Monday's Musings: Inside The Five Levels Of Autonomous Enterprises

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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Cognitive Apps Power The Future Of Autonomous Enterprises

Cognitive applications run mission-critical business systems in a continuous, self-driving, self-learning, auto-compliant, self-securing, and self-healing approach. These AI driven systems intelligently automate transactional systems and processes such as campaign to lead, order to cash, procure to pay, incident to resolution, concept to market, and hire to retire. The goal of an autonomous enterprise is to continuously automate precision decisions at scale. Why? Transactional applications have run their course. Pressure to reduce margins, technical debt, and investment in core systems create tremendous pressure for automation. Customers seek cognitive based approaches in order to build the foundation for AI driven precision decisions. The benefits include less staffing, reduced errors, smarter decisions, and security at scale. The quest for an autonomous enterprise starts with a desire to consider what decisions require intelligent automation vs human judgment.

Inside The Five Levels Of Autonomous Enterprises

Constellation identifies five levels of autonomous enterprises and predicts when these cognitive apps will deliver full autonomy in this $10.35B market by 2030 (see figure 1):

Figure 1. Understand Five Levels Of Autonomous Enterprises

 

Level 1 Autonomous Enterprise: Basic Automation

In this level, the system can provide basic task and workflow automation.

When? Today.

Includes: Basic process automation tools such as BPM, manual instrumentation and control, and intelligent workflow automation

Who’s in control? Humans are still in control and guide many manual steps.

Level 2 Autonomous Enterprise: Human Directed

Level 2 enables human directed automation of business processes.

When? Current state of the art

Includes: Robotic process automation, process mining tools, journey orchestration tools, machine learning algorithms, natural language processing

Who’s in control? Humans direct major decisions, minor decisions automated over time with some effort in training

Level 3 Autonomous Enterprise: Machine Intervention

Level 3 delivers automation with occasional machine intervention

When? The next big thing in 2020

Includes: Cognitive applications, neural networks, GANS models, contextual decisions, and next best actions.

Who’s driving? Humans still on standby, but can be hands-off for periods of time

Level 4 Autonomous Enterprise: Fully Autonomous

Level 4 presumes that the machines can deliver full automation but not sentience

When? Sometime in 2023

Includes: AI Driven smart services, full automation, self-learning, self-healing, and self-securing.

Who’s driving? Machines fully automated

Level 5 Autonomous Enterprise: Humans Optional

Level 5 achieves full sentience and humans may no longer be needed.

When? 2030

Includes: Fully autonomous sentience, empowering precision decisions at scale

Who’s driving? Humans fully optional

The Bottom Line: Expect Level 4 Autonomous Enterprises To Emerge In 2023

The pioneering work with early cognitive applications show exponential progress in achieving Level 4 status by 2023. Organizations will have to rethink how they work with their transactional applications, future data-driven digital networks, and distributed compute and storage environments. The future is autonomous. Machines will deliver services that are continuous, auto-compliant, self-healing, self-learning, and self-aware. The need for greater precision decisions will require connections to data-driven digital networks and for more and more sources of data. This battle for public, private, and shared data will shape who wins in new networked economies that form the future of this autonomous decade (see video).

https://blog.softwareinsider.org/2019/12/23/mondays-musings-the-roaring-20s-and-the-futureof2020/

Lessons from a WFH Freshman

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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Welcome to the incoming class at Working From Home! We hope you have enjoyed the first couple of days of orientation.

By the end of the week, this sh!t is gonna get really REAL. So, I thought I’d pass along some of the lessons I learned in my first five months swimming in the deep end.

How Did I Get Here? I entered the WFH class in November 2019 when I joined Constellation Research after 27 years in an office. In the blink of an eye, I went from being in the middle of a culture that expected physical presence in order to be productive into one that allowed for isolation in order to be productive.

If I am being honest, it wasn’t the working part that proved to be the big adjustment…it was the AT home part. Work has muscle memory, especially for a road warrior who is used to adapting workstyle based on what hotel, conference room, airport lounge or connected aircraft you happen to be on. When I got started, I worked as if I was on the road versus not working in an office. But remote work isn’t road work…that was a hard habit to break.

5 Tips Based on My Early Failings. Some of these will sound trite, but for me, they ended up being the difference between getting into a groove versus getting into a funk.

