Results

#DF19 from a healthcare perspective

#DF19 from a healthcare perspective

It was a meeting of the minds as always with the Salesforce Dreamforce conference.  There are lots of great announcements, and the event takes over all of San Francisco.  From a healthcare perspective, the trend towards consumerization leaves patient-centric needs unmet. The abundance of healthcare information, availability of non-traditional solutions, and new models of care shift control from providers to patients. Patients demand healthcare access on their terms, not the providers’ or payors’ terms.  

Here is a survey performed by Salesforce about patient challenges. 

Latest Salesforce healthcloud announcements

Health Cloud’s Patient Program Management features include:

Guided Program Enrollment allows life sciences companies to create therapeutic support programs at scale to acquire, support and engage patients, improving both the patient experience and shortening the time to therapy. 

Patient Services Consent Management provides pharmaceutical and medical device companies with the ability to easily view and capture patient consent with an eSignature. Now consent can take place with the enrollee in-person or remotely, as patients can log-in using a tablet or mobile device to view and provide consent on forms associated with the program. 

 

Medical Device Commercial Operations features include: 

Sales Agreements help medical device companies manage device sales, volume, price and revenue commitments. Sales and operations teams can collaborate to track whether customers are meeting their commitments by comparing planned sales quantities to actual booked orders, as well as planned revenue amounts to actual booked revenue. 

Account-Based Forecasting helps medical device companies forecast device sales. Now, medical device customers can create a baseline forecast using market and account growth factors relative to the previous year’s actuals. 

#chousangle

  • We do expect the healthcare CRM market to pickup. Expect the fall of patient portals as customer relationship management (CRM) systems evolve to address experience management. 
  • Patients must have all their vital information, from health records to appointment schedules, at their fingertips. Integration and orchestration must address real-time patient matching and information sharing.
  • Patient access is an area of concern, so evaluate how your contact center is operating, and how easy is it for a patient to schedule an appointment? Also, the contact center staff at your organization must have the tool to help with scheduling, so that process must also be efficient and effective. 
  • Pharmaceutical companies should start branching out with non-traditional affiliations with the health system. Think patient first and help the hospitals identify the appropriate patients for clinical trials. 
  • It will be interesting to see how the healthcare CRM plays out as the competition is heating up from various players along with the population health vendors tackling the whole person approach in healthcare. 
Next-Generation Customer Experience salesforce Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

Building Trust, Driving Growth & Empowering Communities | DisrupTV Ep. 170

Building Trust, Driving Growth & Empowering Communities | DisrupTV Ep. 170

Building Trust, Driving Growth & Empowering Communities | DisrupTV Ep. 170

In DisrupTV Episode 170, hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar engage with three thought leaders to explore how trust, organizational growth, and community empowerment are shaping modern business practices.

Featured Guests

  • Robert Glazer – Founder & CEO at Acceleration Partners, sharing insights on building high-performing teams and driving business growth.
  • Liz Miller – VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, discussing the evolving role of marketing in digital transformation.
  • Tiffani Ashley Bell – Executive Director at The Human Utility, focusing on community empowerment and addressing water access issues.

Key Takeaways

  1. Building Trust Within Organizations: Robert Glazer emphasizes the importance of trust in building high-performing teams and driving business growth. He discusses strategies for fostering trust and transparency within organizations.
  2. The Evolving Role of Marketing: Liz Miller highlights how marketing is evolving in the digital age, stressing the need for marketers to be agile, data-driven, and customer-centric to succeed in digital transformation efforts.
  3. Community Empowerment and Social Impact: Tiffani Ashley Bell shares her experiences with The Human Utility, focusing on how empowering communities and addressing basic needs like water access can lead to meaningful social impact.

Notable Quotes

  • “Trust is the foundation of any high-performing team.” — Robert Glazer
  • “Marketing today is about being agile, data-driven, and customer-centric.” — Liz Miller
  • “Empowering communities starts with addressing their basic needs.” — Tiffani Ashley Bell

Final Thoughts

This episode underscores the interconnectedness of trust, marketing, and community empowerment in today's business landscape. Leaders who prioritize building trust, adapting to digital transformation, and empowering communities are better positioned for sustainable success.

