Adobe Acquires Workfront, Focusing Squarely on the Work of Marketing and Customer Engagement

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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On Monday, November 9, Adobe announced that the company had reached a definitive agreement to acquire Workfront, the enterprise work management platform, for $1.5 billion.

According to the press release, Workfront CEO Alex Shootman will lead the Workfront team and report into Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience Business and Worldwide Field Operations, once the deal closes. That’s expected to happen within the first quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year, which starts December 1, 2020.

Adobe and Workfront had a long-standing partnership prior to the acquisition. That relationship includes APIs that connect Workfront to Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud. Of Workfront’s more than 3,000 customers, over 1,000 are also Adobe customers. Workfront currently has one million users across those 3,000 customers.

Adobe + Workfront—A Better Way to Workflow?

Functional silos that stymie progress consistently top the list of roadblocks to marketing and engagement success. Adobe’s proposed acquisition of Workfront squarely takes aim at the internal silo walls that disrupt marketing operations. The move also adds some much-needed operational collaboration to Adobe’s suite of marketing tools, Experience Cloud.

But what happens beyond marketing? Adobe had made huge strides across Creative Cloud in facilitating collaboration and workflows across creative development, from design briefs to final outputs and beyond. The recent Adobe MAX virtual conference focused heavily on these new developments and how they help both hard-core creatives and the people on the front lines responsible for getting the right assets to the right places.

Will this functionality cement marketing as its own worst enemy by driving selective collaboration exclusively within marketing or will it bridge critical collaboration gaps across departments despite different work styles and structures? In an age when customer experience (CX) is not the exclusive domain of marketing, could this create unintentional isolation from other critical front-line collaborators or encourage a culture of CX as a team sport? Or, will it serve to blur the hard lines between roles, management and methodology and firmly plant the customer as the unwavering North Star for CX strategy and campaign execution? We'll be watching closely to see how ambitious Adobe’s vision for work proves to be outside of its marketing, commerce and creative footprint.  

The Allure of Workfront

Don’t call it “just” a workflow manager. While Workfront initially made a name as a project management and collaboration tool, it has increasingly become known as a work management platform. It orchestrates strategic planning, team alignment, creative collaboration and resource planning, focusing on the people doing the work and the ways in which they need and want to connect.

Users believe Workfront truly shines in aligning the complex workflows, processes and foundational work that goes into massive creative projects. That enables teams to work together to get assets out the door faster, more closely align to strategy, and land their efforts with greater impact. With an extensive library of out-of-the-box integrations, Workfront quickly positioned itself as the “effectiveness engine” for the modern marketing operational machine so critical to keeping digital business moving forward.

Workflow’s use case extensions have broadened over time, including the overarching management of digital transformation by helping technology teams to focus on the right projects to take on and the right decisions to make. As a result, IT teams, agency partners, and contractors work more effectively together to deliver the right projects, on time, and with greater impact for the business. In the end, although Workfront has remained dedicated to accelerating and demystifying the work of marketing, its true potential lies in the collaboration required to shape consistent customer experiences—and that reaches far beyond marketing.

Why This Matters for Adobe and Its Customers

Adobe has existed as two spheres of the marketing brain: the wild, unbridled creativity harnessed in Creative Cloud and the rapidly accelerating engine of customer engagement and connection in Experience Cloud. While the two sides of this cloud often connected and clearly influenced one another, workflows, governance of assets, and strategic planning have often failed to flow across the entirety of the creative-to-experience continuum. The addition of Workfront as the epicenter for work helps bridge the gap in planning, understanding and optimizing the entire lifecycle of digital experience from inception to optimization.

For Adobe, this fits the pattern of innovating on behalf of the marketing organization and being the champion for digital business. The work of marketing has distinct requirements and characteristics that set it apart from other types of work. As organizations become more attune to the reality that different types of work have different requirements, tools like Workfront that are intentionally developed to suit a distinct type of work or way of working become that much more important to success.

As recently introduced at Adobe Max, Creative Cloud has investigated, interrogated, and celebrated workflows that more freely bring creatives into a more data-rich strategic dialogue with marketers. Adobe has an opportunity with Workfront to further extend this connection between creatives and marketing execution. If this acquisition lives up to its potential, Adobe will strengthen workflows across Customer Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager. We see this acquisition as a clear indication of Adobe’s desire to empower the engagement lifecycle by documenting progress and impact, aligning around strategy and success, and eliminating the vagaries of gut and instinct.

There’s Clear Upside for Workfront Customers

Workfront has faced some criticism for deficiencies in interface usability, its digital asset management (DAM) capabilities, and pricing. Current Workfront users will see a BIG improvement with access and increased connection to Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Adobe’s DAM solution. It is rich in functionality and, perhaps most interestingly for this acquisition, able to deliver tangible data into asset development, utilization, and engagement. In short, Workfront as part of Adobe gets better.

Bottom Line

We get excited about seeing a future where Sensei is unleashed for insights into rapid decision making, automated workflow updates, and perhaps, measurements around the impact and connection between effective work and effective engagement. Companies need to accelerate the pace at which this work gets done. The right tools can tackle the stagnation of decision making and the lag between ideation and iteration. And that could help unravel the cultural juggernauts that intensify the friction between creation, deployment, and measurement.

There’s tremendous potential in this acquisition, but we still have questions and concerns. Chief among them:

• How does this fit into Adobe’s broader partnership strategy, especially relationships with Microsoft and ServiceNow?
• What happens if Workfront stays siloed within Experience Cloud? Adobe’s track record on seamless integration of acquisitions has been hit or miss.
• Most importantly, what does Adobe want to be when it grows up? Will the company use this opportunity to take the lead in redefining how the work of marketing and customer engagement are done across the board? Or will it focus on cozying up to its biggest partners and increasing its appeal as an acquisition candidate?

