In order to stay competitive, speed and simplicity are of utmost importance to marketers today. Lionbridge is providing “smart” translation services by really thinking about how to make the marketing person’s job easier – through a simple, fast, self-service, and automated capability. We recently spoke with Life Fitness, a fitness equipment manufacturer, about their use of translation services for marketing materials. Life Fitness uses Lionbridge’s onDemand online service, a portal for uploading files to be translated in various formats, providing instant quotes for the timing and cost of completing the translation project.
As an international company, Life Fitness uses this service for translation and localization of all kinds of content, both customer facing and internal in 11 languages (Lionbridge serves 120 languages total). The content being translated includes MS Office documents, website content, email communications, YouTube videos and software on the cardiovascular products. The translation is done by employees, but Lionbridge onDemand automates the workflow process including: file analysis, quoting, delivery estimates, routing to translators, application of glossary and terminology, quality reviews, delivery notification and file delivery.
Life Fitness has had previous translation providers, but felt they weren’t working “smart” enough. The automation and speed that the onDemand portal provides is the big difference. “Quality translation is easy to find,” said a Life Fitness marketing manager. “A number of providers do this well. What they struggled with was the efficiency with the turnaround time and the business process and systems around the translation. That’s where Lionbridge was helpful because the portal is simple and straightforward.”
3 Ways to Simplify the Marketer’s Translation Ordering Experience
Life Fitness described the Lionbridge onDemand service as a straightforward process where its 30 users have their own accounts to log in and choose the product that they want to order. Once they upload the material they verify the source language (which is automatically detected), select the target language, and get an instantaneous quote, which is sent for approval. Before using the automated workflow, Life Fitness had to do a review for every project, which took two weeks to a month of extra time. They now have a 3-5 day turnaround period as a result of automating the file analysis and quoting.
The service has also shaved off time with automation for PO management and invoice payment and tracking invoicing with automated invoice generation—Life Fitness went from a 10 step process involving email coordination between departments and manual tracking in spreadsheets that could take up to a month, which has now been cut down to one day.
Life Fitness also appreciates the ability to receive an instant and reliable timetable for the delivery of a project. (onDemand published figures show a 99.6% on time delivery performance.) Lionbridge beat out its competitors for simplicity and ease of use, although perhaps “too simple” as when the Life Fitness’ technical publications team has larger, more complex file types, they have had some issues with the quoting feature. Lionbridge is working to address by developing an advanced quoting function that was launched in August.
Talent and Tech Combine for Plug and Play Service
The translation work is done 100% by professional, human translators all based in the target locales. What we should watch in the future for potential disruption is the progression of automated/machine translation; Lionbridge itself is making some strides in this area with its GeoFluent offering, targeted primarily at the contact center. In the meantime, this service is able to guarantee the quality of the translation by having efficient automated processes with a human touch in the background.
The Workday services market is growing rapidly, but remains relatively immature. With many of the service providers still finalizing their specific areas of market focus and are trying to find a clear identity and position in the service ecosystem. At the same time enterprise buyers are learning the intricacies of SaaS deployment and service provider relationship lessons in real time.
One of the most uncontroversial findings from our recent research (see: HFS Blueprint Report: Workday Services 2016) into Workday services is that enterprises are increasingly considering Workday solutions to manage both their HR and Finance functions. While Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) remains the leading solution, interest in Workday Finance Management (FM) has significantly grown in the past year. In fact, some enterprises are deploying the FM product first. We see a mix of deployment behavior, including:
Cautious Experimenters: Enterprises deploying a few modules at a time, across a few or all sites
The Big Bangers: Enterprises deploying almost the full suite of the HCM modules to all major sites at once
The All-In: Enterprises adopting the full platform deployment of HCM, FM and sometimes also Payroll applications
The Workday service providers profiled in our recently published HFS Blueprint Report: Workday Services 2016 expect this part of their services business to grow at an average of 46% in the next year. This is strongly supported by Workday itself, which works closely with each of its service partners to identify market positioning and opportunities. HfS estimates that the number of people in service providers’ Workday services practice teams increased by 64% from 2015 to 2016.* Service provider participants of this Blueprint have a total of nearly 5,000 Workday certified consultants.
Service providers and buyer organizations alike are investing in Workday skills and solutions. HfS has published two reports to provide recommendations to each of these parties:
In these reports we highlight the areas buyers and service providers need to focus to ensure successful Workday deployments. For example, service providers should demonstrate a commitment to investing in Workday services, and adopt an industry sector approach to service offerings and solution development. Buyers need to ensure that they understand what is involved in a Workday deployment, both technically and organizationally, and pushing all their service providers to share best practice lessons.
Both of these reports are available on the HfS Research web site at http://www.hfsresearch.com/research and, of course, are free to download.
*Footnote: based on service providers who were included in the HfS Workday Services Blueprints of 2015 and 2016. This also takes out the effect of major acquisitions that these providers may have been involved in.
The funny thing about innovative projects is that everyone likes to talk about buying them as if innovation is a product you just pick up off the shelf at the store. But real innovation – exploring ideas, opportunities, risk, and implications of change – means you likely don’t even know what you’re buying. You’re not buying a packaged piece of software or a defined solution. You’re really buying someone who can be a co-creator with you, helping you wade through the mass of tangled and often conflicting options available to discover and build something that adds a unique value to your business.
