New Report: Few Companies Have Evolved Into a Digital Organization

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

The report by Capgemini, “Organizing for Digital: Why Digital Dexterity Matters” — conducted in collaboration with MIT Center for Digital Business — reveals that digital organizations reported outperforming competitors on key performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction and innovation. The ‘digital masters’, just 7% per cent of companies, display “digital dexterity” – the ability to rapidly change organizational design to realize more value from digital technologies – such as forging new partnerships or identifying and deploying internal expertise.

MY POV: This makes sense as most companies are still trying to decide if they should or need to pay attention to digital — like it’s a channel or a app. It’s really a mindset of how a business is run and how decisions are made and whether or not departments understand their individual contribution to the customer experience as it fits into the overall, brand customer experience. Individual departments can no longer remain silos. They must do their part in the context of the whole. Otherwise the customer experience, as some point in the value chain ends up not meeting or exceeding customer expectations. And not meeting customer expectations means customers will no longer be customers. They will patronize competitors who have maximized their digital dexterity because the customer experience will be more optimized to be customer-centric.

Digital Dexterity Self-Assessment: Based on the research results, the report provides a high-level self assessment guide allowing executives to gauge where their organizations are on the digital dexterity continuum. It also reveals that advanced levels of digital dexterity allows organizations to seize opportunities and respond to disruptions much more quickly than their traditional competitors. In today’s volatile and disrupted world, capability leadership is not enough. Organizations also need to be nimble and flexible – dexterous – if they are to respond to ever-changing technology advances, emerging competitive disruptions, and changing customer needs

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Digital Capabilities Drive Business Results: Digital capabilities drive business results in key areas such as improving the customer experience, boosting employee engagement or enhancing internal operations. However, digital dexterity allows organizations to seize opportunities – and respond to disruptions and changes – much more quickly than their traditional competitors. Our research found that organizations that are high on digital dexterity are more responsive, better at finding talent, and able to self-organize at speed. They also enjoy significant advantages in identifying and re-deploying expertise when it is needed and are better at establishing partnerships (see figure below.)

Every enterprise has the potential to become a digital organization, but it will require leadership, investment and tenacity. Drawing on our research, our experience in working with clients and interviews with industry practitioners, we have identified four dimensions that are critical (see figure below).

? Digital-First Mindset: seeking and prioritizing digital solutions first and foremost
? Digitized Practices: digitizing operations and encouraging collaborative ways of working and learning
Empowered Talent: raising the digital IQ of the organization, developing key skills and increasing engagement
Data Access & Collaboration Tools: accessing data and collaboration tools to drive innovation and share intelligence across the organization

A Digital Mindset: A digital-first mindset is a distinguishing feature of a digital organization. It means that the default position of the organization is to employ a digital solution first. For instance, how does the organization connect with its customers? How does it redesign its core processes using the power of digital technologies? How does the organization think of addressing any new challenge using digital technologies rather than traditional approaches? In the research, 80% of digital organizations said that they take advantage of digital solutions wherever possible, as against only 37% of all firms.

Digitized Practices: Digitized operations, data-driven decision- making and collaborative learning are essential practices for organizations’ adaptability and long-term resilience. In our survey, 80% of digital organizations believed that their core operational processes were automated and digitized. Across all firms this drops to 32%.

Empowered Talent: In the survey, 70% of digital organizations said that their enterprises have well- established, well-distributed digital skills. However, across all firms, this drops to just 14%. Digital organizations put a premium on building widespread digital skills and ensuring engagement for its people within and beyond their organization’s boundaries.
Is your organization stalling, intimating, engaging or self-reinforcing digital capabilities? To find out more, here’s the whole report.

@drnatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Customer-Facing, Digitized Organizations

This report comes after two years of research that was conducted in collaboration with MIT’s Center for Digital Business from January 2014 to September 2015. Together, the team conducted in-depth interviews with thirty-one industry leaders representing enterprises from a range of industries to assess the qualities of companies that were able to quickly adapt to the increasing use of digital technologies and data. A survey of 274 industry executives, representing 138 different enterprises across 28 countries was then conducted to validate the relationship of an organization’s key characteristics with abilities that help firms easily adapt to new technologies.

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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Workday Tech Summit - Progress Report

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…...

We had the opportunity to attend Workday's TechSummit, held at the beautiful Cavallo Point resort in Sausalito.

So take a peek at my takeaways:

I you cannot watch - read along: Always tough to pick the Top 3 takeaways - but here you go:

Insights Architecture - Workday gave us an update on their Insights Apps architecture - and no surprise it uses all the right ingredients for a next generation Application - Spark, Hadoop etc. - always good to learn more. Deployment options and locations was something we did not get to. I asked CEO Bhusri if Workday is slowing down on Insight Apps and his response was that customers are figuring out how to use them. Good problem to have.

Data Center Locations and Operations - For the first time we got an official update on data center locations (3 in the US, 2 in Europe) and how they are connected in (AWS similar) high availability zones. Workday has done a lot in the past to achieve higher resilience and continues to work along these lines, a key area for customers who are putting more and more, larger and larger and more critical (e.g. Finance) applications on the Workday infrastructure.
Presentation Services - The Workday extension story has initially been non existent, then was extended object by object (on my question where the vendor is - the answer was that customers do not prioritize this high anymore, as enough has been done) and now has an interesting new chapter with Presentation Services. The service allows customers to create their own screens and UIs, a major step forward. It is also the technology base for the partnership with ADP in regards of Payroll, where the service is being used to render, enter and validate the fields and information exposed by ADP via the REST interface chosen as integration technology between the two vendors. I expect more modern, next generation interfaces (and partnerships) to leverage this capability. Finally Presentation Services could also mark the first foray of Workday thinking of providing not a full fledge PaaS - but a 'paaS' (with a little 'P') - that allows the further customization / configuration, extension and creation of critical enterprise processes on the Workday platform. Departmental / End use programming knocks at all enterprise vendors doors these days...

Tidbits

iPad Product - We were handed iPads and had the chance to use the Workday HCM iPad app, a very good move that I can only encourage more vendors to follow. Of course I went off script and the iPad app was easy to use, very little 'not so intuitive' pieces and few loose ends (e.g. found 3 different date pickers). Overall a well done tablet client, that is easy to use and powerful enough for a business line manager to do what they need to with their HR application.
TCO Reduction - Vendors always need to work on reducing TCO - not only on the operations but also on the implementation and upgrade side. With O'Toole and Holincheck Workday has tasked two experienced professionals to reduce the cost of implementation and upgrades - always a good thing to see and stay tuned for 2016.
ADP Partnership - A key partnership for Workday, pushing the number of supported countries for payroll to 100 (read more here) - it leverages the above mentioned Presentation Services capability of the Workday framework.

MyPOV

Workday is continuously making progress on its platform in terms of extension for new use cases (e.g. Insights Apps), resilience (e.g. Availability Zones), core capabilities (e.g. Presentation Services) and overall TCO (e.g. Lifecyle Management plans). All good housekeeping a vendor should and needs to do, to stay on top of the game.

On the concern side Workday has chosen to operate on a proprietary architecture, that only Workday knows, understands and operates. This concern is alleviated by the capability of Workday to run its applications on common cloud architectures (e.g. development and test environments run on Amazon's AWS), the adoption of CIO accepted standards like OpenStack (though we heard little of this earlier in the week) and ultimately by Workday growing and creating a large enough ecosystem and scale to alleviate these concerns. Getting to over 5000 employees soon is such a milestone.

