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…...

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Customer 360 Mantra Manifests In The Customer Data Platform

Over 12,000 customers from 40+ countries convened at Chicago's McCormick Center for the annual Salesforce Connections conference. Stephanie Buscemi, CMO, welcomed the audience and key customers such as Conagra, Indiana Pacers, and State Farm to the stage. Key highlights from the event include:

Photo: @rwang0

• Marketing Cloud receives new Einstein AI email marketing enhancements. AI powered capabilties include engagement frequency, send time optimization, and content tagging.  Additional enhancements include transactional messaging.
• Service Cloud gains channels menu and Einstein Bots. The "Contact Us" page goes bye-bye as chat takes hold through Facebook Messenger, SMS, WeChat, What’sApp, web chat, and voice. New bots build intent models to match incidents to resolutions.
• Commerce Cloud adds a low code designer and Mulesoft Accelerator. New Commerce Page Designer gives users more control to create, preview, schedule, and reuse content. Einstein Product Recommendations optimize content acceleration. New Mulesoft Accelerator adds integration and best practices with product configuration, social market places, and chat bots.
• Customer Data Platform ushers in next generation of Customer 360. Salesforce moves beyond the traditional CDP to include data management, identity, consent, and activation across marketing, sales, service, and commerce. Einstein Insights will use AI to help power next best action.

Photo: @rwang0

Figure 4. Twitter Moments for #CNX19

Event Report: Customer Data Platform Takes Center Stage at #CNX19

The elusive goal of creating a holistic view of customers remains despite over 25 years of CRM innovations. The objective hasn’t changed, but hopefully technology provides a higher likelihood of success. Despite the ongoing challenge, Salesforce continues to make key product investments on the way to supporting an AI driven approach to marketing, sales, service, and commerce.

When it comes to Customer 360, however, it’s still difficult to separate the current reality from the vision. Customer 360 was the big announcement at Connections 2018. This year’s event brought some concrete advances, including planned general release of the Customer Resolution Engine in November 2019. This provides the unique key that links customer identity across all Salesforce clouds, routing data and events as needed.

The biggest announcement of this year’s event was…also Customer 360. This time in the form of a customer data platform. Is this a tacit admission that CRM hasn’t turned out to be everything it promised to be? Perhaps. In any case, it’s further confirmation that CRM isn’t the only source of customer data and that pulling everything together, at least functionally, is a growing problem customers want solved.

Salesforce has the vision right, but it’s not alone. Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and SAP are all working on their own approaches to the problem of building a holistic view of the customer. Salesforce is behind in its announcement. That said, the company has many of the building blocks required to execute on its vision and the customer base to make it a top priority.

The message that came through loud and clear at Connections 2019 is that Salesforce has a solid understanding of what its customers want and need to do. Things are looking good on the front end. Now the company has to execute on making everything on the back end work—easily and effectively—for customers.

“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly.” In the fast-paced business world, leaders need to remember to stay in touch with their overall businesses and with themselves.

Recently on DisrupTV, our hosts Vala Afshar and R “Ray” Wang interviewed Jerry Colonna, author of REBOOT: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up, Jay Ferro, CIO at Quikrete, and Constellation Research’s own Dion Hinchcliffe, VP & Principal Analyst, to learn some of the key qualities of effective leadership. Here are some quick takeaways from the episode:

Maximize Leadership Growth Through Radical Self-Inquiry

Jerry Colonna, hailed as the “CEO whisperer,” sat down to discuss his introspective leadership philosophy, which he champions in his new book, REBOOT: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up. Jerry is an advocate of “radical self-inquiry,” which he believes can help people confront the various aspects of themselves that hold them back from reaching their fullest potential. To be truly effective, leaders must learn to slow down and look inward. It is only after this process of self-evaluation that a course of action materializes for becoming a stronger leader.

When the discussion turned to the topic of busyness, Jerry suggested striving for a smooth workflow rather than having spikes in productivity. Many people want the appearance of busyness because being busy can be associated with output and personal value. Furthermore, people might be afraid to slow down and face negative emotions, preferring instead to brush them under the rug and focus on their work. Jerry discourages these tendencies and emphasizes the importance of slowing down to a smooth pace of work. As he says, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly.”