When you’re experimenting with business opportunities it’s complicated enough, but when you add a technology or solution area that’s just emerging, it gets doubly complicated because often the service providers don’t have tons of experience themselves in the new area. Blockchain is a perfect example – most service providers are themselves exploring what blockchain can do for their clients and vertical industries. My latest research into emerging blockchain services shows this, with most providers still in the early days of the blockchain efforts (see Exhibit 1)
Clients and their service providers are learning blockchain together. This is bad if you want someone to hold your hand and tell you everything is going to be ok, that they have the answer for you (by the way, no judgment from me on this – if there’s a well understood solution and you can hand it over to someone to get it done, go for it.) BUT it’s fantastic if you really want to take control of your own business destiny, be strategic and really work collaboratively with a partner to find the right opportunities and create solutions together. It’s a rare chance to be an equal intellectual partner with your services firm and in fact potentially for the provider to learn from you as your team researches opportunities and bring in the provider to help test some of those opportunities.
Five considerations for selecting a services partner for blockchain experiments
If you can’t just send out a standard RFI with what you’re looking for, how can you pick a service provider to help you explore blockchain? Try some of the following criteria:
Look for design thinking capability. Because design thinking is about looking at the human aspects of a situation, finding the problem to be solved, and then working backwards from that solution, it’s a great way to discover opportunities with blockchain. It also allows you to be respected an expert in your own right, unlike more traditional discovery projects where the consultants feel like they already know 80% of the answers.
Find great storytellers. It’s really important to understand the technical aspects of blockchain, of course. You’ll have an easier time finding technical skills than you will finding people who can really dream with you and tell you stories of how blockchain can change the world. This isn’t just about looking for strategists, it’s about looking for providers who can clearly communicate a vision for what’s possible, so you in turn have an easier time digesting the different scenarios and selecting the right ones to move forward on to the proof-of-concept stage.
Conflict resolution, problem solving, and negotiation. Innovation engagements are by definition environments of strong disagreements, opposing views, and conflicting information. Most providers are great at marching when you tell them to march. Far fewer are capable of disagreeing without causing an escalation in the account. Look for consultants with negotiation backgrounds and a methodology that explicitly calls out conflict resolution processes as part of their work.
Put more emphasis on service providers’ partnerships than usual. The market for an emerging technology like blockchain is filled with consortia, startups, and small vendors. Service providers that are just exploring should be comfortable saying they’re looking at a lot of players and haven’t made formal partnerships yet (we saw this often in our latest research.) But they should be able to demonstrate a broad view of those players and the segments where they’re trying to map the vendors. Spend more time understanding what criteria the providers are using to evaluate the technology vendors than you would normally, since this deep dive is going to be more important for you than in other more mature areas.
Ability to work in agile development environments. Yes, I know, you’re likely not even close to building anything right now. But keep in mind that you’re looking to find someone to co-create with you and that requires the ability to be iterative and flexible while still not losing sight of the original goals. Providers who have more rigid engagement methodologies will put more pressure on you to define your requirements probably even before you really know what those requirements are. So look for a player that has strong agile skills since those skills will transfer well to your blockchain exploration.
Of course this doesn’t mean you forget your best practices for hiring service providers: client references, checks into their technical depth and execution, client management and governance, etc. But those best practices need to be supplemented with a few more non-traditional evaluation criteria like the ones above. Ultimately, these kinds of engagements are a lot more push/pull than engagements for more mature areas.
What did I miss? What other less-asked qualifiers do you use when evaluating new areas like blockchain services? I’d love to know your thoughts as I keep researching blockchain.
In the meantime, here’s a link to the full HfS Research Emerging Blockchain Services Blueprint Guide, with definitions and descriptions of the current activity (particularly in BFSI) and how service providers are approaching this inevitably integral part of the future fabric of any industry.
Steve Goldberg (click for bio) is Research Vice President, HR Technology and Workforce Strategies at HfS Research
Back when enterprise time began and God was handing out the technology dollars, why was the Chief HR Officer always seemingly at the back of the queue? Why did so many of our beloved enterprises become plagued with the clunkiest, funkiest legacy systems we never could have dreamed up in our worst nightmares? Especially when you consider the data critically and sensitivity of one’s employees – their profiles, their health records, their compensation, their performance etc…
So it’s no surprise that the advent of the SaaS based HR suite has been embraced like manna from Infosys heaven. Suddenly, our HR-technology plagued enterprises can hatch a plan to rip out the cancerous legacy and slam in something that’s standardized, has hire-to-retire process that are sort of adequate, and doesn’t require that cobol transformation project each time you try to push through an exception payment. So what better timing than for HfS to bring aboard Steve Goldberg – a true veteran of the HR tech world – to lead our thinking in the space and is freshly returned to his desk from the HR Technology show (read his blogs here).
Welcome Steve! Can you share a little about your background and why you have chosen research and strategy as your career path?
Sure Phil. I’ve basically operated on all sides of HR Technology, so a real diversity of experiences. This includes HRIS and Talent Management practitioners in the U.S. and Europe, HCM product strategy leader at both PeopleSoft and emerging solutions companies, co-founder of a recruiting software company, HR-M&A and HR Shared Services exec, a previous stint as an industry analyst, and advisory engagements the last 10 years with solution vendors and end-customers around the globe. This pattern of diverse perspectives and experiences likely started in grad school, as I first pursued a Masters in Social Work and then made a left (or perhaps right) turn to earn an MBA in HR. On the research and strategy part of your question, strategy work is what I hope keeps my brain reasonably serviceable, and I guess research ensures the strategy work is based on what is really happening.
And why did you choose to join HfS… and why now?
