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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One of the more interesting and vibrant new spaces in enterprise software in the last few years has been the category of Robotic Process Automation or RPA. The premise is simple and compelling: Show a software robot how a repetitive work task is done, and it will literally learn how to do it by watching the employee carry it out manually. The result is a rules-based algorithm that can then be adjusted, configured, optimized, and deployed quickly in the field to have that task carried out by the software robot going forward.

RPA can handle a wide variety of business use cases, from invoice matching to mortgage processing that previously required humans to do most of the work (though they still have to help with edge cases, but usually with greatly reduced workloads.) What's been interesting is that because RPA goes so deeply into exactly what a business does on the ground, inside its processes, RPA is often viewed more as a business tool than an IT tool. Thus IT has been surprisingly slow at times in introducing it to the business side, and businesses, not being in the IT field, are often unaware of the potent capabilities of this generation of much smarter process automation tools.

This state of affairs -- unclear ownership and tech unfamiliarity -- has led the RPA industry to flourish a bit less than it might otherwise have, yet still capture some of the most impressive growth stats in the enterprise IT industry

RPA also shows some of the best ROI of any new category of business apps. As the industry has matured and evolved, RPA has succeeded in having considerable real-world impact in the enterprise, with a growing wealth of case studies. While there are also some potentially concerning outcomes of adopting RPA, such as displacing workers at scale or the use of the technology by bad actors to engage in unwanted activities, so far negative outcomes appear rather limited.

The result is that RPA is one of the most practical and impactful applications of artificial intelligence (AI) so far. Yet the realities of making RPA operational quickly became apparent in the initial years, overcoming the overly-simplistic expectations of quick watch-run-deploy-optimize cycles.

End-to-End Intelligent Automation As a Platform

For RPA to sustain and adapt within a business it needs proper support. In other words, adequate design, planning and governance of an overall automation approach, while staying agile enough to quickly change with the business. So too is having a well-defined end-to-end technology framework to automate new processes. This includes integrating a host of related capabilities in an outcome-based sequence: Data capture, ingestion, and cleaning, data enrichment, automation output, quality control, downstream analytics, and exception handling, not to mention back-end features like system integration, autoscaling, capacity management, security, and compliance. 

In fact, wouldn't it be nice if most of this was already assembled as a ready-to-go solution around a capable RPA engine so it could be quickly applied to the business? This is, in fact, where a good part of the RPA industry is currently headed, so that businesses don't have to bolt-on the inputs and the outputs to an RPA tool, and then layer on the necessary analytics, operations, management, and governance capabilities.

The AntWorks Platform: Beyond RPA

The above was the background to an recent trip to ANTENNA 2020, the yearly industry analyst confab organized by leading RPA vendor AntWorks, which is currently on my RPA ShortList of solutions in the space to watch. Taking place in mid-January, 2020 in Turks and Caicos, our hosts were the co-founders themselves, Asheesh Mehra, currently the Group CEO, and Govind Sandhu, who is the COO.

AntWorks as a company is an interesting story, and is on quite a respectable growth trajectory, with about 600 employees today, despite being founded in just 2015 in Singapore, where they remain headquartered. AntWorks is still regarded as the new kid on the block in RPA, however, even though their offerings consist of a more complete and encompassing platform than just that capability. Asheesh notes that this helps them win deals, because they're ready to go out of the box, with less system integration and cobbling together of different pieces to arrive at a solution. While you can use pieces of AntWorks if you already have other upstream or downstream components, it's the entire solution that works together where they shine, something I confirmed by talking with some of their customers at the event.

Asheesh and Govind did much of the presenting in the morning, and were good advocates for the company, laying out the key principles that AntWorks is driven by. One aspect clearly stood out during their presentations: Both founders are grounded in what they want to accomplish, have a crisp vision, and are very careful that fast growth doesn't derail where they are going. They are committed to this to the point that they told us that they still interview every hire they make for cultural fit, something that by now must be quite a burden. However, it will likely pay sustained dividends by laying a strong people foundation in what is -- like most mid-sized enterprise startups these days -- a far flung organization with many small, separate offices that make it hard to build a common identity.

The core AntWorks product offerings as of early 2020

The AntWorks offering itself is based on the principle of 'Integrated Automation' because the company believes that process automation takes a good bit more than just an RPA offering. They divide their solution into four product segments, broken down into Intelligent Automation, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Fractal Science-based Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning (AI/ ML) that includes handwriting, RPA itself, and process discovery, along with other associated solutions (see product view above.) These are all wrapped together into a seamless solution for those that want to to identify the processes with highest automation propensity, pull data out of forms, images, or really, anything, and then automate the business processes that use that data.

The Six AntWorks Differentiators

Overall, there are six key takeaways from the various presentations of our day at ANTENNA 2020. Given the relatively newness of AntWorks to the industry, I will couch them as key differentiators, because that's what they are:

