It was just before the dawn of the 21st century and I was a young, fresh-faced analyst covering technology services. My focus was on application implementation services, the denim-and-shovels analog in the ERP goldrush. It was a busy time. Companies were desperate to plow ahead with ERP projects, both because they wanted to be viewed as investment-worthy by stock markets and to avoid a nasty little problem called Y2K.

Back then the focus was on “having” or “doing” ERP. If your business didn’t or wasn’t, you were behind the times. For all the high-minded talk about business process reengineering, the reality was much more prosaic. More often than not, businesses found themselves with major delays and project cost overruns, usually resulting in big cuts to user training or adoption programs.

The system was the thing. It encompassed everything: data structures and storage, processing and workflow, and user interfaces. The people just had to figure out how to work with it. Actually using it required employees to conform to the way the system was designed. Interfaces typically reflected what was most straightforward from a technology perspective, not what best supported the work a given employee or department was trying to do. The system ruled, and if it didn’t work the way you wanted it to, you could add your complaints to an ever-expanding list of projects the IT department was already working on to change it. Picture the scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark of the Covenant gets put into a vast government storage warehouse. That kind of list.

Fast forward to 2020. A lot has changed. Business applications are much less monolithic and much more flexible. Some are even easy to use. But for the most part, our concepts of enterprise software still center on what the software does, not what we’re trying to achieve with it.

It’s time to think differently about business applications. Rather than concentrating on functional areas, we need a mental model that helps us to understand the capabilities required to achieve our objectives. Things like engaging our customers effectively, creating ongoing conversations, and shaping great experiences, for example—the building blocks that underpin successful businesses.

A different way of thinking about enterprise software will help us to make better decisions about what we need to invest in, the role(s) each element fills, and how it all works together (read: integrates) to support the way we want to operate.

To do that, stop thinking about enterprise applications in terms of the functions they support. Instead, think of three core elements of business technology that constantly interact: data flows, processes and workflows, and user interfaces (see Figure).

Is this a gross oversimplification? Absolutely. But it’s a very useful abstraction when it comes to mapping out who needs what where, and the most effective way of presenting it.

Let’s break down what each element includes:

Interfaces

Think of interfaces as the digital workspaces an individual employee uses to do their job. This is what they log into when they start work for the day. It’s the place where they find the information and resources they need. The appropriate interface—what’s incorporated within it and how information or functions are presented—depends in large part on the individual role. That will look very different for a customer service agent, a salesperson, or a business analyst in corporate strategy, for example, though there may be common elements across all three. Personal preference also plays a significant role. How I prefer to see data may be completely different from my closest colleague.

Really good interfaces incorporate a variety of data sources and functional capabilities. They are most effective when they’re designed to anticipate and support the way people actually do their work. Familiar is good; intuitive and effective are better. And if you can manage all three—magic.

Processes and Workflows

In any business, there is a crowded landscape of business processes and workflows. Some are formally encoded in applications, others are informal or even manual. As more processes become digital, there’s a greater degree of integration and automation. Application configuration and integration address much of this. The growing use of low-code/no-code workflow management tools extends automation even further.

For any type of work, the crucial question is which process areas are relevant or important. Who is responsible for overseeing or assuring which processes? How does that process and communication flow work when a process extends beyond one team or department? What processing happens where?

Data Flows

Simply cataloguing all of the different sources and repositories of data—even just customer data—is a never-ending task. And as important as it is to know which data are where, it’s even more crucial to understand where given data elements—or analysis and insights derived from those data—need to go in order to support different kinds of work. Data is the lifeblood of any organization. While every part of the business needs access to it, each needs different elements in particular forms and cadences. The customer data that’s most essential to the billing department differs greatly from what’s most important to marketing. But they all need to have a consistent view of the same data.

Framing the types of data, where they originate, the forms in which they are most useful, and for whom they are most relevant offers greater clarity in determining priorities.

Doing Things Differently, Doing Different Things

Every part of the business is doing a certain kind of work—whether it’s finance, operations, HR, or the vast array of customer-facing interactions. Marketing, sales, and customer service are only the most obvious. Each department or team has its own set of tools, some of which are company-wide, others that are unique to them, and some that are in between. Different groups have distinct priorities, types of work, and ways of working.

The key point here is that different types of work require distinct data inputs, specific process flows or portions of broader processes, and tailored environments in which to present information in order to support decisions and actions.

