unraveling of the RPA odyssey, it is clear is our leading analysts need to get their research right and owe our industry the real facts, not the puffed up hype to excite the marketeers and sales people in the software and services firms. RPA impacts jobs, it impacts process effectiveness and can cost you dearly if you mess it up. It needs to be handled with intelligence and diligence.
We are now seeing real commercial business applications getting serious about their cognitive potential, with the new announcement of SAP Ariba and IBM joining forces to cognify contracting and sourcing processes, as a start. At HfS, we believe this is just the start of core business applications being immersed in cognitive capability to deliver a new threshold of business value for enterprise clients.
In the recent HfS Procurement As-a-Service Blueprint, IBM, an HfS Winner’s Circle industry leader, invested in transformation-led delivery with a ‘Consult to Operate’ strategy, focusing on on-demand consumable digital processes for procurement fueled by analytics and cognitive.
Looking ahead to 2020, HfS recently wrote: “Towards 2020 IBM will be leading in the cognitive procurement services space. Underpinned by a strong BPaaS platform, most clients will look at IBM first when it comes to new cognitive technology-driven services with vastly improved data analytics capabilities. The biggest challenge for IBM to succeed with cognitive procurement is to bring clients along this journey”.
The goal of this partnership is to take cognitive procurement to the next level. SAP Ariba and IBM are creating two centres for Cognitive Procurement, in Palo Alto and New York. The cognitive procurement capabilities will be expanded through a joint go-to-market strategy and a joint development roadmap. But there is more to this deal…
“Making procurement awesome on steroids”
Asked what the biggest benefit of the partnership is, Moray Reid, IBM Procurement’s Global Offerings Leader, took SAP Ariba’s motto up a notch; “Make procurement awesome on steroids”, by really bringing leadership to the procurement space and enabling smart new technologies to allow customers to make better decisions in real-time. SAP Ariba and IBM truly believe this is a case of ‘better together’.
In a recent article – ‘What will The Procurement As-a-Service Provider Landscape look like in 2020?’ – HfS wrote, “IBM has a massive supply chain, which it smartly leverages in its procurement offerings. IBM is bullish on cognitive procurement. IBM BPS is morphing into Cognitive Business Solutions. Its own procurement provides a great playground for applying and road testing all the new cognitive procurement solutions, giving it an advantage over providers who don’t manage procurement for their own organization or have less ‘cognitive savvy’ clients”.
The partnership with Ariba is a serious step forward for the cognitive procurement ambitions of both organisations. SAP Ariba is a dominant player in the procurement space, with a mature, horizontally integrated platform, the world’s largest business network and end-to-end suite of source-to-settle applications that cover all categories of spend. SAP Ariba and IBM are developing the first cognitive use cases together and creating new services, adopting IBM’s Consult to Operate model, leveraging consulting capabilities in operations to deliver value on an outcome basis. One of the use cases under development is in contract intelligence; Watson sifting through structured and unstructured contract data to gain insights and improve contract compliance, a big step towards actually achieving benefits, one of the toughest challenges in procurement. Part of the work will further the development of intelligent procurement solutions and services, with IBM and SAP Ariba working side by side to explore applications of emerging technologies, including blockchain.
What’s in it for SAP Ariba?
SAP Ariba needed a new differentiator as competition is heating up and competitors, like Tradeshift and Coupa, accrue assets and client wins. With SAP Leonardo alongside Watson, it gets a credible cognitive engine. Further, to leverage network effects and grow its value, the network needs to expand by adding more suppliers. Bringing IBM’s huge supplier base on board will boost the value of the Ariba Network increasing its size and scale.
What’s in it for IBM?
Emptoris has been a good foundation for IBM’s procurement services and BPaaS delivery, but lacks the network. Instead of betting on two horses, by continued development of Emptoris for internal use and partnering to provide the business network capability to clients, IBM will, over the coming period, transition all its BPaaS offerings to SAP Ariba. This is a big operation, but it makes a lot of sense. There must be hard assurances and safeguards in the partnership agreement, otherwise it’s a risky bet to put your As-a-Service/BPaaS future in the hands of a partner.
