Trust in the Post-Identity World

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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The Internet, e-commerce, and digital discourse are dominated by identity. Until recently, identity was all we had to go on when trying to trust other people online. We developed a terrible habit of over-identifying: Relying parties tend to collect circumstantial clues, like credit card verification codes and social security numbers, instead of properly verifying what really matters. People divulge excessive personal data (often unwittingly) which then leaks and gets abused by criminals. We have way too much identity, sloshing around.

Is there a paradigm shift coming? The most important developments in our industry — Self-Sovereign Identity, the FIDO Alliance, and verifiable credentials — are really not about identity at all, but authorship, provenance, integrity, and control. Let’s move beyond identity and imagine a world where cryptographic infostructure is as universal as electricity or clean water. All the data we need is hallmarked, traceable and trustworthy thanks to authentication technologies.

An Unhealthy Obsession

I make this call with great respect for my friends and colleagues in the industry: we must end our obsession with identity. For thirty years, identity has dominated digital practice and discourse. We overcook the Peter Steiner gag that “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. That was just a wry joke about dogs getting up to mischief, not an editorial commentary on digital trust. Until recently, when trying to "trust" anyone online, identity was all we had to go on. When faced with higher risk, we would seek higher trust and ask for more identity. We put the quantity of identity ahead of quality. We put identity first.

Bad Habits

Obsessed with identity, we developed terrible habits. Instead of verifying the particulars that really matter about people we deal with, we drag in circumstantial evidence — almost always extra identifying data — from unrelated contexts, such as CVVs and SSNs, much of which is then stolen and bought and sold and replayed by fraudsters. Consider Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA), which places a premium on “out of wallet” details that ought to be less likely to be known to criminals. But personal information is everywhere on the Internet and KBA backfires by motivating a black market for personal data.

Identification for digital risk management is like putting out fire with gasoline. We should do more to secure the specific facts and figures that each transaction really depends on.

Data as a Utility

Meanwhile, data has become the lifeblood of modern society. The World Bank last year in its world development report Data for better lives called for a “new social contract for data” to protect citizens against harm arising from the information and power asymmetries created by big tech. Data is now a resource almost as important as clean drinking water. Yet we access, accept, and recommend data on an ad hoc basis; outside certain professions and intelligence circles, data is handled without any standards for quality or provenance.

Regulatory Pressure

And so regulatory pressure is building, quite properly, on data flows and processing, and also on what customers know about data. There is more onus on transparency and accountability. There should be no more digital Wild West!

Digital Truth

Cynics say we are “post-truth” but as cyberspace grows in importance, surely our biggest challenge really is digital truth. From payment card fraud and online scams through to misinformation and AI-driven Deep Fakes, every one of these problems is fundamentally about poor-quality data. We can’t trust the evidence of our own eyes anymore. Are we really contemplating digital twins in a synthetic metaverse without first taking better care of fidelity?

Concerted multidimensional responses to the data quality problem are underway (not to mention some narrow legislated bans on Deep Fakes). For one, several major mastheads have teamed with Microsoft Research in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). The group’s first draft standard draws heavily on technical measures familiar to the identerati, such as digital signatures and certificates.

And the new Verified Information Exchange (VIE) is an interdisciplinary research program hosted by UW with a work program focused on network or scheme-based business models for data supply. According to the VIA, “The global information environment is a form of 'market' that needs exchange protocols and local standards”

Another new effort, the Global Assured Interoperability Network (GAIN) was prominent at Identiverse 2022. It means different things to different stakeholders; even the ‘I’ in G.A.I.N. since the initial publication has been reframed to interoperability. One of the best features of the concept is the Service Provider: a fourth party in the data flow, intermediating the familiar End User, Issuer and Relying Party, to enhance scalability.

Infostructure

The payment card processing networks exist purely so that certain customer data — account numbers and some metadata — can be reliably presented to merchants and verified. GAIN represents an extension of the four-party model for presenting and verifying data more generally.

Card schemes are a paragon of infostructure: An organizational structure used for the collection and distribution of information (usually hardware, networks, applications, etc.) used by a society, business, or other group (Ref: Oxford English Dictionary). That is, verifiable data sharing will be underpinned by rules, technologies, and business models.