Future of Work Marketing Transformation New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Revenue Officer

The Return of the CIO Prerogative: A Best-of-Breed IT Landscape

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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When it comes to technology industry trends, the pendulums swing back and forth with steady frequency. Numerous examples abound but two will suffice here: a) the shift from on-premesis to cloud and then a good bit back to edge again, and b) the move from green screens to native PC apps then to the browser. Now when it comes to the way IT is acquired and situated in the enterprise today IT, the pendulum is currently swinging quickly back to a highly-valued old position that will very likely separate leading IT organizations from the also-rans going forward.

Years ago, when IT was much less pervasive, corporate uptake of technology was more varied, and the giant enterprise suites hadn't yet become the all-consuming platforms they've become, it was a simpler time. Back then the CIO put all the strategically differentiating IT into one bucket, and all the commodity IT that didn't move the needle much for the business into another. Then IT took the applications and systems in the differentiating bucket -- the ones that could break the business if done poorly, or would make/keep the business an industry-leader if done right -- were carefully selected, acquired, and customized to fit the special way the business carried out that function, integrated with key systems and then brought online.

Related: The CIO Must Lead Business Strategy Now

Great IT Helps Organizations Compete Better in the Market More Than Ever

As history is such a good teacher, particularly in the IT world, it's easy to look back to see that there were several problems that emerged from this approach.

First, integration was often the most time-consuming and expensive of all of these processes. The best IT systems don't create new data silos when that information already exists in other systems. But for most of the history of IT, integration was hard. It often delayed or even put the whole project at risk entirely through intractable integration issues discovered too late in the game. It wasn't until quite recently that lightweight integration approaches including open APIs, microservices, and now the giant new vendor graph APIs such as Microsoft Graph and SAP Graph emerged, which when combined with integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) like Dell Boomi, Jitterbit, Zapier, and Integromat (to name just a few) that made integration an order of magnitude less costly and time-consuming.

The second problem was IT customization. In the days before cloud, vendors allowed on-premises IT systems to be customized because that's what CIOs wanted, for the differentiating reasons cited above. Though customization was often overdone, the argument itself was sound: Differentiating can really matter, especially around the systems that drive the core value proposition of the business. Yet the IT customizations of yesteryear were frequently stranded as the vendor upgraded the product, which often made the old customizations outdated or incompatible. This required expensive redevelopment and testing for each upgrade cycle. As we now know, it's much better to quickly iterate IT systems to keep up with the market and changing business needs. Yet customizations had the opposite effect, leaving most organizations trapped on rapidly aging versions of products. So customization as often abandoned. As much as it brought strategic value, it also required organizations to take on too much risk and cost, at least with the state of technology back then.

Second Wave DT Requires Difficult-to-Achieve High Velocity Change

Then cloud arrived, along with software-as-a-service (SaaS.) Now IT had competition, and real competition it was too. Apps could be quickly procured and deployed in weeks at lower price points, integrations were easier with standard, simple APIs via REST, and most vendors now have a growing directory of off-the-shelf integrations to make it easier and less costly. Even the entire data center could be made someone else's capital investment issue and maintenance headache.

But as organizations digitized everything more and more, it became clear that the most disruptive market differentiation was regularly demonstrated by cloud-native tech companies that were moving faster, innovating more, and creating more compelling digital offerings in the market. They were also doing this on more modern platforms, they maintained less techical debt, and provided new types of experiences that better appealed to businesses and consumers alike. We are now all familiar with what Netflix did to video rental companies, Amazon did to much of retail, what the iPhone has done to a dozen industries at once (media players, cameras, GPS devices, etc.)

Most businesses have discovered that they've digitized, but they haven't transformed, which take truly sustained and widespread effort on the technology front.

Now we're in a second age of digital transformation (DT), where every organization now has to be a fast-moving cloud-native tech company in order to compete. Unfortunately, most organizations have at least three primary issues that are holding them back on the technology side: a) Two types of technical debt, one in acquired infrastructure/apps and another in in-house enterprise architectures that are too old and out-dated to compete yet are also extremely costly to replace, b) no appealing migration path from this situation to a new and better future that doesn't have a ten year program plan behind it (something well outside the 2-3 year planning and relevancy window of just about any IT department), and c) a runaway IT landscape that today has organizations acquiring and using more apps at an apparently exponential rate.

If you could ask a CIO what their biggest challenge is today -- after the out-of-control, wildly unpredictable, and potentially career-ending threats of cybersecurity and ransomware -- it is this: IT has simply become too complex in its current form to guide and navigate as an overall portfolio. This is not a theory. It is borne out by recent data: As I explored recently on ZDNet on this subject, most CIOs now cite tech complexity as their #2 challenge overall.

Further complicating matters is that the major enterprise IT vendors have built out -- through both development and acquisition -- now massive enterprise suites, especially in ERP and in front office productivity -- which have individual offerings that tend to vary substantially in quality, maturity, and overall integration with the rest of the suite. If given an easy choice, CIO would like to mix and match best-of-breed parts from multiple vendors, but prior experience has shown it was too costly and risky.

CIOs also don't like to become beholden to too few vendors (who then hold the cards), for reasons of choice and having too many eggs in one basket. However, while they do like that the modules of enterprise suites do to work together a bit better and they only have one throat to choke for problems, it's increasingly becoming moot as more and more parts of the business punt locally and use a better tool for the job anyway.

What then can IT leaders do today to address all these factors?

Differentiation Comes Back with a Vengeance

Most CIOs would very much like to put the complexity genie back in the bottle. In fact, they'd like to make the IT landscape less complex for a whole host of reasons, a partial list of which incudes fewer data silos, more consistent user experiences, easier worker onboarding, lower support costs, less cognitive overload, more strategic differentiation, more business productivity, less vendor lock-in and an easier overall IT portfolio to manage and govern. Yet it's likely that this complexity will eventually grow beyond human ability.