But technology for applications is built to run the application - and there is the Finance product which has not seen as much adoption as a successful product should. Workday is bullish to have it 'ready' now - 2016 will tell. Hindsight is always 20 / 20 - but as of today Finance is not a showcase for return of R&D Investment. With Workday eyeing further investment areas (SCM, Verticals were mentioned) it needs to make product development bets with a faster return of investment / better customer adoption. On the flipside for HCM, with the announced Learning product, Workday closes the wagons with a fully integrated suite of Core HR, Payroll (USA, Canada, UK and 2016 France more with ADP), Talent Management and some forays into Benefits and Workforce Management, that is very competitive in the market place. Not short changing HCM customers and product momentum will be a key area for Bhusri and team to manage in 2016.

Overall Workday is doing the right things on the technology side to become the long term partner for enterprises, who run key enterprise processes over multiple decades with the same vendor, through thick and thin. Every year of growth, adoption and investment brings Workday closer to that league / echelon. We will be watching.

The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

Article written in partnership with Roger Beynon.

Whether they are spooked by the specter of "digital disruption" or just afraid that the bandwagon will leave before they can jump on, organizations are desperately looking for C-level talent with digital credentials.

"Digital credentials," however, can cover an array of competencies, and organizations have produced their own array of titles for the potential occupant of the newly allocated "digital corner office."

A quick search on LinkedIn illustrates the title diversity among the digital leader cohort.

So which title will win the battle for the digital corner office?

The answer, we suggest, is to be found not so much in the title as in the role.
Interviews conducted with 100 C-level executives over the last 12 months reveal that the "digital leader's" mission can differ widely from company to company. At retail clothing chain, for example, digital leadership means weaving technology seamlessly into the purchase process. At a hi-tech manufacturer, the job of the VP, Digital is to bring discipline and message coherence to the company's marketing and social strategy. At a century-old furniture manufacturer, digital leadership means process reengineering from the shop floor to the top floor.

Variations notwithstanding, the business imperatives behind any digital transformation strategy dictate a set of responsibilities that begin to define the role of a "generic" digital leader. Those same executive interviews point to a set of priorities common to the adoption of transformational digital leadership:

Developing the next generation P&L and driving, if necessary, corporate-wide self-cannibalization. (Digital transformation must manifest itself in the P&L or it's not worth the effort.)
Facilitating horizontal transformation and digital literacy within a company. (The effective digital leader should work him/ herself out of a job, once the organization is digitally positioned.)
Hacking the product/service requirements loop to understand what customers will need and what they will pay for. (Before these requirements become known to the competition.)

Given these priorities, how do the top-level digital titles and their accompanying responsibilities match up?

The Head of Digital Innovation/ Chief Innovation Officer focuses on exactly that - innovation. It is typically a job for an out-of-the-box thinker, but not necessarily someone with P&L experience.

The VP, Digital tends to occupy a marketing communications role. "Digital" is often synonymous with using technology to build ever higher levels of social engagement with an emotional attachment by the customer. That said, a VP is often someone who has General Management experience that qualifies him/ her for the P&L requirements that underpin the digital transformation imperative.

The Chief Data Officer owns Big Data in whatever form that takes for any given organization. Big data can certainly help shape digital transformation but the Chief Data Officer is unlikely be the driver of change.

The Chief Technology Officer tends to be an inward-focused role, essentially a facilitator and coordinator of the technology next generation infrastructure needed to meet the rapidly changing needs of the CTO's internal customers such as the CIO.

The Chief Information Officer may, in isolated cases, don the mantle of transformation agent, but the CIO role is rooted in maintaining service stability and continuity. Disruption is anathema to the CIO and asking them to embrace change as a way of life would, in most cases, would be asking for trouble.

The executive interviews point to the CDO as the title most aligned with the digital transformation mission. Here's why.

To point #1 (inventing a new P&L/cannibalizing the old):

The digital leader is often brought in with the single focus of preventing her/his organization from being the victim of digital disruption - to the point of going out of business. Richie refers to this as "preventing companies from having their Kodak moments" - more currently, their 'Zune Moments'". This can involve radical self-cannibalization in the way that you see right now with GE, which is divesting itself of financial companies and transforming its commercial and industrial portfolio into a model for the Internet of Things. GE has become a software company in the vanguard of the IoT.

