Work Coordination Vendor Smartsheet Acquires Slope

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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On Jan 15, 2019 Smartsheet acquired Slope

Future of Work

When Doing Good Is Your Business, You Still Need the Right Tools: Salesforce.org’s Acquisition of roundCorner

On Monday, January 14, 2019, Salesforce.org, the philanthropic arm of Salesforce, announced its acquisition of roundCorner, a software vendor focused on CRM for the nonprofit sector. Salesforce.org, formerly known as the Salesforce Foundation, is responsible for managing Salesforce’s 1-1-1 initiative. That entails donating 1% of profits, 1% of employee time, and 1% of technology to nonprofits.

In many ways, this acquisition is the logical next step in the long-standing relationship between roundCorner and Salesforce. A Salesforce platinum ISV partner, roundCorner has also received investment from Salesforce in the past. roundCorner’s products, particularly NGO Connect, have formed a core part of Salesforce.org’s offerings for in this space.

Constellation POV

We see two main take-aways from this acquisition:

1. This is likely to be a happy and more comfortable long-term home for roundCorner
2. The type of acquisition highlights the value and importance to customers of specialism

As a for-profit company, roundCorner was competing in a narrow but competitive market. Though bolstered by the partnership with Salesforce, it lacked the market presence of publicly-traded Blackbaud, for example. (For a view on the key players in the nonprofit CRM space, as well as the do’s and don’ts of nonprofit CRM, check out the excellent blog by the folks at Build Consulting.)

Coming officially under the umbrella of Salesforce.org ensures that roundCorner’s technology will continue to play a leading role in Salesforce’s nonprofit offerings. It also secures the long-term investment required to continue to innovate and build out these capabilities.

More importantly, this acquisition points squarely to the crucial role of specialist knowledge. Enterprise systems are only really effective when they are design to address the distinct needs of a given type of business, non-profit or otherwise. The tremendous power of Salesforce’s platform, applications, and ecosystem lies in a customer’s ability to configure those elements to meet their unique needs (while maintaining things like standard data structures and interoperability). The big drawback is that many customers who lack the capabilities and resources (read: most nonprofits) to do this on their own need something adapted to their needs out of the box.

Salesforce.org has been at this long enough to recognize that managing constituents and donors, administering grant processes, and organizing volunteers and events don’t have direct analogues in for-profit business operations. Bringing the specialist capabilities of roundCorner directly under the purview of Salesforce.org should accelerate the ongoing development of a Salesforce offering better tailored to the particular requirements of nonprofits.

Meanwhile, we’ll be watching to see if lessons learned about the value of specialist knowledge in the nonprofit sector influence other aspects of Salesforce’s core business as well.

Photo courtesy of Care International

Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Revenue Officer

DisrupTV: The Pursuit of Workplace Happiness & Innovation in an Exponential, Techie World

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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Musings - Why Open Source has won and will keep... winning

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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By now we know that Open Source has won for platform software and possibly even more... Time to look how it all happened and what the trends going forward are going to be.

 

 

Why Open Source has won

Why Open Source Will keep Winning

Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity

CIO Predictions for 2019

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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It will be another interesting and eventful year in 2019, both in terms of opportunities as well as significant challenges, for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) around the world as they attempt to navigate an increasingly turbulent digital operating environment. It's an environment that's very much in the midst of major and ongoing systemic change in the collective technology and business landscape, both internally and externally to their organizations.

There's also no question that these market dynamics must be successfully navigated and exploited, yet only if the CIO has the resources and sufficient organizational posture. We'll get to the exact nature of the changes below, as well as what we think CIOs will do about them this year.

Making the overall task more complex is that these shifts are taking place on a backdrop of rather confounding forces: Ever-faster tech change, profound cybersecurity concerns, substantial regulatory changes, rapidly evolving customer preferences, and an overarching scarcity of talent that's ready and able to help cope with these shifts.

Currently, I see that the confluence of these issues is making it extraordinarily difficult for IT leaders to focus on a) longer term initiatives like effective digital transformation, b) delivering on projects with less than immediate payoff, c) taking time to explore the strategic possibilities of emerging technology, or even d) remediation of basic technical debt (the largest ongoing, slow burn headwind in many organizations.)

This means coping with immediate fires and obstacles has often resulted in an epic struggle to adequately deliver on key strategic multi-year objectives, vital to the attaining the largest payoffs in IT. The inability to do so is perhaps one of the main indicators of an organization that has become reactive to the forces that affect it. Instead, CIO success more than ever today means proactively setting the agenda and driving the business as well as the broader industry forward with an integrated and disruptive business vision based on effective new digital capabilities.

What then is in store for the CIO in 2019? The real choice is stark: The top IT executives in today's rapidly evolving organizations must match the pace of change, fall behind, or lead the pack. That's the existential issue at stake in today's digitally-infused times, where bold action must be actively supported by out-of-the-box experimentation and pathfinding. Ths must be done while managing the inexorable daily drumbeat of operational issues, service delivery, and the distracting vagaries of the unpredictable, such as a major cyberattack or information breach. The CIO this year must be both a supremely masterful priority juggler and an effective digital leader from the front.