• Fractal science for more robust and effective machine learning. A key part of the company's special sauce is caught up in a form of fractal science, the kind that many of us learned about in high school, but that here gives them an edge in image recognition and processing, including intelligent document processing of structured, unstructured, image and inferred data as well as handwriting recognition. Their machine learning engine, known as Fractal ML, does this by establishing a more advanced and model-based, pattern recognition understanding of objects. Govind has a detailed YouTube presentation on why they believe Fractal Networks is a more modern approach to machine learning.
• Long-term investors that allow the best product to emerge. SBI Holdings is a key investor in AntWorks and takes a long-term and relatively low touch stance with the company, allowing it to make significantly stronger but perhaps slower burn product decisions that other organizations would have a harder time adopting (see: Ethical AI below.)
• A principled stance towards Ethical AI. This is a deeply held belief by the Asheesh, as well as the company broadly, that AI is a superpower that must only be used for good. They believe that to achieve this requires widespread realization and participation from businesses and governments to address, so that they ensure that use of AI is conducted accountably and responsibly. First, in a do-no-harm position, they call for AI providers to limit the carbon footprints of their solutions. Second, they call for the pervasive enablement of broad auditability and traceability of every AI decision. Finally, providers must not let their AI technology be used for criminal or fraudulent pursuits. Over lunch at the event, Asheesh told me they rigorously examine each deal to ensure their technology will be used properly within these constraints. It slows down sales a bit he said, so I asked him if his investors supported this approach. He indicated they are fully behind the AntWorks Ethical AI approach. Personally and professionally, I applaud their position, especially as the technology within AntWorks has real and immense power to automate human activity, for good or otherwise.
• An end-to-end solution for intelligent automation that goes beyond simple RPA. As cited above, AntWorks has both the vision and capabilities not just for RPA, but for solutions that span virtually the entire process automation value chain, from data capture and ingestion, finding processes, rule processing, workflow, connecting to outcomes, managing galaxies of bots doing this at scale, and providing both operational and strategic insights via analytics. It's a full stack RPA in other words. Also, because it's an integrated solution, AntWorks provides a Hybrid Processing functionality which allows very different data formats (data fields, check boxes, signatures, etc.)  to be interpreted all at the same time, speeding up the process and improving contextual quality. Here's a view of ANTstein SQUARE, showing the complete AntWorks stack:
  
• A purposefully built and maintained corporate culture that puts customers first, even in the face of high growth. A company of this size has already passed several key growth milestones that sometimes undoes smaller, high growth companies. I attribute this to the strong, positive, helpful culture that emphasizes helping the customer that the co-founders have clearly put great effort and expense into developing. I expect that while this must be a rather significant time drain, that they will be able to stay cohesive even as the company grows beyond any possibility of the hands-on approach the co-founders still maintain for hiring and shaping the global staff of the company, as they rapidly open offices around the world.
• High security and robust information safety protections. RPA systems often handle a company's most sensitive data, including financial and customer information. AntWorks emphasized the extensive effort they put into complying with and passing the security reviews of even largest regulated organizations. I did however press on them if they were truly security-first, and based on the answers, they are not quite 100% there yet, but it's clearly an objective of theirs. Bottom line: I rate them as about as high in security as the RPA industry gets based on my conversations with their architects.

AntWorks: A Fully Contemporary Automation Solution

That said, I do have a few minor concerns with a couple of key aspects of the strategy of the company. While they are very careful to build deep partnership with implementation firms and professional services companies that should drive delivery, growth, and net new logos, I believe they are still underpartnered for global growth. In fact, many geographic regions and industries will likely struggle to obtain local AntWorks implementation teams quickly enough, at least for a while. But I suspect they will solve this issue relatively short-to-medium term. Second, they don't have a clearly articulated future roadmap (or are at least not willing to share one yet, considering market competitiveness). While many tech vendors don't have this either, I find it's one of the most sought after pieces of information that buyers want. They want to understand where they are going to be taken. It will be helpful to see at least a high level product roadmap provided by AntWorks in the future.

Finally, there is probably one more key differentiator of the AntWorks platform, and that is a higher than average degree of usabilty. But I have not been able to personally verify that's the case yet, but I'll provide an update when I do.

In the end, it's clear that AntWorks knows what it's about and where it's going. The company has a very well-defined identity and industry objective, which is to bring end-to-end intelligent automation to a truly global market while upholding the highest industry standards of Ethical AI and customer security/safety, with RPA at the core. Their customer case studies were impressive as well, and were among some of the better ones I've seen. Thus, I came away from ANTENNA 2020 with newfound respect for the company, its aims, and its products. It also reaffirmed for me their place on our RPA ShortList as a prime automation platform for digital transformation in the enterprise.

Additional Reading

My live tweet stream with real-time analysis at #ANTENNA2020

2020 Predictions for the Future of Work and Automation

The Digital Transformation of Back-End Customer Experience with AI

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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As we enter the age of Authentic Marketing, Chief Marketing Officers and the teams they lead will be asked to justify authenticity itself…to explain why today is the day to engage with the customer on the customer’s terms and in their language…why now is the time to deliver on the centuries old promise of customer centricity. But, as the incomparable poet Maya Angelou said, you can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.

For Marketers this means looking into our sometimes-misguided past. Stay with me now…I promise…it isn’t all terrible. But we owe it to ourselves to understand what got us here.

Commoditization Is Killing Marketing

In the pre-digital engagement age, when collateral, paper and physical trappings of marketing flooded the supply chain, marketers engaged in negotiations by way of commoditization. Today, this same negotiation permeates across everything from lead acquisition to advertising and audience engagement. If 10,000 leads cost $50 per HQL, can we drive that down to $40 if we contract for 15,000? At some point in acronym bingo, we lost sight of the fact that the Q stands for quality, not quantity.

The commoditization of marketing drives the actions of marketing downward, diminishing marketing into a functional cost where procurement is the focus and the craft of customer engagement comes second. Engagement is not a commodity. Customers are not a commodity. When did we lose sight of those two truths?

The CMO Role Is (Understandably) Under Attack

Everyone wants to be a CMO. Everyone thinks they can be a CMO. Very few outside of actual CMOs know what a CMO does. Today’s CMOs are expected to drive growth across the entire organization, developing the strategy and the vision to turn overarching goals into bottom- and top-line realities. Yet new titles emerge daily, some warranted to describe expanded or focused remit. Others are just rebranding.

