CRM Is Not Enough! Amen. Now Where’s the Beef?

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?

“Rare Breed” authors Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger to Challenge Leaders to Be Defiant, Dangerous and Different During AXS Mind-Share Experience

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!

Sex, Spatial and Rock ‘n Roll: Dr Janice Presser Takes on Tech When I Started #Asking4 Aubrey

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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Ever thought about building a team? Ever tried to do it? Ever wonder why it didn’t turn out like you thought? Dr. Janice Presser is someone you should know.

A world-renowned systems scientist and team architect, Dr. J (as she is lovingly known amongst the Constellation team) is the originator of Teaming Science and the primary architect of Teamability, a technology that measures how people will perform in teams.

For over 25 years, she has been the leading expert in teams, from how to build them to how to recognize the strengths and boundaries of human infrastructure. She is, at her core, an explorer of the human condition and a cheerleader for what makes everyone a visionary, a leader, a contributor and a wonderfully complex part of a team.

Who better to ask what’s next, especially when our own head of Marketing, Aubrey Coggins, is the one asking? Specifically, Aubrey wanted to know what technology Dr. J is curious about as we kick off a new year and decade. Here is her answer when we started #Asking4 Aubrey.

Q from Aubrey Coggins: What tech are you keeping your eye on – it can be personal, professional or profoundly peculiar – as we move into the next decade?

A by Dr. Janice Presser: For me, I think of this in the context of what is personal, what is professional, and then what is profoundly peculiar – or indomitably individualistic as I might prefer!

First up the personal. Since serving on the spatial computing panel at Constellation Connected Enterprise 2019 (#CCE2019), I’ve given a lot of thought to how the collective technologies the term encompasses will change our lives. I expect that there will be more drones, more robotic household appliances, and more charging stations for electric cars, but that these relatively simple - and benign - technologies will be confined to more privileged communities. What concerns me more is the edge of spatial that threatens to replace human interaction with fantasy-driven entertainment, especially for young people. My hope is, of course, that someone will want to integrate teaming science content into the gaming wonders of this next decade.

Next, let’s take on the professional. I expect my focus will turn more to the technologies that will keep we Boomers in shape. I don’t expect to ever retire, which is much easier when all you do is consult and write, but I do want to watch the technologies that will keep me mobile, comfortable, and sassy as ever. Electric cars are fine, but if all I need is something to get me to local pubs, entertainment, and the gym, I’d much prefer a self-driving golf cart - lighter, less expensive, and absolutely non-polluting please! I’m watching some new health-related technologies, including an at-home physical therapy machine that minimizes treatment-related injury. Finally, I’m keeping an eye on any technology related to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll because, well, that’s what’s kept Boomers going this far. With new advances in streaming and recent news that the biggest explosion in podcasting is porn, there’s going to be plenty to observe and comment on.

Finally, the indomitably individualist tech. I’m watching more in the arena of politics. How will we ensure that each vote counts - first, by being counted? How will we deal with the fact that some people don’t have just one district? Will identity technologies eliminate the need to attach ourselves to one address - or any permanent one? If something is technologically possible and available, how will we evolve the law to align with how people really live?

Regardless of where you are looking, may 2020 be the beginning of your best technology decade ever!

More About Dr. Janice Presser: Dr. Janice spent her formative years researching how people team together and found answers in systems theory and physics. Having written her first line of code in high school, she was positioned to architect a system to measure how people work together, in business and personal life, and develop the underlying theory and practice of Teaming Science. The technology is available for business uses – hiring and other management decision making – at Teamability.com. The author of seven books on teaming, she is currently working on the question of how spatial technology will impact human relationships in the future and invites inquiries at TeamingScience.com.

More About Aubrey Coggins: Aubrey Coggins manages Constellation's marketing and communications programs and is the producer of DisrupTV, a weekly Web series on innovation and the enterprise. She is a talented marketing and editing professional with expertise in technology marketing and public relations. If you are interested in being a guest on DisrupTV, Aubrey is the person to connect with and wow with your point of view!