1. Shower. No, seriously. The act of showering is and of itself a pattern or routine that sparks thinking. A behavioral theorist named Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi posited that when one is placed in an environment that promotes deep thought and relaxation, creativity can quite literally incubate. This is central to his deeper concept of “Flow” or the state of concentration and engagement when one completes a task that challenges one’s skills. Flow – and the supreme satisfaction that comes from accomplishment – can’t be forced, but it can be sparked.
   
   A shower can anchor your day. It can spark big ideas. It can make you feel human. Oh…and yes, wearing sweats and PJs all day SOUNDS awesome. But by week 2, it looses its charm. Make a goal of getting fully work-casual dressed at least once a week. It snaps your brain into a different space…and on lockdown day #13…we are ALL gonna need a snap or two.
    
2. Set aside a space. That’s right…you have to pull a Les Nessman. Get some tape (or at least mentally get some tape) and cordon off something that you deem to be your office. There is a discipline that comes with working in an office – a social construct that limits the distraction and wayward wanderings of a mess in sweats looking for a crumb-free laptop perch.
   
   When I first started with the couch-as-office route, comfort was clearly the perk of my new surroundings…complete with a reclining leg option, snacks a few steps away and a big TV with lots of shows begging to be binged (you know…as “white noise in the background.) Next thing I knew, I was asleep, hands still on the keyboard, Netflix asking if I wanted to keep watching. The act of walking to a space that is deemed as your official workspace is liberating, even if that space is the other corner of your couch. It pushes you to set boundaries and personal rules. You will find that if you start to respect the boundaries of your workspace, others might get the drift!
    
3. Set “office hours”, just not from 9 to 5. Those are old numbers trying to fit into a new world. At my old office, we used to position hours as “minimum expectations” as in so we TELL you it is 8:30 to 5:30, but I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t in before 8:30 and I can’t remember leaving before 6.
   
   But at home, you just are NOT gonna make those minimum expectations. Here’s the secret: IT IS OK. You will find the hours that work for everyone – for the business, for your family and most definitely for you. But again, boundaries are essential. It is easy to think, “Oh who’s clocking me in?” while skimming hours off the clock. Without the social construct, accountability is easy to manipulate.
    
4. Don’t binge buy gear. You do NOT need the professional grade camera, speakers and microphone to make your Zoom calls work. Most just don’t need the pro-grade studio set up. Honestly, I get by with the camera on my computer. If you are just getting the team together and wanted to play with the virtual backgrounds so it looks like you are in space, you DO NOT need the gear upgrade.
   
   For me, I needed a keyboard. There is something really “official” about a keyboard. It is the difference between working and working on the road. You may also want to invest in a headset with a microphone so you can stop sounding like you are IN the fishbowl in every conference call. The goal here is to sound and appear professional…not actually BE a home office film maker.
    
5. Congrats! You are now your office’s CISO. Times of crisis always bring out the best and the worst in people. The worst has already started to come out of the woodwork. Attacks are up, scams are up, hijacking everything from the WHO logo to the Johns Hopkins Corona Virus tracker!
   
   Every connection, every email, every file should be seen as a threat. Connect with your actual CISO or CIO to get a FULL understanding of security protocols, requirements and options. You may be required to log into corporate IT assets via a virtual private network (VPN)…you may have mandated security apps and programs already on your computer.
   
   If you have none of those things…go get them. There are lots of great VPN service providers out there that take seconds to set up but secure your connections to ensure that your machine can’t be violated when you finally get to go to that coffee shop with the free (unsecured) WIFI. (Check out ExpressVPN, Surfshark, NordVPN, TunnelBear and for those out there into secure content viewing and, dare I say, torrent streams, you probably already run IPVanish.) Anti-virus and malware protection should be a baseline. Get both. Enable security on your browsers…everyone from Google to Apple have varying degrees of protection and privacy baked in. It takes a village!

You will hit a groove and find a balance between what social media thinks you should do (Enough with the “take the time to tackle those projects you have pushed off like cleaning the attic…this isn’t vacation…it is working people!) and what you can do given your priorities and goals at work.

Several tech firms have opened the gates to let newly minted remote teams have access to the productivity and operational tools that really help remote workers get to work. Check out the offers from folks like Zoho (ZohoRemotely is now being offered for free) and Microsoft (Microsoft Teams is now available with lifted restrictions on user limits).

My colleague Dion also hosted a terrific webcast for folks looking to pick up some real remote working tips from culture change to tech tools from collaboration to productivity platforms. Check it out here: https://www.constellationr.com/media/guide-remote-work-during-covid-19.