Data Means Business

We know data is big business — good and bad — and that information is being organized into value and supply chains. We are still in the very early stages of digital transformation. As cyberspace becomes civilized, we need data business to be more orderly and transparent.

If there is any truth in the comparison of data and crude oil, then let’s think in terms of assaying data. That is, let’s start to measure the properties of data that make it reliable, fit for purpose, and valuable. And then let’s bind the assays to the data records as they move through the information value chains. I envision a world with widespread cryptographic infostructure, so that verifiable data is available everywhere, just like stable electricity and clean drinking water. We have the tools to build such infostructure. We IDpros know we have these tools because we have already built them!

The Post-Identity World

So let’s shift focus from the abstract to the concrete. Notice that I haven’t used the word “identity” since the start of this piece. The idea of identity is simply not helping. I know that it strikes some as a sterile perspective but what we think in the digital identity echo chamber doesn’t matter because the tools developed by our industry have shown the rest of the world how to design for verifiable facts and protect them cryptographically. We can trust without identifying. We are familiar with “zero trust” - let’s try zero identity!

We can break old habits. Instead of starting with identity, let’s ask:

• What do you really need to know?
• Where will you get the data?
• How will you know if it’s true?  

It is perfect timing for a paradigm shift. We have intelligent devices at the edge, we have mobile digital wallets that make ideal verifiable containers for data, and we have clouds full of APIs for signing data. We can do better with digital identity; indeed, we can do something much bigger and better for all of cyberspace. Let’s apply our proven tools to build an infostructure that delivers data as a true utility.

News Analysis: IBM and AWS Crank Up Their Partnership Up A Notch With AWS Marketplace

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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This year's Amazon Web Services reInvent brought over 55,000 attendees to one of the premier tech industry events.  The obvious and noticeable change in this year's event was an overemphasis on partnerships and alliances.  The AWS leadership team made it clear that partners were more than welcomed.  IBM's presence as the Global Partner of the year did not go unnoticed by the attendees and of course the other public cloud vendors who have not yet had the courage to host in-person events at scale.

reInventing Partnerships With Public Cloud Vendors

IBM’s transformative journey with AWS as a partner began earlier in 2022 when IBM Software became available as-a-Service on IBM Cloud.  The partnership gave customers the ability to access IBM software that runs cloud-native on AWS. The partnership has three key components:

1. Honoring customer cloud commitment spending. Resell partners can apply clients committed spend with AWS against IBM products from the AWS Markeplace.
2. Driving co-sell programs. Partners can sell offerings from IBM, Red Hat, and AWS solutions in the marketplace.  Since May, products such as IBM API Connect, IBM Db2, IBM Maximo Application Suite, IBM Security, Verify, and IBM Watson Orchestrate have been available on the AWS Marketplace.  At this year’s reinvent, IBM added Envizi ESG, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, IBM Content Services and IBM App Connect Enterprise running as-a-service on AWS.
3. Leveraging the AWS’ ecosystem. In addition, ISVs can now purchase IBM software offerings from the AWS Marketplace with similar benefits as an IBM partner.

Meet Customers Where They Are At

IBMs revitalized strategy takes a customer-centric approach – “The client is at the center of everything IBM does,” noted IBM’s worldwide channel chief Kate Woolley in many keynotes and interviews.  This better together strategy enables clients to make the most out of the joint IBM – AWS relationship.  Further, as more IBM offerings are added to the AWS Marketplace customers can purchase and consume their offerings with more flexibility.  Both customers and partners can expect more offerings in the AI portfolio and the Embeddable AI portfolio to be added to the AWS Marketplace.

Modernize Compute Power With Cloud And Mainframe

IBM’s revamped public cloud strategy is a full 180 turn from former CEO and Chairman of IBM’s head on, belligerent approach to public cloud vendors such as Amazon.  This coincides with a strategic push to focus on high value workloads versus commoditized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) workloads.  The hybrid cloud and Multicloud models now form the heart of IBM’s strategy and the AWS partnerships is proof of this strategic shift that greatly benefits IBM, AWS, and customers.  