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Happy Caterpillars Can Deliver Sustainable Transformation…and Other Lessons Learned at CCE2019

Happy Caterpillars Can Deliver Sustainable Transformation…and Other Lessons Learned at CCE2019

There are almost too many things to share and recount from #CCE2019. For example, I could share my expanding vocabulary thanks to Chris Lochhead or the fact that I am considering hiding under a park bench in fear of the year 2030 thanks to Alan Bealieu.

The more I walked the hallways and heard from speakers, panelists and moderators, the thing I kept hearing was a sense that amongst these disruptors, change agents and enterprise provocateurs, there is a clear path to the results and reward of digital transformation. Welcome to the age of action.

For most of us, the path to digital transformation has been filled with more question marks than exclamation points. Teams reshaped. Tools realigned. Data reimagined. Strategies scrapped, remapped and scrapped again. For the leaders in that ballroom, sitting around the tables, on the couch or on the stage, the path has been winding, bumpy and marked with more than a couple “failing forward” moments. But thankfully, the insights they shared are lessons we can all leverage to draft our own paths to success.

Doing is Different Than BEING. Alan Bealieu joked that if you wanted to retain a Millennial in the workplace, you should use the word sustainable at least 3 times in the interview…regardless of context. Funny…especially for this GenXer. Yet the kernel of truth there is that Millennials don’t want to DO…they want to BE. They want to BE sustainable. They don’t want to DO sustainability campaigns. They are also VERY aware of the difference.

We can argue sustainability success rates later, but it does mirror what we need to emulate when it comes to digital transformation. We can’t just plan or hope for digital transformation. We need to BE digital. We can’t afford to DO digital through a series of loosely connected projects. We need to BE digital on purpose because our customers already expect digital. Anything less than being digital will be akin to saying transformation three times in a conversation, regardless of context.

Don’t Give Up…Take Naps. To paraphrase SAP’s Eric Stine, our greatest competitor in this digital transformation race is change fatigue. But according to Steve Reese of the Phoenix Suns, we aren’t going to get very far without a good night’s sleep.

It can’t be stressed enough that this hamster wheel known as transformation has been a marathon with no end, run at the all-out pace of a 100-meter sprint. It feels impossible and unfair, running uphill…both ways. From the vantage point of the Chief Marketing Officer, the idea of fatigue is very real. We’ve been running, sometimes backwards using data as a rear-view mirror that only justifies past investments, carrying a stack of point solutions held together with brand band-aids and customer experience hope. It is starting to crack and fall apart.

Maybe it is time to take a nap…or at least get a better night’s sleep. As the Suns have learned through a comprehensive workplace sleep study, improved sleep yields improved decisions. Instead of ripping and replacing, perhaps a nap is in order to make better decisions to advance the agenda.

Transformation is an action, not magic. John Hagel reminded us that automation is not synonymous with transformation…it just makes the caterpillar move faster. But the change in form between caterpillar to butterfly is not really transformation either. Metamorphosis, by definition, is a transformation that appears to be by magic or sorcery. It just “happens.” But transformation is an act…intentional action that leads to a change in appearance or character. It does not just happen. Tadpoles morph into frogs. Companies just don’t happen to foundationally change their business model.

Transformation demands focused action by strong leaders. However, the ideas we have about leadership must also change. Dr. Annie McKee shared that leadership, like happiness, is a choice. To be an effective leader, we must focus more on the happiness part of that statement. “People are emotional beings,” McKee emphasized. “When we FEEL bad, we don’t think as well, we make poor decisions and take stupid actions.” Stupid actions will not empower transformation. It will just make a faster (super expensive) caterpillar.

While every panel, every keynote and every hallway chat were peppered with discussions of technology (can I get a shout-out for blockchain anyone?) and how to be a disruptor and not the disrupted, in the end, all roads led back to people.

I’ll end this recap with an exceptional challenge from Ritchie Etwaru, “Turn up your customer empathy to 100. Turn down your product arrogance to 0.” If nothing else, my hope is that we can manage to start moving the dials, shifting our focus away from transformation to sell products faster and towards new models that exceed customer expectations. Once we do, we will have found the magic that leads to metamorphosis and, perhaps, the actions that lead to true transformation.

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Welcoming Veteran Marketing Executive Liz Miller to the Constellation Team

Welcoming Veteran Marketing Executive Liz Miller to the Constellation Team

We’re thrilled to welcome Liz Miller to the Constellation team as vice president and principal analyst. She will focus her coverage area on CMO priorities and the critical tools needed to advance marketing’s growth agenda.