This becomes even more crucial as we adapt our businesses to rapidly changing demands and circumstances. To be successful, we need to find different, better ways of working—and sometimes change what we’re doing in the first place.

With this in mind, and by abstracting enterprise software across these three elements, it’s far easier to understand where there are gaps and what the options are to fill them. Because the biggest challenge to today is not a lack of technology tools. It’s determining the most appropriate combination, in terms of both capabilities and return on investment, to support the work your business does—and the way you want to do it.

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Survive or thrive? The underlying conditions of the business matter more than business conditions. Get on with analysis and planning.

As we approach the summer of 2020, much of North America -- and the world -- is getting back to business. It’s clearly not business as usual, with continued social distancing and uneven, half-steps back to business. With recovery in mind, here are some of the latest points of advice from my Constellation Research “Post Pandemic Playbook” for data-to-decisions initiatives.

Underlying Conditions for Business

Just as certain underlying medical conditions make people more susceptible to COVID-19, certain underlying business conditions can make or break a company in a challenging economic climate. Being an analyst, I’ve come up with a two-by-two matrix (below) to explain. On the vertical axis are resources and debt, while the horizontal axis weighs the impact – lasting or not -- of the pandemic and lockdown.

Resources exist in many forms. Large companies, for example, are in a better position, generally, to absorb economic blows, than are small companies, but there’s much more to it than that. Other resources include access to capital, financial health, brand equity, large and sticky customer bases, business agility, and seasoned, innovative leadership. All these resources can be counted in an organization’s favor, and many small companies have more of them than troubled large companies.

High debt is always a millstone around a company’s neck, and if you compound that with a deep economic impact, as we’ve seen in travel and retail, the outcome is not good. Hertz, JC Penney, Niemen Marcus and J. Crew have been the headline bankruptcies in recent weeks, and what they all had in common was high debt levels and, in most cases, questionable management practices and strategies.

At the opposite extreme there are examples of companies that have seen less-damaging economic impact. Grocery stores and drug stores never closed during the crisis, so many food supply and consumer product goods (CPG) companies are doing reasonably well. In fact, some companies, like Kimberly Clark and PepsiCo, saw big sales increases in sales in the first quarter, due in part to consumers stockpiling (and hoarding) goods before the lockdown.

Kimberly Clark reported a 14% increase in paper product sales in Q1 while PepsiCo saw strong SuperBowl snack and beverage sales followed by consumer stockpiling that sent the company’s first-quarter sales up 7%. PayPal saw a 17% increase in new accounts and a 20% increase in payment transactions in the first quarter, as organizations and consumers sought alternative payment options amid the lockdown.

The point is that it’s hard to anticipate outcomes by industry. Instead, look at underlying health, agility and leadership by company. We’re likely to see strong, agile companies consolidating their positions and perhaps acquiring vulnerable rivals that lack resources or that are saddled with debt.

Move to Fine-Grained, Low-Latency Analysis

Even firms that discovered a silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud, like Kimberly Clark, have pulled their financial guidance for 2020 because uncertainty remains. This is one reason I’ve been advocating the adoption of more precise analyses driven by more granular, low-latency data. Timely, fine-grained insight will help organizations better understand big differences in business resumption within countries, states, cities, counties and even suburbs and exurbs. Aggregations at the level of global regions and regions within countries are less useful than they once were. Similarly, predictive models built on old data may need to be retrained or entirely rebuilt for today’s very different customer behaviors.

Demand-driven forecasting is nothing new, but it can make a significant difference when dealing with the rapidly shifting market conditions we’ve seen over the last couple of months. Heading into the lockdown in February, global systems integration and consulting firm Infosys helped a major CPG company to harness near-real time point-of-sale (POS) data, as well as weather, trade promotions and competitive data, to improve the accuracy and timeliness of demand forecasts. Previously the company relied on shipment data, which would have totally missed demand spikes experienced heading into the lockdown in mid-March.

A CPG Pulse report on comparative "essential product" sales and out of stock (OOS) conditions in Georgia and New York in Q1 2020. Source: Infosys

POS-driven analyses of sales in New York State, for example, spotted panic buying setting in on March 12. Sales of the company’s products in the state increased 51% compared to the prior month. As a result, out-of-stock (OOS) conditions spiked by 28%. However, the early warning provided by timely analysis helped the CPG company stabilize the supply problems by March 17. Overall, the use of granular, store-by-store daily POS data has improved forecast accuracy by 70% to 85%. These forecasts are used to accelerate the delivery dates of firm orders, within the guidelines of service level agreements, to prevent stock-outs. The typical improvement across all states for the company has been a 2% increase in overall sales.  