Point #2 (working horizontally across the organization):

Any digital leader missioned with company-wide transformation must be able to bring a horizontal purview to the organization and operate across functional silos. To identify, develop, and roll out new digital products or services, the digital leader might need to work with (but have no direct authority over): customers, designers, product developers, finance, marketing, sales, legal, compliance, operations, and customer support. Consider the logistics that confront a 2,500-store grocer like Kroger when it wants to roll out a click-and-collect capability -- adding drive-thru lanes, creating a picking process from an inventory system organized in huge, wrapped pallets, integrating store return credits to customer accounts and inventory systems, etc. The digital leader must bring all the vertically-minded disciplines together and move them toward a digital paradigm. (Richie believes that a digital leader in this sort of role should not have a job in about three years, because they would have worked with the rest of the organization to pivot towards the digital opportunities and make their role obsolete.)

For point #3 (figuring out future opportunities in the marketplace):

The digital leader is tasked with identifying market opportunities that can be best exploited through digital execution. To be able to see opportunity before it becomes visible to others, the digital leader must be able to work with and win the trust of customers. The digital soothsayer must divine how customers are internalizing technology-driven paradigm shifts, since those shifts will generate future requirements. IMS Health's customers include the major Pharma companies small, large, regional and global. Richie works with Pharma companies to figure out their own paths toward transformation and in doing so is able to capture their aspirations for the future. He then interprets those aspirations and delivers them to the IMS Health's digital product team to be able to build the company's next gen P&L.

The digital leader must therefore operate (and be welcome) on the customer side as well as the product side. This, as describe by Richie, differs significantly from product development practices of the past, in which "our product guys build whatever the hell they think the future is going to be and it's left to the marketing team to describe it in a way that makes sense to customers who don't really want the product but need to be convinced they do."

What are the characteristics/competencies to look for in a Chief Digital Officer?

Companies can hire and allocate digital responsibilities to any and all the titles listed above, but if the transformation imperative covers the entire company and is seen as essential to survival and success, then they will more than likely want to hire a Chief Digital Officer. For what, therefore, should they be looking?

The research identified these primary attributes:

1. A technologist who is fluent in business:
The CDO will typically have computer science or engineering as a first degree, often bolstered with an advanced degree in business and a macro-economic world view. At core, they are technologists, but fluent in language and lore of C-suite business because they will have accumulated P&L responsibility along the way. This is important because the P&L perspective guides prioritization. Digital expertise along the whole of the value-creation chain, moreover, allows the CDO to distinguish digital value from "digital noise" and to be able to evaluate opportunities consistently spawned by technology change.

2. An Internet veteran:
This is not a mandatory qualification, but the experience accumulated while riding the Internet wave cannot be overstated. Many CDO's have been involved in the Internet world for 20+ years. The majority of these have climbed the corporate ladder on the back of their technological prowess and then used that prowess to jump from IT to e-commerce to digital innovation and now to digital transformation. Having lived through the most explosive years of digital's relatively short history, they better understand its evolution and have the best chance of anticipating its direction.

3. A skilled, agile communicator:
The CDO must be articulate and persuasive. It helps if they exhibit what one CEO called "contagious confidence." The CDO's motto could be: "It's not hubris if you can back it up." They tend to be acutely conscious of their own brand, and they know its value to their corporate employer. They make digital "cool" for everyone within the organization, not just the geeks and the marketers. The CDO makes digital a corporate an idiom as well as an emblem. As a result, both the brand and the culture carry a different vibe.

4. A digital anthropologist:
The CDO is an observer and analyzer of customer behavior. Their job is to interpret that behavior for the digitally impaired by "parsing" customer needs and aspirations into digital (or digitally supported) products and services. CDO's who have multi-industry backgrounds bring added value to this capability. The more a CDO understands the nuances of parsing customer needs for B2B as well as B2C, or international and domestic, or CPG and electronics, for example, the greater the anthropological asset s/he brings to the hiring company.