Liz will focus her analysis on the leadership, business transformation and technology requirements for today’s marketing organizations and how to effectively transform business models to stay competitive in the shifting digital landscape. In addition, she will explore the key trends modern CMOs face, ranging from the realities of engagement in the trust economy to how marketing has become enterprise security’s greatest threat and critical champion.

“Today’s CMO must rethink, evolve and disrupt the traditional expectations of a brand leader, expanding their capabilities and strategies to set a new course for the corner office,” said Miller. “This course demands a new leadership mindset coupled with a different toolkit where the best of breed meets the best of what comes next. Constellation has long been rooted in identifying this exact convergence, and I am thrilled to be joining the mindshare of the organization.”

With more than 20 years of marketing experience under her belt, Liz’s prowess aligns content marketing, engagement and connecting the dots across business need and customer expectation. She has held senior marketing roles at the CMO Council, GlobalFluency, Jan Marini Skin Research, Inc. and Customer Manufacturing Group. Miller is a skilled moderator, facilitator and speaker, engaging C-suite executives in hundreds of industry webcasts and roundtables, keynote presentations and panels around the globe.

Welcome to the team, Liz. You can check out her upcoming research and latest updates here.

 

Marketing Transformation New C-Suite Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer

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

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

It hasn't taken long for Juergen Mueller to ramp up as the new Chief Technology Officer and executive board member of long-standing enterprise software industry leader SAP. While he previously held the role of Chief Innovation Officer at the company for several years -- and he continues to be responsible for product innovation overall -- today he must successfully lead SAP’s overall platform and technology development including such flagship offerings as the SAP Cloud Platform as well as their foundational offering, SAP HANA. He and his team are also charged with the incubation and market adoption of intelligent solutions such as analytics, SAP Leonardo, machine learning, and IoT across SAP’s vast and growing product portfolio.

So, it was recently at the company's big customer conference, SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, that we were able to see the early results of his January, 2019 ascension to the top technology role at the helm of the firm's technologies and products. Juergen comes into his job at time of growing hypercompetition among the top-tier vendors for enterprise customers as they begin a deeper shift to the cloud. Cloud platforms now exceed any previous platforms in terms of capability that they offer operationally, feature-wise, security-wise or by just about any other measure. What's more, customers are in play in terms of acquisition in a way they may never be for the foreseeable future as they switch from legacy IT to cloud-based IT.

The SAP Intelligent Enterprise in the Cloud: Focused on Experience (Customer, Employee), Analytics, and Operations (ERP, Supply Chain)

Furthermore, enterprises still make their vendor selections for the long term, at least five years or more today. Juergen has come into his role at a time of great transition in the industry, as well as for SAP as a company, and one that they must navigate successfully with both high growth and many net-new customer wins, as more customers are potentially up from grabs today across the market than they will be for quite some time.

Giving the opening keynote at TechEd, Juergen gave many in the industry a sustained look at both his leadership style as well as the specifics of his ongoing vision for the company's technology and platform portfolio. Here is what I was able to take away from my analysis of his wide-ranging talk and numerous announcements:

  • SAP's doubles down to definitively encompass end-to-end experience, intelligence, and operations. Juergen opened with this trinity and together as a value chain they continue to comprise the overall organizing principle for SAP's product vision and strategy, the Intelligent Enterprise concept that they have been maturing over the last few years. While this has been expressed before, it never been with such inevitability and as we'll see, with important new details. Experience, at least as an explicit term, is a relatively new emphasis for SAP. It's one that includes not just customers, but employees, supplier, product, and brand experience. In my estimation, SAP's continued emphasis in this area -- despite existing customers being much more on the ERP and operations side -- shows they can't afford not to be part of the market's extensive experience economy investments that customers are making now. SAP continues to rapidly build out capabilities in this area, from SAP Customer Experience to their acquisition of Qualtrics to establish credibility in new (for them) and critically important experience channels that are vital for revenue growth of their customers. In short, SAP used to be about the back office, now it's adding the front of the business, along with industrial strength analytics in the middle of the trinity to hold them all together and produce value.
  • The Business Technology Platform (BTP) has emerged to become the prime enabling path to the SAP's Intelligent Enterprise. Previously known as SAP's Digital Platform, the BTP is a collection of data management and related cloud technologies, with new improvements focused on making it easier for businesses to develop applications that link their core SAP systems both to one another as well as with data residing on other platforms. Want to take your data and SAP systems and build applications or experience that improve processes, drive revenue, and deliver innovation? BTP is the vehicle for enterprises to deliver on both tactical improvements and business transformation all along the edge of their digital core using data management, analytics, AI, IoT, blockchain, application development, and integration services on one of the few genuinely open and neutral cloud platforms for the enterprise.
  • SAP appears willing to go far beyond their existing customer base to emphasize its new experience focus. Juergen took considerable time in front of a customer and developer audience that has its passionate roots in back office systems like ERP and databases to explain SAP's growing end-to-end vision that now starts with experience. This isn't an audience positioned well to expand into these new categories, as they tend to be siloed in areas far away from the customer. The willingness to spend time on this onstage indicates both confidence in the message and its vital nature to SAP's own long-term growth strategy. Juergen needed to be inclusive and embracing of this new buying and partner audience. He generally succeeded in welcoming them, without overly alienating the existing base. Experience buyers are a critically important audience that can fuel SAP's continued relevance and growth, and as it happens, a necessary one to deliver a much more comprehensive vision for IT and strategic digital capabilities. Make no mistake, SAP still has some gaps in its products for both customers and workers, but office productivity tools are now one of the few outliers.
  • A unified data model for integration arrives, allowing enterprises to truly connect their systems together cost effectively. Dubbed SAP Graph, I will go on record saying it will be one of the most important advances that SAP has created. SAP Graph is a single semantic data model across all its applications, with a unified API layer. The objective of the newly announced SAP Graph is to simplify creation of systems and integrations that require access to SAP data. “It can be used by any application, running on SAP or non-SAP technology,” Juergen noted. One single API and data model will go leaps and bounds into taking SAP into a core role as an integrating fabric for enterprise-class business capabilities. Juergen is to be lauded for this announcement. In a separate conversation I had with him about it, he noted that it will take a while to fully realize SAP Graph, given the size of SAP's product portfolio.
  • Consumer grade usability, especially across end-to-end business processes, is now a priority for SAP. I've long heard from customers and developers that the hodge podge of internally developed solutions combined with acquisitions like SuccessFactors, Gigya, and Fieldglass has left SAP customers with a disjointed user interface experience that was increasingly painful and simply required too much training/effort to use. Juergen promised that will change with the advent of SAP Fiori 3, which will offer users a more modern, better harmonized design and user interaction model. This user interface model is also available to enterprises developing their own apps on SAP, whether they’re targeting desktop or mobile devices so that their entire IT experience is consistent. I suspect the transition to Fiori 3 will take much longer than everyone would like, but it's a significant and worthy move to make SAP's portfolio more unified and effective from an experience standpoint.
  • Azure becomes a special cloud partner to help customer realize results faster and better. SAP calls them a 'hyperscaler', presumably to make customers consider them more of an infrastructure play than a business platform, since both companies certainly have competitive products in a number of business categories. Azure head Scott Guthrie was brought on stage with Mueller to show the seriousness of the relationship, which ostensibly is for making their respective clouds easier to use together, with focus in areas like AI and blockchain. The risk here is that SAP is essentially demoting other clouds (most notably Google and AWS) to less than a first-class citizen footing. This might work out, however, given that large enterprises often use Azure more than they use AWS or Google Cloud, but it is a calculated risk nevertheless.
  • SAP now appears open to tuning its business model and go-to-market fundamentally, offering pay-as-you-go for the first time. With most cloud services being pay-for-use, a big key to some of the attraction to the model, SAP Cloud Platform has not been offering itself in such a consumption-based model. Committing to this model is important to be competitive long term in many (but not all) product categories in my estimation. It's actually a watershed moment where SAP can now charge for value delivered and move to revenue models that are more modern and able to capture the upside. While undoubtedly they received much pressure from customers to make this change, the fact they did so, despite having highly differentiated offerings, show how far SAP is ready to go to be a true cloud players. The challenge is it remains to be seen how their shareholders will take this in the short term, but as long as product adoption is where it needs to be, this shouldn't be an issue, because the revenue will be there. From a CTO perspective, there is a lot to do to make pay-per-use work in products that weren't designed to meter usage from the outset, but it appears Juergen is not concerned.