Enhance Business Strategy through CIO Integration

In the age of digital, the majority of organizations have some sort of digital presence according to Jay Ferro. Given this shift, the CIO must have their fingers on the pulse of all aspects of the business now more than ever. A bidirectional relationship should exist where CIOs learn the business functions from the other officers while catching them up on the technical side of things. When faced with a multitude of intricate technical problems, CIOs may forget to focus on their development as leaders. Jay emphasizes that the best CIOs are business leaders of people. In fact, with their specialized understanding of all things digital, we may see more CIOs taking the role of CEO in the future.

Navigate and Adapt to Pressures of Digital Transformation

Continuing the discussion of executive leadership in the digital transformation age, Dion Hinchcliffe emphasized the learning that CEOs are having to undergo to understand and develop new business models. The demands on the modern workforce are advancing rapidly, and many firms are finding themselves in dire need of education, hiring, and mentoring.

Though many businesses face uncharted terrain, there are plenty of digital transformation success stories to be found in all industries. To illustrate this point, Dion gave us a sneak peek at this year’s BT-150 winners, emphasizing the diversity of this year’s group across various sectors and industries. The BT-150 are leaders who Constellation Research identified for their successes in digital transformation leadership. This year’s list includes some great examples of leaders who are succeeding in the modern age of digital transformation.

As leaders brave the challenging and transitioning business landscape, introspection, awareness, and adaptability are three pivotal qualities that can help leaders reach a flow state that is infinitely more productive.

This is just a small glimpse at the great advice shared during the show. Please check out the full discussions in the video replay here or the podcast.

DisrupTV is a weekly Web series with hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar. The show airs live at 11:00 a.m. PT/ 2:00 p.m. ET every Friday.

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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Oracle has simplified its analytics product lineup and pricing and gone public with its roadmap. Here’s what’s coming and why Oracle customers will take a second look.

The Oracle Analytics Summit, held June 24-25, gave the company a chance to introduce what executives called “a new beginning” for Oracle Analytics. The themes of the event, held as both a webcast (attended by more than 6,800) and an in-person event (attended by roughly two hundred customers, partners and analysts) were “simple, transparent” and “trustworthy.”

The company needed a new beginning, as Senior VP of Analytics, T.K. Anand, put it, because Oracle had previously “inflicted a lot of change on the community” and “wasn’t transparent” about product plans and roadmaps. In recent years Oracle has been pushing its cloud-based analytic options while doing little to update software deployed on-premises by tens of thousands of customers.

T.K. Anand, a Microsoft veteran who joined Oracle one year ago as senior VP of Oracle Analytics, announces "a new beginning" at the Oracle Analytics Summit.

On Simplification

Oracle announced a consolidated lineup with just three products: Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), Oracle Analytics Server, and Oracle Analytics for Applications. OAC has been the company’s cloud path forward for analytics for more than three years. It’s a modern, self-service-oriented cloud service emphasizing data visualization and offering extensive augmented analytics capabilities (including data prep recommendations, Web and mobile natural language (NL) query, NL generation, automated insights and, soon, personalized recommendations). Recent integrations extend the NL capabilities to the Oracle Digital Assistant and third-party products including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Oracle Analytics Server, due in Q4, is an on-premises-oriented product that consolidates governed, self-service and augmented capabilities and replaces myriad products that came before it. The promise is that Oracle Analytics Server will be aligned, feature and function wise, with OAC and will see annual updates based new capabilities first delivered through OAC. It’s also Oracle’s option for multi-cloud deployment, as it will be software that can be deployed anywhere.

Oracle Analytics for Applications, as the name suggests, is essentially OAC pre-integrated with Oracle cloud applications. The integrations will make it easier to analyze data from Oracle applications, starting with Oracle Fusion ERP by Q4 2019 and Fusion HCM by Q1 2020. Executives promised that other Oracle cloud applications and third-party applications will follow on a quarterly cadence. Importantly, Oracle Analytics for Applications includes a managed data pipeline and data warehouse instance based on the Oracle Autonomous Database. Also included will be supporting content, including ready-to-use semantic models, reports and dashboards.  

Another key element of the simplification is the pricing for OAC, which is straightforward and aggressive at $20 per user, per month for the workgroup- and departmental-oriented Professional Edition and $2,000 per Oracle Compute Unit (OCPU) per month for the Enterprise Edition, including unlimited numbers of users.

On Transparency and Trust

To be more transparent, Oracle has published its Oracle Analytics roadmap online for the first time. This is something Tableau, Qlik and others have done for many years, so Oracle is merely catching up with customer expectations, but it’s a sign that the company is listening.