5. A risk-taker:
Even though the dominant career path has been along the corporate Internet highway, CDO's often exhibit strong entrepreneurial characteristics and it is not uncommon for them to have started (and sold) their own companies. This background gives the CDO a high tolerance for ambiguity. Change is their constant. They are hyper-inquisitive -- seekers and synthesizers of ideas, preferably in an "alpha state." That said, every effective CDO carries scars. The learning that took place in the earning of those scars dictates that, having embraced and accepted risk, the CDO will constantly look to reduce risk levels within their digital initiatives. Consistent, disciplined, risk minimization is not antithetical to hubris.

6. A thought-leader:
New ideas fuel the CDO's intellectual and professional engines. CDO's seek out the type of high-fliers who speak at TED events because they identify with them. They follow and respect people like Ray Wang (at Constellation Research) and Scott Galloway (at L2inc). They network naturally and copiously with their peers and they are plugged into the start-up and investor communities. Many are mentors to incubators or innovation labs because digital is driven by disruption and the CDO's radar must continuously scan 360. Richie describes this as: "There's a lot of value to be found on the fringes, out where it can get a bit weird."

7. A time-jumper:
CDO's create the future out of the past. They must be able to move readily and rapidly between the past (constraints of culture and legacy systems) and the future (the limitless world of digital possibility). To succeed, a CDO must be under no illusions about the legacy constraints under which the company operates. The most common constraints are out-dated platforms, but might also be ossified practices, processes, or people. Legacy constraints restrict the boldness of the vision the CDO can present. Pizza Hut, for example, had 9 POS systems at one point in time, so creating an app needing to link to all nine rendered the cost of digital innovation moot. Legacy burdens also impact the CDO's budget and thereby restrict the speed with which the CDO can move. And speed is critical. CDO's seek permission to fail, so long as they do it quickly. They operate on the belief that rapid failure leads to quicker success. Richie describes this as "de-legacy" activity, suggesting that it is more important to "stop or reverse un-innovation anchored on the wrong side of history" than to only look forward.

8. A trust-builder:
The most effective CDO works hard to be seen as an asset to his/her peers. Because a CDO's appointment often indicates that a company feels threatened by digital forces outside its control, a CDO's digital initiatives carry an implicit threat. The CDO must demonstrate by actions and results, as well as by words, that they can be trusted to make their colleagues as well as their customers successful. To that end they must be skilled in the creation of emotional capital, and even more adept at its allocation and cultivation.

The digital corner office: most CDOs we spoke with, do not have a physical office, the digital corner office is completely virtual, or constantly hoteling! Marketing Transformation Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer

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Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Introducing Microsoft PowerApps – for the non-developer! We work on our phones, tablets and laptops and often on the go. That could mean being on manufacturing floors, in airplanes or at customer meetings or on the highway. With nearly limitless computer and data in the cloud and the mobile revolution, the work professional experience has been transformed. And that’s important, because how people works affects the type of customer experience brands can create!

Until now the apps most employees use to do business have been slow to keep pace with employee demand for ease of use and not having total dependence on IT. While companies are increasingly turning to SaaS solutions for specific scenarios like CRM, travel and HR, using services like Microsoft Dynamics, Concur or Workday, most business app scenarios still remain locked on premises, dependent on corporate connected PCs. Too often, they’re not optimized for mobile, not easily integrated with other services, and not accessible when and where people need them most – on the device they want to use in that moment. The business app category continues to lag behind consumer app scenarios in terms of richness and ubiquity.

What is the cause of this business app “innovation gap”? Working closely with our customers, Microsoft has identified three key problems:

1) Not enough skilled mobile developers. There simply aren’t enough skilled developers to keep up with demand for business app scenarios.