Host Analytics Rebrands as ‘Planful’ to Emphasize Continuous Planning

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Host Analytics gets its identity in sync with its platform and what’s most important to customers.

I have yet to meet anyone who says they do “corporate performance management.” But I have met plenty of people who say they’re financial planning and analysis (FP&A) professionals. Indeed, if you search the Internet, you’ll quickly find FP&A certification programs and plenty of online resources for corporate financial planners.

Seeking to update its identity with a brand that finance professionals can better relate to, Host Analytics announced on January 15 that it’s changing its name to “Planful.”

What’s in a name? Grant Halloran, the instigator of the change and Host’s CEO since July 2019, points out that the new name is a real word. I looked it up, and Merriam-Webster has two definitions for planful: 1: full of plans: resourceful, scheming and 2: according to a plan: persistent and arousing of the mind. I’m not sure about the scheming part, but what finance executive would not want to be described as “full of plans, resourceful, persistent” and “arousing of the mind?” Better still, it’s every FP&A professional’s objective to have things go “according to plan,” unless, of course, they could “exceed all plans.”

The company wanted to get away from “Host” for the obvious reason that the word is a relic from 2001, the infancy of cloud tech and the year the company was founded. As for the focus on planning, I myself having been advocating a move away from corporate performance management – an aging name for the technology that users never really adopted.

Last summer I changed the name of our “Constellation ShortList for Corporate Performance Management” to the “Constellation ShortList for Cloud-based Planning Platforms.” As I explained back then, the name change reflected “broad strategic and operational use [of the tech] outside the boundaries of finance” as well as “end-user adoption of ‘financial planning and analysis’ as the name of the discipline that they practice.”

What, exactly, will change with this rebranding? I was glad to hear it’s mostly about messaging and the conversation with customers rather than the vendor’s product, which has been on my ShortList for years (despite the dated moniker). In another brand tweak, the platform’s modeling capabilities will be renamed “Dynamic Planning.”

Importantly for customers, the company will continue to invest in all aspects of the platform. Financial consolidation and reporting, for example, will “continue to be an anchor and differentiator,” Brian Martell, director of product marketing, told me. “Solid figures from consolidation and reporting are the bedrock of accurate plans and are critical to driving more agile planning cycles.”

Planful execs also talk about helping to “elevate the financial IQ of the entire organization.” That happens when organizations spread planning outside of finance and when finance leaders collaborate more effectively with budget owners. Planning platforms also help companies to drive toward continuous planning, accelerating from annual and quarterly planning to monthly, weekly and event-triggered planning cycles that enable companies to quickly adapt, pivot and innovate. Planful reports that customers moving from manual, spreadsheet-based methods to its platform shorten planning and forecasting cycle times by up to 50%, reduce reporting time by 90%, and reduce average time to close by up to 75%.

Amen to acceleration. As I wrote in “Why the Digital Era Demands Agile Planning,” my latest report on this category, “All too many business and financial leaders rely on months-old budget projections and lagging financial measures to gauge the state and direction of their businesses.” Cloud-based planning platforms give companies better visibility into the latest business conditions while agile planning and forecasting capabilities help them to innovate and be the disruptor instead of the disrupted.

The cloud and digitization have leveled the playing field for midsize companies and upstart innovators in many respects, but these advantages can be forfeited when relying on siloed, spreadsheet-based financial planning and analysis methods that are anything but agile. Modern FP&A professionals know there’s a better way.

Achieving Safe and Reliable Farm-to-Table Methods in a Modern Society

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 have an unmatched amount of people to feed with populations growing around the country and world. Despite the globalization of trade, advances of technology, and rapid growth of available food, did you know we are still operating on pretty archaic systems?

The world also is experiencing unprecedented levels of foodborne illnesses. The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 10 people fall ill due to foodborne diseases each year. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that roughly 48 million get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases every year!