I chose HfS for 2 main reasons: In my career I’ve always tried to be around folks smarter than me (the rising tide lifts all boats principle), and who are also thinking differently than most. A former colleague once told me that it’s not what you think, but how you think. The first time I read your stuff, Phil, that comment from decades ago came back — and frankly that’s when I reached out to you.
What are the areas and topics that you will focus on in your analyst role?
My role, and the themes I’ll be exploring, will focus on both the HR Tech solutions space and the HR services (or in HfS-speak) “as-a-service” market. I tend to study business value drivers and impediments, and how both vendors and customers maximize the former while minimizing the latter. As we know, the pace of innovation and product/services advances is often ahead of corresponding adoption curves, so my work will also try to help both vendors and customers navigate this challenge. Clarifying various vendor claims that can confuse buyers is also of interest to me; e.g., what is truly an industry or global solution?
And what hot trends and developments are capturing your attention today?
These would include what capabilities and innovations are driving the most business value, looking at the “big 4” themes in HR Tech — Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud — and discussing the likely trajectory of each with people on all sides of the value chain, and also collaborating with HfS colleagues on covering unique angles around more traditional services areas like Payroll, Benefits, HRO/RPO, etc.
So what do you do with your spare time (if you have any…)?
Well, I try to play piano almost daily as I never know when an opportunity will surface again to play in a local venue, I take walks on the beach here in FL when the heat isn’t too oppressive (so about 6 weeks a year), play computer chess, and get vicarious thrills from the lives my 2 adult kids are leading.
Steve – I look forward to challenging you to a chess game soon when you can hone those strategic skills against me =)
One of the age-old knocks on the HR profession is that it attracted those who prided themselves on “being good with people.” I was never really sure what this meant when I selected HR / HR Systems as a career path way back when, but it seemed better than being good with hazardous waste. This notion was eventually borne out by the fact that my shortest corporate HR stint was with a Waste Management industry leader.
So how does this relate to the recent HR Tech Conference? Well, beyond what was discussed in my last post about smaller players doing their share to drive product innovation, another realization hit me: Dozens of newer HR technologies are not just “good with people,” but “really smart about people.” This means knowing personal if not unique drivers, how to engage and motivate, and leveraging that context for the benefit of both the organization and its individuals. Employing different talent management and employee engagement approaches for different talent pools (e.g., early career vs. later career or more experienced employees, high potentials, high-value candidates, change-resistors, etc.) makes very good sense.
The personalization theme was indeed ubiquitous at this year’s HR Tech conference, and since forms of personalization within HCM solutions are potentially limitless, I suspect we’ll be seeing more product innovations relating to this theme with each passing conference. The reasons are indelibly clear. Personalization in a user experience drives user adoption and system stickiness, which drives value realization and ROI. It’s also a key by-product of cognitive computing; e.g., the system determines what data, metrics, other content, activities or actions is most relevant for the individual, making them more efficient and effective. And both of these benefits lead to other critical business benefits like engagement, retention and productivity.
Personalization is “killing it” in the recruiting space
It’s no revelation that thousands of recruiting professionals are tripping over each other vying for the attention and interest of the same top talent, many of whom are not looking for a job change or even interested in discussing one. Overcoming these challenges requires not just shiny objects, but shiny objects with initials engraved on them so to speak.
Why all the fuss about engaging passive candidates? Well, the quality of job candidates is generally better within this group for a few reasons: They have not been displaced by their previous employer, they are likely well regarded by their current employer and treated accordingly, and the best opportunities come to them so they are less frequently on the market. Engaging anyone that generally doesn’t want to be engaged isn’t easy, let alone engaging people already bombarded by social media and other technology-driven interactions.
Below are four impressive examples of personalization I observed from recruiting solution vendors at the conference; and I’d also suggest checking out HfS’ recent research on the talent acquisition services BPO market. It provides solid examples of how vendors differentiate with respect to their ability to engage top talent. You can find it here: http://www.hfsresearch.com/pointsofview/hfs-blueprint-guide-to-talent-acquisition-services
ENGAGE’s customers source from one of the largest pools of passive candidates available anywhere; and based on continuously refreshed industry and company data points, insights and inferences, recruiters get alerted real-time when a target candidate is likely to be receptive to a job conversation based on relevant triggers. Timing and receptivity are everything when competing for the best candidates.
The Muse, a relatively new but well-funded player whose first wave of customers would make any established vendor envious, is a career development and employment tool that allows prospective employees to immerse themselves in the experience of working in a particular organization or even role in the way that satisfies their curiosity and interest. This is achieved while getting coached with employment / job search tips along the way that are also highly personalized.
GetTalent helps organizations craft the right (personalized) message and recruitment campaign to attract and engage customer-defined pools of candidates, easily assign target (largely passive) candidates to pools, and track the efficacy of the various communications and campaigns.
1-Page also allows companies to find, qualify and engage passive job seekers; and breaking down technology and other common barriers to communicating with candidates — in the ways they prefer to be communicated with — is one of this vendor’s product strengths.
Not at all limited to Recruiting solutions
Certainly the personalization theme abounds outside the recruiting domain too. A company called Enboarder demonstrated how on-boarding is really meant to happen from a new hire engagement and emotional connection perspective. This is achieved using automated, highly personalized texts from managers and other colleagues based on personal info the new hire shares about themselves in a fun Q+A texted to their mobile.