Consequently, successful managing complexity, as I began to say a few years ago, is fast becoming an IT imperative, not a nice-to-have. Soon we will simply have too much homogenized IT that doesn't separate us meaningfully from the competition, but still accompanied by sheer data and experience sprawl that will make it very difficult to have workers learn and do their jobs effectively (other than perform whack-a-mole across many dozens of highly variable and poorly (or not-at-all) integrated apps.)

As I've argued recently, the starting point for addressing these challenge effectively requires a new and highly-related focus and mindset:  We must become experience driven organizations. Where to start in this view? We must focus on the most strategic and differentiating areas of customer, employee, and even partner experience.

However, putting the IT complexity genie back in the bottle is going to require a sea change in a few key parts of the IT landscape. One that would ordinarily seem unlikely to happen on its own. Yet happen it has with the arrival of highly capable entries in two relatively new product categories and one still emerging one. These have been directly enabled by the widespread adoption of APIs by SaaS and cloud platforms vendors. Combined, this has created an emergent industry breakthrough that has returned mix-and-match power to the CIO, as well as a way to combine and streamline app experiences into simpler, easier to train on and support solutions. Business data can easily be accessed wherever it's needed, while individual features can be extracted and moved to the places where they best belong, with the swift assembly of pre-existing data and functionality into compelling new point experiences. This approach can also be scaled better, because it uses high leverage new conceptual models that are as as manageable as they highly accessible, so that mixing-and-matching can be a daily activity carried out by a much wider group of citizen developers, instead of just IT.

Indeed, this self-service model, one of the key new ways to tap into much larger resources with low cost (such as end user peer support), has now arrived for integration and application development as well.

Three Key Enablers of Best-of-Breed IT: The Product Categories

While there are other supporting technologies in best-of-breed IT, the principle categories that are most influential in moving IT into a new mix-and-match posture, yet and also delivers on the experience imperative for more streamlined,  more-focused, and situated IT at high speed and scale are:

• Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS). The industrialization of integration has arrived with platforms that have combine off-the-shelf integration catalogs with point-and-click "wiring together" and testing. Performance management, operations capabilities, and governance are also common in iPaaS. The best iPaaS even makes it possible for power end-users to integrate much of their data sources, with the aforementioned Zapier and Integromat being prime examples. With iPaaS, most organizations can quickly API-enable and integrate most legacy IT.
• Low-code/no-code solutions. While spreadsheets have long been the low code tool of choice for the typical non-IT worker, they are entirely inadequate as a low-code model. The good news is that this has begun to change in a big way with the advent of solutions that bring application development-style sensibilities and features (testing and version control, for example.) Our regularly updated Low-Code ShortList which I maintain with my colleague Holger Mueller is a good example of how a cottage industry has grown in a major tech industry in its own right. Many analyses have shown that there will never be enough professional coders to digitize everything that needs to be digitized in businesses today. Nor does there need to be. Making it easier for workers to turn their tech dreams into reality is now the next step in IT. That is, as long as the necessary guardrails around data security, privacy, and regulatory concerns are incorporated into the model. Many of these platforms now directly address this need.
• AI-based app generation. On the cutting edge, and without any clear category name yet, is what will likely prove to be the next major breakthrough in scalable IT differentiation. This is the creation of applications by using a capabile AI-based solution that can take high-level requirements in natural language, determine what the solution needs to do, then design, develop, integrate, and test it, and finally provide the completed app to the user for acceptance. While there are virtually no products in the commercial space currently available for this (yet), the impressible results of OpenAI's GPT-3 has shown that this breakthrough is not only possible but likely inevitable. The power this will confer on the average IT user is difficult to understate. It's is akin to literally verbally articulating the need for an app to solve a particular problem, and then having an AI agent immediately develop it.

Important Note: iPaaS and low-code/no-code are often used together to form what I refer to as a multicloud experience integration stack. This is an end-to-end strategic platform solution that helps deliver on best-of-breed IT assembly line with an experience-centric focus. Please see my exploration of this important new category of IT solution and the key players.

A New Democratizing Craft Model for IT, But Without the Old Baggage

How then can the CIO begin moving back to best-of-breed IT? First, they will need to create a better API-level foundation, or best-of-breed is relatively inaccessible to them if on-premesis IT resources need to be glued together or mixed-and-matched (which is highly likely in any larger organization.) That's because while their cloud and SaaS vendors are largely providing the APIs for IT already, most legacy systems still lack them. Fortunately, solutions like Mulesoft and TIBCO Cloud Mashery can great help added the needed legacy APIs in a full lifecycle framework. Second is the mindset that IT must be made far more malleable and easily-reshaped in the middle-tier and in experience-delivery, and that those that can and should engage in this activity aren't always in IT.

Most IT organizations do very much want to go faster and do better with digital, and now they really can. Employee experiences can be created for each step in the employee lifecycle out of the whole cloth of existing IT. New customer experiences can be rapidly created that are highly contextual and personalized, using everything the organization knows about them to improve their digital journey. But IT departments will have to unlearn a lot of their own predispositions and pick up some new talents along the way (especially low code education and application lifecycle management on the edge.)

That all this can be done by most organizations, there is little question. In fact it has been happening in the margins of many IT departmenst for years already. Now it must move from the margins to the center of IT. Ultimately, there is a clear and substantial business case in being more intentional and programmatic about creating a faster, nimbler, more malleable best-of-breed IT department. It's now up to the CIO to drive this agenda.