Here are my predictions for what CIOs will encounter this year, and how they will respond:

CIO Predictions for 2019

1. The CIO will have their best-ever opportunity to partner with the CEO and the board. The reality is that most executive teams still lack qualified digital expertise at the leadership level. This is hampering strategic decision making across the enterprise when it comes to becoming a digital native organization. While the CIO can still be perceived as being from the old guard (i.e. IT as a cost center and support unit, or "part of the problem"), the data shows that more CEOs are now picking up the primary mantle of digital transformation, more so even than CIOs today. This creates a unique opening this year for the CIO to become a parter with the CEO and whomever else is driving digital transformation in the C-Suite and board of directors. While I have often encouraged the CIO to foster digital leadership skills, now is the best time to use them, to become a trusted advisor with an equal seat at the top table for mapping out the digital future of the organization. The CIO is uniquely equipped by virtue of understanding the needs of the business, owning many or most of the IT systems that run the business, and managing the invaluable data sets within them. CIO must successfully become what many were hoping the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) would become (though many have): Reinventing the organization as a true digital business and technology company.
2. CIO attention will focus on customer experience like no time before, and collaboration with the CDO and CMO will grow. I have argued that today's continued deconstruction of the enterprise value stream into functional silos (marketing, sales, operations, delivery, customer care, and innovation/R&D) is no longer effective in a world where seamless customer experience is the most important discrimating factor for how a business will perform. In 2019, the CIO will need to help the organization make the transformations well beyond just solving the myriad problems with fragmented and disjointed digital touchpoints themselves. Instead, the CIO will need to begin tackling the tougher underlying problems in involved in creating a more integrated customer experience stack. This means creating genuine master data out of the dozens, and often hundreds, of the poorly integrated or disconnected digital platorms used to serve customers today. Then help the organization restructure the end-to-end customer experience capability from an org structure and process perspective. This won't be completed in 2019, and may take years, but the imperative is clear that getting the customer experience house in order will be absolutely required to thrive and grow, now and even more so in the future. This will require closely working in concert with other C-suite leaders, particular the CDO, CMO, and the Chief Customer Officer (CCO), which a great many CIOs this year will do.
3. Cybersecurity will dominate operational reality, budgets, and management attention, closely following by digital regulation. For anyone keeping score, the sheer scope, seriousness, and breadth of cybersecurity breaches in 2018 showed that virtually all organizations are vulnerable. Consequently, nearly all CIOs will need to continue to up their game this year to invest time and some of their very best resources in keeping the organization safe. Getting caught up in a serious cybersecurity breach is now a career ender for the CIO and his/her peers, never mind the real and most important issue: The safety and privacy of customers, workers, and business partners themselves. This is an easy prediction, but I forecast that 2019 will ring in even more serious breaches and cyberattacks than 2018 as perpetrators continue to get more organized, often aided by the sheer connectedness of tech today. IT leaders need to exert themselves not only on the technology front, but in education and communications both upwards and downwards on prevention, preparation, and response, as well as scale up on-demand incident management teams and proactively exploring emerging security technologies such as AI-based adaptive detection and defense tools. Regulatory concerns such as ongoing work to ensure new and legacy IT systems comply with GDPR or California's new data privacy law will also be high on the list this year, as these regulations have emerged in key operating environments. There are potentially serious ramifications for compliance failure, as it's expected that regulators will begin ruling more actively this year.
4. Digital transformation will become/remain a shortlist corporate priority, but most CIOs will be expected to proceed without (sufficient) new resources. It's a surprisingly little known fact outside the CIO's office that most of the IT budget is used to keep existing systems operating, supported, updated, and maintained. This leaves only minor budgets for innovation or creating new digital lines of business. In an era of all time high tech change and a corporate imperative to disrupt or be disrupted, most CIOs are only seeing single digital IT budget increases, despite often profound talent shortages and mountains of rapidly aging legacy systems/technical debt . I predict more CIOs will make bolder cases for more investment being routed to them for digital innovation initiatives, which is often happening outside of traditional IT today. The upshot: Tech spending is way up, it's just often not being given to the CIO. Leading CIOs will reclaim more of this funding for themselves and ensure it gets used effectively. Yet there is good news too: We now see that many vital elements of digital transformation that can be addressed without major new investment, from developing an enterprise-wide microservices strategy to steadily and proactively improving the master data story in an operational way. These two alone will enable the next generation of growth-creating digital experiences to be developed much more easily, quickly, and inexpensively. I've long observed that the most successful examples of digital transformation have a strong foundation story, often years in the making. At the very least, the CIO can prepare in this way during 2019 as the budget situation is improved this year.
5. The CIO will be increasingly leaned upon as an innovator well beyond IT, but many will be relegated to a second-tier technology infrastructure executive role instead. More will be expected of the CIO in 2019, even as they wear too many hats already. I've explore the new CIO mindset in the past, but as digital infuses virtually every aspect of the business, the CIO no longer has nearly as much direct control over the use of the technology. Instead, as my good friend and IT leadership maven Mary Fran Johnson observed at CIO Perspectives last year in Virginia, influence must now be cultivated and wieldied "as the most important single role" of the CIO today. My prediction: This will be even more true this year. CIOs that are ineffective at using influence to cultivate change agents and drive progress across the organization as well as within the business itself will increasingly be pushed to the margins. CIOs with limited influences will have roles focused more on day-to-day technical functions of cybersecurity, infrastructure management, and business continuity instead of leading the business-focused digital transformation of the organization from the front.
6. It will be a difficult year for CIOs to speed up digital change, as digital "tablestakes" continue to rise faster than solutions are found to become more agile, especially with emerging technology and big tech. The need for IT to move faster and meet stakeholder needs better has been a long standing issue (94% of CIOs I surveyed recently say they have strong or very strong pressure to move faster.) Some have predicted that traditional IT must ultimately break unless new ways are found to move quickly and more responsively. While advances like agile methods and devops has helped, we're going to need solutions on an entirely new scale. I predict the next-generation of IT service management will be forced to evolve quickly in 2019 to be more self-service, inclusive of far more cloud and mobile solutions, and behave much more like a responsive and useful enterprise app store than an frustrating, unsatisfying service desk, IT liason conversation, or procurement process. ITIL 4.0 is finally coming this year, but it won't have much impact in 2019. Instead, I predict that fundamental and outside-the-box rethinking of how IT can reduce time-to-value will be more prevalent this year. Breakthroughs will sorely be needed as tech leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Elon Musk's companies continue to set the global pace, even creating real concern with CIOs that they will move next to compete directly in their own industry.