Juergen Mueller, CTO of SAP

Incoming SAP CTO Juergen Mueller

What digital and IT leaders should take away

SAP remains targeted at the high margin part of the cloud space. It's leaving commodity infrastructure and its relentlessly price-pressured products to the hyperscalers, and focusing on business services that provide the most value. Enterprises that want a business partner for their digital capabilities at the most strategic level are generally still left to SAP to work with in a space that's now increasingly crowded. Yet the other clouds will continue to "climb the stack" and offer more and more business capabilities. However, it's hard to see that leaders like Amazon or Google will enter the ERP space. Oracle is the real competitor here, and the technology vision simply isn't as cogent or forward-thinking as what Juergen put forth.

From a leadership perspective, Juergen appears to be from a newer generation of more collaborative leaders, more humble, but with even higher expectations than their predecessors. His existing audience of developers and partners should find him likeable, as well as the new segments that SAP has added to their strategy.

In the final analysis, SAP has taken a great step forward with a full-spectrum set of experience offerings, along with a BTP that will allow organizations to build and integrate everything else that they're need to digitally transform into the businesses of the future. The X data (experience) and O Data (operational) messaging is right, but the challenge they have is that they are now out ahead of most of their customers, who are just now seriously thinking about how to connect these two worlds together better to realize the experience revolution happening in some organizations today. But this is where they need to be, and I believe Juergen's challenge now will be sustaining investment for as long as it will take to truly combine the Intelligent Enterprise vision craft from what is essentially a large silos of product development efforts and integrations.

This overall vision is the right one, now it's about timely execution. If Juergen can truly harmonize product experience, if he can deliver on SAP Graph in 3 years and not five or six, and if he can produce an increasingly cohesive offering from existing, new, and acquired products while continuing their rate of growth, SAP is positioned to sustain and win in best-in-class digital capabilities for complex enterprises.

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Congrats to the 2019 SuperNova Award Winners

Congrats to the 2019 SuperNova Award Winners

Last night at the ninth annual awards Gala at CCE, our team unveiled the winners of the 2019 SuperNova Awards. This was one of our toughest years to choose just one winner in each category; the competition was top-notch.

As digital change continues to dominate the agenda of the global C-Suite, organizations across all industries and geographies must make deeper investments to create true impact. These case studies embody the necessary leadership and teaming talents needed as we move from the post-digital divide into winner-take-all networks.

If you missed the gorgeous gala last night, I’m happy to share the results with you. Congrats to the 2019 winners in each category.

2019 SuperNova Award Winners

AI & Augmented Humanity
Singapore Management University

Data to Decisions
GE Aviation

Data-Driven Digital Networks & Business Models
IBM Food Trust

Digital Marketing & Sales Effectiveness
Sportable Scoreboards

Digital Safety, Governance & Privacy
Sovrin Foundation

Future of Work: Employee Experience
Walgreens

Future of Work: Human Capital Management
Special Olympics
SiteOne Landscape Supply

Next-Generation Customer Experience
Posadas

Tech Optimization & Modernization
University of Pisa

The SuperNova Award winners were selected by a combination of industry judging and public polling. If you are interested in submitting a case study for our tenth anniversary, be sure to look at this year’s winners and prep your nomination for next year. The nominations open in Spring 2020.

For more information, visit https://www.constellationr.com/events/supernova/2019.

 

 

 

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

Are you prepared for the HHS fines?

Are you prepared for the HHS fines?

The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) has agreed to pay $3 million to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and take substantial corrective action to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules.

#Chousangle - This is an area where, on the surface, it looks like an easy fix where every device such as a thumb drive and laptop should be encrypted. Encryption of the device is the easier part. The challenge comes down to setting up a security program, as stated in the correction action agreement.  

A third party consulting entity will conduct the risk analysis to identify the gaps. Once you have the gaps identified, the technical debt on the network infrastructure will be identified.  