Competing on multiple fronts
Watson is IBM’s big platform bet of the decade – its main challenge is being a bit too far ahead of its time, pushing a cognitive story at clients that simply are too bogged down in other initiatives to take the time and consider the ROI of injecting cognitive capability into their processes. Positioning it as one of the largest procurement platforms makes a lot of sense from the perspective of not only competing for Procurement As-a-Service services with other providers, but also allowing IBM to be a technology provider to competitors via SAP Ariba. If you can’t beat them on the services front (you can’t win them all), at least get a piece of the action via the procurement platform side.
What’s in it for buyers?
Many buyers see cognitive procurement as the next frontier, but don’t have a clear understanding, or plan, on how to make it work for their organisations; the majority of procurement organizations perceive themselves as far removed from advanced innovative procurement capabilities. They are fixing the basics, getting procurement technology to work and pondering the opportunities RPA could bring the procurement function. The gap between cognitive procurement and the (perceived) level of maturity and change readiness of procurement is the hurdle IBM needs to take to make its cognitive ambitions reality or be at risk of running too far ahead of the game.
IBM and SAP Ariba will focus on a step-by-step approach to ease clients into the world of cognitive procurement, the key being small steps with tangible benefit. Buyers who need to see a serious roadmap and a partner with deep domain expertise and consulting capabilities gain a valuable option for their journey to the future of procurement.
Questions left to be answered
How will other partners react? Eleven out of fifteen service providers in the 2016 ‘Procurement As-a-Service Blueprint’ have a partnership with SAP Ariba. Just as when Wipro announced its strategic partnership and investment in Tradeshift earlier this year, the SAP Ariba and IBM folks will be fielding a lot of calls from concerned partners. What will this mean for their partnership with SAP Ariba, IBM or both? How much influence and access will IBM have on SAP Ariba’s architecture, roadmap and governance? How valuable is our partnership to SAP Ariba, now IBM stepped to the plate in such a manner?
The bottom-line: Procurement buyers; there is light at the end of the cognitive procurement tunnel
Two giants putting their weight behind cognitive procurement is a big step in taking the promise of cognitive into the realm of procurement.
Hand holding will be required to take clients along the journey and IBM and SAP Ariba vow to be the ones to extend their hand.
HfS will closely follow the value this partnership will create for service buyers, particularly in the fields of strategic sourcing and category management. How will those upstream procurement areas benefit from the cognitive capabilities on top of a business network? Can it find clever ways to address the scarcity of category talent and expertise? Is this partnership bringing true digital procurement closer, with pulling more suppliers onto the digital platform than before?
Focusing Watson on processes that can significantly benefit from tangible cognizant results, especially areas like contract management and general sourcing, is a smart way forward. HfS expects IBM to follow this with other initiatives across other business processes where the firm has real strength and depth, such as HR and F&A – and eventually broader supply chain. We should also expect further forays of Watson in the healthcare sector, where IBM has proven credibility supporting medical research and life sciences work (see our earlier report on Watson’s potential in medical research).
In the HfS Blueprint Report for Utility Operations, we take a close look at how you can better find support for business model creation, IT/OT integration and customer experience improvement in engagements.
Electricity is the lifeblood of our economy and society. Electricity is what makes your smartphones, computers, TVs, refrigerators, and lamps work. Many core processes in our lives and businesses are electricity dependent, and electric appliances are everywhere. Gas, coal, oil, nuclear, water, wind, and sun – all of these resources are used to power the grid, the world’s largest machine and one of the humankind’s greatest engineering achievements. And today’s infrastructure is overwhelmed.
The current infrastructures are built for a bygone era. Utilities need smarter and seamlessly connected grids that allow renewable production and local energy generation. The emergence of micro-grids and residential- and utility-scale battery storage for electricity, for example, will give a push to local energy systems. But, integrating all these new technologies, building new business models around them and improving customer experiences require utilities to drastically change its way of working. This is where smart utilities leverage service providers.
Employing Utility Operations services to get ahead of being disrupted
The HfS Research Blueprint Report for Utility Operations provides a comprehensive overview of services for the utility industry. This Blueprint looks at business process services, information technology services, and engineering services across the utility value chain areas of generation, market operations, transmission, distribution and metering, marketing and retail, and cross-value chain BPO, engineering, and ITO services.