7. Scarcity of talent will grow and continue to plague new IT initiatives, but some progress will finally be made on alternative talent sourcing. Powerful and rapidly maturing new technologies like big data analytics, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain, to name just some of the most significant all offer the potential to create game changing competitive advantage for organizations. The technologies are available and improving rapidly, but the talent to turn them into effective tools for the business is usually not available in sufficient numbers. High demand for skilled IT staff has resulted in what is effectively negative unemployment in many sectors of the technology and IT worlds this year. CIOs will have a tough job acquiring the talent they need, from technology specialists in these areas, to mid-level and senior managers who can manage the increasingly complex delivery dynamics and web of interdependencies inherent within modern IT solutions. These are increasingly crafted out of an ecosystem of existing IT systems, corporate databases, 3rd party systems, open APIs, and open source software solutions and require those familiar with these many different sources of data and functionality. I predict that instead of competing for talent with the Amazon, Google, and Apples of the tech world, CIOs will move more toward cultivating higher impact educational resources for existing staff. These include aggressive apprenticeship programs, just-in-time online skill building, formal mentoring efforts, internal hackathons, and incubator programs to encourage development of skills, hands-on with the latest tech. I also see a trend that CIOs are demanding better learning resources from their vendors and CHROs both as well. Some of the former, like Salesforce, have actually stepped up with popular upskilling solutions like Trailhead.  More vendors are following and IT leaders will embrace them. I predict the IT industry will also see much wider use of emerging new on-demand talent sources like gig economy techical marketplaces in 2019.
8. Vendor management will be seen to require a fundamental reworking as more IT shifts to SaaS and public cloud. As the gap between IT and the systems that the department actually oversees continues to grow wider -- I'm talking about the separation between IT and the actual resources it uses, which are moving steadily to the public cloud -- the issue of control has begun to return. This is because more and more net-new IT systems run mostly or entirely in the public cloud. Topics like outage management, vendor transparency, communication, responsiveness -- and ultimately, trust -- are taking on all new levels of importance when there's little IT can do except hope that a cloud vendor handles key operational events well when they occur. Getting a handle on service level management of these systems has become steadily more urgent given the sheer number of cloud-based applications and services most organizations use today. Service-level agreement (SLAs) have become a primary operational artifact that must be measured and managed far more closely by both sides. Over the last year, I've heard from the CIOs that I speak with and advise that there is a real desire for improved measurement, automation, and enforcement of cloud service levels. SLA analytics for public cloud is now becoming an industry and is becoming a growing part of the IT service management world. However, I do not expect better and more transparent SLAs to appear widely from cloud vendors yet, other than tweaks to the current uptime/outage dashboards that most of them provide. Instead, what I do see happening this year is steadily growing pressure on cloud vendors to start to offer some version of a "build-your-own-SLA" from templates containing acceptable ranges of parameters based on cost. The cloud has always risked cutting out the middleman, IT in this case. So without some level of control and configuration, IT's role becomes less valuable, even as it should remain the key responsibility that better adapts such solutions to the business. Thus, more variability and control over the service level details and compliance levels of cloud subscriptions will be an increasing push this year. Active governance, backed with data, over cloud SLAs will help sustain IT's relevancy well into the future.
9. The push for automation, especially with AI technologies, will expand both within the CIO's own purview, and become a widespread priority with the most internal stakeholders to-date. It turns out that a key strategy to achieve a lot more in IT while experiencing relatively flat budgets is simply to automate more of what IT does. I'm on record saying that by 2025, 90% of what a CIOs is responsible for must be automated, just to tread water on existing service and staffing levels. But since the hype cycle began on machine learning and AI, automation has captured the imagination of business stakeholders like few other times in history. Helping drive this demand, technologies such as robotic process automation are maturing to the point that they can be rapidly fielded to automate nearly every type of rote business process or activity in fairly short order. The business benefits are considerable as the latest data shows as well, particularly in IT, surprisingly. I predict that rapidly increasing level of automation, both in IT and across the business, will be a top 5 focus for most CIOs in 2019, even if it isn't always called by that name.
10. Employee experience will continue to see underinvestment, particularly in mobile solutions, leading to shortfalls in realizing digital experience for key stakeholders, even as emerging approaches create new promise. 2019 is the year that a high water mark of CIOs will conclude that their digital workplace is a mess, as applications and IT services continue to accumulate. I've seen an concerted effort in some organizations, mostly larger and more well managed enterprises, that are attempting to make a more holistic and integrated experience from what is essentially becoming a grab-bag of formally sanctioned productivity and business applications, mobile applications, and shadow IT. One approach is to create more designed end-to-end experiences around high value processes built on top of existing IT systems, or provide intelligent "super portals" that bring all the applications and data together into a more organized and searchable model. The right answer depends on the organization naturally, but I actively see leading CIOs experimenting to find the right combination of new approaches for employee experience in 2019. I am also sanguine for the likelihood that contemporary "intelligent" intranets, or even enterprise social networks and team collaboration platforms, are good centers of gravity for the overall employee experience. The data to bear out the most popular and effective target platforms for holistic employee experience will start to emerge this year as well. 
11. The post-ERP era has arrived, and build vs. buy is back on the table as organizations seek to build their new Digital Core. The rise of highly effective low code tools combined with a great many IT products having APIs and/or microservices that make them readily reusable and recomposable, has led us to a strange path down from the mountain of long-held truth better known as "don't customize IT (especially ERP) systems, it's almost never worth it." Most companies now have well deployed, yet increasingly aging, ERP systems that now run much of the day-to-day business. With the rise of digital cores, it's not clear that organizations are well served by an ERP-focused system any more. Instead, as I've explored above, digital experience has become the new measure and digital boundary over which value is created and exchanged. Organizations now seek less monolithic systems and instead want to be able to access digital business functions and data in a way that can be projected into any touchpoint or experience. Low code tools and integration-platfoms-as-a-service (iPaaS) make it quite straightforward to weave just-in-time applications that meet stakeholders needs in short time periods, even for one-off processes in way that's cost effective. In the post-ERP era, data, services, processes, and experience that are well structured, shared, and accessible are becoming the differentiator and force multipler. I argue that this is enabling a much-needed new generation of experience creation to emerge that is highly industrialized and scaled. Instead of customization, new on-demand experience creation will provide the better significant strategic advantage in the near future. This will unleash mass customization, personalization, and perfect fit solutions. In 2019, I predict CIOs will be investing in exploring their options to create this important new fabric for growth and value creation/exchange.
12. Multicloud will be a pervasive reality for most organizations, CIOs will push for more ways to take advantage of its benefits. Every organization today is multicloud, they just often don't fully realize it. IT organizations are inheriting whatever public cloud their SaaS and mobile application providers are using, plus whatever shadow IT and departmental apps use that are outside of IT control (see: the CMO's martech portfolio.) But CIOs are at last concerned about having their data and SLAs in so many buckets, and often not even having a grasp of which buckets. As more enterprise cloud vendors allows Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) to be swapped out of the bottom of their application stack with the customer's preferred commercial cloud of choice, there will be more motivation to understand multicloud dependencies in modern IT. This will lead to economy of scale and arbitrage of cloud capacity to the benefit of the business. Expect multicloud to be a hot topic for both governance and control as well as cost management in 2019.