Adopt Continuous Planning  

I’ve been writing about the need for frequent, iterative financial planning and analysis for years, but the need has been all the more acute in today’s climate. The leading firms I have encountered have stepped up from monthly to weekly or even daily planning to respond to changes in supply chains, sales, financial results, and human resources requirements. Cloud-based planning platforms make it far easier to support continuous and collaborative planning among finance and business leaders. But what if your organization is locked into antiquated, spreadsheet-based methods? Is it realistic to deploy a new platform in the middle of such a tumultuous period?

During last week’s Planful Virtual Tour, customer SmartyPants Vitamins presented on a focused, 20-day planning deployment that stayed on track amid the lockdown in March. SmartyPants has been an innovator and challenger in the vitamin category. It launched in 2011 with a single product: affordable children’s multi-vitamin gummies without artificial ingredients. The company subsequently branched out into gummy vitamins for adults and even pets, and in 2016 it surpassed $25 million in sales.

Early in the first quarter of 2020, the company decided on a phased deployment of the Planful, cloud-based planning platform rather than a big-bang deployment addressing the entire balance sheet. “We decided to focus on sales and trade spending, as opposed to the total balance sheet, because sales drives the rest of the organization and how we allocate spending,” explained Cheryl Chow, the company’s Senior Finance Manager. “Sales was already on a monthly cadence, and we needed something dynamic that could pull in actual results data and then reforecast the rest of the year quickly and at a very detailed level.”

Cheryl Chow, Senior Finance Manager at SmartyPants Vitamins, said the company's focused planning deployment went off as planned in March despite work-from-home challenges.

Little did the Marina Del Rey, CA-based company know that its March 2020 project would soon have to cope with that state’s pandemic lockdown. The switch to working from home definitely “added a level of complexity” to the project, said Chow, but the team managed to stick to its 20-business-day deployment schedule with some parallel execution of the four deployment steps: Step 1. Understand revenue drivers and templates and test modeling hierarchies; Step 2. Simultaneously import existing data into Planful, including historical actuals and the existing budget; Step 3. Build out and test reports and reconciling data disparities; Step 4. Roll out new planning and reporting capabilities to the sales team with thorough training.

The crisis confirmed that the decision to start with sales and trade-spend forecasting was the right approach. "Because we were doing this during a period of craziness with Coronavirus, our demand-planning team really needed weekly forecasts,” Chow explains. “They use details available in the sales and trade-spend forecasts to do demand planning because these are the drivers of the business, so it was clear it's what we needed to focus on in the first phase."

SmartyPants wrapped up forecasting sales and trade-spend for the full year and it has developed preliminary sales and trade-spend forecasts for 2021. The company has also moved into the second phase of its Planful deployment, addressing operating expenses.

“Just two months in we’re now wrapping up operating expense templates and starting forecasting for the rest of 2020 and preliminary 2021,” explained Chow. “That's a huge win because I don't want to have to manage dozens of spreadsheets from departments maintaining separate budgets and planning.”

In a planned third phase, set for the second half of 2020, SmartyPants will extend the platform to address cost of goods sold and the overall balance sheet.

In response to the many companies now desperate to get to faster and more agile planning, Planful has come up with fixed-cost, 30-day deployment offerings for specific financial planning and analysis use cases that are currently in high demand. These include cash-flow forecasting, workforce planning, monthly close and consolidation, and multi-dimensional ad hoc analysis. I’d expect other vendors to follow Planful’s approach of offering focused, fixed-cost, fixed-time deployments during this recovery period.

I’ve been around long enough to have seen tough economic conditions before, from the real estate collapse of 1987 to the dot-com bust of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2007. The agile and adaptive companies respond, rebound and lead the way back to better times.

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…...

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Today could very well have started with an early morning crisis call that was dominated by the question, “HOW do we respond to THIS?” That call might have happened Friday afternoon…perhaps over the weekend. Some of you might be having this call right now.

In times of crisis it falls to the marketers, communications leaders and customer advocates to start to communicate, especially when that crisis feels as hurtful and impossible as the current tidal wave of emotion sweeping the United States. We have just spent the past several months working to assure (then reassure) our customers that we are “in this together” as the coronavirus spread across the globe stealing lives and wreaking havoc on economies. Now, we have a painful race conversation topped by outbreaks of violence and senseless brutality. It is starting to feel like we just can’t get a win these days.