Starting with mainframe DevOps, IBM and AWS announced the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack availability in the AWS Marketplace.  Developers will receive key tooling for public cloud platforms and support the modernization of applications. Astute clients may even take advantage of IBM Z’s confidential computing capabilities to encrypt data in and out for additional security.  Constellation believes this expanded pool of developers and tools, will enrich the overall ecosystem and enable customers to match the right work loads with the right compute power, with the right security model, at the right performance/value ratio.

Gain and Streamline Enterprise Class Security

Whether it be in AWS or hybrid cloud environments, IBM’s Security offering includes consulting, systems integration, technology, and managed security services on AWS. IBM has received a Level 1 MSSP Competency Partnership endorsement along with Premier Consulting Partner, Advanced Technology Competency Partner and ISV Accelerate Partner.
 

The Bottom Line: IBM's AWS Relationship Provides A Win-Win For Both Customers and Partners

Customers are already benefiting from the IBM relationship. In one case, FinnAir migrated 70 apps on 400 servers to AWS in partnership with IBM.  Many customers are moving on-premises applications such as SAP into AWS.  Moreover, customers and partners now have an access to IBM offerings on AWS via the AWS Marketplace. 

Having the IBM software and services portfolio accessible to the AWS ecosystem gives stakeholders access to IBM automation. IBM Data and AI, IBM Sustainability Software, IBM Security Software, IBM Security Services, and IBM Storage.  This shift in strategy provides both a customer and partner centric approach that will help accelerate cloud migration and acceleration.

Your POV

Are you both an IBM and AWS customer? Do you see this as a win-win? Will you be more likley to choose AWS because of the IBM relationship?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org. Please let us know if you need help with your strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

• Developing your metaverse and digital business strategy
• Connecting with other pioneers
• Sharing best practices
• Vendor selection
• Implementation partner selection
• Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
• Demystifying software licensing

Reprints can be purchased through Constellation Research, Inc. To request official reprints in PDF format, please contact Sales.

News Analysis: FTC's Lina Khan Blocks $69 Billion Microsoft - Activision Acquisition

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Microsoft Faces Its Biggest Challenge Despite Its "Social" Standing

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella’s and Vice Chair and President Brad Smith face their toughest challenge.  There was always the belief that so long Microsoft acted like a “good citizen” on social issues they would be immune to anti-trust.  That myth has been burst.  The FTC has filed a lawsuit and a judge must decide if the case is strong enough to block the $69 billion deal.  To be blunt, the FTC fears Microsoft will not provide titles for other platforms.  Other headwinds include 16 countries that will have to approve the mega deal.  China will probably block the deal to protect TenCent's position.  Tencent also owns 5% of Activision.

"This is a battle for the future delivery of gaming and gaming platforms," Ray Wang at @constellationr explains as the FTC puts the brakes on Microsoft’s $75bn deal to buy Activision Blizzard. #CallofDuty #MSFT pic.twitter.com/2gvYQHIG1X

— Dan Murphy (@dan_murphy) December 9, 2022

Digital Giants Operate On A Different Dimension And Playbook

Should the deal be completed, Microsoft will become the third largest gaming player by revenue as they reach 3 billion users behind Tencent (#1) and Sony (#2).  Activision brings 31 million monthly active users (MAUs).  Xbox gaming brings 20 million users to the mix.  At the surface, Microsoft's argument about industry competition makes sense for the $200 billion gaming market. However, digital giants are collapsing industries into value chains.  A software company, gaming company, telecom company, and entertainment have collapsed value chains along four common elements:

• Content - titles, movies, software
• Network - monthly active users and subscribers
• Distributions channels - stores, cloud (Azure), internet, consoles
• Tech platforms - gaming platforms, consoles, marketplaces

Moreover, a concentration of competitors who have integrated content, network, distribution channels, and technology platform could stifle competition. This argument should be the heart of the FTC's argument around digital giant dominance and future digital giant dominance. 

Perceived Past History Haunts Microsoft's Argument

Activision has blockbuster titles such as Overwatch, Call of Duty, Diablo, Warcraft, and Candy Crush Saga.  The FTC's argument primarily rests on how Microsoft allegedly failed to keep its word on more open distribution of its titles post acquisition when it acquired Zenimax. The FTC claimed that Bethesda titles Starfeld and Redfall were not available on other platforms. 