Any single predictions list is likely going to leave out some interesting ideas. For example, I don't see CIOs engaged much in culture change for digital and so it's not listed here, but that is clearly one of the main obstacles to successful digital modernization and transformation. So please leave your own CIO predictions in comments for discussion below, or on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Related Reading:

Six Trends Affecting the Innovation-Led CIO

The Digital Transformation of Back-End Customer Experience

Constellation Research 2018 Digital Transformation Study

The Business Transformation 150 for 2019: Our global list of top digital leaders, including many top CIOs to follow

New C-Suite Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Future of Work Leadership AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Analytics Automation B2B B2C CX EX Employee Experience HR HCM business Marketing SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology eCommerce Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP finance Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service Chief Executive Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Experience Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Operating Officer

2019 Predictions for Marketing, Sales, and Service: Market Mashups, the Rise of Specialists, and a Reinvigorated Grim Reaper

After the gentle lift-off of a mid-week start to 2019, it’s time to focus on the year ahead. Here are a few predictions of what’s to come based on signals we started to see by the end of 2018.

1. More Market Mashups

Companies are realizing that in order to become truly customer-centric, they have to do things differently. Software vendors are one step ahead of them. Anyone and everyone who thinks they have a better way of managing customer interactions or building customer insights will get into the action. Some already have. For the most part, this is blurring the lines between existing markets rather than creating new ones, but that could change.

Customer service meets sales and marketing. In November 2018, Zendesk announced new offerings in CRM and marketing automation, expanding beyond its stronghold in service desk. Expect others to follow their lead. While the jury is out on the strength of these capabilities and how successful Zendesk will be, the move represents an important addition to the market mix.

Service desk is inherently customer centric, so vendors coming from this space bring a fundamentally different philosophy to managing sales and marketing activities. This is good news for companies trying to build consistent customer experiences across marketing, sales, and service. Tools that provide a consistent view of customers but the flexibility to adapt to specific business practices across all three have tremendous potential.

Customer experience becomes just another enterprise app. SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics offers more than an example of the multiples to be paid for expertise in assessing customer and employee experience. Perhaps most significantly, it’s an indication of the potential value of incorporating these insights into operations throughout an enterprise. That’s a very good thing. Marketing, sales, and customer service most obviously benefit, but insights straight from customers can (and should) influence just about everything a business does.

The full impact of tracking customer experiences (tracking is not the same as “experience management,” more on that here) lies in consistently operationalizing those insights. The first step is gathering them. The second is disseminating them appropriately. The third is doing something with them.

Workflows get specific. This is where things get interesting—and complicated. To design compelling and consistent experiences, especially across departmental silos, you need to create workflows. Those workflows, with customers the central focus, cut across departments, teams, and types of work.

While most of the large enterprise suite vendors would argue (with varying degrees of justification), that they already make such workflows possible, this isn’t their heartland. A wide range of vendors with different origins and backgrounds are tackling the challenge with various approaches. One example, Totango, describes itself as a customer success software provider. Using a data-driven, customer-centric approach, Totango provides the tools for analyzing customer data flows and building workflows to enable “success blocks.” These blocks are designed around specific outcomes and KPIs that describe success for both customers and the companies working with them.

Ring Central comes at the challenge from a different perspective. The call center vendor is building on its background in customer service and collaboration to unite (the theme of its 2018 event) customer experience and employee experience. In principle, by reducing the number of tools that employees use to work together and manage various channels of customer interaction, companies can significantly increase both employee engagement and customer satisfaction simultaneously.

Yet another example comes from robotic process automation (RPA). Ushur has built a system to combine workflow automation with engagement automation. The vendor offers a templatized approach and AI tools to analyze unstructured text and automate conversations based on content. Workflows address different types of conversations, such as customer service, claims processing, and billing, and can be tailored for specific requirements.

The scope and scale of workflows that impact customer experience are vast. They range from specific types of conversations on a micro level to customer lifecycles on the macro level. Some technology vendors will have the flexibility to address both. The biggest question is on what level companies will choose to tackle the workflow challenge first and where they go from there. As a result, expect this to emerge as an increasingly crowded (and confusing) market in 2019.

2. Specialists Rise to the Top and Bring the Biggest Value

Workflows provide a great segue to another important prediction for 2019: the rise of specialists. If you’re trying to achieve specific objectives, generic workflows and generic data management systems won’t cut it. Objectives and priorities vary from sector to sector and business to business. They’re integral to competitive differentiators.