This report analyses and reviews how the market is evolving toward more business-outcome focused, flexible, and collaborative services and how service providers are (or are not yet) meeting the needs of utility organizations. It also includes profiles and assessments of 14 providers of Utility Operations services.
Top challenges include:
Modernizing the power infrastructure to support renewable integration and optimization
Leveraging digital in the grid infrastructure
How the power generation fuel mix changed for good
Changing customer expectations
Disruption of business models
New competitors enter the arena
Cybersecurity: of paramount importance, but still often overlooked
These challenges underscore three key market dynamics:
Utility Operations services adoption accelerates. The market is vibrant and in growth mode, with several service providers reporting high growth rates for their Utility practice, outpacing other horizontal and vertical practices. This strong growth is a sign of an industry pulling the services lever hard to make up for lost ground. Having been reluctant and conservative about investments in technology and now, in the face of so much disruption and technology-driven opportunities, utilities are partnering with service providers to catch-up. For their part, many service providers have started to strike the right cord with a mix of outcome based services, partnerships, strategy and messaging around technology-driven areas like smart grid, smart metering, renewable energy integration and intelligent automation. There’s a refresh underway for partnerships in this market.
The value of partnerships. No one company can deliver all the services and solutions required for the transformation the utility industry is experiencing. In the digital age, breaking down silos, creating end-to-end processes and information flows, and unleashing the actionable insights derived from advanced data analytics are critical imperatives for survival. We see this in the convergence of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) and in the increasing role of digital platforms across the value chain. Leaders in the utility industry are forming partnerships as brokers to find and bring together the best capability to impact. Examples are utilities that partner with service providers and Original Equipment Manufacturers to create resilient, autonomous, solar micro-grids incorporating equipment, battery technology, sensors, analytics and on-demand services. The result is a resilient emergency demand response solution.
Plug-and-Play services emerge. We see interest emerging among service buyers for plug-and-play digital business services, particularly for analytics and retail platforms. These modular, on-demand services give utilities the advantage of easy implementation and the ability to tap into a business outcome, increasing speed to value. Plug-and-play services are in the initial stage of development with significant progress forecasted over the next few years as service providers become more comfortable with being platform developers.
Bottom Line: Utility executives, you will find guidance in this report to reinvent customer experiences, processes and operating models, and to tap the unmatched potential of renewable energy, digital technologies, and storage.
The challenges outlined in this blog and the Blueprint report form an existential threat to the utility industry as we know it. Utilities must face these challenges head-on or risk becoming irrelevant, with others – new entrants or savvy current competitors – taking its role in the value chain and its customers. The service providers in the Utility Operations Blueprint are reliable options to partner with and charge ahead together.
HfS Premium Subscribers can click here to download your copy of the new 2017 Utility Operations Blueprint Report. It includes coverage of the following service providers: Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, Cognizant, Cyient, EXL, HCL, IBM, Infosys, Luxoft, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Tieto, Wipro.
When an industry is enduring a secular shift that is literally redefining how we do work, it’s pretty important to get some real, unfettered dialog going among all the key stakeholders this impacts. We need to break free from the glitzy paid-for sales presentations, robot keyrings, stress balls, nasty logo-ed leather notepads and greedy events firms vying for a quick buck from vendors eager to part with cash to promote themselves to all their competitors.