Microsoft disputes the terms of the agreement by stating that "“Future decisions on whether to distribute ZeniMax games for other consoles will be made on a case-by-case basis, taking into account player demand and sentiment. Factors that will inform Microsoft’s decision-making on future games include consumer demand and preference and the willingness of third parties to work with Microsoft to launch games for their devices.” 

Despite the apparent confusion and displeasure by the FTC, labor unions such as the Communication Workers of America (CWA) are in favor of the deal.   While Microsoft's gaming head Phil Spencer has offered Activision's blockbuster title Call of Duty, (a $1 billion dollar franchise) for 10 years to both Sony and Nintendo, this may not have been enough for the FTC to back off.

The Bottom Line - Microsoft - Activision Will Become A Landmark Case In Antitrust

Tech companies who thought they could be immune by taking positions on social issues have now realized they are not immune to government interference. At the heart of this case will be how to define the current markets versus the future markets in anti-competitive activity and anti-trust. Dominance in content, network, distribution channels, and tech platforms will eventually become the standard, once this has been identified by the FTC.  For now, this is really about the FTC and Lina Khan needing a win as time is ticking for the current administration to make their point.

In the larger picture, a key factor should be how the innovation lifecycle plays a role in innovation.  Startups and mid-size companies need exits to fund new innovation.  Large digital giants often can not innovate fast enough, attract enough talent, and reach new markets without mergers and acquisitions. Over regulation on M&A will stifle market innovation. Yet, not understanding the dynamics of how digital giants operate in dominating markets will harm consumers in the long run. These factors make this deal a landmark case for the future and may also pave the way for the Metaverse ambitions of Microsoft.

40 Years Young: Adobe Celebrates a Milestone

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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The very first time I ever heard the word “PostScript” was in high school. I was the editor of my high school’s yearbook, and the publishing company told me that they used the newest technology available like PostScript files that could be sent directly to a printer. Soon we wouldn’t even need carbon paper! A couple years later Adobe would come up again when I was asked if I had ever seen these new Adobe fonts and did I like Utopia or Minion.

It would be a couple more years until I officially joined the ranks of full-time marketer and I had to make that choice many of us had to make back in the day: Adobe or Quark? After dabbling in Quark, my creative "training" (super loose quotations around the word training there) landed and remained in the Adobe Creative Suite. There are still a couple Creative Directors out there that wish I had never taught myself Photoshop or InDesign…and just today I’ve spent a good part of my day creating data charts and report graphics in Illustrator.

Making Milestones Personal (aka It’s All About Me)

I will mark 30 years in Marketing in 2023 and I have to admit that Adobe has been a near-constant partner in my professional journey. And now, all these years later, I cover the broad portfolio that is today’s modern Adobe as part of my role as an Analyst tracking the ins and outs of CX. The team at Adobe may admit that this connection is probably really unfair to them. It is why I can be a bit more tough or critical of them, coming at them as an overly excitable raging (recovering) practitioner instead of a more measured or mild-mannered analyst. But maybe this is also why I find myself thinking about Adobe’s milestone as a marker of “our” work and not just a marker of their work.

When I think about Adobe, I think about an interview where co-Founder John Warnock retold how he and Charles “Chuck” Geshcke decided to leave their jobs and start this adventure. Quoting the transcript from the Wharton interview Warnock said, “I went into Chuck’s office one day and said, “Chuck, we [can stay at] a very cushy, wonderful job here. Or we could try to get something done.” As a marketer, this drive to just go…leave the comfortable…explore that space between cushy and something…is a familiar motivator. It is core to the work of marketing. And the work of marketing is core to Adobe.

But it is, perhaps, a line from a white paper that only the truly nerdy among us have likely ever read. Called “The Camelot Project”, John Warnock outlines a brief for a new technology and foundational idea behind a project that set out to “solve a fundamental problem that confronts today’s companies.” That problem would be the ability to standardize and communicate visual materials across different applications and systems. In this paper Warnock wrote out a vision for documents that could be viewable and printable on any modern device. He wrote, “If this problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.”

That standard was the Portable Document Format (PDF), and the project was renamed Adobe Acrobat.