Bottom Line
Almost all of the major themes swirling around the HR tech space these days seem to have some connection to the personalization theme, from user experience and solution design, to driving system adoption and usage, to – arguably most importantly — more effective ways to identify, engage, manage and truly leverage talent.
The market for talent has seen massive fluctuations over the last eight years. The 2008-9 global recession caused massive employment contractions across all major regions; however, the tide has now really started to turn. In recent years we have been witness to one of the longest sustained periods of economic growth in the last 100 years, and with this, the need for fresh talent is on the rise.
Coupled with the rise of the intelligent digital business, these two market dynamics have changed the way organizations have to approach recruiting new expertise and mindsets. With employees now augmented by this technological innovation, the potential for increased efficiency gains and quality of service delivery is greater than ever.
Here’s the talent challenge now: Employees now, more than ever, need to bring the ability to truly impact an organization’s bottom line, and recruiters need to find and attract them into their companies.
Candidates, particularly passive candidates, are in the driver’s seat and are becoming increasingly particular about which companies they will work for, doing their due diligence to find their right match, using the abundance of information at their fingertips. For today’s candidates, work-life balance and a fulfilling work environment are now at the forefront of candidate’s decision-making process. In addition, many candidates are now exploring contractual work; and this, coupled with increasing project specific assignments in the workplace, is leading to an increasingly active contingent labor market.
So what does this talent acquisition challenge mean for RPO?
Traditional Recruitment Process Outsourcers (RPO) that aim to purely fill permanent positions are no longer often an ideal, forward-looking fit for many companies.
Many organizations are now either partnering with multiple service providers to fulfill RPO (mostly for full-time permanent) and MSP (primarily for contingent/contractor) services separately or looking at service providers that can provide both options. Therefore, HfS is now seeing a convergence of the MSP and RPO market, into a broader Talent Acquisition Services market.
About This Blueprint Guide
In the Talent Acquisition Services Blueprint Guide, we take an innovative look at the Talent Acquisition Services market, reviewing the market activity and a comparative analysis of the innovation and execution capabilities of 10 multi-national, multi-functional service providers.
These service providers have Talent Acquisition Services support capability in their portfolio—at least three of the following services: Candidate Selection and Assessment, Workforce Planning, Employer Branding, Onboarding Services and Candidate Care. Recruitment agency work is not in the scope of this Blueprint Guide but it does include outsourced Talent Acquisition Services on a contract basis that extends one year and beyond in duration.
What does the changing market dynamic mean for recruitment stakeholders?
With service buyers identifying cost and shortage of talent as the predominant drivers in the Talent Acquisition Services market, you could assume that buyers should look for the lowest cost, high-volume Talent Acquisition Services provider, which therefore provide the lowest price but potentially the greatest number of candidates due to scale of operations and reach. Also, many buyers label themselves either cost or value play buyers, based on number of hires and scarcity of skillsets sought, and then source Talent Acquisition Services providers accordingly based on either cost or quality.
However, these sourcing tactics provide a false economy because they could ultimately negatively impact further business outcomes. For example, a sub-standard recruiting and onboarding function has been proven to negatively impact employee performance and increase the likelihood of churn. There is additional impact via an increase in the overall cost of hiring practices, reduced workforce productivity and negative impact on company culture.
With the rise of cognitive recruiting and sourcing platforms been able to identify talent in a cost effective manner recruitment sourcing no longer has to be delivered from offshore centers. Also, automated systems are removing much of the administrative work from the process. This means that the cost of higher value interactions with the candidate such as screening, interviewing and onboarding can be delivered from onshore or on-site locations for a lower total cost. Placing greater emphasis on quality interactions at this point has proven to increase employee productivity and tenure. In addition, these cognitive systems can also identify a better quality of candidate fit that leads to an improved cultural and performance fit of candidates by identifying and matching unique character trends and skillsets based on existing employee performance data.
As such, buyers should look to service providers that can support a proven record of higher quality recruiting services combined with the required level of scale, even if this means a marginal cost penalty at the front end. Therefore, it is vital to include the c-suite in sourcing initiatives and demonstrate long-term ROI of these initiatives. Engaging with a service provider that understands your ultimate business outcomes, strategy and culture is a crucial element in the equation.
Ultimately, organizations are only as profitable as the persons they employ and recruiting practices should mirror this goal.
To access and download the Talent Acquisition Services Blueprint Guide, which provides an overview of market challenges and activity and a high level assessment of service providers, click here.
We’re rapidly evolving to an era where there is only “OneOffice” that matters
The OneOffice paradigm is all about creating the digital customer experience and an intelligent, single office to enable and support it. In a few months, we won’t be talking nearly as much about automation and digital technology as the critical “value levers” for operations, as they become an embedded part of the fabric of the future operations platform for new generation enterprises. Instead, we will be talking a lot more about OneOffice, where an integrated support operation has the digital prowess to enable its enterprise to meet customer demand – as and when that demand happens.
OneOfficeis when the needs and experiences of the customer are front and center to the entire business operations, where the old barriers between corporate operations functions (often referred to as “front” and “back office”) are eroded and the constraints of legacy ERP systems are minimized to allow the business to invest in digital technologies and capabilities that enable it to cater proactively for its customer needs at the forefront of its markets and be a very fast responder if these needs change unexpectedly.
In short, OneOfficeis the endgame, where the digital enterprise can work in real time to cater for its clients. It’s where the intelligence, the processes and the infrastructure can come together as one integrated unit, with one set of unified business outcomes tied to delighting customers.