2) Business data proliferation. Business data has proliferated spanning on premises systems and beyond the firewall to SaaS clouds. With data stored in many systems, it is difficult to connect to and consume related data from within an app.

3) IT agility and app sharing. Mobile app distribution typically happens through app stores, or through mobile device management, governed by IT. This creates inherent friction in getting apps onto employee phones.

The introduction of Microsoft PowerApps is a unique solution to these problems. PowerApps is an enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps with your team on any device in minutes. And PowerApps helps anyone in your organization unlock new business agility.

For employees,

Quickly create apps that work on any device using a Microsoft Office-like experience, templates to get started quickly and a visual designer to automate workflows.
Use built-in connections, or ones built by your company, to connect PowerApps to cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive and on-premises systems including SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases, SAP and more.
Share PowerApps like documents. It’s as simple as typing an email address and your coworkers can take advantage of an app you created.

For developers and IT professionals,

PowerApps includes Azure App Service for employee-facing apps, so native web and mobile apps get into employee hands faster than ever.
Build additional data connections and APIs to any existing business systems, thus empowering any users in your organization to create the apps they need.
Data security and privacy controls are respected by PowerApps, so you can manage data access and maintain corporate policies.

Microsoft Power Apps has been partnering closely with a number of customers and partners such as Toro, Bose, Metro Bank and eBecs to ensure our vision for PowerApps addresses their needs for business agility. Customers have built solutions ranging from a recruiting app for an internal team to a mobile app for banking employees that connects to their CRM data. And customers are realizing the impact of PowerApps on their business. Stéphane Cavallo, CIO of Division Habitat at Groupe Beneteau, shared, “PowerApps is simple to use, and doesn’t require deep technical knowledge or programming skills. I can create fully-functioning apps very rapidly and easily. In fact, we’ve brought app development in-house, which has really saved us a lot of money.”

PowerApps will dramatically accelerate how business apps are built, reducing time to solution from weeks or months to minutes and empowering a new category of app creators. It balances power between IT and business users, arming those closest to business needs with tools and services to not just envision but also implement the solution. It moves what has been for decades a set of scenarios that typically only run on-premises with PCs to being centered in the cloud and delivered mobile-first.

To learn more about Microsoft PowerApps and to put your name on the list to get access, go to www.PowerApps.com. And, if you are professional developer, learn more about development related scenarios with PowerApps on Channel 9.

The more we make the way we work better, the sooner and better the customer experience will be!

@drNatalie, Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Customer-Facing Applications

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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What is a Smart City? It is defined by the Smart Services used by Smart Citizens! IoT Business disruption and Service level improvement through Decentralization

Andy Mulholland

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Andy Mulholland is Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on cloud business models. Formerly the Global Chief Technology Officer for the Capgemini Group from 2001 to 2011, Mulholland successfully led the organization through a period of mass disruption. Mulholland brings this experience to Constellation’s clients seeking to understand how Digital Business models will be built and deployed in conjunction with existing IT systems. Coverage Areas Consumerization of IT & The New C-Suite: BYOD, Internet of Things, IoT, technology and business use Previous experience: Mulholland co authored four major books that chronicled the change and its impact on Enterprises starting in 2006 with the well-recognised book ‘Mashup Corporations’ with Chris Thomas of Intel. This was followed in…...

Improving ‘Service’ in the broadest definition of the term has historically been taken to mean optimization through centralization. The Business Disruption introduced by the Internet of Things, IoT, introduces new types of Smart Services and responsiveness achieved by decentralized autonomous interactions providing individually optimize responses. This may be counter-intuitive to some views of a Smart City as achieving new levels of centralization to optimize management.

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Examining how Smart Services and users create a Smart City is an instructive example for Enterprises in how they must consider a similar adoption path. Starting with the Technology definition of IoT as an Inter Connected Interactive world of Intelligent Devices operating Autonomously, to understand how Business Value is created through Smart Service incorporating these new technology capabilities.