Celebrating the Hard Work of Marketing

Once again, we are confronted with this desire that sits at the very epicenter of Adobe’s history…the desire to solve problems and improve how people work. It is still alive and well in today’s Adobe, unapologetically championed by a new cadre of leaders starting with Shantanu Narayan.

From how we imagine and express to how we reach and engage, Adobe has been there stirring the pot and solving problems. There are only a few organizations out there as in tune with the work of marketing…dare I say the messy, hard, sometimes-heartbreaking, always-changing, insanely wonderful work of marketing.

As Adobe turns 40, we can all step back and appreciate how far the company has come, and by extension how far the work of marketing, communications and creativity has come. Adobe isn’t perfect…far from it. Like every other company out there, Adobe has a SWOT deck with plenty of things to include in that W box. But for today, let’s set aside that criticism and cynicism to appreciate the journey started by Warnock and Geshcke who named their little adventure after a creek that ran behind Warnock’s home.

Adobe, Happy 40th. 40 years from now as younger analysts mark your 80th trip around the corporate sun, may they continue to celebrate your dedication to us…to the marketers that decided to leave something cushy behind so we could just get something done.

WalkMe in 2022: An Update on the Digital Adoption Journey

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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I'm here in Kensington, London this morning to get an update from WalkMe, the well-known digital adoption platform. Arguably the poster child for the fast-emerging cottage industry, I've seen solutions in the category spread across organizations as they grapple with getting today's cornucopia of tech more effectively used by their workers. However, among the digital adoption platforms available today, WalkMe continues to define the category, which was first tracked here by Constellation Research.

The success of providing just-in-time training and analytics insights for the digital employee experience has been evident given the number of Constellation SuperNova awards such solutions have won in recent years. Guiding workers through filing expense reports or managing complex projects to ensure they make the most of the expensive and sophisticated IT tools at their disposal has become so vital that I recently cited it as table stakes for the essential core of the digital workplace today.

WalkMe, for its part, has never been content to rest on its laurels, so I'm excited to see what they present this morning in terms of the new art-of-the-possible for digital adoption platforms.

WalkMe Analyst Day, Q4 2022

9:00am: Ofir Bloch kicks things off, talking about how the category started. Mentioning how just about every research firm covers the space now, though it's still not nearly as broadly known as it should be.

9:04am: Now Claire McGovern, Senior Manager of Analyst Relations, is up and introducing the schedule and the day. 

9:10am: Maor Ezer, SVP in the WalkMe Office of the CEO talking talking about living through a rare time in human history. COVID-19, supply chain, Ukraine War, the economy and other current events as a defining time to live through. All of these event are driving change and "really affects us. In the world of enterprise, what we're seeing is we saw a massive spike in experience through the sole great resignation and everything. Everybody started thinking about the employees about the experience they're having, getting the job done, and suddenly almost in a day, we're now seeing the industry talk about ROI, efficiency, and optimization." Shows a graph of the S&P 500 to show the major event shaping the world today.

9:17am: Maor (correctly) says the ability to better connect the user experience the user, whether it be the customer or the employee, to the the business workflow is what ultimately drives ROI. And that is the primary goal of the company. "And if you're able to put them together, you're going to see a lot more ROI." Notes that the typical organization rolled out 187 new apps last year, often with duplicative value, but don't get nearly the value from them that they should, due to various adoption challenges.

9:22am: Now talking about the digital adoption journey, especially across business applications, the business keeps on saying they're thinking about an application, but they are thinking about an application, but it's not an application. It's a user journey, and the user journey goes over multiple applications. Cross application digital adoption is where the value is, notes Maor. It's all about the frustrated employee, who has to engage with so many pieces of software.

9:31am: Talking about their partner ecosystem. "We've seen Accenture build their first digital adoption practice. Same with Deloitte. SAP made a huge deal with us, we're sold with Concur by them." Have seen comparable growth in process intelligence. Talking about positioning, one person notes that "random acts of digital are a thing of the past", meaning WalkMe helps organization make digital deployment and adoption more deliberate and planned.