Time to settle the debate: CMOs drive, orchestrate and accelerate growth by aligning resources (and intelligence) to optimize engagement and establish the brand that underpins the far more broad and enterprise-wide customer experience strategy. Instead of fretting over the loss of the 4 P’s, today’s modern CMO is laser focused on the 3 R’s: revenue, relationship and reputation. So, if it quacks like that duck, it is a CMO.

The “Frankenstack” Will Be the Death of Us

Marketing organizations, let alone the CMO, do not have an accurate accounting of all the solutions the entire organization already has implemented to manage the customer relationship across brand experiences and customer engagements. Unlike the gentle creature Mary Shelley created, marketers have built a beast, co-located across a patchwork of software as a service, cloud and on-premises solutions. Too bad the monster is failing us…and all the other teams building their own creatures.

A recent Deloitte study shared that of the US$20 billion that human resources executives invested into technology in the last five years, 65% felt their HR stack is still inadequate or only doing a fair job achieving people goals. According to the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, while 89% of their finance leaders say they are advancing technologies like AI, only 10% believe their finance teams can support their organization’s digital dreams.

Bottom line: We all brought parts to build the monster. Now, we must tame it.

Magpie-Marketers Can’t Resist Shiny Strategy Buzzwords

A magpie is a brightly colored, attention-grabbing bird, a symbol of good fortune, chatters constantly and collects indiscriminately. Hits close to home, doesn’t it? Instead of collecting trinkets, promises are the CMOs collection of choice. This promise-hoarding is a vicious cycle: buy into the dream, rip and replace solutions that don’t meet the lofty promise, continue to collect promises just in case one of them is real. The allure is real...so is the struggle.

The new decade is already promising an epic round of buzzword bingo, ripe with lofty promises that might be too intoxicating to look away from. Marketers will have to adopt a new posture of B.S.-busting for any hope of survival. For those colleagues who felt that “optimization of customer engagement through big data segmentation” was the epitome of buzz, just wait until artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and quantum computing get into the mix. In fact, this promise was recently sent via email: “future-proofed for the quantum-ready blockchain data lake.” Bingo!

Marketing Metrics Lost Their Meaning

We set definitions to measure and quantify engagement, then trained the C-suite to expect as measurement. We made up measures to justify new channels where value was being lost in translation. What was a like? Why invest in a Twitter campaign? Why should we keep sending emails? We had to answer real questions with simple answers that negated the complexity of the relationships and journeys we were architecting.

The vanity metrics served a purpose as we needed to bridge an understanding gap between the pre-data and post-digital eras. For non-marketers, the presentations focused on likes, clicks and views as a validator of spend sounded like nonsense, but it was better than the alternative of no reporting at all. Vanity metrics (or the memory of them) make it impossible for some to fully accept and embrace marketing’s new growth mandate. For CMOs to truly take control of the growth agenda and rise to the opportunity, metrics can’t be for metrics’ sake and hold as little meaning as a “like” or an “open” measured in a vacuum.

So here we are…

Our customers expect relationships to be more like the “good-old days”...personal, bi-directional and valuable...and our organizations expect us to be precision performance growth engines but with flair. This is the core of authentic marketing.

Authentic marketing is best described as a strategy defined by engagements that are based in fact while remaining true to the personality, spirit and character of the brand. It expects marketers to develop deep relationships with the market, with customers and with the industry writ large. It is bidirectional in nature and devoid of imitation or false promise. It embracese data without being paralyzed by it, using all the colors in the box while leveraging data to keep that creativity focused, contextual and relevant to an audience of one. 

The connected customer craves this deeper connection, just not at the cost of truth, trust and authenticity in purpose, action and reaction. The age of authentic marketing demands that CMOs reclaim the creativity and storytelling that marketing has always advanced while firming establishing the role as owner of the 3 R’s—revenue, relationship and reputation. It doesn’t ask which lobe of the brain is dominant: it expects that both the analytical and the artistic can work in perfect harmony and without apology or regret. 

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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• Thinking outside of the box and breaking the status quo through bold measures
• Activating and advancing experiences that understand and anticipate customers’ needs
• Recognizing and respecting that customers call the shots
• Making real impact by guiding their organizations to reinvent themselves and disrupt their industries