My research on this topic:

The art of the possible: Pervasive integration of enterprise systems and data arrives | ZDNet

To Strategically Scale Digital, Enterprises Must Have a Multicloud Experience Integration Stack

Digital Transformation Target Platforms ShortList

Why Microservices Will Become a Core Business Strategy for Most Organizations

Future of Work New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer

News Analysis: Oracle Allegedly Wins Bid For TikTok

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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The Bottom Line: Oracle Could Enter A New Era As A Digital Giant

Oracle's skill in winning TikTok is a coup on the cloud front, the ad tech front, and in the geopolitical trade wards. With over 80% of the top 20 ad networks, portals, creatives optimizers, trading desks, and ad brokers leveraging data from Oracle Data Marketplace, TikTok builds on this lead. With Rob Tarkoff, head of Oracle CX at the helm, there is a huge opportunity to compete head on with Google, Facebook, and Amazon for the estimated $600 billion dollar digital ad market in 2024. Add a next generation public cloud infrastructure to the mix and a shrewd management team, Oracle is now entering a new era where digital giants win based on their ability to:

1. attract massive user bases;
2. create signal intelligence with rich data;
3. achieve decision velocity via automation and artificial intelligence; and
4. deliver digital monetization models

Oracle's success in running TikTok and a consumer business will require a different mindset. If this ends up as just a pure technology partnership with Oracle playing the privacy and data enforcer, then the deal will lose the ad tech appeal. However, this once in a lifetime opportunity is one that Oracle has been building towards over the past five years. If the deal goes beyond just a cloud deal, expect Oracle to emerge as a new digital giant via this acquisition and compete head on with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter for ad revenue.

Data to Decisions Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce Tech Optimization Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Oracle Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI HR HCM business SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance M&A Enterprise Service CCaaS UCaaS Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Experience Officer

News Analysis: Salesforce Commerce Cloud Acquires Mobify for Progressive Web Apps

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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Customers like Mobify's modern storefront solution because it enables easy, manageable customization, and more engaging commerce experiences. This push to headless commerce is used by leading brands such as Cosnova, Shisheido, and Under Armour. Customers and prospects were impressed by the Mobify SDK which included a rich component library to build their storefront in React, a strong set of analytics integrations for instrumenting analytical events, and a scalable managed runtime that offloads the stress of handling peak holiday traffic and enhanced security.

Matrix Commerce Moves To Headless

1. Diversify supply chains. The norm was a global supply chain with outsourced operations and heavy concentration in regions such as China. International relations and security concerns have shifted priorities to diversifying production and distribution. Business continuity risk management has many organizations moving to a near shore model and also ensuring domestic availability.
2. Double down on demand planning. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) have never been hotter. Demand planning is a business process that forecasts demand for a product or service. The result is a more efficient production and delivery to stake holders.
3. Focus on top 20% of SKU's. Leaders have identified their highest volume SKU's as well as their most profitable SKU's to determine which products to double down on. Prioritization and focus have enabled organizations to ensure supply meets demand while some operations are furloughed or shut down.
4. Digitize channels. The shift to mobile , voice assistant enabled, and online ordering has never been more important. Digitization enables contactless commerce and frees up FTE's to focus on core operations.
5. Build subscription business models. Organizations with subscription business models have fared the best with minimal cancellations. Identify where a product, service, experience, or outcome can be brought down to bite size chunks in a subscription model.
6. Move to direct to consumer. From B2B organizations to organizations that have never sold direct, the shift to D2C is very real. Shifting from selling bulk to smaller packaging sizes will be the toughest challenge for B2B organizations used to high volume, large quantity orders.
7. Optimize pricing. Now's the time to invest in pricing optimization solutions. Understand the factors to pricing elasticity and understand how to optimize pricing models by channel, region, industry, economic trend, and supply.
8. Drive up automation. Decentralized work environments have sped up the need for automation. With scarce labor on hand and the need to make more rapid decisions, investments in both AI and automation have increased.
9. Build dynamic feedback loops for personalization. Learn how to use attribution, context, dynamic choices, A/B testing to identify long term patterns to create digital feedback loops. Determine how to apply AI to improve personalization.
10. Move to event driven architectures/ micro services. Upgrade your architecture to support the latest approach. EDAs promote the creation, production, detection, consumption of, and reaction to events. These events can be mined for improved AI and orchestration of personalized journeys
11. Accelerate payments. Improve your payments infrastructure to support contactless commerce. Upgrade your security systems with better payment gateways and advanced billing capabilities. Invest in billing platforms that enable subscription capabilities and accurate revenue recognition.
12. Deliver contactless commerce. From buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) to buy online pickup at curb (BOPAC), to other means for prepayment and delivery, the rush to contactless commerce has never been so great. Buyers expect zero tampering and contamination of their products during delivery. Organizations must support contactless commerce variants as conditions change.

The Bottom Line: Mobify Acquisition Shows An Urgency To Modernize Monolithic Demandware Platform

Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Supply Chain Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software IoT Blockchain ERP Leadership Collaboration M&A ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Robotics AI Analytics B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing Metaverse developer SaaS PaaS IaaS Quantum Computing Growth eCommerce Next Gen Apps CRM finance Social Healthcare VR CCaaS UCaaS Customer Service Content Management Enterprise Service Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Experience Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Operating Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

New Release: Week Two Q3 2020 Constellation ShortList™ Portfolio Updates

Elle DeRosa

Director of Marketing, Communications & Operations
Constellation Research

Elle is the Director of Marketing at Constellation Research and producer of the weekly enterprise tech show, DisrupTV. She leads marketing and communications efforts across all avenues while also managing an array of programs including the SuperNova Awards, Business Transformation 150, AX100, AI150, S50 and ShortLists. She has previous experience in public relations and has a strong passion for the marketing world. Contact Elle at [email protected] ...

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Great news! As promised last week, we’ve published an additional 25 lists from the Constellation ShortList™ portfolio today.  

Each technology vendor on this list has been chosen based on their products and services offering. Our analysts consider technology investment, use cases, strategic vision, customer value, executive leadership and price when anointing a vendor to the ShortList™.