Waste is also a huge issue. According to the FDA, food waste is estimated at between 30–40% of the food supply in the U.S. alone! Given these major challenges, most people also want to know where their food came from, who made it, what types of pesticides are being used (if any), and if the label is truly accurate.

Luckily, one group has taken a seat at the table in order to solve this cluster of a problem.

Building on their initial work with blockchain to improve how food is transported, IBM, Walmart and Tsinghua University came together to create the IBM Food Trust to address food fraud, freshness, supply chain efficiency, waste and more.

The team created a reliable and secure way to know exact details when something goes eschew, implement a safer farm-to-table journey and reduce food waste. The technology behind this solution encompasses a shared view of food ecosystem information, with convenient data publishing and controlled sharing of information. This means that we maintain data ownership, access and permissions and locate items from the supply chain, all while being protected under the highest level of encryption.

The Food Trust is impacting the food industry around the globe. With the addition of Carrefour, Nestle, Dole, Driscoll’s, along with small to medium farms and producers, the Food Trust network is laying the foundation for better management of our global food supply. Using the reliability, security, and power of blockchain technology, they are providing insights into what happened when something goes wrong, reducing waste, and a safer journey from the farm to our local markets and, ultimately, to our dinner table.

This disruptive approach is what sets them apart from other contestants and made them the winner of the 2019 SuperNova Award for Data-Driven Digital Networks (DDNs) and Business Models. 

The IBM Food Trust not only influenced the way we interact and move food from farm-to-table, but the way we value reliable, consistent and secure data in order to advance in a modern society.

If you have or know a team that is causing innovative disruption, then make sure you submit your nomination starting in March!

Top-Tier Partners Propel SAP Customers’ Transition to the Cloud

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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I had the opportunity recently to attend the invite-only SAP Executive Summit at TechEd Barcelona to gain a current understanding of the state of their cloud partners ecosystem. Headlined by Jurgen Mueller, SAP‘s new CTO as of January, 2019, it was clear from the outset that the enterprise software giant sought to present the most thought through go-to-market for data-driven cloud platforms currently available.

There is a lot of interest right now particularly in how SAP works with all of the large, hyperscaler cloud providers. This was another key focus as SAP seeks to work as a high-order enterprise business platform on top of existing commodity cloud offerings. Overall, the day succeeded in its goal, but the fuller story is better revealed in some of the key details, particularly in the extensive and mature partnerships with top-tier vendors like Microsoft and Red Hat.

Figure 1: Incoming CTO Juergen Mueller kicks off the SAP Exec Summit at TechEd Barcelona

Five Levels of Data-Driven Organizations

Key to unpacking the day was Mueller’s opening talk about the five levels of thinking about data-driven organizations, a strategic idea he's been talking about publicly over the last year. These ideas, which were echoed repeatedly in subsequent presentations, are presented -- rightfully in my view -- as the full range of options organizations must embrace to be digitally competent and competitive in the cloud today.

Juergen has come up with “five hypotheses”, or approaches for organizations to make money or extract value from data. The first strategy is just having a culture of data-driven decisions that are delivered to the “complete extremities” of the organization. That’s not only the management level, which is thinking that “I have all my fine dashboards, but it's each and every person in the front row. Are they thinking analytically? Are they making decisions with actual data?” The second pattern that he sees is companies saying, “Hey, if I have so much data, maybe I can automate the process completely.”

The third aspect of this model is getting even more deeper into deriving the value of data as it gets embedded in products and services. More and more companies are realizing that if there are two competitors, and one provides a product or service and the other provides product and service with contextual data embedded in it, customers are willing to pay a premium for the latter. Juergen made clear this is the value add that SAP is aiming at offering. The fourth part of the pattern that he is seeing, as companies even evolve further, is that they're looking at the data and realizing they can make a completely new business entirely driven by this data.

The fifth and final part of the cloud enablement of data is the business model change it directly helps realize. If enterprises can reinvent what their businesses are, based on what they’re reading from their data, and understanding the market better, they can offer new insights and other data-driven value streams that the market will pay for.