• Brian Aronowitz, Chief Marketing Officer at Institute of Culinary Education
• Mark Browning, VP IT and CIO at Exelon Utilities
• Christopher G. Burger, Vice President Global Technology & Global CIO Chief of Staff at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®)
• Christina Callas, Chief Digital Officer at Total Wine & More
• Cheryl Cargill, Vice President of Total Customer Satisfaction at Faurecia
• Charlie Cole, Global Chief eCommerce Officer at Samsonite and Chief Digital Officer at Tumi
• Glenn Coles, IT Business Executive, Advisor & Speaker at Yamaha Motor Corporation
• Rhonda Crawford, Vice President of Global Distribution & Digital Strategy at Delta Air Lines
• Ross Creasy, EVP, Chief Innovation Officer at Ameris Bank
• Sandra De Zoysa, Group Chief Customer Officer at Dialog Axiata, PLC
• Lynn Diegel, Consumer Care and Contact Center Operations, Associate Director at Clorox
• Renee Ducre, Senior Director of Data Strategy at Turner Sports at Warner Media
• Jay Duff, Director of Analytics Engineering at Chick-fil-A Corporate
• Tori Forbes-Roberts, Vice President, Reservation Sales, Customer Care and Digital Engagement at Delta Air Lines
• Kieran Hannon, Chief Marketing Officer at Openpath, Inc
• Heather Hanson, Head of Global IT User Experience at AB Electrolux
• Jo Ann Herold, Chief Marketing Officer at The Honey Baked Ham Company
• Jennifer Hewit, User Experience Strategu and Analytics Executive at Bank of America
• Danielle Joiner McPherson, General Manager, Global Reservations Tech and Innovation at Delta Air Lines
• Linda Jojo, Executive Vice President, Technology and Chief Digital Officer at United Airlines
• Robert Kleinschmidt, Strategic Digital Business Innovator & Senior Vice President at Airborn, Inc
• Ronda Krier, Vice President, Digital Guest Experience and Business Intelligence at Red Robin
• Kenny Lauer, Former Chief Experience Officer & Now: Unlimiting our human potential through AI Personas at Lifekind AI
• Victor Lee, Former Chief Marketing Officer of RXBAR
• Marty Marcinczyk, Founder/GM Helm at Comcast
• Ed Massey, Head of GHOS Americas Region at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®)
• Mike Menendez, IT Vice President at Exelon
• Heather Miksch, Vice President of Business Operations at Carbon
• Chris X. Moloney, Chief Marketing Officer & Senior Vice President of E-Commerce at Brinks Home Security
• Alexandra Morehouse, Chief Marketing Officer & Chief Digital Officer at Banner Health
• Pedro Mota, Vice President of Marketing at Porsche Cars North America, Inc
• Lynda P. Pires, Global Head of Customer Experience Insights, Grupo Santander Digital at Banco Santander
• Kellie Romack, Vice President, Digital HR and Strategic Planning at Hilton
• Rob Roy, Chief Digital Officer at Sprint
• Sunny Sanyal, Vice President of Marketing at Hyster-Yale Group
• Kendra Shimmell, Senior Director, UXR Central Science, at Twitch
• Charlie Sung Shin, Marketing, Data and Technology Strategist and Vice President Strategy & Analytics at Major League Soccer
• Janet Song, Startup Exec, Advisor, & Travel Lover and Former Chief Customer Officer at Dollar Shave Club
• Steve Stessman, Vice President of National Sales at Tuff Shed
• Nikki Todd, Vice President of Digital User Experience at The Coca Cola Company
• David Trice, General Manager at Honeywell Connected Buildings
• Mirjam Van Den Berg, Chief Customer Care Officer at Travix
• Dan Vinh, Global Marketing Executive/CMO Marketing & Communications at Culinary Institute of America
• Ricky Volante, Chief Executive Officer at The Professional Collegiate League
• Rahul Vora, Vice President of Customer Experience at FLEETCOR
• John Walsh, Vice President of Marketing at Mack Trucks, Inc
• David West, Principal COO at The Professional Collegiate League
• Paul Zaher, Vice President of eCommerce at WestRock Company
• Krystal Zell, Chief Customer Officer, VP Customer at Home Depot
• Eileen Zicchino, Managing Director, Head of Client Strategy, Business Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch

David Chou

CIO Harris Health Systems

Title: About David Chou David Chou is vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, covering the intersection of the healthcare systems’ stringent processes and regulations and the transformational power of technology. With nearly 20 years of experience as a senior IT executive across various health systems, David brings a CIO’s practicality to his advisory practice on emerging technologies and disruptive innovation. He offers guidance to healthcare institutions and practitioners navigating digital mega trends and how to strategically apply them to hospital operations to maximize their technology investments. David’s expertise is helping a health system transition toward becoming a digital enterprise in the healthcare setting. He has worked on building a digital…...

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We wrapped up the J.P. Morgan's 38th annual Healthcare Conference a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco. The event is tailored more towards pharmaceutical and life science industries, medical devices firms, technology vendors, emerging start-ups, and members of the investment community. I believe that the contents at the upcoming HIMSS Global Health Conference will resemble the related discussions from San Francisco with a technology focus.

Themes from #JPM20

• The shift to value-based care starts with price transparency.
• Consumers want to be in charge but, are they really in control?  
• Massive investments to lower drug prices.  
• There is still a focus on digital, but are we building the culture or talent.

Focus for CIO at #HIMSS20

Technology platform to incorporate virtual care offerings and define the desired digital experience.   Healthcare providers must define their consumerism strategy and what does that look like for the patient experience. We expect the expansion of telemedicine services by every organization, and CIOs are on the hunt to help define the digital patient experience while looking for the ideal technology platform. 

CIOs need the right information security solutions to safeguard assets.  CIOs and CISOs are working to build a comprehensive information security program while investing in a variety of tools to combat sophisticated external and internal threats. Specific products such as Identity Access Management (IAM), internet of medical things (IoMT) protection and management, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) are top of mind for the executives during the conference. Pervasive security will mature as the new normal.

They are exploring the right partner for their back-office transformation using Cloud ERP. Healthcare systems are in the process of an aggressive change by utilizing technology solutions such as ERP and revenue cycle. Unfortunately, many health systems have antiquated ERP solutions, and the CIOs will be looking for the next generation cloud ERP solution as a trend for the upcoming years. 

Clinical communication.   Effective clinical communication is a core competency for patient engagement. Physicians, nurses, and every clinician must be on the same page when they provide care for the patient. The clinical communication technology provides the platform; it is the transparent tool that can be used by every clinician for delivering patient care. The communication technology is more than a secure messaging platform; it should also be the platform for a clinician to document patient interactions, and it provides notes on a patient as the clinician administers care.

We want a "digital front door." - The digital front door requires a mass personalization for the patient. The solution starts with the contact center as the first interaction for a patient/consumer for scheduling appointments or any questions related to care. CIOs will explore next-generation contact center technology as a standard to establish the digital experience. 

API orchestration using low code platforms.  Interoperability is still a hot theme on the radar for CIOs, and they are looking for the low code, easy to use platform that can decouple data from the various applications while stitching them together using microservice architectures.