In another sign that the company is listening and working on building trust, T.K. Anand, a Microsoft veteran who joined Oracle one year ago, said that Oracle has doubled the number of analytics customer-support engineers and improved processes to reduce service request resolution times by as much as ten times. It’s also investing in auto-remediation capabilities to reduce the time to recovery. Service improvements are a constant area of investment for most vendors, but a doubling of support staff is a real commitment.

Oracle's newly published analytics roadmap, available at oracle.com/solutions/business-analytics/roadmap.html

MyPOV on the New Oracle Analytics

From Oracle’s perspective, any customer of its applications or data-management software should naturally consider Oracle’s analytics options, but defections have mounted in recent years. The Summit announcements were designed to get customers to give Oracle Analytics products a first (or second) look. The attention getter was clearly the simplified, aggressive list pricing, and as Oracle customers all know (and count on), the more you spend, the more likely the company is to offer discounts.

To put the Enterprise pricing in context, I talked to one customer with 1,000 users who said he’s using 12 OCPUs while another customer with 600 users said he was “overprovisioned” and had room to grow with just six OCPUs. Capacity requirements will vary based on the complexity of the data and query, reporting and analytical demands.

The real new news among the announcements is the pending release of the Oracle Analytics Server aimed at on-premises deployment. Oracle’s prior emphasis on OAC and only OAC left the impression that cloud was the only way forward, yet plenty of customers aren’t ready to go there. Oracle Analytics Server is billed as an all-inclusive product that will get annual updates. In another carrot for current customers, any licensee of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition will be automatically licensed and entitled to download and deploy Oracle Analytics Server, which will include the latest self-service and augmented capabilities.

In short, the newly promised terms, transparency, support improvements and feature upgrades across Oracle Analytics are attractive and worth considering. We’ll have to wait and see whether the finished Oracle Analytics Server product is as simplified, integrated and all-inclusive as promised. Will it be as hybrid and multi-cloud friendly as the options from independent vendors? Oracle executives demurred on whether and when vendor-supported options for container-based deployment would emerge (something some rivals have delivered or announced). We also heard that there would be some differences in functionality between OAC and the Oracle Analytics Server (in the area of augmented analytics, for example), and licensing terms for on-premises deployment is another area where details have yet to emerge. 

Customers that I talk to that have gone cloud don’t hesitate to choose cloud-based options. But tell an on-premises customer that cloud is the only way forward and they will be less likely to try your cloud option. The way forward for vendors that didn’t start in the cloud is to give customers clear, transparent choices and the freedom to move when they are ready. This is the new beginning that Oracle Analytics promises and we’ll surely hear more details about each option at this year’s Oracle Open World.

Related Reading:
Qlik Advances Cloud, AI & Embedded Options, Extends Data Platform
Constellation ShortListâ„¢ Cloud-Based Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms
Tableau Advances the Era of Smart Analytics
MicroStrategy Embeds Analytics Into Any Web Interface

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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Salesforce $15.7 billion mega acquisition will add revenue and blunt a Microsoft competitive threat, but long-term benefits will depend on deeper integration and additive innovation.

Salesforce is spinning its mega acquisition of Tableau Software as the number-one CRM vendor buying the number-one business intelligence (BI) and analytics vendor. It’s a big deal that was likely hastened by last week’s acquisition of Looker by Google. In the short term, it will give Salesforce more revenue, but in my view, the success and ultimate value of the proposed $15.7 billion deal will depend on what Salesforce and Tableau can do together and whether Tableau can accelerate its move into the cloud.

Tableau fills a competitive gap for Salesforce that Einstein Analytics hasn’t filled. Einstein Analytics (which originated as Salesforce Wave Analytics in 2014) is still very new, and it’s not widely adopted by Salesforce customers. What’s more, Einstein Analytics has been largely aimed at CRM-centric analytic needs, whereas Tableau gives it broad, multi-purpose analytical capabilities that are already widely adopted and highly regarded.

A key challenge, however, is that only one third of Tableau customers, at best, are running in the cloud. So either Tableau has to accelerate its move into the cloud or Salesforce has to develop more of a hybrid strategy. The latter would go against Salesforce’s longstanding “no software” ethos, although even cloud player Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made accommodations for on-premises deployments in recent years.

One thing that Salesforce and Tableau have in common (other than tens of thousands of customers) is Microsoft as a formidable rival. Microsoft goes after Salesforce primarily with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and it goes up against Tableau primarily with Power BI. In both cases, Microsoft stresses its broader platform, including Office 365, Azure, the LinkedIn graph, and its broad data-management portfolio, but the real weapon on both fronts is the blunt instrument of competitive pricing. Microsoft effectively discounts its CRM and analytics offerings knowing it can count on long-term benefits, stickiness and profits from each customer and byte of data that ends up on Azure.