It is understandable that we want to have a position – a statement of where our brands stand on the issues that impact our customers and our people. But in times like this, we need to stop and really think through the hard questions before saying a word.

Please let’s be clear here: I am NOT advocating for silence. In fact, I whole heartedly support any brand willing and able to take a stand in support of equality, humanity and lifting a community up. What I am offering is a bit of candor.

Making a statement and taking a stand today must be met with continuous action tomorrow and into the next days, weeks and years. Fall down on that promise…break the trust built by your statement and you will lose your customer.

Be bold. Take a stand. Just don’t walk into this lightly.

When embarking on a crisis or support statement…regardless if it is this week or the next crisis around the corner…I suggest asking yourself these honest questions:

1. Is Your Brand an AUTHENTIC part of THIS Conversation? Now is NOT the time to test this. Your gut has already answered this question before you got to this line. Most marketers know…instantly…if they are part of the conversation or part of the distraction. If you are part of the distraction…sit this one out.
    
2. What Stand Feels Right for Your Brand, Your People and Your Customers? This isn’t just about one community…one audience…it is about ALL of your audiences. This is as much about your customers as it is about the people who come to work to build your brand, your products, your promises every day. Have you taken the time to really listen and understand what is important about today's conversation in their words and in their lives? What IS at the heart of the issue for them? Is it the violence? Is it equality? Is it shouting at the top of their lungs, but never being heard? What stand and what statement will best respect and reflect what you have heard? If you don’t know…sit this one out.
    
3. Can You and WILL YOU Follow Thru? Any communication you send out today will be remembered tomorrow. Case in point: The NFL released what, on paper, feels like an earnest and heartfelt statement against police brutality and disproportionate violence against the African American community. The response was swift, with words like hypocrisy and false being added to the league’s sentiment. Amazon released a similar statement denouncing the “inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people.” Hours later, responses emerged pointing to stories of protests from minority workers about working conditions. While I am confident that the words issued by the NFL and Amazon were earnest and intended to be a unifying rallying cry, they were used as opportunities to bring up history and highlight inauthentic voices and moments. Right or wrong, the NFL’s stand against players “taking a knee” in protest discounted them from being seen as an authentic participant in today’s conversation. Will your brand be able to push past any noise of the past to be part of a future conversation? Will your brand WANT to be part of any future conversations? If you don’t know…sit this one out.
    
4. How Long Will You or Can You Demonstrate Your Commitment? Unlike showing support for a single cause or a single event, the current social conversation is a lengthy one. This isn’t writing a check to a charity of choice. This conversation will not go away this week, at the end of the protests or even after the next election. They will continue and be reignited with the inevitability of the “next time it happens.” And because this is a matter of when and not if the conversation reignites, will your brand be there again, reaffirming your commitment to the cause and taking an even bigger step to show support? If you don’t know…please, sit this one out.
    
5. Why Do You Want to Respond? THIS is the most important question to answer...and answer honestly. Do you want to respond because everyone else has? Did your competition beat you to a statement…so it is now or never? Do you think it will keep you relevant in the conversation? Did someone tell you your GenZ customers expect you to respond? This is NOT the conversation to test out your tone of empathy. Unless your brand has an authentic voice in this conversation…unless there is both empathy and honesty interlaced with every word...this is NOT the time to experiment with social consciousness. Virtue signaling does not mean your virtue or your signal is not earnest and pure. But today’s debate and today’s customer has gotten enough chatter and has very little bandwidth for more noise. They crave authentic voices. Trust me…if you are still not sure…sit this one out.

Here is what some people might not tell you. It is 100% OK to say no…to admit you don’t really WANT to have a voice in the current events of the day. But you need to be honest about that now…not a day after a statement goes out. If you don’t want to respond…don’t. The reality of communicating in a crisis is that best intentions don’t cut it. Now, more than ever, nothing less than an authentic communication that is in line with your brand vision, direction and purpose will do. And yes...if you are in doubt...ask us. Advise is our stock in trade. And we are here to help. Just be prepared for me to tell you...it might be best to sit this one out.

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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IBM had to cancel the physical Think 2020 conference and go to a digital format like many other conferences. As the first major vendor event going digital, IBM had to set a yardstick in terms of digital events – and did not disappoint. A special challenge was that Red Hat's Red Hat Summit conference just happening the week before and it stole a lot of the 'thunder' especially in regards of hybrid cloud announcements. Weekly event proximity does not well for a set of rich announcements.