CIOs discuss 5G, but they are not convinced yet.  The fifth-generation global mobile telecommunications standard, which is expected to become broadly promises much faster speeds through a higher-frequency millimeter-wave band. 5G requires building out more infrastructure and CIOs for the impact while exploring their wifi infrastructure strategy. With a mature 5G network, can this replace the hospital wifi infrastructure? 

Healthcare Provider Goals:

Here is what is happening for the healthcare provider space.

"Our main challenge is that we are working to lower the cost of care while managing the population health so that we can get paid for value, however, we must also protect the "money maker" aka inpatient care.  

We will see many Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreements with competitors. Outpatient pharmacy chains like CVS are not looking to build hospitals. They will partner with a health system to drive inpatient referrals. Another example is a non-profit and a faith-based system in California that come together to create a joint venture that will own and operate a medical center. 

2020 is about blocking and tackling. CIOs must focus on reinforcing the IT foundational building blocks. Infrastructure must be up to date; enterprise applications in the portfolio should be reevaluated to ensure that the departments are utilizing them effectively while removing redundant systems to drive efficiency. CIOs must focus on cleaning up the core technology stack as a starting point before they jump into leading the digital initiative. 

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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It will be quite a year in 2020 for digital workplace and employee experience, as a number of important emerging trends shift the landscape. Some long-standing issues will also reach a tipping point for many organizations. In my discussions with CIOs, CHROs, heads of digital workplace, and IT solution owners over the last year, it's clear that it's currently a difficult time right now for those in charge of digitally enabling work in our organizations.

I recently laid out the reasons for this in considerable detail. These issues are now consistently a significant challenge for many organizations to deliver well on either digital workplace or employee experience, two closely related concepts. While these issues can't entirely be overcome this year for most organizations, it's safe to say that understanding them and tackling them proactively will produce the better result.

Underscoring the importance and urgency of progress is the significant gap today between delivery and expectation in employee experience. A recent in-depth study by Deloitte reported that while 80% of executives say employee experience is important, only 22% of employee report it's done well. What's more, 59% or organizations say they're not really ready to address it. This means there's a lot to do for those responsible for this area, not just in driving improvements on the ground, but managing stakeholder expectations overall.

That's not to say it isn't a very exciting time to be in the practice. It very much is. The technology options, transformation techniques, and design/delivery methods have never been richer or more mature. Techniques like design thinking, technologies such as talent analytics, new transformation techniques that scale well, and employment trends like gig economy for the enterprise are all offering new possibilities for breaking through the challenges that many are facing in closing the gap between what organizations are able to deliver and not only what their workers want, but would actually benefit from.

Related Research: Experience-Driven Organizations

Fourteen Trends in the Future of Work

Here are twelve leading trends that we see meaningful movement in when it comes to developing and improving the employee experience:

• Employee experience will see more concerted leadership attention and increased levels of investment in 2020. Although employee experience is best when it's delivered completely and effectively through joint partnership between IT and HR, efforts will nevertheless attempt improvement with or without the partnership. Those that do it together, however, will see the most significant committment of budget, as each purview can contribute investment. It will also be seen as more significant and credible by other executives and the board. As employee experience gains awareness, credibility, and urgency as a construct -- and more success stories emerge -- investments will grow in general in 2020 and beyond.
• An increase in committed attemps by IT and HR to come together in partnership to create a genuine and more effective employee experience vision, strategy, and operations. More CIOs will join with CHROs in 2020, largely because of the growing understanding of the infeasibility of changing just the technology or just the way that people are trained, managed, and work in isolation. It has to be done together. As a better understanding emerges of what it takes to embark on the digital transformation of work to reinvent the three aspects of employee experience together (physical, digital, and cultural), we'll see a steady increase in more teaming and collaboration within the C-Suite this year. I also expect to see more Centers of Excellence around employee experience, as a way of accelerating the efforts in high value areas to boost acquisition and retention of workers in particular.
• Automation of tactical work will substantially increase, as remaining roles will become steadily more strategic, while AI gains spotty traction that's far removed from creating large scale unemployment. AI isn't replacing humans yet, and good thing, because such capabilities will need to be overseen by workers with a high vantage point within the organization for the foreseeable future. What we'll see is easy-to-use automation tools like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) being used to augment or replace more and more rote jobs. Best-in-class employers will use new educational capabilities that have emerged to reskill and cross skill those workers, many of which, as I've predicted for a while, will have a harder time becoming the developers or managers of AI-based automation deployments. 
• Fragmented and disjointed digital workplaces will be recast by best-in-class employers into more integrated, organized, and streamlined experiences aimed at highest value use cases. The workplace as it is made up today requires ever more time spend in applications and digital channels. As apps continue to proliferate and there is a strong shift away from one-size fits all to more local choice in the systems used to get work done, we're seeing broad interest and demand for ways to develop a "center of gravity" for employee experience or what I sometimes call a digital workplace hub. One example of this is Citrix Workspace, with the addition of Sapho's capabilities. We see some of this showing up in the emerging the digital canvas category, as well as products that either aim at integrated employee experience to next-gen intranet products that integrate apps, data, and people into more seamless, end-to-end functionality. We'll see more trials and experimentation in a big way in 2020 to drive productivity improvements, improve onboarding speed, and reduce cognitive overload, among other benefits.
• Capabilities to constructively manage and shape Shadow IT, now a major and unpredictable factor in the workplace today, will see improved early adoption. It's clear that unsanctioned workforce applications are here to stay as part of the digital workplace. I've argued that they actually provide a practical form of free R&D and innovation to improve the digital workplace, but that we'd need capabilities to provide operational guardrails to make it sustainable. These types of capabilities are now available. Solutions from Expanse, Perforce, ClusterSeven, and Ntiva are not only designed to find and control Shadow IT but allow workers, whenever it makes sense, to continue using the best tools for their jobs in a more maneable and protected way. Shadow IT is a major force in organizations today, often making up more than half of IT being used (though usually not mission critical systems.) Employee experience leaders can now offer choice, flexibility, and the best tools for tasks at hand in their digital workplaces/employee experiences.
• Work will become even more flexible, dynamic, and unconnected to location, as workers become less attached to the companies they work for and more connected to their peers, careers, and communities. Expectations and desires around work itself have been steadily changing. Jobs are steadily becoming more transient, remote, and virtual. People want meaningful connection in their work, and they are getting it more from their colleagues, long term career narrative, and the groups of people they attach themselves to, such as professional assocations and online communities related to their work. Employee experiences will adapt to this by helping workers to better make these connections using everything from enterprise social networks and alumni communities to online employment platforms and corporate social responsibility networks (as examples.)
• New sourcing models for talent, such as gig economy for the enterprise, will continue to take marketshare, enabling better personalization of work/life while giving organizations powerful new options for hiring. Employment is shifting in a significant way to platforms that can provide long term opportunity for an entire career, as opposed to an individual job. The gig economy has matured and is making significant inroads into the enterprise, offering far more flexible employement on both sides of the equation. See my recent exploration of how on-demand digital hiring has become a leading source of innovation in employment in important new ways in my discussion with the CEO of Gigster.
• For the first time, strategic design and updates of the employee experience will tend to cater most to the needs of Generation Z, while most other changes won't be aimed at any particular generation. Now that Gen Z has become the largest percentage of the workforce, at about 40% this year, it will drive many of the largest policy and strategy decisions when it comes to key elements of employee experience. Gen Z's top driver, for the first time in employment history, is not salary but control over work/life balance. There are other factors too that are only now being understood. Employee experience in particular will be dramatically impacted in 2020 by companies that want to be preferred employers for this leading talent cohort. Offering customization, choice, flexibility, and adaptability to need is therefore key to the future of work. I'm having more hiring and IT managers come to me than ever saying they are getting unusual requests from new hire prospects, including requesting the ability to split time between two companies or only working three days a week, for example.
• Pressure to rethink and digitally transform HR will get the most serious consideration yet, but actual movement will be slow except in certain high value and/or easy-to-implement areas. HR has been one of the departments most resistent to digitially transforming itself and I don't expect that will change much this year, mostly due to the simple fact that the digital world is not typically a core competency of the HR function in general. However, where there is ready opportunity to improve employment screening, automate rote HR tasks, analyze in-house talent using digial tools (thereby rethinking performance reviews, for instance), or otherwise rethink portions of HR in a targeted fashion, I believe we'll see it happen more in 2020 than ever before. But important advances evident from the digital world that are obvious to everyone (i.e. online learning) will put the onus on HR to have a bigger rethink sooner rather than later, especially as automation and AI continues to make major inroads. Thus, the groundwork for this may be laid in many organizations this year, with insiders expecting more "flip the script" than ever within the function.
• Education and skillbuilding will continue to evolve, with informal learning, social learning, microlearning and other forms of on-demand, personalized, and co-created education to help workers stay abreast of and effective in a fast-changing world. The ways that technology has reimagined corporate education in the last five years has been dramatic. Everything from freely available and high quality online courses to internal employee crowdsourcing of learning has made it possible for workers to learn much more quickly and just-in-time. Enterprises now have the tools to upskill and crosskill workers being affected by automation, as well as offering a vital means of retention for those organizations will to assemble best-of-breed onboarding and retraining programs using today's digital art of the possible.
• The ongoing fierce competition between top digital workplace vendors in certain major categories will result in most offerings more clearly defining their corner and staying in it, as sharp differentiation continues to be required to stand out. This competition is perhaps best represented by the ongoing face-off with the great Slack and Microsoft Teams competition, with others like Dropbox and Box, and Office 365 and Google Suite rounding out the platforms I'm most asked about in pairs currently.
• The rise of design thinking and data-driven optimization of the workplace will simultaneously raise the quality and businss impact of the employee experience. We now have the capabilities to create personalized, end-to-end employee experiences for our workers using the latest digital workplace tools. We can also use powerful new analytics solutions -- well exemplified by Microsoft's impressive Workplace Analytics --  to help workers function better, with fewer errors, and less wasted time on all sides. Design thinking in particular offers a way to get the heart of what workers need today to be effective and engaged. Talent and workplace analytics is giving us a way to find out what's actually happening and then proactively improve or optimize it, uncovered new opportunities along the way. I expect a broad uptake of both practices, though the management processes to deliver on it well are still being figured out within most organizations.
• An exciting new set of categories for digital workplace applications and solutions will gain more interested new adherents. While there's no question that technology is advancing more quickly than most organizations can absorb it, that doesn't mean enterprises shouldn't increase their metabolism and explore what's truly possible today. Again, best-in-class employers will tend to do this more than others. Some of these new categories are exciting areas that have been in early adoption phase for several years, including work coordination platforms, augmented meeting services, and digital adoption platforms like WalkMe. All of these, and others, should be given serious consideration now to improve the employee experience and broader business impact and worker effectiveness.
• Recent industry regulations and an increased focus on corporate responsibility will complicate the employee experience and digital workplace, while providing some notable and worthwhile protections. Well beyond GDPR, which has had a dramatic global impact to how business systems operate, new digital regulations will continue to arrive including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as well as the new gig economy law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5). All of these will have a host of unintended consequences (see this example with AB 5 here) and will thus make creating employee experiences more complicated, although they will have clear and targeted benefits in some cases. Practitioners should be prepared to adapt to these and be steeped in the details of digital regulation in 2020.