That’s why we’re assembling 75 of the industry’s finest leaders in a single room for a whole afternoon to thrash out the mandate for the future of operations in the robotic age for our inaugural FORA council session in Chicago, 19th September. And promise no sponsors, stress balls or bad white papers to take away…
Here’s just a sample of the industry robo dignitaries who’ve already committed:
Alastair Bathgate, CEO, Blue Prism
Chetan Dube, CEO, IPsoft
Chip Wagner, President, Emerging Business Services, ISG
Cliff Justice, Partner, US Leader, Cognitive Automation and Digital Labor, KPMG
David Poole, CEO, Symphony Ventures
Daniel Dines, CEO and Founder at UiPath
Jesus Mantas, Managing Partner and General Manager, IBM Business Consulting, IBM US
Lee Coulter, Chair for the IEEE Working Group on Standards in Intelligent Process Automation
Dr. Mary C. Lacity, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Information Systems, UMSL, and Visiting Scholar MIT
Max Yankelevich, CEO, WorkFusion
Mihir Shukla, CEO, Automation Anywhere
Peter Lowes, Partner, and Head of Robotics & Cognitive Automation, Deloitte US
Shantanu Ghosh, SVP, CFO Services and Consulting, Genpact
Thomas Torlone, U.S. Leader of Enterprise Business Services, PwC
Tijl Vuyk, CEO and Founder, Redwood Software
Weston Jones, Global RPA Leader, EY
We also have leaders of cognitive and automation initiatives from the following buyside firms already signed up to get stuck into the debate:
So let’s cut to the chase – it’s time to have the real, hard conversation about where we really are as an industry. Why aren’t those 40% cost savings happening, each time someone slams in some software and hope it somehow eliminates manual labor because they can access a bot library? In fact, why are a third of RPA pilots just left hanging with no result? Yes, people, it’s time to wake up and smell those robotic roses and have those really tough conversations about what is real, versus why so much of this stuff just isn’t working – and why we’re not putting together properly governed RPA rollout plans like we do with ERP software and SaaS platforms. Why are we making such a mess with this, when we could have so much to benefit from?
So join us in Chicago this September 19th for FORA the inaugural council meeting that finally debates the true Future of Operations in the Robotic Age
FORA is the very first industry council is established to bring together buyside operations leaders, service providers leaders, expert advisers and technology developers to steer industry’s transition to the Digital OneOffice™.
FORA’s mission is to bring together the leadership from senior buyside operations leaders, service provider leadership, expert advisers, and technology developers to set the agenda for the transition to the Digital OneOffice™, and to develop an industry mandate for navigating and managing the creative destruction that looms. Supporting the FORA initiative is the IEEE’s Intelligent Process Automation Standards initiative that will encourage further research and investment, leading to powerful and attractive new service offerings. But the commercial frameworks needed to encourage and sustain wider deployment of these technologies are lagging because they fundamentally threaten established models.
In order to communicate the learnings from the FORA meetings, the group will produce a quarterly “FORA Mandate” that communicates core recommendations to the industry from the group meetings that will be held at quarterly HfS Summits.
So how can you get considered for Council Membership?
HfS will consider applications to the FORA Council based on seniority and relevance. Are you interested in participating? Just email us at [email protected].
This is a really important development as we consider the future of services and operations amidst all this creative disruption. I hope to greet many of you personally in Chicago this September.
These days, we talk about Robotic Process Automation as if it’s the remedy to all modern business woes. But, as with all technologies, the capacity for RPA to deliver value has its limits.
Last week I had the privilege of attending an RPA user group event hosted by the Global Sourcing Association packed with service providers, buyers, and experts – where this solutions capacity to deliver was laid bare. After two refreshingly honest presentations by automation gurus from Symphony Ventures and Thoughtonomy, the roundtable discussions kicked off. Several buyers joined me, alongside two of Symphony Ventures finest consultants, Katharine and Nick, who were both more than willing to impart honest and impartial advice. While the parameters of the conversation were broad, there are four key takeaways that I’d be happy to share with you. I have built all of the following out of the challenges brought to the table by practitioners and buyers. With the answers that came from the knowledge and expertise of the experts or those having weathered some implementations.
1. RPA isn’t the salve for all wounds
There’s no doubt about it, the technology is powerful, but it’s important to recognise that there are limits. Environments with chaotic data sets or irrational processes are not suitable without a huge amount of refining. Nor are you likely to find much success if processes rely too heavily on external data sources – unless the owner of the source is particularly liberal with access.
RPA works best on processes that are formulaic and rules-based. If your process has a set input required to achieve the desired outcome, with a series of consistent steps in between it’s in scope. Even if there are a huge number of steps or the rules to follow are relatively complex, a solution can be built, albeit with the hard work and knowledge of providers and experts.
2. Don’t be tempted to go rogue
Some of you may be tempted to leave other areas of the organisation, especially IT, out of an RPA project. However, all the experts in the room warned against doing so. Inviting IT to the party is essential to help navigate through some of the trickier aspects of the implementation with solid business and technical knowledge.
Some of the providers I spoke to at the event provided plenty of examples of when their implementation was made just that little bit harder when relations between the buyer and IT were…less than harmonious. The key is to build relationships with all stakeholders before embarking on the project to ensure your RPA project delivers the most business value and has the greatest chance of success.