Check out the 25 new and updated lists:

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Cloud Platforms
• Augmented Reality Platforms - NEW
• B2C Marketing Automation for Enterprise - NEW
• B2C Marketing Automation for Small to Mid Sized Business - NEW
• Campaign to Commerce: All-In-One-Commerce Clouds
• Cloud-Based BI & Analytics Platforms
• Compensation Management
• Customer Experience (CX) Operations Services: Global - NEW
• Digital Asset Management (DAM) for High Volume Commerce
• Digital Experience (DX) Platforms
• Digital Transformation Services (DTX): Global - NEW
• Enterprise File Sharing and Cloud Content Management
• Global HCM Suites
• Healthcare Clinical Communication
• Healthcare IT Security
• Marketing Analytics Solutions
• North American Talent Acquisition
• OKR Tracking and Management Tools - NEW
• Partner & Alliance Relationship Management (PARM)
• Payroll for North American SMBs
• Product Information Management (PIM) - NEW
• Robotic Process Automation
• Self-Service Data Science & Machine Learning
• Travel Management Platforms
• Virtual Events: Webcasts and Meetings - NEW

This program is part of our open research library. You can download and view each list and the criteria for free. If you missed last week’s updates, be sure to check them out here. To engage us in a rapid vendor selection process, please contact [email protected].

For more information, visit https://www.constellationr.com/shortlist.

Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Future of Work Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Chief Analytics Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Privacy Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer

New Release: Q3 2020 Constellation ShortList™ Portfolio Updates

Elle DeRosa

Director of Marketing, Communications & Operations
Constellation Research

Elle is the Director of Marketing at Constellation Research and producer of the weekly enterprise tech show, DisrupTV. She leads marketing and communications efforts across all avenues while also managing an array of programs including the SuperNova Awards, Business Transformation 150, AX100, AI150, S50 and ShortLists. She has previous experience in public relations and has a strong passion for the marketing world. Contact Elle at [email protected] ...

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We are excited to unveil the latest updates to the Constellation ShortList™ portfolio.

The Constellation ShortList portfolio highlights the key players when considering investments across all of our coverage areas, including HR tech, Healthcare, AI, marketing, customer experience, analytics, machine learning, and more. We update the lists once per year to every six months depending on the category. Our goal is to match the rapidly changing requirements with customer needs and demand.

Today we released 27 new and updated lists:

• Augmented Meeting Services
• AI Driven Cognitive Applications – NEW
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Best Of Breed Platforms
• Augmented Business Intelligence and Analytics
• B2B Marketing Automation for Enterprise - NEW
• B2B Marketing Automation for Small to Mid-Sized Business - NEW
• Benefits Admin
• Campaign to Commerce: Best of Breed Commerce Platforms – NEW
• Cloud Customer Service and Contact Center Software
• Cloud Identity Management
• Cloud-Based ML and DL Platforms
• Customer Experience (CX) Design & Execution Services: Global – NEW
• Customer Loyalty
• Digital Performance Management
• Enterprise Group Messaging
• ERM/GRC
• European-Centric Talent Management Suites
• Event Marketing & Management Software - NEW
• Gig Economy Platforms - NEW
• Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud Data Lake Management
• Matrix Commerce Order Management
• Metadata Management, Data Cataloging and Data Governance
• Population Health Management Solutions
• Smart Services Digital Monetization Platforms
• Virtual Care Platforms
• Virtual Events: Conferences & Experiential Events - NEW
• Workforce Management Suites
   

Each offering meets the threshold criteria as determined by our analysts through client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research. These reports are part of Constellation’s open research library and are free to download.

For more information, visit https://www.constellationr.com/shortlist

Be sure to check back next Wednesday for the final updates for the quarter.

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Where Does Empathy Fit in Industry 4.0?

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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In an age when manufacturing looks toward the “fourth industrial revolution”, aka Industry 4.0, the focus of transformation tends to be where and how automation and smart machines can be introduced to operations and processes that have been in place for decades. As the dialogue continues, words like robotics, computerization and autonomous operations creep into the discussion.

Smart. Predictive. Resilient. Autonomous.

This leads to the obvious and persistent question…what happens to the people? Where do customers fit in this vision of Industry 4.0 with hyper converged systems and quantum computing powering autonomous enterprises? Where do employees fit in this predictive world powered by robotics and decentralized cognitive decision engines?

For two powerhouse brands, DuPont and Stanley Black & Decker, people sit in the middle of it all, the beating heart of Industry 4.0…thanks to strategic design.

Both organizations had unique issues to address. At DuPont, the question was not how to rethink manufacturing, but instead how to rethink the world through the lens of what DuPont’s customers could dream of buying. At Stanley Black & Decker, the question was not how to reimagine tools, but how to evolve manufacturing operations to empower talented, thoughtful and imaginative people with technology.

What if The World Was a Circuit?

Since 1802, DuPont has been synonymous with innovation. Manufacturing chemicals and materials that have become household names like Kevlar, nylon, Teflon, Corian and Lycra, DuPont’s leadership asked an audacious question: Instead of following the trends to build “smaller” – what if DuPont went BIGGER to reimagine the world as a circuit?

The first step in this journey was to listen, quite literally, and then understand how to white board their big ideas into reality. To do this, DuPont turned to strategic design methodologies to amplify the customer’s voice, adopting a research-led approach that values empathy over ease of deployment. To set the entire exercise up for success, Brian Ammons, Business Director, Smart Materials for DuPont, acknowledged that risk needed to be eliminated to open the opportunity for big change to be possible.

“It sounds hard to do – to think big and take real steps forward – so we de-risked,” he explained. “We set foundational principals at the very start to set-up what could be possible in a world without risk. We asked for the time, the budget and the people – specifically people with the drive to execute and the ability to think big – needed to succeed.”

By creating a new category of materials and devices, DuPont chose to work closely with an outside team of diverse, multi-disciplinary leaders with unique and varied backgrounds. Designit, a global strategic design firm, embedded teams into DuPont and across the industries and markets that the new smart materials business could potentially be applied.