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…...

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It might be easier to start with what I do NOT mean when I say BRAND SECURITY.

Brand Security is not:

• The official duties of the logo police that make sure you are using the right colors and aren’t replacing the tag line
• A line of code to make sure nobody swipes stuff off the website
• Permission for anyone to stomp on anyone else’s turf
• Buying new tech tools that make life even more complex and onerous

Then there is what I DO mean.

Brand Security is:

• A holistic strategy that applies process and technology to transparently aggregate, analyze and share customer signals and data, secure that data, permissions, consent and intelligence while securing the reliability, sustainability and durability of a customer’s relationship with a brand
• An intentional technology framework that prevents and mitigates the impact of intrusions, infringements and incursions on a customer’s engagements and interactions

Brand security unifies the intentions of marketing, service and sales to deliver consistently relevant, personal and valuable interactions with the objectives of IT, operations and security to deliver transparency, proactive protection, monitoring, reaction and remediation.

Brand Security is a new epic mix tape.

Remember back to what made a truly epic mix tape? There was a theme that held everything together. There were sections and structure where songs blended together to tell a story…usually about something really angsty. The most memorable mixtapes had a purpose…the break-up consolation mix, the girls-night pre-party warm up, the crushing so hard it hurts mix. They took thought and consideration to create but were easy to listen to and appreciate.

Mix tapes were never meant to be a random mash up of songs you happened to like. It wasn’t just hitting the record button when the radio was on. The epic mix tape remains the one location where NWA, Garth Brooks and Bon Jovi make perfect sense together. A mix tape was a STORY made up of dozens of different, distinct parts working together under a single theme.

Brand Security’s story – it’s true purpose – is to provide a new cross-functional business strategy that elevates the ongoing efforts of IT, Marketing and Security to establish customer engagements and channels enriched with trusted data and operations. It shifts the focus away from the conglomeration of tools and technologies conveniently tucked into silos. It asks marketing to embrace a security-by-design methodology that respects and values customer data, consent and intent while asking security technologists to abandon a compliance-first mindset in lieu of a brand and buyer-first action plan.

A new Brand Security framework helps define structure by aligning and connecting strategies and solutions into layers of tools intentionally addressing the key aspects of trust. The first layer of the framework intentionally clusters strategies, operational processes and platforms that empower product development, brand engagement and customer experience together. The second layer aligns the strategies, processes and systems that collect, manage and deploy permissions, including customer expectations for consent and control.

Together, these layers empower and enhance the action layer, which seeks to more proactively and transparently deploy customer engagements and interactions while feeding new actions, permissions and promises. The promise, action and permission layers are enveloped in a proactive protection layer that optimizes delivery while securing everything from endpoints to perceptions.

Brand security must become a blended cross-functional view so that champions emerge to address everything from budget to impact on sales and the bottom line. These are no longer isolated discussions for IT and security operations to debate, compromise on and then roll out.

This is change management at the highest levels of the organization, demanding that all CxOs align around a security and protection posture as part of a brand security strategy that directly affects profitability. By delivering exceptional customer engagements and interactions, brand trust is boosted and brand security strategy is advanced. Half measures become negative headlines and faking it becomes the next hot meme on Twitter.

So why do I think THIS new mix tape will be the epic shift we need to address a new wave of business and customer expectation? Because it already HAS worked. Remember the not too distant future when organizations were trying to unravel the mystery called GDPR? Time and again I heard tales of executives attempting to architect change to meet the requirements outlined in the massive tome on their own. Fighting the fight for budget while pushing for transformation in the name of compliance.

Alone, CMOs, CIOs and CISOs fought uphill battles based in their own cost centers. But unified, the asks became more about transformation and less about one-off tick boxes for compliance. They became strategic plans that attached business KPIs and outcomes. It delivered tangible cross-functional plans and expectations the CEO, COO and CFO could understand and back. Together, they could kick the can down the road. It will take all functions focused on the same goal to achieve success. With brand security, marketing, service, sales, IT and security will each need to leave their comfort zones of functional fiefdoms in order to comingle strategies and stacks.

Brand security is a new epic mix tape. The theme is an ode to the customer with the wildly different genres of marketing, IT and security all blending together in a way that finally makes sense. Pop it in. Let the different genres and songs wash over you. Let it become an ear worm. But most importantly remember that today’s customer is redefining and setting the exchange rate on their new currency called trust. If we keep sending them recordings of the radio and not a coherent, relevant story like Brand Security, someone else will.