3. The process may have RPA written all over it, that doesn’t make it suitable
Let’s say you have a process that ticks all the boxes – boring, formulaic, rules-based stuff that nobody wants to do. Although it seems perfect, it may not be suitable for a simple reason: the ROI isn’t there. Examples abounded of processes pushed forward for consideration that was already relatively inexpensive to handle, making the cost of automation fail to add up. Such as a long-winded rules-based process that, in practice, was only handled by a single person in the first place.
After all the calculations are laid out on the table, the economics of automation may not add up, at least from a cost saving perspective. However, be careful of ruling it out completely as it’s possible that freeing up someone’s time or improving the process may add economic value in another way, by improving customer and employee experience, for example.
4. In some cases, RPA is the last solution on the list
For some processes implementing RPA is the equivalent of hitting a nail with a sledgehammer (I ruined a perfectly good shed attempting that). For others, it’s like sawing a plank of wood with a fish, just plain unnecessary. For example, a process highlighted for consideration due to its resource demands may, in fact, also be managed elsewhere in the organisation. The simple fix would be to merge all parallel processes to not only ensure consistent outcomes but also to reduce the resource overheads significantly.
Halting unnecessary processes or merging duplicate ones may be the solution businesses are looking for instead of automation. Katharine and Nick, the consultants we spoke with advised that they often start an engagement first by taking a holistic view of all processes before jumping in with an RPA implementation to make sure it’s the best solution for the problem.
Summary
RPA simply isn’t the right solution for every problem, and these are just a few of those discussed at the user group. Perhaps it’s the right time for the industry to take a step back and understand what value the technology can add in different situations. Instead of pushing it as the miracle cure for all business woes – a perception facilitated by buyers looking for a shiny new tool and providers seeking to make the most of the RPA Gold Rush.
Bottom Line: Without a doubt, RPA is a powerful technology, but for some business challenges there are far more effective solutions to consider.
The presentations and interactions at the recent Sitel customer event illuminated a few key themes that customer experience oriented companies can take away as they look to implement customer experience strategies within their organizations and in conjunction with their service providers:
Align the entire organization to customer centricity. To effectively serve the digital customer, what we at HfS call operating as OneOffice, the corporate focus needs to create a work culture where individuals are encouraged to spend more time interpreting data, understanding the needs of the front end of the business and ensuring the support functions keep pace with the front office. T-Mobile shared an initiative where people in the organization that traditionally have “nothing to do” with customer experience listen to phone calls with various problems from customers. They found that someone in a back office support function listening to the issues on customer calls helps “make things real” in other parts of the business. Hearing the customer’s experience of a fallout from an order management issue, for example, really helps to illustrate how every function in the company impacts the customer experience—and the business. It also, in turn, helps discussions for how to improve operations from the back to the front office.
Find the right blend of digital and human touch to meet customer expectations. This is not going to start with technology, it’s going to start with understanding your customers, their expectations, and pain points. Companies thinking about digital customer experience need to start mapping the customer journey, which in many cases means using digital technology along with the human touch. Intuit discussed its implementation of “SmartLook” video chat, which has been a successful initiative to better support customer inquiries about their TurboTax product. Intuit finds itself competing with the in-person tax preparation services, so in order to supply that high-touch experience, the software company set up the capability for one-way video so that the customer can see the representative helping them with tax questions, and also the ability for the rep to draw on the customer’s screen. They quickly found that customers really value the human connection, and scaled from 100 to 4500 live video agents in a matter of months, including special training for being on-camera and shipping out uniforms and blue backdrops for its work-at-home agents. The results are impressive: decreased call handle time, a resolution rate improvement of 10 points, and an NPS increase of 20 points putting Intuit in the 80s (world class service levels!). It’s a great example of the blend of digital technology and the human touch that is still very relevant for many customers and types of interactions. This is not without drawbacks of course—there were many lessons learned about the training involved and implications of having a live agent on screen with customers (i.e. customers taking unflattering screenshots of the agents…). Finding this balance will always be a work in progress as technology and customer preferences change.