As best practices get further baked into technology tools and automated workflows, it’s important to make sure they’re the right practices for you and your organization. Increasingly, that means going to vendors who really understand the particular challenges you face. The advantages included better tailored solutions and significantly faster time to results. That’s true across a broad range of technology areas, but here are just a few examples of specialists that are proving their worth.

MakerSights focuses on “decision-enablement” for the fashion sector of retail. They support the unique needs of fashion brands with a structured approach and process to product testing. Through a combination of the brands’ own customer contacts and a proprietary respondent community, MakerSights helps to close the gap between what brands think customers value and what customers really want. The vendor effectively combines data collection and analysis tools with forecasting that's accessible to a range of employee roles and genuine market expertise. The team at MakerSights is keenly aware of the financial risks of accumulating debt inventory, the need to align to the retail calendar, and how to streamline decades-old decision processes for testing and launching merchandise. Though the company’s customer base started with online retailers, established fashion retailers navigating brick and mortar and online are its fastest-growing segment.

Kahuna has tailored marketing automation for the distinct requirements of online marketplaces. Managing both sides of a market requires different approaches for buyers and for sellers, as well as a recognition that it’s possible to be both at the same time. Kahuna provides both the technology platform and AI tools to manage both audiences. The vendor also brings expert knowledge of managing the lifecycle of a healthy marketplace—the priorities during initial launch and growth aren’t the same once a marketplace is mature.

Mindtickle, a software and services company, specializes in sales onboarding and training—what it calls “sales readiness.” Through a combination of tools, including AI, and expertise in effective training techniques, Mindtickle works with sales organizations to make sales teams more productive. Beyond providing the most effective materials, approaches, and tools, the company tracks individuals and teams. By assessing their currency and proficiency—their readiness—Mindtickle believes it can help companies understand their capacity to sell as a predictor of revenue, not just assign sales targets.

All of these examples illustrate that the real benefit is in solving specific problems—and that’s where specialist knowledge is invaluable. As companies of all ilk reset their focus on understanding customers, expect them to turn to specialists for help.

3. The Scythe Comes Out for MarTech

Exciting as it is to find new providers of useful tools, there are way too many MarTech vendors out there for any reasonable marketing organization to come anywhere close to evaluating. Close to 7,000 at last count, according to Scott Brinker and Anand Thacker. And though the last several years have brought even more expansion in the competitive landscape, this might just be the year that the Grim Reaper sets his sights on all that fodder.

The possibility of a recession in 2019 will drive (much needed) consolidation in the MarTech sector. At a macro level, recession or reasonable fears thereof will put pressure on marketing budgets, reducing available spend on new technology tools. Simultaneously, marketing departments will more closely examine the comparative return on all of the tools they use. Those that don’t deliver meaningful value will be cut.

Companies will evaluate where specific tools provide critical capabilities and deliver measurable returns across KPIs tied to customer engagement and understanding. Technologies that address multiple areas and integrate easily are more likely to make the cut. So are the ones that—wait for it—provide specialist capabilities that incorporate relevant best practices.

Yes, we’ll undoubtedly see a fair bit of merger and acquisition activity. But if fears of recession prove concrete, many vendors simply won’t find a reasonable exit. That should worry the thousands and thousands of MarTech vendors out there.

What's your view? What do you anticipate in 2019?

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DisrupTV: The Only Constant is Change, and It’s Gaining Momentum

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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It’s a new year, and while I don’t like setting unobtainable resolutions, I do take the opportunity to reset and create a clear path for the next 6-12 months. This week on DisrupTV, a solid theme arose from our interviews that we should all consider as we set off to find success in this new year.

Embrace Change.

 “Today will be the slowest things will ever be moving,” explained Stuart Miniman, host & senior analyst at theCUBE. Let that sink in…

The speed in which technology is disrupting business processes is daunting. We adopt these new tools with the purpose of easing a pain points, but they sometimes make our work lives much more complicated (just ask your IT guy/gal!). And while we spent some time on the show geeking out on the techy topics, such as multi-clouds, SaaS, serverless, AI, containers and IoT, this theme translates to all parts of an organization. You can’t stand still and get stuck in “this is how we do things.” That’s exactly how you get left behind.

Augment Humanity.

Rachel Happe, co-founder & principal at The Community Roundtable, expanded upon the sentiments. She was trained to do better than technology. Times are changing; we need to train people to complement technology. We need to do what AI and other technologies can’t, she explained.

We, as humans, provide creativity and the authentic connections needed to build strong communities. Our value lives in the true personalization at each touchpoint that technology can’t offer. We are the weakest link if we don’t change our mindsets and build our skillsets in a new way. She expressed the need to truly engage, build relationships, and learn, alongside the tools available to us.

Meet Without Distractions.

Embracing change is a good focal point for 2019. The end goal will still be there, but if we can stay nimble through the constant state of change, we can meet that end destination in maybe a better way than we imagined.  

So how do we cut out the noise, manage the chaos and get a solid standing in the ever-evolving world around us? Technology has and will continue to accelerate how we conduct business. We must change WITH technology but also learn there’s time to grow and change WITHOUT it.

Here’s a place to start: Set up meetings without distractions. This may mean pulling out the trusty notepads and leaving phones/computers turned off (Gasp!). Visual Strategist Heather Willems discussed the importance of focusing your attention in meetings. Using visual strategy to draw up what is being said helps focus the conversation, heighten engagement and capture the essence of sometimes complete chaos. The final product helps illustrate goals, action plans and direction for the team. You can then present it visually to create a constant reminder for everyone, keeping the team focused and honest.

I used to doodle in every tedious meeting I was dragged into early in my career. Little did I know that I was actually focusing my energy into the conversation and learning!

To really keep up with the competition, build a stronger team, grow professionally, tackle market shifts and just keep sane day to day, accept today’s reality, continue to learn, and embrace change. These small steps will kick off 2019 strong and help set a solid path for growth personally and professionally.