Working from home has been my new normal for several months now and I still feel like I’m working out the kinks to get it right. I can only imagine how people feel who got tossed into the deep end this week. Good news is that it IS possible to just start swimming…you CAN just stay afloat until you get your bearings and kick start your flow.

Oh…and most important tip I can pass along: virtual backgrounds are found by opening Zoom, clicking on the gear on the right there…look to the left column menu about halfway down and there it is…you can add you own images. Current mood: padded cell… ‘cuz my new co-worker is a toddler!

Hang in there everyone!

Let the Sunshine in: Zendesk’s Service-Centric Approach to CRM

Zendesk Relate was scheduled to take place in Miami the first week of March. Instead, it was the first Coronavirus casualty on this analyst’s jam-packed March event calendar. Credit to Zendesk management for rapidly deciding to cancel the event and quickly pivoting to a virtual analyst briefing instead. Zendesk Relater, the virtual incarnation of fun, sun, and sessions in Miami, comes later in March.

In the analyst briefing the Zendesk team covered its two major announcements: the expansion of Zendesk’s CRM platform, Sunshine, and availability of two suites, one for sales and one for service.

First, the suites. In practical terms, Support Suite and Sales Suite are both packages that bundle numerous capabilities—such as Chat, Talk, and Messaging—along with the core functionalities of Support and Sell. The advantages for customers include straightforward pricing and out of the box integration across all capabilities in one workspace.

Zendesk has long been known for providing a straightforward, integrated, easy to use interface—or workspace—for service agents. The new Support Suite builds on what was already an intuitive view of relevant customer information to include a wider range of communication channels as standard.

The Sales Suite is arguably more groundbreaking. In keeping with the strategy behind acquiring Base, the underpinnings of Zendesk Sell, the company has introduced an offering designed to do for salespeople what Support has done for customer service agents. The Sell interface has a similar look and feel to Support, but has been designed around the work of selling to customers. Instead of a database, customer conversations—in effect, the workflow of sales—form the core structure of the workspace.

Sales Suite acknowledges that salespeople, too, use a wide variety of communication channels to interact with their customers. As with Support Suite, the idea here is to unify all those channels to provide salespeople as broad a view as possible of the conversation happening with any given customer. Recognizing that salespeople need a simple, straightforward system to help them navigate the work and next best actions of selling is, like it or not, still pretty radical in the CRM space. Zendesk Sales Suite gets a major step closer to closing the gap.

That said, the offering still seems primarily to meet the needs of inside sales teams. While that may fit the bill for some companies, many more also want the ability to track and manage face-to-face interactions with customers. (As odd as that might sound in the midst of nationwide self-quarantines, it will remain a high priority!) That’s something we’re still waiting for.

Most importantly, Sunshine. The Sunshine platform easily embodies the most compelling aspect of Zendesk’s move into CRM. Sunshine provides both the underlying data structure and the basis for defining workflows to support customer interactions, regardless of channel or internal department. The core components of Sunshine include profiles, events, objects (which can be customized), and conversations. The announcement covered general availability of unified customer profiles (the CRM requirement du jour) as well as custom events and an AWS events connector to stream data.

It may seem trivial, but the fact that Zendesk uses very different language to describe the key components makes a huge difference. Instead of leads, Zendesk’s platform focuses on events, which trigger actions. It’s difficult to overstate how important this distinction is to designing systems that respond to customers, rather than trying to force fit them through a particular process. This is undoubtedly part of the customer service heritage that Zendesk brings to the CRM market landscape. It’s a point of view that is both distinct and important.

Unfortunately, we didn’t hear much discussion on this perspective during the analyst briefing. (And yes, Zendesk Sell definitely still uses the term “leads”.) To my mind, that’s a missed opportunity. As companies grapple with questions of how to transform their organizations to be more responsive to customers and focused on shaping customer experience, issues like data structure and system architecture matter. Get these underpinnings right and a whole new realm of possibilities open for redefining the ways companies interact and engage with their customers. That’s a conversation that matters—even to a non-technical audience.

Bottom line: Zendesk brings an incredibly valuable perspective and philosophy on customer experience to the CRM market. The potential is there, but we have yet to see it fully realized. The current development roadmap will help. We’d also like to see Zendesk step up and articulate more about why it’s taking the approach it has and how it’s benefitting customers. This vision has an eager audience ready and waiting to hear it.

Personal Log: Understanding Case Fatality Rates For #COVID19 #CoronaVirus

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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Data In Early Case Fatality Rates Are Naturally Biased To Show Massive Fatality

Disclosures

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