  • Will budgeted be allocated to support the next generation secured infrastructure or will the health system take 3-5 years on the infrastructure redesign and implementation, creating a constant state of hardware refresh? 
  • Enterprise risk needs an organizational owner. Who is accountable for enterprise risk? This has to be the COO or someone leading operations and not the CIO.
  • An important key area is to design a security program, including the right governance structure vs. checking off the box on the audit. 
  • Will research institutions comply with the organization's security protocol?
  • How will we hold employees accountable for failing to comply with the security guidelines?

These are just a few notes off the top of my head. What are your thoughts?

Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience AR Chief Information Officer

DisrupTV Live: Niche Down — How Differentiation Becomes Legendary

DisrupTV Live: Niche Down — How Differentiation Becomes Legendary

DisrupTV Live: Niche Down — How Differentiation Becomes Legendary

In this live DisrupTV segment, hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar facilitate a dynamic discussion with Christopher Lochhead—renowned CMO-turned-category designer and coauthor of Niche Down—and Heather Clancy, award-winning journalist and coauthor. Together, they unpack the power of carving a radical niche, explaining how differentiation fuels category design, legendary brands, and meaningful impact.

Featured Guests

  • Christopher Lochhead – Veteran CMO, entrepreneur, and bestselling author (with Niche Down and Play Bigger) whose career-defining philosophy is category design and owning a niche. lochhead.com+1
  • Heather Clancy – Editorial Director at GreenBiz Group, acclaimed journalist and coauthor, exploring how "being different" can be a business superpower.

Key Takeaways

  1. The power of being different: Lochhead argues that "being different is the best way to become legendary", urging audiences to niche down instead of competing in crowded spaces. 
  2. Create your own category: Differentiation means designing a new market where you define the rules rather than competing in existing ones. The category makes the brand, not the other way around.
  3. Niche brings clarity: Heather emphasizes how focusing on the intersection of your skills and vision empowers authentic expression and purposeful positioning. 
  4. Category design is strategic storytelling: Lochhead frames category design as teaching customers what to believe—reframing problems and shaping categories through narrative.

Notable Quotes

  • “Being different is the best way to become legendary.” — Christopher Lochhead
  • “Category makes the brand.” — Christopher Lochhead
  • “What makes you different? What did you choose to do that others didn’t?” — Heather Clancy

Final Thoughts

This session clarifies that niching down isn’t limiting—it’s elevating. By owning a specific category and crafting a compelling narrative, individuals and organizations can move beyond competition and shape markets. Lochhead and Clancy remind us that true impact comes by leaning into what sets us apart—and turning difference into distinction.

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The Future of Finance: Automation, Strategy & Transformation | DisrupTV Ep. 169

The Future of Finance: Automation, Strategy & Transformation | DisrupTV Ep. 169

The Future of Finance: Automation, Strategy & Transformation | DisrupTV Ep. 169

In DisrupTV Episode 169, hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar engage with three thought leaders to explore how automation, strategic alignment, and digital transformation are reshaping the finance function.

Featured Guests

  • Aaron Harris – CTO at Sage, focusing on technological advancements in financial operations.
  • Grant Halloran – CEO at Host Analytics, emphasizing the alignment of financial strategies with business objectives.
  • Nicole France – VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, analyzing the evolving role of finance in digital transformation.

Key Takeaways

  1. Automation in Financial Operations: Aaron Harris discusses how automation is transforming financial processes, enabling organizations to achieve greater efficiency and accuracy.
  2. Strategic Alignment of Finance: Grant Halloran highlights the necessity of aligning financial strategies with overarching business goals to drive value and growth.
  3. The Evolving Role of Finance: Nicole France explores how the finance function is evolving from a traditional support role to a strategic partner in business transformation.

Notable Quotes

  • “Automation is not just about efficiency; it's about enabling better decision-making.” — Aaron Harris
  • “Finance must be aligned with business strategy to drive true value.” — Grant Halloran
  • “The future of finance is about being a strategic partner, not just a number cruncher.” — Nicole France

Final Thoughts

This episode underscores the critical role of automation, strategic alignment, and digital transformation in the future of finance. Organizations that embrace these elements are better positioned to drive value and navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape.

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Why I'm a CDP Skeptic...And What We Need Instead

Why I'm a CDP Skeptic...And What We Need Instead

If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know how passionately I believe that customer experience should be the organizing principle and top priority of every business. Focus on customers is, to say the least, highly correlated with success. Customer understanding—knowing your customers and anticipating their needs even before they might themselves—makes it possible to design consistently good customer experiences that build successful businesses.