A New Future of Work Is Upon Us

There are other trends too, but these are the key ones that will be either most interesting or most impactful for those responsible for digital workplace and employee experience in 2020. It's clear that creating an effective workplace takes both big picture thinking as well as the ability to harness and actually tap into digital complexity, which is one of the hallmarks of effective digital transformation today.

I do expect that the confluence of factors facing organizations today will take the next several years to sort through and find the most workable methods to capitalize on the above trends. This issue is that considerable control continues to be lost as both technology and the nature of employment itself shifts dramatically towards new models that offer greater value and therefore opportunity, both for workers and enterprises. The future of work continues to be a brave and exciting new world for sure, for those that choose to adopt and live in it, and are willing to acquire a new mindset.

Update: This post started with twelve predictions, but I subsequently added two more.

Additional Reading 

How to Achieve Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Employees

Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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Privacy dies yet again

In another masterful piece of privacy reporting, Kashmir Hill in the New York Times has exposed the nefarious use of facial recognition technology by crime-fighting start-up Clearview. The business offers face searching and identification services, ostensibly to police forces, on the back of a strikingly large database of reference images extracted from the Internet. Clearview claims to have amassed three billion images -- far more than the typical mugshot library -- by scraping social media and other public sources. 

It’s creepy, it offends our intuitive sense of ownership of our images, and the potential for abuse and unintended consequences is enormous.  But how should we respond objectively and effectively to this development? Does facial recognition, as the NYT headline says, “end privacy as we know it”? 
First let’s get one distraction out of the way. I would agree that anonymity is dead. But this is not the end of privacy (instead I feel it might be a new beginning). 

If there’s nowhere to hide, then don’t

Why would I say anonymity is a distraction? Because it’s not the same thing as privacy.  Anonymity is important at times, and essential in some lines of work, but it’s no universal answer for the general public.  The simple reason is few of us could spend much of our time in hiding.  We actually want to be known; we want others to have information about us, so long as that information is respected, kept in check, and not abused.  

Privacy rules apply to the category Personal Data (aka Personal Information or sometimes Personally Identifiable Information) which is essentially any record that can reasonably be associated with a natural person.  Privacy rules in general restrain the collection, use, disclosure, storage and ultimate disposal of Personal Data. The plain fact is that privacy is to protect information when it is not anonymous. 

Broad-based privacy or “data protection” laws have been spreading steadily worldwide ever since 1980 when the OECD developed its foundational privacy principles (incidentally with the mission of facilitating cross border trade, not throttling it).  Australia in 1988 was one of the world’s first countries to enact privacy law, and today is one among more than 130.  The E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) currently gets a lot of press but it’s basically an update to privacs codes which Europe has had for decades.  Now the U.S. too is coming to embrace broad-based data privacy, with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) going live this month. 

Daylight robbery

Long before the Clearview revelations, there have been calls for a moratorium on face recognition, and local government moves to ban the technology, for example in San Francisco.  Prohibition is always controversial because it casts aspersions on a whole class of things and tends to blur the difference between a technology and the effects of how it’s used.  

Instead of making a categorical judgement-call on face recognition, there is a way to focus on its effects through a tried and tested legal lens, namely existing international privacy law.  Not only can we moderate the excesses of commercial facial recognition without negotiating new regulations, we can re-invigorate privacy principles during this crucial period of American law reform. 

I wonder why privacy breaches for some people signal the end of privacy?  Officially, privacy is a universal human right, as is the right to own property. Does the existence of robbery mean the end of property rights? Hardly; in fact it’s quite the opposite! We all know there’s no such thing as perfect security, and that our legal rights transcend crime.  We should appreciate that privacy too is never going to be perfect, and not become dispirited or cynical by digital crime waves. 

What is the real problem here?

Under most international data protection law, the way that Clearview AI has scraped its reference material from social media sites breaches the privacy of the people in those three billion images.  We post pictures online for fun, not for the benefit of unknown technology companies and surveillance apparatus. To re-purpose personal images as raw material for a biometric search business is the first and foremost privacy problem in the Clearview case.  

There has inevitably been commentary that images posted on the Internet have entered the “public domain”, or that the social media terms & conditions allow for this type of use.  These are red herrings.  It might be counter-intuitive, but conventional privacy laws by and large do not care if the source of Personal Data is public, so the Collection Limitation Principle remains.  The words “public” and “private” don’t even feature in most information privacy law (which is why legislated privacy is often called “data protection”). 

Data untouched by human hands

The second problem with Clearview’s activity is more subtle, but is a model for how conventional data protection can impact many more contemporary technologies. The crucial point is that technology-neutral privacy laws don’t care how Personal Data is collected.  

If an item of Personal Data ends up in a database somewhere, then the law doesn’t care how it got there; it is considered to be collected.  Data collection can be direct and human-mediated, as with questionnaires or web forms, it can be passive as with computer audit logging, or it can be indirect yet deliberate through the action of algorithms. If data results from an algorithm and populates a database, untouched by human hands, then according to privacy law it is still subject to the same Collection Limitation, Use & Disclosure Limitation and Openness principles as if it had been collected by another person. 

The Australian Privacy Commissioner has developed specific advice about what they call Collection by Creation: 

The concept of ‘collects’ applies broadly, and includes gathering, acquiring or obtaining personal information from any source and by any means. This includes collection by ‘creation’ which may occur when information is created with reference to, or generated from, other information the entity holds.
Data analytics can lead to the creation of personal information. For example, this can occur when an entity analyses a large variety of non-identifying information, and in the process of analysing the information it becomes identified or reasonably identifiable. Similarly, insights about an identified individual from data analytics may lead to the collection of new categories of personal information. 