In a nutshell, people simply want to operate digitally these days, whether they are an employee, customer or partner. They want to use interactive technology, mobile apps, social media, text, online chat etc. to get things done. People are used to using sophisticated digital technologies in their personal lives, and now expect to use them in their professional lives. Whether they are buying products, groceries, renting accommodation, ordering Starbucks, takeout, applying for mortgages, insurances policies etc., digital technology is the new language of business.
The issue facing many traditional business today is the fact that while the consumer is increasingly digitally sophisticated, many enterprises are still beholden to legacy technologies and processes that are fast sinking into obsolescence. In addition, many have employees in the “back office” who are so steeped in the legacy way of doing things, they are facing a double-edged issue: how do they drag their operations kicking and screaming out of the dark ages to support their digital customers?
The answer, believe it or not, is quite simple: break down the barriers between departments, involve the digital customer experiences into all the business processes and practices, by creating a OneOfficeTM digital culture where an enterprise’s customers, partners and employees are all entwined together to deliver the end customers the ultimate experience, and the operations function a genuine connection with the true running of the business from back to front.
The winners will be the disruptors, not the disrupted
In almost every industry today, emerging disruptive competitors are using digital platforms and cognitive computing that can wipe out “traditional” enterprises overnight.
For example, you could be a traditional insurance firm with over 10,000 employees processing claims onshore using green screen computers, or a bank which still has hundreds of main street branches employing traditional retail bank workers, or a retail outlet with no mobile application strategy: your enterprise could be at dire risk of competition attacking your business with mobile app-driven, user friendly, intuitive and cognitive business models, supported by intelligent, affordable BPO and IT operations. Today, we are seeing infrastructure-light insurance firms quickly leap onto their markets, “digital banks” purely targeting Millennials with app-friendly interfaces, and “digital mortgages” targeting consumers by bypassing traditional banks altogether. These are potentially massive business disruptions that can terminate traditional businesses today, not even taking into account the potential impact of Block Chain in the future, if it fulfills even half of its promise to disrupt how we perform secure finance transactions.
Enterprises seeking to get ahead of digital disruption urgently need operations infrastructure that enables them to pivot fast and combat these potential fatal threats to their business model. They need to recognize where the threats could come from and quickly hatch a plan to remain competitive by forging a much more fluid operational support model where the customer is front and center to the entire operations of the enterprise (see the graphic above).
The “Digitally-driven Front Office” drives the whole enterprise
Digital, in its purest form, is all about transforming the business to create, support and sustain the immersive digital customer experience. These “immersive” customer experiences are about leveraging the omnichannel (mobile, social, interactive technologies) and creating meaningful analytics to create a true digital experience for the enterprise and its customers, its employees and its partners up and down the supply chain. The OneOfficeenterprise needs a support function to service those customers, get its products/services to market when they want them, manage the financial metrics, understand their needs and future demands and make sure it has the talent which truly understands how to meet the desired outcomes of their work.
The “Digital Underbelly” creates the Building Blocks for the OneOfficeexperience
Digitally-driven enterprises must create a Digital Underbelly to support the front office by automating manual processes, digitizing manual documents and leveraging smart devices and IoT where they are present in the value chain. Enterprises simply cannot be effectively with a digital strategy without automating processes intelligently – forget all the hype around robotics and jobs going away, this is about making processes run digitally so smart enterprises can grow their digital businesses and create new work and opportunities. This is akin to a “central nervous system” that incepts and processes all the elements necessary to make the enterprise function.
“Intelligent Digital Support” breaks down legacy functional silos
Enterprises need their support functions (like an “enterprise circular system”), such as IT, finance, HR and supply chain, to be aligned with supporting the customer experience, as opposed to operating in some sort of vacuum, hence, we are terming this “Intelligent Digital Support”, where broader roles can be created. Most of today’s college graduates are simply not motivated to perform mundane routine work: operations staff proactively need to support the fast-shifting needs of the front office, which is changing the hiring needs or savvy digital businesses, many of which are seeing talent which can “learn on the job” as opposed to simply having years of related work experience, which may no longer be relevant in these fast changing markets.
Hence, the focus needs to shift towards creating 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. This is especially the case in industries that are more dependent than ever on real time data, using multiple channels to reach their customers and being able to think out-of-the-box with disruptive business models. Of course, we all need to make sure we can keep the operations functioning by paying the bills, responding to customers, processing the claims etc., but if we cannot be proactive and look at how we can create a better customer experience using digital channels, or challenging the logic of running a process a certain way, we will never create work cultures that will attract the bright minds to take us forward.
People want to feel a part of something and that their work matters – and the best way to do this is to move away from rigid corporate structures of the past, with too many management layers and departments run siloed like mini-empires. We need to invest in driven managers, which understand how to motivate and collaborate across business functions. Sales, marketing, customer service, IT, finance, HR and supply chain are functions that all depend on each other to be effective. Smart enterprises are already breaking down the silos and creating multidisciplinary teams, using collaborative tools and Design Thinking methods across delivery centers to help their staff be more motivated, creative and challenge the old way of doing things.
“Intelligent Digital Processes” help us predict as opposed to react
Last, but certainly not least, the OneOfficeenterprise is laser-focused on designing business processes that align with its desired digital customer experiences to be competitive and effective in its market. OneOfficeis not about collecting and archiving historical data simply to discover what went wrong, it’s about being able to predict when things will go wrong and devising smart strategies to get ahead of them. OneOfficeis about embedding smart cognitive applications into process chains and workflows, it’s about learning from mistakes and new experiences along the way. This is the “enterprise neural system”.