Figure 2: Five strategies for turning data into business value

Juergen’s view of data as a strategic asset can be much better understood through the agility, elasticity, and cost effectiveness of the cloud, since the cloud is a much more natural home for an integrated view of enterprise data across all systems.

Then came a series of talks that explored how this vision is actually realized using a wide range of partner solutions that each run SAP, by employing delivery frameworks that empower modern cloud strategy.

Explaining the details of SAP’s cloud strategy was Damien Johnson, Chief Architect of SAP’s Cloud Business Group. He explored new customer research that showed their customers were encountering an experience gap when it came to achieving both cost reductions and business impact using the cloud. Early on, new to cloud, they don’t necessarily know the right practices to employ or have predefined blueprints that enable them to deploy faster and quicker and cheaper, with less risk.

Enter SAP’s Embrace initiative, a way of accelerating customer success by combining well-defined migration pathways, ready-to-use digital business capabilities, reference architectures, and open, extensible, and composable SAP solutions.

Figure 3: The Embrace initiative for quickly adopting SAP cloud solutions

The key to this model of course is that a business will run SAP’s business applications that range from customer experience to enterprise resource planning, but the actual digital core underneath these systems is entirely in the cloud service providers arena. This model gets SAP out of the highly commoditized hyperscaler business, and keeps them closest to their zone of excellence, which is running the day-to-day business operations of enterprise customers.

The sweet spot of the Embrace initiative is the concept of a ready-to-run migration program complete with a set of services, scenarios, and agreements to help facilitate the move from on-premises customers to Microsoft Azure in a manner aimed at reducing time-to-value and reducing risks.The Embrace initiative also makes good use of SAP’s existing partner ecosystem, such as their global service providers, as well as conferring the ability to our customers to leverage the underlying value that’s provided by the cloud service providers, such as economies of scale, usage elasticity, and very low capital expenditure.

I expect that if consistently successful, the Embrace collaboration with Microsoft will be used widely as a rapid path to maturity, low risk, and fast ROI by enterprise customers as they adopt new SAP platforms, applications, and solutions, including those of partners. Notable in the approach is SAP’s support of the full range of on-premise, cloud, and hybrid scenarios, which reflects the complex reality in which large enterprises operate.

One insight that was made evident is that SAP is far from solely focused on its own solutions when it comes to customer success. The company made that abundantly clear by dedicating most of the rest of the executive summit to top vendor partners that enable SAP in the cloud in some way. Certainly, this is a critical approach as most serious enterprise scenarios today involving digital systems requires a whole constellation of other products and vendors, from networking providers to cybersecurity. By establishing close partnerships with top vendors like Microsoft, Red Hat, and others, SAP ensures better uptake, faster adoption, deeper integration, more rapid deployment, and the long-term success of its solutions.

SAP Cloud Means Choice of Commercial Clouds and Implementors

Kicking off the third-party vendor portion of the executive summit was Matt Ordish, head of product for SAP Solutions on Azure. Arguably the hyperscaler cloud with the most enterprise uptake, Microsoft laid out a case that its customers have long used both companies’ products extensively.

Moreover, the two firms have a partnership going back 25 years. Microsoft is a 100% SAP shop when it comes to ERP, and is one of the largest SAP customers in the world. Microsoft runs its SAP S/4HANA instances entirely on Azure, and so is very experienced at connecting the two platform stacks.

Figure 4: The three evolutionary stages of how SAP is used on Azure

Matt noted that running SAP solutions on Azure is basically straightforward today. The issue is more of a cultural one. That’s because as a company shifts how it thinks about running compute today on premise, that when running the same workloads in a cloud, the principles are fundamentally different. That means accepting how hyperscalers operate, especially their security principles and their networking principles.

As the key partner in SAP’s Embrace initiative, Microsoft is looking at more than just lifting and shifting existing SAP customers onto Azure. They are specifically sitting down and asking SAP customers what kind of outcome they are seeking to create with their move to the cloud.