Support customer experience by making digital assets universally accessible, and embracing the cloud in a way that enables genuine scalability. As the CMO of Wyndham (a chain that opens two new hotels every day) pointed out, there’s a lot of integration behind the scenes in order to be fast and nimble enough to meet customer expectations. Two years ago the hotel group did not have high-resolution photos for all of its properties. Digital images were spread across five different content management systems, which didn’t have the space to store them—and in fact, it was often up to the individual properties to manage and store these images. Wyndham decided to make the digital team part of the CMO organization, and using several partners, shot a million high-resolution photos in the last 18 months and consolidated them on to one cloud-based content management system. Adding these photos to its websites and mobile apps has already generated a 40% conversion increase, a 52% mobile bookings increase and a 10% of return visitors. The next steps in Wyndham’s transformation journey will be to use all of these images along with customer data to create better, personalized experiences online, and the company needed this streamlining to get to the next step in their digital transformation.
Embrace design thinking as an ongoing method to promote customer centricity and design frictionless customer experience. CapitalOne described its desire and journey toward becoming a tech company first and a bank second. Because of the threat from the growth of fintech companies, the bank has altered its core business strategy, impacting who they hire and how they operate. One major change has been the use of design thinking as a way of learning. They use the term “customer back”—meaning always start with the customer and work your way back. As this has culturally taken hold at CapitalOne, the bank has found that it is not just for people with design in their title, it’s being embraced across the organization. Results from these efforts have included customer-focused changes which remove barriers and make the customer experience more intuitive, such as ways that customers can pay their bill. For example, customers can now use Echo to ask Alexa what their balance is and pay a bill. CapitalOne has also implemented a chatbot named Eno who is available on SMS—customers can pay bills, get their balance and other basic functions. By listening to customer feedback, they’ve also implemented the ability to “unfreeze” a card that’s been flagged for fraud for just 15 minutes through their mobile app—for the busy customer that just needs to make a transaction while on the go. Involving customers in the design process has increased their ability to serve customers in the ways they prefer. It’s important that design thinking continues as an ongoing effort, as markets evolve and business needs change.
As each industry is being disrupted in new and different ways, it’s important for every organization to start somewhere – take these lessons and embrace small and quick wins in order to move forward in becoming more customer-centric organizations.
Acticall Sitel Group is undergoing a “moment of transformation,” as they put it – “pivoting from a contact center to a group of global services, innovative and socially engaged, dedicated to providing exceptional customer experiences.” What this really means in a world overflowing with overhyped CX buzzwords isn’t easy to tell, and here’s what I learned as one of the analyst community members that spent time with Sitel executives and 70+ clients and prospects at its 2017 Miami Analyst Day and corresponding Customer Summit this week: that a company in transformation needs a North Star – one that is bright and shiny to illuminate the path forward. Acticall Sitel has a lot of stars, but it’s not yet clear which one will stand out to lead the way.
Diversification: The Ventures Ecosystem
The “New Sitel” is the portfolio of companies: the traditional Sitel contact center business and a number of other “venture” companies brought on with Sitel’s acquisition by French based Acticall Group in 2015. This new Sitel has been a couple of years in the making, but the story that is emerging is an interesting and compelling one to buyers of contact center services and those of us who are enthusiasts of the contact center being a core element of customer experience design. A few highlights from the event:
The Social Client, one of the ventures, is a customer experience consulting and strategy company focused on implementing design elements like visual IVR, employing design thinking and journey mapping.
The Learning Tribe, a training and learning entity focused on digital aspects of learning, i.e. mobile and social learning, brings gamification and certification elements to training environments in need of transformation. As the head of training for a major corporate bank said, “we need to be digital internally within our organization as well as externally with customers.”
The Premium Tech Support venture is providing white glove services to clients and generating revenues through cross-sell and upsell opportunities while utilizing the Customer Insights analytics venture to optimize its services using predictive customer analytics.
The big picture of the new Sitel still seems a work in progress, especially in terms of commercial engagements, as the service provider retrains its sales staff and restructures incentives to more effectively sell across the ecosystem—but the passion and vision is certainly present. And Sitel is also investing in AI with a quality monitoring tool, empowering a trend the provider calls “botshore,” the use of bots as a lever along with offshore and nearshore options– a concept which jives well with HfS’ vision of using increasingly intelligent automation as just one of the levers to pull when it comes to engagements with service providers.