I’ve only just skimmed the top of the great advice! Please check out the full discussions in the video replay here or the podcast. The knowledge shared during the three interviews is invaluable! Tune in every week for DisrupTV on Fridays 11 AM PT/2 PM ET. Continuous learning is the best path to instill change.

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Constellation 2018 Enterprise Awards

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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By The Constellation Research Team

Awards Showcase What Was Top Of Mind In Enterprise Technology At The End of The Decade

This year the Constellation Research team attended over 270 events, engaged in 1000's of inquires and briefings, conducted 1000's of media inquiries, and almost touched 1 billion impressions in the social sphere. As disruptive technology in the past decade evolved from cloud, AI, social, mobile, IOT and big data, 2019 saw the evolution and maturity of IOT, 3D printing, 5G, robotics, mixed reality, AI, and quantum computing. Top of mind business themes included the privacy rights, data-driven digital networks, stakeholder capitalism, augmented humanity, and digital ethics.

Before the team ushers in the new decade, Constellation takes one last moment to reflect on 2019, an era of the best US economy in history, the most divisive politics and discontent around the world, and a year where technology remained in the spotlight for political, economic societal, environmental, and legislative mind share. Tech went from a force of good to a force for evil in a blink of an eye.

Amidst this backdrop, the Constellation Research team is proud to announce the 2019 Enterprise Awards.

BEST ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE STARTUP

This category recognizes when an enterprise software startup achieved escape velocity in mind share and relevance.

Winner: Outreach

Outreach, which is a sales acceleration app that automates contact sequences and gives inside salespeople prioritized activities and recommended next best actions. It may sound pretty simple, but what they do helps companies operate like they have much bigger sales teams, get more quickly to the real opportunities that are likely to close, and focus on sealing the deal. They're officially a unicorn with the latest round of funding they got earlier this year--now valued at $1.1B on about $100M in revenue that is growing like crazy.

Runners Up: DataGrail, EagleView, Invoca, Sisu

DataGrail made their big splash as the purpose-built privacy platform taking on GDPR compliance. So, it is understandable that in their early days, their primary marquee customers were EU based grappling with the realities of compliance. But now, the Menlo Park, CA based venue tackles all things privacy, trust and transparency just in time for California, Nevada and New York to usher in punishing data privacy, security and governance demands via regulation. DataGrail allows an organization to identify and map applications and the data they bring into the enterprise…think of them as the easy button of compliance with hundreds of pre-built application connectors and integrations for data lakes and the promise of no-code on-boarding. The goal here is that new systems can be automatically detected, and privacy requests performed without involving application owners. In other words, you can check off the opt-out, inventory and tracking demands of new regulations like CCPA while also managing the opt-in, security, quality and permissions tracking demands of GDPR. Considering how much chaos is expected in the privacy space in 2020, DataGrail might prove to be the right startup at the right moment in time.

Bellevue, Washington based EagleView's aerial imagery, data analytics and geographical information system solutions pioneers in the global aerial imagery market. With a $125M patent court win against rival Verisk and its Xactware Solutions unit behind them, and the arrival of Michael Park in January, this company is building a data-driven digital network that fights insurance fraud, improves government planning, enables smarter construction, and allows utilities to scale maintenance.

Invoca, whose AI-based solutions analyze call conversations (mostly sales, but anything inbound) to identify customer insights. Invoca's tools get used to drive tighter connections between marketing campaigns, advertising spend, and business results. Along the way--and this is what I find most impressive about it--the tools highlight all kinds of issues that impact customer experience (like IVR systems that aren't programmed effectively, hold times to get to salespeople that are way too long, support issues that are diverting potential upsets). They're providing the substance that allows different departments (often marketing or analytics teams) to have the right conversations with other parts of the business to make the changes that lead to really significant improvements. This is the kind of stuff that helps to grow top line revenue and drive bottom-line cost savings at the same time.

San Francisco-based Sisu stood out in a crowded BI and analytics market by taking a focused approach to addressing business problems instead of piling on yet more tools for developing reports and dashboards. Sisu focuses on delivering diagnostic analytics that go beyond telling organizations what happened to informing them why things changed. Sisu does root-cause analysis over time to make it clearer why key performance indicators are headed in the right or wrong direction. It's the crucial first step to knowing how to act to ensure better outcomes.

BEST ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE VENDOR

This category recognizes the enterprise software vendor who improved their customer relevance, market share, customer satisfaction, and brand standing.

Winner: Zoho

Zoho has emerged as one of the winners in delivering business productivity and enterprise class applications to the small and medium sized business market. Their success gives them an opportunity to go up-market to the enterprises who continue to see escalating costs and a slowdown of innovation in the enterprise software market. The company's ever-expanding portfolio is designed as constituent parts of a greater whole, so everything works together. Led by Sridhar Vembu, the co-founder and CEO, Zoho has found a formula to digitize businesses at scale. With an estimated valuation of $2 billion (USD) for Zoho, the company remains private and has not taken any investments from venture capitalists. The relentless focus on reinvention and new ways of working has enabled the organization to deliver not only innovation at scale, but also a massive breadth of business applications and platform.

Runners Up: Splunk and Smartsheet

Splunk, a popular cloud-based analytics platform has been on a roll for several years now, recent,y reaching 18,000 enterprise customers. The company has reached an inflection point with the installation current CTO, Tim Tully, mantra product design says that products such as theirs should be “indulgent”, beautiful, and eminent,y usable. The company’s stylish user experiences and famously incisive analytics visualizations rank at the top of the industry.

Smartsheet, a publicly traded SaaS company that offers enterprise-grade work management solutions, has one of the most engaged and enthusiastic customer followings in the tech business. Far from being cultish, however, the company achieves this passionate status by delivering one of the most practical and effective collaboration tools in the industry.