For DuPont, imagining the world as a circuit is still a work in progress. Thanks to embracing a design-inspired, research-led approach, the transformation towards industry 4.0 and a smart material future is less about the products that can be sold and more about understanding where DuPont’s customers can reimagine and reinvent with DuPont. “It is less about industries and applications and more about how WE participate in the market and with customers,” concluded Ammons.

What if Machines Empowered People?

The leadership team at Stanley Black & Decker didn’t just commit to an Industry 4.0 strategy – they committed to transforming every factory around the globe by keeping people at the center of every move. This raised some interesting and complex questions that needed to be addressed early in their journey: How would teams – filled with technology skeptics and generations adverse to automation and change – embrace new tools and technologies to continue building some of the best power tools and security solutions on the market for over 177 years?

“Our purpose statement is that Stanley Black & Decker is for those who make the world,” noted Sudhi Bangalore, Vice President, Industry 4.0 at Stanley Black & Decker. “So, we knew we needed to start our transformation with the over 40,000 people across the world, in our factories, who make the tools that make the world.”

The company adopted a mindset where technology should be deployed to work collaboratively with people. By eschewing traditional research methodologies and embracing strategic design principles of human-centered, qualitative research that puts ego and assumption aside in favor of living in another person’s shoes, Stanley Black & Decker began to do the hardest work of all: leading with empathy. The design process revealed a new reality: Nobody was hesitant or resistant; Everyone was in search of opportunity.

In the end, empathy had to be driven by caring, which in turn empowered action and change. “Above all else, you have to care. If you care, you can apply smart technologies that empower those people to work in new and exciting ways,” concluded Bangalore. In the end, understanding was only part of the picture…having the desire to act on empathy has become the difference between intentions and actions.

Understanding the Power of Design

Strategic design methods are not magic. Design doesn’t mysteriously open a portal to a land of perfect products. It does, however, have the potential to make leaders uncomfortable. It invites criticism. It demands honesty. It creatively reshapes challenge into opportunity because it remains firmly grounded in a deep understanding of people.

While design is often thought of in the more hyper-creative, aesthetic work of business – advancing a brand or rethinking a product’s physical or aesthetic attributes – it is increasingly associated with more holistic innovation. In fact, strategic design is grounded in the idea that research and analysis of an organization’s internal and external inputs, data and trends can design innovative solutions from products to massive systemic change.

The difference, of course, is that modern strategic design drives innovation that is empathetic towards key stakeholders, from customers and prospects to employees and partners. It shifts the center of co-creation from gut-reactions of perceived market demands to collaborative, purposeful action based on customer voice.

Design can take the biggest problems and rethink and reshape them into bold, human responses.

This is the real power that both DuPont and Stanley Black & Decker individually tapped into by embarking on a design-led transformation journey. This was not research that could be done with a series of snappy surveys or external polls. The hard work of reimagination requires multi-disciplinary teams looking for the unexpected in a sweeping range of locations.

It’s Never Too Late To Get Started

The question often comes back to getting started, which is exactly what I asked Sunil Karkera, Global Managing Director of Designit, who shared his three foundational steps and guidelines to successful design.

1. Never forget to design for humans It sounds simple…after all, who would forget this? As it turns out…at some point we have all likely lost sight of this as organizations strive for efficiency of design and optimization of margin. Karkera explained, “Don’t design for the sake of technology or the ideal end use of a product. You need to design for the human who will use the product.”
2. Be grounded There is a temptation to do more dreaming than designing in this process – to think so aspirationally that failure, no matter how fast or cheap, is never an experience of failing forward and learning from a momentary setback. “Hands in the cloud, feet on the ground is what I tell people,” shared Karkera. “Design needs to be viable, do-able and most important, it needs to be achievable.”
3. Design is a series of compromises When done correctly, compromises throughout the process will be informed by the research and data inputs included in analysis. This is not a process of gut reactions, but rather an exercise of collaboration to reach the right set of more-informed actions.

Beyond anything, my conversations with these three business leaders has highlighted a singular common message: Industry 4.0 and all the wonders of automation, robotics and technology that can come along with it will fail if people are left out of the equation.

Without empathy, transformation will just accelerate the bad decisions and detrimental behaviors of the past. For design to be successful, leaders must be willing to explore without limits and preconceptions, be flexible enough to bend and compromise, and most of all, be ready to not see their own reflection in the mirror, but instead see their customers and their employees.

To see the entire conversation, visit https://www.wipro.com/events/design-led-manufacturing-new-outcomes-for-operations-products-and-services/

 

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Blackhat 2020: A Tale of Paper, Prison and People

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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Blackhat 2020 went all virtual this year, like every other conference under the sun. In its 23rd year, folks who normally descend on Vegas didn’t seem to miss Vegas…at all. They missed each other, the camaraderie, the fun, but in more than one session, speakers started with “we wish we were all together” then quickly pivoted to what that speaker despised most about Vegas – the heat, the taxi lines, casino-stench, expensive drinks.

What Informa did well was put community and connection, the engagement and the opportunities to connect, be it with speakers during sessions or with each other in between sessions, front and center. While the “content” of each session was pre-taped, there was always live Q&A and the back and forth that is harder, but not impossible, in a virtual session. It wasn’t the same…but it wasn’t terrible and while attendees knew what they were missing, they didn’t regret investing the time to attend the virtual soiree.

Aside from the event and engagement itself, here are some of my takeaways and thoughts:

The Election is a Big Cyber Deal

A HUGE part of Blackhat was dedicated to Election security, kicking off with a keynote from Matt Blaze, legendary security researcher, McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, Chairman of the Tor Project, and co-creator of the Voting Village at DEFCON (the hacking conference) who issued a broad call to action for the security community to come to the aid of election security. One CTA that had the chat room buzzing was the suggestion that the best way to secure the election was to have security pros volunteer at polling centers…LITERALLY asking people to be in the room where it happens.