Pivoting the ventures toward American business will be a challenge, but very recent leadership additions, including a creative agency veteran in the role leading The Social Client and a BPO sales mogul in place leading sales in the Americas will bolster the potential for execution across the organization. Sitel will need to continue to think through the messaging and branding of these ventures: What truly represents the capability and value of each one and as part of the whole new business? For example, the name “The Social Client” is limiting and not representative of its capabilities. Sitel seems to be sitting on a gold mine and needs to unearth the potential to let it shine.
The Bottom Line: The time is ripe for a legacy call center provider to really transition to a customer experience design leader
In this world of “digital transformation”, many enterprise buyers are asking the question, who do we go to for design? Instead of paying boatloads of money to a traditional consulting firm, can they leverage their trusted contact center service providers who already know their customer inside AND out, and are investing in capabilities? I think the opportunity is there. We have been talking about it for years, but have yet to see a pure play contact center BPO provider really cultivate and hone a brand for the customer experience design element.
One of the elements that has consistently made Sitel’s events relevant and useful in the past (even pre-Acticall) is their transparency and willingness to give accessibility to their clients—especially at an event like this one, where we had the opportunity to meet with customer experience leaders from many industries and with various goals. The customer presentations were extremely valuable in understanding these enterprises’ mindsets and they were clearly getting a lot of value from each others’ stories as well. It’s quite a network that Sitel is establishing here.
What we now need to see from Sitel and its peers is real life examples of using the “value-added” services” – including digital marketing and customer experience design- which are presently a tiny percentage of revenues for Sitel and other contact center companies. On the same note, buyers who are constantly screaming “bring us innovation!” need to get involved and work with their service providers about the opportunity engage in these services. As soon as we start seeing more case studies and success stories of turning this theory into practice, the doors will open wide for those providers and buyers willing to invest and take the risk to really transform.
This is me jumping on the bandwagon with an opinion about the global WannaCry ransomware attack last Friday. As of my writing this, this attack hit over 200,000 companies, hospitals, universities, and other groups in more than 150 countries according to Europol. It’s been headline news.[1]
While bandwagon jumping generally has a bad connotation (doing or supporting something just because it’s hot at the moment,) security is one of the bandwagons you should proactively jump on. Right now. Really.
Security tools, services, articles, etc. are all popular because security attacks are popular – and increasing. So yes, if in the past you thought your passive following of whatever standards were placed in front of you was good enough, you need to break out of that rut and get proactive. Too often, standards aren’t keeping up with the changing threat landscape. You need to constantly search for new security tools, skills, and services to help you protect your firm, your employees, and your customers to achieve digital trust in the market.
In fact, the recent attack only brings findings from HfS’ recent Managed Security Services Blueprint into clearer perspective. We heard from both providers and security executives that effective security programs shared key characteristics:
Automation everywhere possible. There are too many threats and attempts for your security team to monitor them without automation – you’ll never collect the necessary data manually. Your automation investments need to include appropriate analytics to evaluate and find patterns in the data so your team can take appropriate next steps.
Investment in cognitive computing. Predictive analytics and cognitive computing investments for tomorrow aren’t negotiable. Today’s environments can collect and analyze, but you also need to be focused on systems that learn from current data to build predictive models and help you prevent attacks, not just respond to attacks as they happen.
Focus on employees and the human element. This takes two tracks: 1) Educate employees more often and more consistently about phishing and other techniques that attackers can use to get credentials and other sensitive information from workers to attack company systems. And 2) keep your security team’s skills up to date. The talent shortage in security is exacerbated by the skills gap – staying current on all security trends is daunting but necessary. And security teams are so overwhelmed already that it may seem they don’t have time for training. It’s time to evaluate your hiring and training for security to look for ways to bring in non-traditional talent and get them up to speed faster to ensure you’re protected.
Bottom Line: Treat security as your business, not as an enabler
Without effective security your business won’t survive – either your company systems will be brought down, or more likely, customers won’t want to do business with you if they see you as a threat to their own information security. The WannaCry ransomware attacks is another proof point that security threats are increasing in number, scope, and scale. Jump on the security bandwagon and follow practices of leading edge security practioners for effective programs.