BEST ENTERPRISE SERVICES VENDOR

Winner: Accenture

Source: Accenture

Runners Up: Capgemini and Tata Consulting Services (TCS)

Google Cloud is currently in a distant third position when it comes to cloud provider market share. To gain market share it needs to get more of a share of enterprises IT spending, and a Analytics / BI solution like Looker fills exactly that role. Looker caters also well with the bigger Google Cloud play of bringing AI, BigData and ML to the masses - the technical savvy business user. Looker's ability to be embedded gives Google Cloud additional load and CxO in enterprises more options to address analytics and visualization needs in the next generation application projects.

BEST PARTNERSHIP

This category recognizes the enterprise partnership that delivered the most impact for customers and the market.

Winner: Google's Ascension Health partnership

Healthcare took center stage this year with the public cloud companies clamoring over healthcare partnerships. One of the nation’s leading non-profit health systems, Ascension, partnered with Google Cloud's AI and ML solutions to improve healthcare experiences and outcomes. With over 2600 sites of care including 150 hospitals and over 50 senior living facilities, this mega-partnership drew concern among regulators. More than just shifting workloads to the cloud, using GSuite, and putting new tools to work for front line healthcare delivery teams, Project Nightingale, seeks to modernize healthcare with a data-driven approach to transforming the continuum of care. Asscenion's reach provides Google with massive population health data and a good cohort data set to apply ML and AI. This deal represents the battle for industry data in data-driven networks and will be the first of many across industries.

Runners Up: Cerner and Amazon AWS

EMR and healthcare tech giant, Cerner, takes a major step towards modernizing their enterprise applications with a cloud first mentality. Historically, the Cerner culture built applications with a not invented here approach. However the opportunity to build in the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), openeed up opportunities to rethink and recreate the core Cerner application. Migrating the core Cerner application to AWS, along with the utilization of AWS machine learning platform will hasten the move for Cerner clients towards population health management and value based care.

BEST CEO

This category recognizes the best enterprise CEO. Enough said.

Winner: Aneel Bhusri, Workday

Aneel Bhusri has shown the persistence and patience that is needed to potentially change the ERP category for the better. With the closure of the Analysis, Planning and Execution cycle, the back office gains all the innovations of the latest technologies delivered in the cloud. Originally starting with HCM, then adding Finance and more recently Operations capabilities, Workday has set out to inherently integrate analysis, planning and integration automation needs. As with all fundamental changes to the value proposition of a software category, this transition takes time and education of the markets. Both hav been given and delivered by Workday with Bhusri pushing through numerous product development architectures as well as acquisition to get the 'virtual cycle' of ERP to a new level. Workday's next step will be the move of Workday's product to the public cloud, in order to take advantage of cheap compute and availability to fuel AI / ML capabilities that are needed to take ERP to the 21st century. Add a deep bench of management talent and a customer focused mission, Workday has delighted a wide range of customers to take market share from legacy players. The mission and purpose started by Co-Founder Dave Duffield and passed on to Aneel Bhusri appears to be on course to transform core operations software in the next decade.

Runners Up: Thomas Kurian (Google), Marc Benioff (salesforce.com)

It was a surprise when Oracle product leader and President, Thomas Kurian, switched his commute exit to a few exits south on US 101 from Ralston Road to Mathilda Avenue for Google Cloud. Since his hiring, Kurian has not rested as he expanded on the vision of Google Cloud way beyond the original vision of previously leader Diane Greene. No longer is AI / ML and security are the key value propositions, but Google Cloud has aggressively pursued next gen compute load, with Google Anthos. A bigger focus on GSuite for the future of work and a vertical apps agenda (e.g. in M=media) give Google Cloud a new and better shot at moving up from its current #3 position. A more ISV and open source friendly approach makes Google an attractive cloud provider for vendors that are worried to be squeezed out by larger IaaS players. An executive team overhaul, a bigger focus on go-to-market capacity and commitment to enterprise requirments round up the increased potential of Google Cloud in 2020.

Marc Benioff continues to find the balance between tech for social good and innovation sherpa for enterprises seeking business transformation. From hiring the top talent into salesforce.com for the past two decades to creating new roles such as Chief Equality Officer and creating the Office of Ethical and Humane Use, Marc has pioneered what the modern corporation may look like in the re-emerging trend of stakeholder capitalism. Since inception, Benioff has espoused an integrated philanthropic approach of pledging 1% of product, time, and resources, known as the 1-1-1 model. Salesforce.com has given more than $240 million in grants, 3.5 million hours of community service and product donations of more than 39,000 non-profits and educational institutions. Marc's presence at the World Economic Forum and Business Roundtable have shifted the corporate mindset and shown how tech companies can lead the way to improving global issues.

BEST NEW ENTERPRISE CATEGORY

This category recognizes the best new enterprise category that made an impact to the market.

Winner: Sales Engagement Platforms

This category of tools pulls data from CRM systems, productivity tools (e.g. email, phone, collaboration, etc.), and other sources of customer information to organize, prioritize, and automate sales activities to improve close rates and deal sizes. In effect, Sales Engagement Platforms deliver a type of low-code workflow management tool (with a dash of ML and AI). Purpose built for sales people, the systems encapsulate best practices gleaned from actual results. With over 60+ sales engagement solutions in the market, this new category separates the wheat from the chaff. Key vendors embracing this category include: Clearslide, Dealhub, Groove, MixMax, Outreach, Reply.io, RevenueGrid, SalesLoft. Scaura, and Xant.

Runners up: Gig Economy For The Enterprise and Data Driven Digital Networks

GigEconomy for the enterprise recognizes the ability to bring just in-time skills and resources and crowdsourcing platforms together in the future of work. The blending of free-lancers and full timers enable the best talent to be applied to the right engagement and project at all times. Vendors such as Gigster's PeopleCloud and Wipro's TopCoder exemplify this category.

Data-Driven Digital Networks apply disruptive and exponential tech such as Cloud, 5G, IOT, Blockchain, and AI to craft new businesses models with a subscription commerce, smart services, cross value chains, or joint venture approaches. The value of the network comes from the insight, not the transactions. These digital feedback loops power next best action, recommendations, and contextual decisions. IBM FoodTrust won this year's SuperNova Awards in this new enterprise category.