Competing against Microsoft Power BI is one thing, but cloud competition is about to get tougher with Google’s acquisition of Looker, announced last week. And with both Google and Microsoft now strongly pursuing the BI and analytics market, it likely won’t be long before AWS steps up its game from its current, less-than-competitive QuickSight offering.

Tableau needed a deep-pocketed parent to help it compete against these new competitors. A key area of investment important to both Salesforce and Tableau is augmented analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft has been adding augmented capabilities to Power BI, and it highlights the connection to the rest of its AI portfolio. Leveraging one set of AI and augmented analytics investments across Salesforce and Tableau should provide economies of scale that will help both parties innovate.

MyPOV on How to Better Serve Customers Together

I appreciate that Salesforce is promising to maintain Tableau as an independent business, just as it did when it acquired Mulesoft last year. Salesforce is far better than most companies at retaining the leadership, talent and values of the companies it acquires. A big part of Tableau’s strength has been its culture, and I see Salesforce as more likely than any other suitor to retain that energy.   

As I noted above, investments in AI and augmented analytics are an obvious place to start on future innovation. But with trends moving toward low-latency demands and predictive and prescriptive recommendations, I see analytics as destined to be more frequently embedded into applications. Not just OEM apps, but software apps that customers build themselves. Salesforce and the Force.com platform are both good fits for accelerating Tableau’s embedding strategy. Microsoft is pursuing these trends with its Power Apps, Flow and Power BI Embedded capabilities, and Salesforce and Tableau would do well to exploit their strengths.

As for how Salesforce and Tableau could improve and take advantage of integration, a few areas should be addressed to better serve customers. For starters, Tableau must evolve its self-service strengths and provide more tools and controls for centralized governance. The company started down this path a few years ago with data-certification capabilities, and it’s expected to add a data catalog this year.  Salesforce and Tableau together could do more to address centralized data modeling, ensuring reusability and a single version of the truth. Here’s where Looker has strengths, offering an old-school semantic modeling environment built for modern cloud data architectures.

The addition of Tableau also raises questions anew for Salesforce as to how deeply it will invest in data-management capabilities. Last year’s Mulesoft deal upped Salesforce API-oriented integration capabilities, but AWS, Google and Microsoft offer end-to-end database, data warehouse, data integration and high-scale data platform capabilities that give customers one-stop-shop opportunities while also fueling AI capabilities. Salesforce has to decide whether to take a Switzerland approach -- working with all the major clouds and third-party vendors -- or whether it’s going to also offer its own data platforms and services. Perhaps it could choose a middle ground by focusing exclusively on analytics, acquiring, say, Snowflake, and perhaps a bit more in the way of big data and data integration capabilities.

These are interesting times, and I am hearing echoes of the BI and analytics consolidation that happened just over a decade ago. There is a danger that history could repeat itself, as when BusinessObjects, Cognos and Hyperion were acquired in 2007/2008 by SAP, IBM and Oracle, respectively. Back then, many predicted that these massive consolidators would push independents out of business, but that’s not what happened. That’s exactly when Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire and other innovators emerged and it was mostly downhill from there for the incumbents.

The lesson for Salesforce is that it can’t count on the power of its platform to retain and win new Tableau customers; the product must remain competitive on its own merits, and that will require investment and the spark of innovation that got Tableau where it is today.    

Related Reading:
Google to Acquire Looker: First Salvo in a New Round of BI and Analytics Competition
Tableau Advances the Era of Smart Analytics
MicroStrategy Embeds Analytics Into Any Web Interface

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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Google announced May 6 its intention to acquire Looker, in a $2.6 billion, all-cash deal that will see the business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics vendor become, upon the close of the deal, part of the Google Cloud. The move is not totally unexpected, as Looker was a close partner with Google, but it's the first shot that will likely see Google buy more and, most likely, a competitive response from Amazon Web Services.

Looker competes with BI and analytics vendors ranging from IBM, Tableau, Qlik and Microsoft PowerBI to Microstrategy, Oracle and SAP. Looker's strengths include its centralized data-modeling and governance, which promotes consistency and reuse. It runs on top of modern cloud databases, including Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake. There's speculation that Snowflake, which is currently independent, might be a next aquisition target for Google.