Matt also explored Costco’s migration of SAP to Azure and how it gave them the ability to dynamically compose IT in a way that enabled new types of on-demand data warehouses that were not possible before due to the poor malleability of previous legacy systems.

So, although a lot of the focus that we’ve seen on the industry is to make SAP run on hyperscalers like Azure, the next chapter is how does that focus mature, so customers can then move on to accelerate to capture new digital opportunities and function on a higher operational plane. This is where Microsoft and SAP are collaborating to establish a jointly proven roadmap to maturity for SAP solutions running on Azure.

Although Azure is the leading hyperscaler for running SAP today, there are plenty of customers using SAP or who want to use SAP solutions using a private cloud or hybrid cloud model.

To address this customer segment, SAP partner Red Hat, now a part of IBM, presented their vision for an data-intelligent private/hybrid cloud stack they call E2E. Based entirely on open source, the stack is fully-enbabled as an SAP-ready architecture. It enables integration, intelligence, automation, interoperability, and robust of cloud structure, pulling in SAP’s or Red Hat’s solutions and services wherever they make the most sense, often both.

Figure 5: Red Hat offers an end to end open source cloud run time for SAP solutions

Red Hat is perhaps the most respected name in high end, open source private and hybrid cloud. They provide a unique and differentiated offering for SAP customers that want to move to the cloud while having more control in an incremental fashion.

To round up the different ways that SAP customers can move to the cloud, Hitachi company oXya presented how they can provide a complete, turnkey managed service for cloud-based SAP solutions running on platforms like Azure.

By creating economies of scale across many clients, then steadily proving out processes, methods, governance, and security, oXya can cost manage SAP’s cloud solutions far better than any individual organizations could achieve in their own.

To recap, SAP does not really provide it's own native cloud-based infrastructure. Their business solutions, ranging from ERP to customer experience, analytics and IoT, are all focused higher up in the realm of business domain. They then allow customers control and choice over which hyperscaler cloud runtime to use to operate these solutions.

Overall SAP’s partner vision for the cloud makes sense and has a reasonable choice for most customers. It’s clear that each one of the partners is dedicated, experienced, and mature when it comes to deploy and SAP solutions using a variety of cloud models and configurations.

Figure 6: The six elements of SAP cloud strategy across experience and operations

Mature Cloud Partnerships Strengthen SAP's Go To Market

SAP’s overarching vision that separates the business platform from the technical platform will almost certainly pay off for them long term by being inclusive and diverse when it comes to technology stack that customers can mix and match. How the company increasingly delivers on its vision on operations, experience and analytics as the three major pillars of its business platform will require that this partner strategy continues and evolves.

Enterprises today, however, are likely to find an option that suits their pre-existing choices of cloud runtime and vendors as they move their SAP solutions to the cloud — or acquire new SAP solutions — particularly as the software giant's offerings and grasp expands across more and more key business functions in the enterprise.

Additional Reading

How SAP's partner ecosystem is built for long-term growth | ZDNet

As SAP's New CTO Takes the Reins, a Grand Enterprise Strategy Matures

SAP Democratizes Product Development & What It Means for Customers

How CXOs Can Attain Minimum Viable Digital Experience for Customers, Employees, and Partners

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's been fairly apparent for several years now that our organizations are steadily shifting towards a vital new set of models for creating and exchanging value with stakeholders. The prime motivation for this is that the ever-more fragmented and siloed world of our organizations -- along with the technologies and digital tools that enable them -- has increasingly been unable to support how the modern world works today.

By this I mean broadly that organizations have steadily been moving away from the traditional model of siloed enterprise efficiency, where each type of task is carried out in specialized areas of the business for reasons of cost effectiveness, economy of scale, and required skills, to one where everything is seemingly connected to either one, two, or all three of the top-level value streams that now essentially constitute the vast majority of what most organizations do today to create value for their stakeholders and sustain themselves. (For those not familiar with the business jargon, a good definition of a value stream is the set of steps that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a product or service that is valuable.)