The beauty of the OneOfficeenterprise is that the legacy systems and ERP are no longer holding back the enterprise from business progress. Cognitive technologies, advances analytics and robotic process automation can create the functionalities necessary to operate in digital environments by automating and extracting the data needed real-time to respond to markets, support critical decisions and stay ahead of the game. Even the most disruptive of digital business today, such as Uber and AirBnb, use traditional IT systems, IT support and BPO support to get things done. The key is to “ring-fence” the legacy so it can’t constrict the emerging technology from enabling the business.
Open feedback loops are core to the OneOffice paradigm
The goal of the OneOffice is to engineer processes to ensure that the whole of an organization is greater than the sum of its parts. Any system within any organization is likely to become inefficient or requires maintenance and overhaul at some point. Systems and processes with closed feedback loops are an issue with current business practices in many industries. Until recently, innovation has been typically driven by the experience of business leaders and has not had the benefit of the vast amount of data – particularly around the causes and effects of changes to business models and business practices. The biggest change driven by digital is not only the better interaction or access to new markets, but more the data that can be collected and analyzed from interactions. It gives companies instant (or near instant) feedback on its decision-making loops – which can be used to create a massive open feedback loop for decision making.
In such a feedback loop, the impact of changes made in any part of the system can be tracked and analyzed. This data can determine, for example, when and how products are launched, the level of training a new product will require – and perhaps, more importantly, whether this strategy was correct. The open feedback loop is the heart of Design Thinking and the key to successful OneOffice schema. All parts of the organization are joined so cause and effect can be judged. Failure can be measured and learned from. The real reasons for success can be measured and replicated.
The Bottom Line: OneOffice is the real alignment of operations with the business end of the organization
We’ve been talking about aligning support functions with the goals / mission of the firm for decades now, but digital is realigning us all with the true uberlord of the organization – the customer. If our supporting technologies and people can finally respond to, interpret, predict and be part of our digital customer experience, we’ll finally see those barriers stagnating organizations come crashing down.
If there’s one character, on the client side, who’s really take on the mantel of “Chief of the Robo-Buyers” it’s Lee Coulter, the year’s Chairman for the HfS Sourcing Executive Council.
He probably won’t appreciate the moniker, as his standards group has already dropped the term “Robo”, but we’ll call him that anyway… So without further ado, let’s hear more from Lee as he gathers his thoughts after the recent HfS Cognition Summit:
Server: “Hi there, my name is HAL, and I will be your server. Can I get you started with something to drink? Sparkling water or something else perhaps?”
Watson: “I’d like a Hadoop martini, Drilled not Dremeled.”
Holmes: “That’ll be fine for me, too, but with some Flume and a touch of Pig”
HAL: “Sure. And have you had a chance to look at the menu? Do you know what you’d like?”
Watson: “I’d like the Presto with Storm please. Can I get a side of Sqoop as well?”
Holmes: “I’d love some Oozie with the Mongo preparation and Thrift as a starter.”
Server: “Very good. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
A few weeks ago, at Phil’s event in White Plains, I got to hang out with some of industry’s best and brightest. Of course, as we have been doing at HfS for years, we looked to the future for trends, disruption, and new capabilities that will influence what the SSO industry will be facing. I also had the privilege to hang out with Gerd Leonhard for a couple hours over a drink. That was a real treat.
Not surprisingly, there was a lot of talk about automation, machine learning, AI, cloud, aaS, and so forth. I remarked to Phil that gone are the days when we were wrestling with how to do transitions well, how to contract for BPO, location strategies, and even the years-long discussion about why we aren’t getting innovation from our service providers. In the last three years, the conversation has totally changed. Whether you are a Utopian or a dystopian, the irrefutable reality of rapidly increasing Intelligent Automation is a fact. Leading futurists like Kurzweil, Leonhard, and Diamandis disagree on a few things like timing and the impact to society and future of work; they all agree that the world will fundamentally change by 2030.
During the event, and on the plane home, I was thinking a lot about what’s next. How do we get from where we are now, to a position in which our organizations can take advantage of this really cool stuff?
The pace of the pace of advancement is such that I am calling this era Living Logarithmic. There are so many technologies in an exponential rate of advancement that in combination, the total acceleration is logarithmic. Weirdly, the human brain is inherently incapable of comprehension of change at this pace without deliberate effort. I have been feebly trying to do exactly that, and wanted to share some thoughts.
My organization is an an early adopter of automation, and I am generally a geek that follows technological advancement fervently. We have a five-year roadmap taking us into a new world of d-BPO or digital BPO (will reserve for another discussion). We have a well-established CoE implementing unattended batched automation and assisted in-line automation, and are looking deeply at NLP, UCaaS, and Machine Learning (ML). We are in active dialog with Amelia, Cognitive Scale, Watson, and Holmes. These are technologies that all make use of ML. I am very careful with my choice of words here as things like autonomic, cognitive, and AI are not defined. As an aside, I should mention that I am Chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Working Group on Standards in Intelligent Process Automation – the first output of that work will be a Guide to Concepts, Nomenclature, and Terms. We expect to be opening that for public input sometime in December. So for now, I lump these more sophisticated technologies into the bucket of ML.