The outputs of a face search service are new records (or labels attached to existing records) which assert the identity of a person in an image. The assertions are new pieces of Personal Data, and their creation constitutes a collection. Therefore existing data protection laws apply to it. 

The use and disclosure of face matching is required by regular privacy law to be relevant, reasonable, proportionate and transparent. And thus the effect of facial recognition technology can be moderated by the sorts of laws most places already have, and which are now coming to the U.S. too. 

It’s never too late for privacy

Technology incidentally does not outpace the law; rather it seems to me technologists have not yet caught up with what long-standing privacy laws actually say. Biometrics certainly create new ways to break the law but by no means do they supersede it. 

This analysis can be generalised to other often troubling features of the today’s digital landscape, to better protect consumers, and give privacy advocates some cause for regulatory optimism. For instance, when datamining algorithms guess our retail preferences or, worse, estimate the state of our health without asking us any questions then we rightly feel violated.  Consumers should expect the law to protect them here, by putting limits on this type of powerful high tech wizardry, especially when it occurs behind their backs.  The good news is that privacy law does just that.  

An interesting announcement—published as an ad in the Wall Street Journal—came to my attention the other day. A group of independent vendors led by Segment has publicly drawn a line in the proverbial sand. They’re saying it loud and they’re saying it proud: traditional CRM systems are not enough to meet the needs of businesses today.

This group calls for “flexible customer data infrastructure [that] can match the reality of today’s digital world.” Their declaration emphasizes that data should be available and used by every part of a business, not just marketing and sales. It decries rigid, siloed systems that can’t adapt to changing requirements to fulfill customer expectations. They call for choice, flexibility, and the opportunity for every organization to be customer-first.

To Segment, Airship, Amplitude, Drift, Iterable, Mixpanel, Outreach, Pendo, Radar, Tray.io, and the other signatories—some of whom I know well, some of which I’ve used—I salute you. I’ve written a thing or two about how crucial data and an enterprise-wide approach are to building durable customer relationships. You’re on the money. And you’re saying what many believe but few are willing to give voice, for a whole host of reasons that are better discussed on a podcast or over a pint.

But where’s the beef?

We agree on the objectives and the urgency of the need. In fact, just about everybody involved in trying to improve customer interactions, shape compelling customer experiences, and build great customer relationships does, too. But how will you help with the hard work of making it happen?

In particular, how do you propose tackling the most intractable challenge of all: creating a standard data model? (If anyone doubts the scale of this challenge, just start with trying to define a “customer” in a way that marketing, sales, service, finance, and legal can all agree on and work with. Then map it to two or more systems.)

We share an embarrassment of riches today in enterprise software and technology. Cloud-native offerings, API-based integration, and low-code/no-code workflow apps, along with a remarkable shift toward UI/UX design that actually anticipates the needs of workers doing their jobs, make it possible to create business systems that work the way people do. Matching those systems to the ways we want to operate may not exactly be easy, but it’s far easier than it was in the past. It’s also much faster and adaptable as things change. Implementing best-of-breed systems in the current environment makes a whole lot more sense as a result.

Without a core data model that provides a solid starting point, however, alternatives to enterprise suites remain a tough sell for any established company. This isn’t necessarily a “better” approach, it’s just a more practical one. Even the big players know they have to do something because this won’t be true for ever. Witness Oracle CX Unity, Salesforce’s Customer 360 Single Source of Truth, and the Open Data Initiative among SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe.

Which brings me to my request: for those of us who believe that there’s an alternative, even one that coexists with enterprise suites, what are you going to do next? How will you help make the vision a reality? Will this “platform of independents” work together to define a song book that everyone sings from? Are there any plans to create a formal working group or consortium?

You’ve got my attention. Now what?

Aubrey Coggins

Constellation Research

Aubrey (Levinstone) Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise.  She previously served as a senior manager of corporate communications at Egnyte and held account roles at Access Communications and The Hoffman Agency. Born and raised in Texas, she received a bachelor's degree in Public Relations from The University of Texas at Austin – Hook ‘em!   ...

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Rebellious. Audacious. Daring. Divergent.

Most advice guides encourage leaders to change their inherent characteristics to get the job, get the promotion and get the client. We are taught to “fit the mold” and hide those traits that make us different.

The authors of “Rare Breed” Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger will completely tear down this misconception and break away from the façade we have always constructed. I’m excited to see them take the main stage at our inaugural Ambient Experience Summit (AXS) in February with their keynote that will challenge attending leaders to set a course for strategic rebellion.

Bonnell and Hansberger will share their wisdom and insights from their radical "outside the box" book written for the mavericks, oddballs and visionaries they call “Rare Breeds.” Instead of trying to conform, leaders who follow their own paths will find success and make real impact.

The keynote highlights the tone and what to expect for the entire conference, which will be hosted in Atlanta on February 26–27, 2020. This exclusive, invitation-only event will bring together leaders who understand and anticipate customers’ needs and recognize that customers call the shots.

Through think-tank-style workshops, panels, fireside chats and networking sessions, we will focus on knowledge sharing and best practices for CX around organizational change, redefining processes and changes in thinking. Leaders in this customer experience movement will share valuable insights and lessons learned in their own transformations. Together (during and after the event), we’ll keep raising the bar to improve CX and design the experiences that serve them well.

AXS will kick off with an awesome Porsche driving experience and will conclude with a celebration of the experience leaders listed on this year’s AX50 who have already started charting their unconventional and rebellious course. These are daring, global executives who are unafraid of delivering amazing, transformative experiences across the enterprise.

Hope to see you at AXS 2020! Get ready for a bold, wild ride!