These value chains are so important to modern organizations -- essentially representing the trinity of core actiities that enterprises must focus on creating, innovating upon, removing all friction from, streamlining, and supercharging in effectiveness -- that to focus on anything else would mean to lose the game. Furthermore, the data tells us the story of the true state of affairs today: While 80% of organizations believe they provide a good customer experience, for example, as little as 8% of their customers agree.

The Three Core Stakeholder Experiences

This means that, for executive leaders, there is simply nothing more important today that focusing on ensuring the three main value streams of stakeholder experience not only right, but on a sustainable evolution for the long term. In rough order of importance, though all three are essential, these are the three core enterprise value streams: Customer experience, employee experience, and partner experience.

Why use the lens of experience to frame these value streams? Because the term experience describes the critical boundary across which value is exchanged with stakeholders. Creating and exchanging value is very the reason we exist as enterprises, and the experience is the most powerful construct we currently have to decribe the place where this happens.

Thus, customers experience a company through its products, services, and the workers that serve and support them. Employees experience their work through the physical, digital, and cultural aspects of their workplace. Partners experience their relationship with other companies through their associated physical, digital, and personal channels. Combined, these experiences form a complete operating model that we can reason and act upon.

All of this is a realization that's come slowly, however. Yet most of us have heard some form of the rallying cry of phrases like "Everyone is in marketing now." Or "all workers should be customer obsessed." And one of my favorites, "you can't have a great customer experience without a great employee experience." Although the future is indeed decentralized, what that really means is that most of the organization contributes in some way to these three experiences, yet far too much in isolation.

As businesses, we used to focus much more on individual processes, tools, and technologies in an organization were everything we did was already decomposed. Function was far more important than form or innovation in many cases, because efficiency and optimization was often the most highly prized in a world that didn't change much and in which there wasn't very much choice. These priorities -- while still key -- have been turned on their head by the Exponential Era. As I often say, leaders that attempt to cope with exponential change using yesterday's linear tools are hopelessly outmatched.

Data Fuels Both Experiences and New Change Models

The reality is that most organizations today are still running mostly open loop when it comes to real-time or even recent measurement of the effectiveness of their stakeholder experiences. Though they often have some data about customer experience, they usually have very poor operational measures of the key attributes of the other two value streams (shown in the first figure above.) This status quo has to change substantially if improvements are to take place.

As a result, I've long championed decentralized change at scale and growth to overcome the mismatch in approaches used -- though very much loosely coordinated centrally by leadership -- by using methods and tools that are matched to the scope and speed of the challenges and are also highly data-driven to ensure feedabck from reality rapidly goes back into the effort. I've been very fortunate to have been at the helm of several such efforts that have systematically employed exponential techniques like Networks of Excellence or distributed communities of change agents, both which work quite well to marshal far more change -- and are faster -- than traditional methods. I've closely watched other such efforts succeed in the industry as well. Overall, this is quite good news: We now have early but workable frameworks and tools that can effect transformation effectively and repeatably at scale.

However, as effective as such high scale change methods can be -- especially if they are carried out in conjunction with ready removal of any and all barriers between people, systems, and data in a coherent and integrated digital foundation -- it's my analysis that they are still held back by one last, very important obstacle. Namely our top level organizational structures that are organized around silos that typically cut right across, thereby literally disconnecting and disassociating, the three core experiences in our organizations.

Most of us are all too familiar with customers getting bounced around across marketing, sales, delivery, customer service, and other functions. Each one has its own silo that uses their own technologies, tools, and platforms, and typically rolls up to a C-level executive that has no accountability to any of the other functions. This creates large impediments in so many ways to offer a consistent and high quality experience for customers, for instance, despite the fact that great customer experience is the single most important differentiator for a business that there is. The reasons for similiar such issues in employee and partner experiences are different, but the results are the same: Complexity, dysfunction, inability to change, inconsistency, poor usability, stakeholder rejection, and the list goes on.