One of the most crucial resources for customer understanding is data. You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that I’d be a fan of customer data platforms (CDPs). After all, they promise to pull together all of a company’s customer data from any number of sources to help analyze, predict, and respond to customer behaviors in ways that improve marketing results.

But I’m not. Here’s why:

  • We live in the real world, where customer data is imperfect, and continuously imperfect at that. The pace of change means that no customer data source can ever be perfectly up to date and consistent. And besides, although we’re getting better at prediction all the time, customers will still do things we don’t expect them to, or when we don’t expect them to. Implementing a CDP to fix that is believing in a fairy tale. Only a company in stasis is going to have a totally consistent view of customers…and a company in stasis is not likely to be a going concern for very long.
  • There’s never been one consistent source of enterprise data for any length of time. Just as customer data is continuously imperfect, so is the structure of most companies. Mergers and acquisitions, expansion into new lines of business or geographies, new strategies, experimentation with new processes or technology approaches—all of these things mean that having only one source of data and insight is, and will likely forever be, an elusive goal.
  • Marketing isn’t the only part of the business that needs a holistic view of customers. Analyzing and taking action on customer data only from a marketing perspective completely misses the bigger objective. Customer experience spans all aspects of a business. Anyone who interacts with customers needs to have access to a consistent view of those customers and insights that make each interaction better. Creating yet another data silo, especially when it purports to be a single source of customer information, is a short-sighted, ill-advised investment.
  • Different departments and teams need different views of the same customer data. What’s most useful to customer service may be very different to what’s top priority for sales teams. What we need to know about customers varies with context. Insights that drive planning, strategy, or product development, for example, have a totally different scale and cadence to what informs effective real-time marketing efforts. Each part of the organization has its own lens or filters to get to the most valuable customer insights for them, but all need to work from a holistic, shared view. And while we’ll never achieve perfection, customer data should be highly consistent no matter who’s using it.

While the promise of CDPs falls short of the mark, these are fundamental challenges that need resolution. So what does getting it right look like?

Here’s my view on the key characteristics of enterprise-grade customer data management systems:

  • Their design is driven by both a solid foundation of good data management practices and a clear set of use cases across different parts of the organization. In other words, they’re not just repositories, they’re also tools that flow seamlessly into all of the enterprise systems that require customer insight to operate effectively.
  • They can adapt to support a wide range of needs and uses, beyond those that we have already identified today.
  • They can accommodate both deterministic customer data (from systems of record) and probabilistic customer data (predictions based on observed behavior)
  • They support different cadences, from real- or near-real-time to periodic, depending on the use case.
  • They provide the ability to identify customer segments that meaningfully inform the most effective ways to interact and engage with individuals—regardless of the type of interaction (e.g., marketing, sales, service). That’s based on more than just analyzing behaviors from a marketing perspective.
  • They ensure that personally identifiable information (PII) is only used where it needs to be and where it’s permitted, whether it’s a question of regulatory requirements or customer preferences.
  • They draw from, coexist with, and feed into the tools that different teams use to get their work done.
  • They help to establish the metadata structures that will improve effective data analysis and use over time.
  • They’re straightforward to use across departments and functions.

This may all sound as much like a fairy tale as the promise of CDPs. The good news is that many companies and a whole lot of sharp minds are working on the problem. Those attempting to tackle it range from startups to established players (some of whom are already in the, ahem, CDP category) to large enterprise technology providers.

Part of the challenge is semantic. The term CDP has become muddied by undelivered promises and limited understanding of the need. Many of the more recently announced offerings in the area of customer data management have been unofficially described as “CDPs that aren’t just CDPs.” These are much more than just data management systems, however. They aim to provide intuitive tools for deriving and applying customer insights, not just consolidating customer data.

The pace with which players in this fast-evolving space are tackling the dual challenges of data management and applied use gives me hope that we’ll soon have some much more effective solutions to putting customer understanding at the heart of business operations. While I suspect we’ll never get to one single system for all customer data, there’s every reason to believe in practical solutions to this large-scale problem in the near future.

In the meantime, do some serious tire-kicking before you invest. Define the use cases that are most crucial for your organization to address immediately. Push hard to understand what a vendor's offering includes today, out of the box, and what's on the near-term roadmap.

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