All of that is well and good. However, over the last year or so, we have made a surprising, and somewhat dismaying, discovery about this next wave of capability. Simply stated, you need DATA; lots and lots and lots of data. It is absolutely essential for this next round of advancement, and it is not the data you think you already have. It is no surprise that Google and Facebook (among a few others) are already in the business of ML and perhaps even some narrow AI. Their worlds are, by design, entirely digital. Every single thing that happens in their universe creates digital exhaust that is captured in truly staggeringly huge data repositories. It is estimated that Google has somewhere around 1.8 million servers today and approximately 15 EXAbytes (that is 15 million TB) of data. For comparison, that is about 3% of all of the data stored by mankind. Facebook collects 500 TB of data daily. The beauty of their worlds is that they designed it so that every part of it would be digital. All interactions between man and machine are digitized. Transactions and the software that enables them are built for AIDC and KeyValue storage. They planned it so they would have the data to feed their future.
In the enterprise, we are not so fortunate. In fact, businesses today are data malnourished. What does that mean? I created that term to describe the current reality where enterprises have a digital record of remarkably little of what they do. Where they do have data, it is woefully insufficient and anything but a balanced meal when you consider the appetite for ML and AI.
To give a bit more context, enterprise software systems of today are designed to discard almost every digital breadcrumb except the final transactional output. Because of limitations of computing and storage that existed at the time these systems were developed, programmers built the system to intentionally discard transitional data and contextual information. While most businesses have some sort of Business Intelligence (BI) program and a data warehouse and think things are rosy, they are not. Keeping with the food analogy, think of it this way: after business is done serving up a whole Thanksgiving dinner, the only digital record is a single byte of information regarding the color (but not even the exact shade) from one dot of icing on one cookie. That simply won’t do. That is data poverty and data malnutrition.
The Bottom-line: Move over automation, the real task at hand is saving our data souls
The next big thing is going to be all about data: data forms, data formats, data structures, data strategies, data storage, data management (a field unto itself), human-machine interaction digitization strategies, data user, data context, data content, data fabric (a new term), data seeding, data landing, ACID testing, semantic data mapping, ontological structure imposition, Automatic Identification and Capture (AIDC), data governance, data cleanliness, and a whole host of new things known today only by experts. A new set of words and tools will likewise enter our business vocabulary: Hive, Mahout, Presto, Sqoop, Flume, Thrift, Hama, Oozie, Impala, Docker, Hbase, micro-service, Avro, Box, Kafka, Chukwa, Mongo, Dremel and Drill and Sawzall (not hand tools!), Pig, Cassandra, and Storm.
I realize that all sounds like a crap load of confabulation, but that too is a term we will get to know and hate. Confabulation: The act of making an intuition-based decision appear to be data-based.
So folks, grab your Dockers with both hands, the Storm is coming, and there’s no Presto button to catch this greased Pig. If you didn’t find a little humor in that, it probably means you are suffering from the data scientist scarcity like most of the global industry. Current estimates say we are short by 200,000 data scientists in 2017. These folks currently make an average of $113k in suburban areas and command $200k in dense metro areas.
Move over automation. We need to save our data malnourished companies… and quickly!
Lee Coulter (pictured right) is currently senior vice president at Ascension and the chief executive of Ascension’s Shared Services Subsidiary. Lee is the 2016-2017 Chairman, HfS Sourcing Executive Council (SEC); Co Chair, World BPO/ITO Forum; Global Steering Committee member Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON); and Chair, IEEE CIS Working Group on Standards in Intelligent Process Automation. In his 30 years in the SSO industry, he has worked in senior leadership roles for GE, Kraft, Aon, and Ascension.
Notwithstanding having my 13th HR Technology Conference participation cut short by needing to return home to Florida to deal with a hurricane, one major observation stood out for me. It was also a fairly pleasant surprise, something that doesn’t come easy after attending so many of these events—as enriching as they usually are.
In fact, the hurricane actually contributed to the observation. How? Well, in having to unfortunately cancel briefings with major HR Tech vendors to leave early on Thursday, I had to rely more on quick-hitting discovery sessions in the exhibit hall, generally with lesser known vendors. They are typically not as schedule-constrained at the conference.
So, here it is: I found it just as easy to see meaningful HR Tech innovations in the booths of “little guys” and emerging players as I did in their much larger and more established counterparts. I’ll define ”meaningful product innovations” as practical, obviously value-creating (vs. largely “wow factor”) advances where the system’s intelligence is leveraged without a lot of heavy lifting or major change adoption needed by the customer organization … dependencies often under-estimated by vendors and customers.
This phenomenon of smaller players excelling so much in the innovation department is arguably a function of basic math: There’s only a small group of market-leading solution vendors but roughly 400 HR Technology companies exhibited at the event. And no matter how large and well capitalized a solution provider is, it is just impossible to make every functionality area or module in their product portfolio a priority every release cycle, or even every second or third release or enhancement cycle.
Added to that is the more subtle notion that a large customer and product footprint can also be a double-edged sword. While they logically lead to more robust revenue channels, they also cause a correspondingly larger list of potential enhancements and R+D investments needed to maintain a leadership position across the portfolio, prevent customers from defecting, attack new markets, etc. This allows smaller players, for varying periods of time, to lead the way with innovative solutions that solve fairly specific, often vexing HCM-related business problems.
Below are four examples I encountered on the exhibit hall floor, and these particular upstart vendors were all borne out of HCM-related consulting practices having pockets of expertise not typically found in classic HCM software companies. This is perhaps another contributing factor to why (and how) smaller players are driving so much product innovation.
TalentQuest leverages validated assessments and related behavioral information to help managers give employees the most meaningful feedback and coaching, but in ways that will resonate the most — a great example of personalization (more on this theme in my next post). TalentQuest’s technology also guides employees in pursuing roles in which they will excel and find the most satisfaction.