BEST NEW ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE MARKETING OF THE YEAR

Runners Up: SAP, Oracle, and Google Cloud

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Digital Transformation Yields Positive ROI for 68% of Early Adopters

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Constellation's latest report, the Constellation 2018 Digital Transformation Study, examines the state of digital transformation among the first movers, early adopters and fast followers that constitute Constellation Research’s subscriber base.

This report is based on findings from the Constellation Research 2018 Digital Transformation Survey, in which Constellation asked survey respondents to identify the major priorities of their digital transformation efforts today, who is leading digital transformation, impediments to digital transformation, challenges that particularly vex executives, the state of implementation of emerging technologies, the state of investment in maturing digital technologies, workforce issues and digital transformation’s impact on innovation in the enterprise. 

While organizations’ digital transformation strategies may have varied goals and challenges, one thing is clear: with 68 percent of respondents reporting positive ROI for digital transformation strategies, digital transformation is now a profitable endeavor, and many are enjoying its results (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Return on Digital Transformation Investment 

The Goals of Digital Transformation in 2018

Constellation asked respondents to identify the three most important goals of their organization’s digital transformation strategy.

Collectively, the top five goals of respondents’ digital transformation are as follows: reaching and engaging customers more effectively, at 50 percent; building a competitive advantage in the current market, 46 percent; implementing new, data-driven business models, 36 percent; increasing revenue, 35 percent; and modernizing legacy IT systems and processes and reducing costs, 31 percent (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Digital Transformation Goals in 2018

Read about leadership trends, impediments, investment in emerging technologies and more in the full-length study. 

This report is part of Constellation's open research library. Download a free copy of the report here: Constellation Research 2018 Digital Transformation Study

Experience Management: Hate the Term, Love the Concept

If you’ve read my recent blog post on Customer Understanding (more on this soon), it will come as no surprise that my major concern is that far too many businesses are missing the boat when it comes to understanding their customers and anticipating their needs.

So, I’ve been watching the growing buzz on Experience Management (XM) with particular interest. The term has been catapulted into the headlines, most notably of late with SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics, a digital research and survey company that built much of its business on customer, brand, and employee experience management.

The Good

The concept of XM, however, is much broader than this deal alone would suggest. XM requires harnessing all of your knowledge about a particular group—say, customers or employees—to shape everything from what you offer them to how you communicate and interact with them. In principle, providing them with experiences and offerings that better meet their needs makes them more valuable customers or more dedicated employees.

This isn’t a new idea. Marketers have always attempted to track customer behaviors, online and elsewhere. They’ve conducted brand equity surveys to determine where their companies ranks in customer perception. For years, human resource departments in large companies have run regular personnel surveys to track employee engagement.

What’s different now is formalizing those inputs and making them part of regular, consistent feedback loops that can inform all kinds of activities and interactions. In the case of customers, XM extends that feedback beyond passive data collection—tracking website traffic patterns or email opens, for example—to actively seeking input from individual customers. This provides an invaluable source of insights into customer priorities and preferences.

Asking customers for their views and input provides a much clearer understanding of their intentions. It tells you far more about their expectations and preferences—the reasons why they do something—than simply identifying what they do. It offers a powerful means of improving customer experience so that every interaction feels as if it were tailored to that individual. (Of course, doing this well requires both qualitative as well as quantitative input, but that’s another subject for another blog post.)

Yes, there are lots of things to like about XM. The label, unfortunately, is not one of them.

The Bad

The first black mark against Experience Management is that it is a misnomer. You simply cannot manage something over which you do not have control. Let’s be clear: companies absolutely can and should shape the experiences of their customers (and their employees) as thoughtfully and effectively as they can. But if you think you can manage them, think again. Experience is in the eye of the beholder. Until you can manage what side of the bed a customer (or employee) got up on in the morning, you won’t be managing their experience. (Seriously, please don’t even try to manage what side of the bed anybody but you gets up on.)

Call me a pedant if you will, but what we’re really talking about here is not Experience Management but proactively seeking customer (or employee) input to better shape their experiences. That holds tremendous value.

The Ugly

The second strike against XM comes from its common usage. Most of the time, the term XM describes a set of capabilities to survey customers or employees and build those insights into a knowledge base. I cannot understate the value in these inputs, especially when combined with other sources of insight such as behavioral analysis.

Yet seeking and analyzing inputs is only half the XM equation. In order to shape an experience (much less manage it!), you need to do something with those insights. That means taking action and making decisions—and not just in corporate headquarters. To do that, you must find a way to put the relevant insights and analysis into the hands of employees so that they can do their jobs more effectively. Even better if you can do so at the most appropriate moment in time.

In the case of customer experience, that could mean giving product managers better feedback on their designs, empowering agents to change customer service policies, helping marketers hone their messages, or providing salespeople with more compelling value propositions and commercial terms. Preferably, all of the above and more.

Applying insights to improve the myriad interactions that form an experience is no trivial task. Interpreting customer feedback is not the same as knowing what to do with it. A given set of insights may fuel different kinds of decision-making in different contexts. Using them effectively requires asking the right questions to determine how and where they provide useful answers.

An airline, for example, might use the same customer feedback to help the marketing team determine what messaging to develop for the next set of campaigns on one hand and the airport staff modify the process for checking luggage on the other. Each of those teams uses different elements of that knowledge base in different forms to do its job. 

The tools and processes to apply customer or employee insights are not the same one used to gather and analyze them. Identifying and implementing the former is a much bigger topic—one we’ll address further in detail.

Bottom Line

Contemplating the Pacific from my window, I’m not crazy enough to think that I can overcome the rising tide behind an increasingly popular term. All I ask is that as we use it, we do so with open eyes about what XM really means—and what it doesn’t.

Data to Decisions Marketing Transformation Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Revenue Officer