Looker has been a significant partner for Google, and with each delployment, customers bring significant amounts of data for analysis onto the Google Cloud. The model for Google going forward is likely to be similar to the way Microsoft promotes Power BI at competitive prices, knowing that there's a payoff in bringing more data onto the cloud platform, making it stickier and driving ongoing storage fees.

With Microsoft promoting Power BI and Google soon promoting Looker, watch for AWS to respond by building or buying an analytics and BI offering that's more attractive and comprehensive than QuickSight, which has thus far, in Constellation's estimation, failed to capture much marketshare.

Established BI and analytics vendors have already been responding to the competitive pressure of Power BI by diversifying and deepening their capabilities, variously adding data-management, data-prep, data catalog, and advanced analytics capabilities. Competitors to Looker will point out that LookML coding is not exactly business-user friendly. What's more, the company has not pursued much in the way of augmented analytics or advanced analytic capabilities, though these are strong suits for Google where it could advance Looker functionality. What's more, Looker is dependent on the underlying database for performance, and customers running on Redshift or other clouds may have concerns about the acquisition by Google.

Google's move will surely spark even more intense competition, and perhaps consolidation among BI and analytics vendors.

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst Constellation Research

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

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First published April 2018. 

For at least five years there has been a distinct push within the identity management industry towards attributes: a steady shift from who someone is to what they are.  It might have started at the Cloud Identity Summit in Napa Valley in 2013, where Google/PayPal/RSA veteran Andrew Nash, speaking on a panel of “iconoclasts” announced that ‘attributes are more interesting than identity’.  A few months earlier, the FIDO Alliance had been born. On a mission to streamline authentication, FIDO protocols modestly operate low down the technology stack and leave identification as a policy matter to be sorted out by implementers at the application level. Since 2013, we’ve also seen the Vectors of Trust initiative which breaks out different dimensions of authentication decision making, and a revamp of the US Federal Government Authentication Guide NIST SP 800-63 which decomposes the coarse old Levels of Assurance. 

Across cyberspace more broadly, provenance is the hottest topic.  How do we know what’s real online? How can we pick fake accounts, fake news, even fake videos?

Provenance in identity management is breaking out all over, with intense interest in Zero Knowledge Proofs of attributes in many Self Sovereign Identity projects, and verified claims being standardised in a W3C standards working group. 

These efforts promise to reverse an inexorable complication. Identity has long been over-analysed and authentication over-engineered.  The more strongly we identify, the more we disclose, and the unintended consequences just keep mounting.  

Yet it doesn’t have to be so. Here’s what really matters:  

• What do you need to know about someone or something in order to deal with them?
• Where will you get that knowledge?
• How will you know it’s true?

These should be the concerns of authentication.  It’s not identity per se that usually matters; instead it’s specific attributes or claims about the parties we're dealing with. Furthermore, attributes are just data, and their provenance lies in metadata.

The conventional wisdom in IDAM now is that few transactions really need your identity.  So why don’t we just kill it off?  Let’s instead focus on what it is that parties really need to know when they transact, and work out how to deliver that knowledge in our transaction systems.

IDAM has been framed for years around a number of misnomers. “Digital identity” for instance is nothing like identity in real life, and “digital signatures” are very strange signatures.  Despite the persistent cliché, there are no online “passports”.

But the worst misnomer of all is the Identity Provider, an abstraction invented over a decade ago to try and create a new order (dubbed at the time, the "Identity Metasystem").  Now, I agree in theory that bank accounts for example may be regarded as “identities”, and it follows that banks could be regarded as “identity providers” (IdPs). But these conceptual models have proved sterile. How many banks in fact see themselves as “identity providers”? No IdPs actually emerged from well-funded programs like Identrus or the Australian Trust Centre, and only one bank ever set up as an IdP in the GOV.UK Verify program. If Identity Providers are such a good idea, they should be widespread by now in all advanced digitizing economies!

The truth is that Identity Providers, as imagined, can’t deliver. Identity is in the eye of the Relying Party. The state of being identified is determined by a Relying Party (RP) once it is satisfied that enough is known about a data subject to manage the risk of transacting with them.

Identity is metaphorical shorthand for being in a particular relationship, defined by the RP (for it is the RP that carries most of the risk if an identification is faulty).  Identity is not the sort of good or service that can be provided; it is a state that is defined and conferred by RPs. The metaphor of identity provision is all wrong; canonical Digital Identity is a false idol.