It was telling that Blaze, who has arguably seen a LOT, shared that security of the 2020 United States federal election presented an issue that was “orders-of-magnitude more difficult and complex” than anything he had seen before. Both Blaze and Chris Krebs, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) discussed the problem that was also the solution to fraud and security: Paper.

That’s right…you heard me loud and clear. That thing that was supposedly dead because the internet killed it…paper…is the channel that could save us all. But getting that paper into the hands of voters is what is keeping some researchers up at night thanks to a complex voting system run by individual states but demanding security and uniformity at the federal level. While the question of how we get paper into the hands of the electorate – and then returned to the right secure destination – is the nightmare du jour, but having an auditable record on paper, according to Krebs, is the path to a more secure election. Now if we could just convince people to stop clicking on all those memes and misinformation links!

Letting Your Contractors Go to Prison...Not Cool

Anyone who has ever worked in a services or consulting based business has horror stories to share about nightmare clients. The social engineering and physical pen-testers at Coalfire officially set the bar at “our nightmare client let us get arrested, spend the night in prison and be charged with a felony.” They had been hired by the state of Iowa’s Judicial Branch and let’s just say, it didn’t go well for anyone. If you want the whole story behind, check out this great summary from DarkReading.

Long and the short…the job was to test security. They did…found a bunch of flaws…set off alarms and then literally waited around to see the response. The testers were arrested, spent the night in jail, charged with felonies, had bail set at an astronomical level, had the business threatened with every type of legal action, and lived through an extended trial drama that ended in total exoneration, charges dropped all over an internal power struggle over jurisdiction and who had the power to authorize the testing.

The soap opera turned pen test horror story was less about the actions and testing motions executed by Coalfire and red-team experts Gary De Mercurio and Justin Wynn and far more about the fragility of egos, the peril of turf wars and a stark reminder to have iron clad contracts. Their story has all the makings of a made-for Netflix movie. The chat stream was filled with bets on who should play De Mercurio with most voting for Dave Bautista. But in the end, security wasn’t in question…people were.

The Human Toll of Cyber

From the sessions on the election to the tales of pen-testers in prison, and all the medical device, diversity in security and pandemic-related attack dissections in between, the common theme was that security is testing limits…and the human toll is beginning to show. More than enough research was presented across the two days of conference sessions telling the tale of a frustrated, stressed out, over-worked and burnt out security teams being forced to do much more day in and day out with barely a shred of respect.

Security today is a tale of over-tooled and under-resourced teams now having to spend time unravelling the mass of competing data just to get a handle on what is and is a threat. Then there is the reality that internal threats, from espionage to lazy keystrokes that bring down the internet, are growing and making bold headlines.

Nothing discussed at Blackhat 2020 felt like it had an easy fix. The complexity being described in the seemingly simple need to get paper ballots into the hands of voters turned into a massive workflow across competing systems rife with vulnerabilities and little oversight. Hiring pen testers became a human drama of epic proportions. Just onboarding new tools and techniques revealed the pressure teams face as chat streams started to fill with laments over “I wish our leadership team got it,” and shared misery as security teams are being asked to justify spend and deliver tangible returns outside of “we didn’t get attacked this week!”

The frustration in security is real – and we can’t afford to ignore it or assume that new tooling will help. In fact, over-tooling is as much to blame as is a general lack of awareness and education beyond the security community about the threats and issues teams are really facing.

If there is anything I walked away from Blackhat 2020 with it is this: Security needs champions. It has amazing leaders who are more than capable of turning security posture into a strategic advantage for our businesses, our countries and our lives. It has ridiculously talented people wearing white, red and purple team hats and hoodies. What it doesn’t have is help.

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New Offering Launch - Oracle Boosts Developer Velocity with Autonomous JSON Database

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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More Time to Code, Less Time Lost on Admin/Ops

Introduction

Oracle introduced a new offering of its technology stack on August 13, 2020: Autonomous JSON Database. Autonomous JSON Database joins the growing autonomous product family at Oracle, which already includes the Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Autonomous Linux and Oracle Autonomous Data Guard. 

This blog post looks at Oracle Autonomous JSON Database's impact on developer productivity and how the new offering can boost a key developer satisfaction driver: velocity. 

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Rethinking the Professional Services Organization Post-2020

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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In 2020 professional services organizations (PSOs) are profoundly experiencing at least three different and substantial disruptions to their business, and often several secondary ones as well.

It was the arrival of COVID-19 earlier this year that led to lockdowns around the globe that have curtailed client demand and hampered project delivery. Those same lockdowns have also restricted project staff to their homes for the most part, slowing down client projects and impacting billable work. Finally, a rising economic downturn is wreaking havoc both in client budgets as well as the PSO firms’ own finances, leading to urgent calls for cost cutting and new efficiencies.

It’s the proverbial perfect storm of major challenges and it’s leading to a dramatic impact on customer success as well as affecting morale of the talent base in most PSOs. This has resulted in calls for a widespread push within firms to rapidly rethink and update their operating models to determine the right mitigations and respond effectively.

Except, as many have found, responding quickly and effectively to these challenges is hard to do when so much uncontrolled change is currently taking place.

In fact, many PSOs will be tempted to focus first on cost control to ensure short-term survival. While this is a natural response that does offer immediate and tangible control over a once-in-a-lifetime event filled with uncertainty, organizations must also remain mindful of the vital characteristics of professional services firms. Overly enthusiastic responses to this year’s disruptions can adversely impact the organizations strategic operating model long term.

Sustaining a Bridge to a Better Future

The risk is in affecting the overarching characteristics of professional services firms. In particular, it is two stand-out characteristics that make them unique in the industry: One is the nature of the highly bespoke work they do that is especially tailored for each client regardless of tools, services model or data. The second is the special nature of cultivating successful long-term client relationships. Both of these characteristics require intensive and skilled delivery capabilities. Finally, underpinning both of these foundational characteristics is the high leverage human capital model that determines both revenue and profit for the PSO, and which needs to be finely tuned across the many layers of the organization.