9:38am: The buyer of the DAP solution today is still fragmented notes Maor and sits across sales, product, IT, HR, customer care, e-commerce, finance, and operations. The CIO, CDO, and CHRO are often taking the ownership, though the best fit currently for DAP acquisition overall is the CIO. "They tear it out of the business, and make it a center of excellence." 

9:43am: The three legs on the DAP table are a) data on usage and user journeys, b) actions that increase adoption and engagement and c) improved experiences. Talking about the DAP flywheel. Specifically talking about outcome-based solutions, "what are you trying to achieve? Build, solve, measure" in an agile cycle.

9:50am: Talking about the DAP process, which is to define success upfront and then adaptively zero on it. Examples of digital success include: Shortening trouble ticket times, encouraging customer self-service, improving CRM data quality, streamlining the quote to cash process, shorten employee onboarding, and increasingly digital sales.

9:55am: "So the experience piece is the cherry on top. That's what the employee engages with. When you think about experience, this is where they meet. This is key to the digital adoption solution. We want something that is the Google of the enterprise that I come to, to start my journey. We want to make sure the future of work and the work experience is accessible to all and really easily on mobile, on desktop, and on the Web.".

10:08am: Showing voice assistants to aid digital adoption. Saying they're going to be able to deliver the experience not just in their application, but through any application in the IT portfolio to the employee using voice. "We will take it on Slack, on Teams. to use in on Cortana, etc. You want to use any technology to be able to be the funnel that connects the automation in the UI."

Summary: WalkMe remains focused on their mission and overall trajectory. However, they have a desire to continue to increase ease-of-automation and bring better and more streamlined access to the experience layer, especially across applications. They are putting their R&D into these goals.'

WalkMe Product Demo by Lloyd Soldatt

10:27am: Lloyd shows the WalkMe DAP Flywheel and explains how they think about customer challenges. "Of course, it's about relevance and precision. We cannot serve the customer without knowing what level of digital experiences they have in the organization. We have three pillars of the digital adoption technology (data, action, experience.) We collect the data, they give us the understanding where the customer is and in every case, it's a unique situation. It's never the same. So it's not the same solution for everyone. It's very unique. Then we develop and deploy the experience. We then measure the outcome, and we re-evaluate if necessary, so it's ever evolving. It's ever adjusting. It's always fitting the situation. " Will now show WalkMe in action shortly.

10:31am: Now talking about the AI in WalkMe called Zest. "It learns what I do throughout the day. So next time if I want to repeat a similar action it actually prompts me with my habits and my behavior from before. So it cuts down on the time that I spent trying to fulfill my tasks but it also makes me extremely successful."

10:40am: Now Lloyd gives an excellent demonstration of how digital adoption actually works to both guide and the user and educate them right in the moment as they carry out their work. Video of the demonstration here.

Customer-Centric Strategy, Value, and Innovation by KJ Kusch, Field CTO

10:50am: KJ is an experienced CTO with experience from ServiceNow. I've spoken with her before and she has a pragmatic, can-do attitude towards IT. Explains how Walkme provides value to customers: They start by defining initiatives, which help them understand what the potential digital adoption projects can be. That's important for them to define a DAP business case for customers. Then they stage the steps of the initiative out: "Because I'm not going to do everything at once. I've got to spread it out over three years. And then we engage with the business, to make sure whoever I'm working with understands the business impact and KPIs."

11:00am: Exploring how WalkMe idenfies value in the use cases. Most valuable are the tasks that are carried out over and over again. These form the foundation of a digital adoption initiative. "So the whole crux of all these conversations we have really comes down to making sure we get the right words on paper to have a mutual plan. And that mutual plan isn't just with us and the customer is with services and partners. We document what we know so that we have a clear understanding of what we've been talking about before we even do anything." Then they make sure there is a way to capture and demonstrate incremental value. Interesting. WalkMe has industry benchmarks now, to tell customers what they can expect and how they compare to competitors.

11:10am: Now KJ shows some impressive client business value assessments for DAP, that show the value accused over the years of actually deploying a digital adoption plan. Shows an example of a client with 61 use cases where they deployed over 200 pieces of digital adoption content to help aid their workers. Then they ensure they measure all of the resulting time saved and efficiencies into an actual dollar amount to show ROI.