TalentGuard, with a heritage in career development and robust competency models, uses well designed behavioral frameworks to meaningfully tie together performance tuning and coaching with ideal, personalized development options and career pathing guidance. The result is fully engaged employees who perceive a fair and transparent process that has their best interests in mind.
eeStrategy’s flagship product, eeCompensation, serves up recommended compensation decisions based on the system knowing which data points are the most relevant for each employee, and therefore should be considered the most in a compensation decision. Data points might include skillsets becoming more important but also scarce internally/externally, or key employee retention risks. Coming from someone who used to manage year-end bonus processes in global investment banks, basically eliminating all the data and spreadsheet manipulations is a beautiful thing.
TheChemistry Group, one of 8 startups recognized by conference organizers as offering the most promising HR technology solutions, also has its origins on the consulting side – specifically, assessments that predict star performers for different roles and organizational contexts. These folks, whom I met while sharing a table at the recognition luncheon, are actually moving from using structured to unstructured data (e.g., social media and other publicly available data) as the basis for predicting great hiring outcomes.
These lesser known solution vendors, and many others I didn’t have time to connect with or who weren’t at the conference, are clearly doing their part to drive increased demand (and therefore funding) for HR services and solutions from HR’s internal customers.
I’ll get to other examples of lesser known players offering compelling HR Tech product innovations in a follow-on Conference post being published shortly. It will focus on an obviously huge industry trend: Finding and engaging with the right passive candidates at the right time, using personalization and other advanced forms of system intelligence.
And if you’re an HCM/HR Tech solution provider that wants to schedule a briefing with me, kindly use this form.
Focus everyone on the shared outcome: The healthcare consumer experience
“We are, frankly, still at a stage in which healthcare technology often hinders, rather than helps, physicians trying to provide better care,” says Andy Slavitt, Acting Director of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The examples he shared at HIMSS16 still resonate with me: feedback from physicians who have told him, “To order aspirin takes 8 clicks on the computer. To order full strength aspirin takes 18.” Another said, “I can’t track my patient’s referral; I sent them to the hospital and can’t track them.”
Despite the increased, even prolific, use of IT in healthcare with member and patient portals, electronic records, and online billing and payments, the clinician or healthcare consumer experience has yet to change fundamentally for the better. To truly become digital, healthcare organizations have to rethink their use of IT. In many cases, where they have software vendors and service providers involved, they also need to revisit their engagement strategy, especially as the industry shifts to value-based care and payment based on results.
A single-minded focus on the customer—patient, member, employee, clinician, etc.—can break down the barriers in and across organizations to drive meaningful processes and use of IT
Digital healthcare, in its purest form, is all about transforming the healthcare business to create, support and sustain the healthcare customer experience – customers being, at times: plan members, patients, physicians, caregivers, etc. The “end user” can be the same person in different roles, or working with people in other roles, creating a complex network of constituents with varying wants, needs, and motivations. So, creating a healthcare experience is not a job for a solo artist, either – it takes the whole orchestra playing together to create a musical masterpiece and not just a cacophony of sound.
Simply stated, a pivotal factor for being truly effective in delivering the vision of better health and care at a more reasonable cost for the industry is a coordinated, interactive, and interoperable approach in operations, what we at HfS call the Intelligent OneOffice. OneOffice is all about how people use data and digital technology to bring together the front, middle and back office to enable a user experience that matters, thereby having an impact on health, care, and the viability of healthcare organizations and businesses.
Everyone in the industry has a role to play in supporting this person-centered approach. In some cases, the impact is more obvious and intuitive, such as the front line staff of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists directly discussing a patient’s care plan, therapy and medications. However, roles that are more removed from these direct touch points also have an impact on health, medical, and administrative outcomes. For example, operations support staff processing claims are analyzing data to identify care gaps and opportunities for new interventions, making sure patients are informed through the design and input into systems that automate outreach and reminders through phone, email, or text, for example. So much of how the touch points in healthcare can be more effective depends on the data, digital technology, and relationships that extend from “hidden” roles in “the back office.”
People who can identify and articulate problems and coordinate across internal and external organizations to focus on the end-consumer, are key to bringing together IT and operations
Generating the kind of synchronistic flow from less customer-facing processes to support the healthcare customer experience is no easy task. What will help drive change is finding and/ or cultivating “brokers of capability”—people who can articulate a business problem or opportunity, the desired outcomes, and then coordinate and facilitate across internal and external entities to reach those results. In healthcare, we see brokering going on to create networks such as for ACOs and hospital systems leading to data stores and insight-driven interactions to better manage a patient’s health and care, end to end, covering socio economic/financial and medical needs.
Who are your brokers of capability? People you identify in your organization with critical thinking and networking skills, people who put people first. Taking this approach also creates a more attractive workplace and can play on a naturally altruistic synergy as many people enter the healthcare profession to “help others.” No matter what role they play, as a nurse, doctor or physician, or a claim processor or medical coder, there is an opportunity for everyone to impact the customer experience and gain a greater level of satisfaction and engagement.
Note to readers: Our study on achieving Intelligent Operations, with input from Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and Business Process Services practice, canvassed 371 major buy-side enterprises and had 45 healthcare executive participants. Link to The Journey to Intelligent Operations in Healthcare and download for free after registering on the site.
If there’s one character, on the client side, who’s really take on the mantel of “Chief of the Robo-Buyers” it’s 
Lee Coulter