This was a painful lesson learned across the PSO industry from the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Decisions made too expediently negatively impacted firms long after the crisis had passed.  Studies have shown that decisions to reduce talent or cut compensation and billable time affected their client relationships as well their brand image for many years. Conversely, the firms that weathered the short-term pressure and managed to keep hard-to-replace human capital prospered as the economy recovered. In this same vein, organizations with a clear sense of the type of PSO that must emerge from the veil of 2020 — and what it will take to thrive in the resulting market conditions — will be in the best position to prosper.

Figure 1: The Pre-2020 Model of PSOs is Giving Way to a New Client/Talent Focused Model

Priorities First: Update the Firm to Reflect New Realities

It’s therefore paramount that any cost control discussions be viewed through the constructive lens of the organization’s business and talent strategy, along with its future operating model. In order to be able to do that, the business must first recalibrate their core strategy and execution with today’s fresh realities in mind:

• Clients are going to be much more selective and demanding about projects going forward
• Deal flows and talent sourcing will be more turbulent until well after the pandemic passes
• Delivery talent will require better enablement and support for their new daily work realities
• Major opportunities now exist in creating a more holistic and dynamic PSO operating model that can cost less and with less talent loss, while actually increasing margin
• Significant new types of business and growth opportunities have come within reach to offset recent revenue impacts

In other words, there are major prospects to do more than just survive through brute force cost cutting. Instead, more elegant solutions afford themselves if first the PSO will engage in a rapid rethinking through a view of the current the art-of-the-possible. In essence, a combined business and digital transformation. This transformation will generally consist of a combination of bold new ideas, better integration and consolidation of operational activities, and powerful new technology tools including automation, holistic user experience upgrades, and powerful new concepts from the realm of digital business.

The Evolution of the PSO Through Proactive, Targeted Transformation

As it turns out, the typical PSO has been experiencing quite a bit of change in the last couple of years anyway. Trends like more dynamic staffing approaches, better automation of delivery, more project analytics and diagnostics, have all led to improved services, higher margins, and greater customer success. Often led initially by technology, which has led to simultaneous advances in re-imagining the operational models of PSOs through new capabilities, a new type of PSO is emerging that is more agile, lean, digitally-infused, and experience-centric.

Driven by industry trends, technology innovations, and changes in the world, below are the types of key shifts that are being seen in PSO organizations as a result of the events in 2020. These trends are grouped into three categories, focusing on the business/clients, the worker, and overall health and wellbeing of all PSO stakeholders.

The Business of PS: Trends

• Predictive operations. Projects are becoming instrumented well enough today while sufficient historical project baseline data is now available to routinely predict risks and anticipating opportunities before they actually happen. Using these insights can lead to significant cost savings, higher success rates, and quality improvements.
• M&A support. A wave of mergers and acquisitions will inevitably occur out of the events of 2020, particularly of smaller PS firms. PSOs that have sophisticated infrastructure and processes for managing the financial, operational, and structural merging of clients will have an advantage.
• Large portfolio management. Most PSO are not taking advantage of the ability to manage large portfolios of projects across a client to maximize talent reuse, achieve economies of scale, and improve delivery.
• Next-generation client engagement. As the industry becomes hypercompetitive, the time is right for a more engaging, sustained, informative, and transparent connection to the client using a combination of technology, user experience, and real-time data flows. This higher quality delivery approach will result in increase of project share within clients against other PSO firms.
• New growth models. Most PSOs have readily accessible untapped growth opportunities which they can add to their existing portfolios to increase sales.
• New business models. The time is ripe for PSOs to lateral over into adjacent business models such as subscriptions, IP licensing, strategic data services, and annual recurring revenue that can provide vital new green fields for resilience and expansion

The PS Career: Trends

• Smart recruitment. New models exist for recruiting and project matching via AI, while talent screening and the pre/onboarding process can be made more intelligent and automated. This will drive bottom-line business benefits while also increasing acquisition and retention.
• Better talent experience. The top workers will have expectations of a general return to the quality of work life they had prior to 2020. PSOs that proactively deliver on this in remote work scenarios while also uplevelling the overall worker experience will have significant retention benefits.
• Learning the future of PS. The existential changes and new opportunities in the PSO world must be better communicated to workers, so they can help realize as well as reap the benefits enumerated here.
• Hybrid talent sourcing. New dynamic staffing models — aka the Gig Economy for professional services — will mix with full-time employment to create much stronger teams that are also more cost contoured while attracting new types of diverse talent.

Health and Wellbeing: Trends

• Delivery team engagement. Creating enabling and more connected working environments in the new remote work situation particularly for delivery teams is essential to preserve a connection to the “mothership” while also nurturing workers through the tough and challenging times.
• Wellbeing tracking. Tools and processes that track the physical, mental, and psychological health of PSO stakeholders, from project staff, back office, and clients — and provide appropriate assistance when needed — will be increasingly expected and has already become a hallmark of best-in-class employers.

In summary, PSOs have a historic opportunity to pivot to adapt to the significant disruptions they have faced so far in 2020. By adopting an updated operating model and quickly delivering on it with clients and talent using new solutions, PSOs can avoid the most damaging types of cost cutting while being positioned for growth in 2021 and beyond. That is, as long as they are willing to think outside the box and adopt sensible yet far-reaching shifts in their strategies, tools, and operating models.

Additional Reading

How the Gig Economy is Transforming Work in the Enterprise

A Blueprint for a Post-Pandemic CIO Playbook

It's Time to Think About the Post-2020 Employee Experience

How Professional Work Will Evolve in a Digital Post-Pandemic Society

Revisiting How to Cultivate Connected Organizations in an Age of Coronavirus

My 2020 Predictions for the Future of Work

Working in a coronavirus world: Strategies and tools for staying productive | ZDNet

Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience

The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital Workplace Today

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