We hardly ever need to know "who people are" online (or in real life for that matter); we just need to know certain specifics about them. So let’s get over identity, and devote our energies to critical infostructure to supply the reliable data and metadata so urgently needed for an orderly digital economy.

David Chou

CIO Harris Health Systems

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

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I had the opportunity to moderate the telemedicine panel at the Southern California HIMSS event on 5/23/19. We had an outstanding list of panelist:

Zia Agha, MD, Chief Medical Officer & EVP, Clinical Research, Medical Informatics & Telehealth, West Health

William Jih, MD, MBA, Medical Director, Population Health & Strategy, Loma Linda University Medical Center

Michael Pfeffer, MD, FACP, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer for the UCLA Health Sciences

Omid Toloui, MBA, MPH, Vice President, Digital Health, CareMore

Virtual Care Trend

• Five years ago, it would have been a differentiator if you had a virtual care service offering, now it is an expectation from the patient community.
• Roughly 14% growth in Telehealth adoption.
• Poll from MGMA in 2018  - 39% of physicians do not offering telehealth option.  There are still a lot of doubters in the physician community.
• Technology is the easy part of the telemedicine program design.

Challenges with Virtual Health programs

• Health systems do not have a consistent workflow designed for telemedicine, departments specialties utilizing the telemedicine solutions are all unique, making it difficult when creating the telemedicine technology solution.
• Physicians are still skeptical about using a computer screen to diagnose the patient.
• Physicians feel that the loss of touch and senses hinders their ability to make the best clinical decision. 

Chou’s Overview:

• Telemedicine should be used to augment care. The medical community has to understand that technology is not going to be a replacement for clinicians.
• Lack of education on telemedicine training.  The use of technology must be incorporated into the medical school curriculum as we live in the digital world.   Next generations of caregivers are digital natives, and they expect that the use of technology to be pervasive in providing care.  Currently, the medical school curriculum does not have a focus on how the use of technology for physicians.
• Key concerns still exist with uncertainty around reimbursement and physician skeptics, which does not help with adoption.

David Chou

CIO Harris Health Systems

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

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Great event at SAP SAPPHIRENOW with an emphasis on customer experience and the integration of Qualtrics.  The integration of Qualtrics will be the key.  Where is Qualtrics used in healthcare currently?  The healthcare clients that I have spoken to are utilizing Qualtrics mostly for HR employee engagement and surveys for the research department.  The next phase for Qualtrics is to persuade the health system to use the platform from a patient/customer engagement tool.

What’s next for SAP and the Healthcare CIO?

1. ERP optimization is a big theme for healthcare provider systems.  Every hospital system in North America is going through an evaluation of their ERP system.  Organization are looking to either upgrade their current system or evaluating a potential change to the next generation cloud platform offering.  This is an opportunity for SAP to grab the healthcare ERP industry, but the challenge is that SAP is not currently on the shortlist for the North American healthcare provider CIOs at the moment.
2. SAP Intelligent Enterprise.  SAP business object has a great presence throughout the healthcare industry.  The key is to convert these customers to the intelligence platform and will the North American healthcare providers trust SAP as the data platform of choice.

3. Global Healthcare Market.  SAP has done a great job globally in healthcare.  Great customers in the UK, EU, and China has allowed SAP in growing incrementally globally.  I have seen a few healthcare organizations utilize SAP as the main clinical and back office system and that momentum may continue to grow as they focus on building out the platform more.  

David Chou

CIO Harris Health Systems

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

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Big Announcements

• Qlik SaaS and Multi-cloud offering. 
• Attunity acquisition and platform integration.

Healthcare CIO Point of View

• When we think of Qlik, it is still a BI platform while the company’s strategy is to transform Qlik to be a data platform.

• I like the Attunity acquisition because the challenge for every organization’s data transformation is the data integration effort. Hopefully, Attunity will deliver the results as promised.  The key challenge for healthcare providers is data mapping and integration with enterprise healthcare applications.  Will Attunity figure out this out quick and will the existing healthcare clients look to Qlik as an enterprise solution versus a visualization product?

• Great announcement of supporting multi-cloud and SaaS offering.  Enterprise clients that are currently on-premise will have to rely on the expertise of Qlik resources or partners for the migration which CIO should explore deeper.  It is not an easy migration and I believe we are in the early stages of having a migration playbook.
• Qlik product sponsorships typically start at the departmental level for the majority of healthcare clients.  Qlik must work towards getting more executive sponsorship at the CIO level in order to align with the strategy of transitioning to a data platform.