For organizations to survive and be competitive today, they must embark on an all-out effort to rapidly transform and organize around these three core stakeholder experiences. Otherwise, digital transformation and other large scale initiatives will continue to turn in the same very limited results until this restructuring is realized. This is in large part due to an effect known as Conway's Law, that says that no matter what you do, the design of your technology product or service will merely reflect the organizational structure of the entity that creates and operates it. For those not in the technology business, it's hard to understate how true this really is: Our new digital world, because of its connectedness, is generally a mirror reflection of how we go about creating it.

Becoming an Experience-Driven Organization

Thus, I've taken my last few years of research and put it into a first-gen operating manual of sorts on how to execute such an organizational shift.  It's in a marquee new Constellation Research report titled "Experience-Driven Organizations." While you can consult the report for details, here is a summary of the key steps of the process below:

• Assess your organization honestly to determine the true maturity of current digital capabilities, end-to-end.
• Dispassionately compare these results against benchmarks and your industry peers.
• Turn key strengths and weaknesses into goals for digital capabilities, emphasizing streamlining and resilience.
• From these goals, develop new initiatives and org changes in a transformation roadmap using breakthrough new change methods at scale.

The reality is that organizations must systemically achieve a minimum viable set of modern stakeholder experiences in as short order as possible, and do so sustainably. It will require several bold changes in organization structure, a rapid shift to a modern technology foundation, and the relentless, even ruthless, removal of barriers to the key aspects of stakeholder experience. These key aspects are, again in rough order: Useful functionality, high usability, effectiveness of outcome, relability, trust, high engagement, and shared value creation. There are also stretch objectives within these experiences as well (see top figure above.)

As we learn more about how to structure and operate our organizations in this digital era, we will continue to learn new methods and approaches that will help us get there. It is currently urgent that we modernize our organiations for present conditions, where experiences are the core value streams that run our businesses. I believe the mindset and approach is a natural one that most organizations will eventually make on their own. We should consequently move the process along if that is the best end state. Finally, I am also finding it vital that we share best practices across the industry when we can, given how fast change is taking place. Please send me a note to share your own experiences on digital and business transformation and in this regard I'll summarize them with credit in any updates.

Additional Reading

Digitally transforming organizations into their three main experiences | ZDNet

Creating an Employee Experience as Great As Your Customer Experience

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

Unobtrusive Innovation in Healthcare to Help the Aging Population

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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The number of older individuals is increasing all over the world with the advancements in modern medicine, and this poses a serious issue with the complexities and costs of our healthcare system today.

Older adults require more care and personalized services, but in a typical setting, the services they receive are provided by a complicated and fragmented support system. It’s not uncommon for an older, independent adult to rely on a constantly changing mix of family members, home health care providers, local hospitals, and others. This is a very stressful, insufficient and pricey combination. And most people just want to continue living comfortably in their own homes.

How do we better serve these individuals, make the system more efficient and cost effective, while offering non-intrusive monitoring? Seems impossible?

The good news is, Singapore Management University (SMU) has taken action to solve this looming crisis.

Researchers at the iCity Lab, led by professor Hwee Pink Tan, piloted an Assisted Living solution, which combines sensor-enabled homes, personalized home care, and a medicine adherence care model. By using community assistance through a caregiver network and not the healthcare system, the Assisted Living solution helps control costs significantly while still enabling the last-mile human touch.

Through the use of machine learning and data tracking, the team has been able to accurately monitor people in their homes. The most innovative part of their program is the indistinct sensors to learn specific patterns that could predict any need for outside assistance. This mode of tracking enables the elderly to live comfortably and independently while retaining a safety net – without feeling they are being overly checked.

This team has disrupted the status quo of caring for older adults. They turned something deemed expensive and inefficient into reliable and effective. The program has a lot of amazing growth opportunities for the future of our healthcare system. This is why they won the 2019 Constellation SuperNova Awards for AI and Augmented Humanity. Kudos to Singapore Management University, TCS and the entire team for making a difference in the lives of our elderly today and hopefully for us in the future.

If you have or know a team that is causing innovative disruption, then make sure you submit your nomination starting in March!