An easy example of how Autonomous actions create localized benefits for Users can by found in traffic speed monitoring by GPS units in cars. A traffic jam on the selected route promotes individual responses as each driver decides on their own reaction. Some choose not to react and wait in the traffic jam; other drivers will embark on a detour; some using their personal local knowledge, a further group will follow the option suggested by their GPS. The result will usually result in the most obvious detour routes, in turn, become blocked, and a larger and larger area gridlocking as time passes.

The limitation of the current Service for Traffic Service is that it is a passive service, not capable of the continuous intelligent interaction and management that differentiates an IoT Smart Service Traffic Service. Each car is individually maintaining a two-way quasi real time dialogue with all other cars within the localized Traffic Smart Service cell to optimize the use of available road space and routes. The sheer amount of data traffic involved between the Traffic Smart Service Event Engine and the cars, with the response times required to maintain real time traffic flows, require this to be a decentralized service. However, the Smart City would contain many such localized Traffic Smart Service cells, or in IOT terminology Fog Computing zones.

A IoT based Smart Service Traffic Management, as with many other forms of Smart Services, gains much of its ‘smart’ responsiveness and value to citizens through their real time participation in localized situations. The challenge is to design and deploy Smart Services that encourage citizen participation around very direct localized responsiveness.

The full value of a Smart City, or an Enterprise lies in the extent to which different, but aligned, Smart Services interacting to provide a further level of unique insights and values. Connecting the Smart Service Traffic Management similar Smart Services covering Traffic Lights, Routing Smart Signage, Public Transport, etc. has an almost logarithmic capability to multiple the insights and values created. In IOT based Smart Services scale is achieved, as with the Internet itself and the Web, by the decentralized architecture, but it is the careful aggregation of interactive Smart Services that makes the City become ‘Smart’.

In addition to the challenge of deciding what Smart Services will be well received to maximize participation with perceived value to the City and Citizens there are some very real concerns for the City Management in the costs of operating Smart Services. IT budgets remain stretched, the cost of operating a further layer of Technology is difficult to justify with out strong benefits.

At the heart of Smart Service business models is the shift from CapEx, Capital Expenditure with an identified payback, to OpEx, Operating Expenditure where the over the last five years Marketing operations have shown a very different approach. Budgets should flex to follow success and cut off poor results…quickly. More of what works meets the criteria of ‘More (Value) for Less (Cost) common in the public sector.

The Private sector has led in making the shift to OpEx through its experiences in adopting and monitoring Social Marketing Campaigns where results are immediate and quantifiable. Social Marketing and IoT Smart Services have much in common, increasingly IoT events are being tied to Social Marketing reactions, therefore it is instructive to consider Social Marketing OpEx experience.

Five years ago Marketing was seen to be a necessary fixed annual investment budget item but with the understanding that the value was difficult to quantify, (truism at the time; ‘half of all marketing is wasted, but which half?). Today micro marketing using decentralization/localization provides immediate quantification of value; the result is that more of the Budget has become flexibly allocated to increase expenditure in successful areas and decrease elsewhere.

Using the same model defined by citizen satisfaction in traffic flow management requires more of the annual fixed CapEx Traffic budget moving to a more responsive OpEx model where increasing knowledge of successful Smart Service outcomes dictates where the money should be spent. Increasing expenditure against high value returns and decreasing expenditure on less successful initiates is the goal for any Smart Service deployment business model.

Underlying any Smart City, or Enterprise, contemplating exactly what Smart Services to deploy are increasingly selective Citizens or Users who after a generation of Smart Phone Apps are now vocal in their expectations. Good Apps, or Smart Services such as Uber quickly go viral, and just as quickly poorly thought through Apps, or Smart Services, are panned.

Competition between Smart Services, whether Public or Private Sector, will more closely resemble a Financial Trading market where event data feeds, evaluation and time to respond, are the difference between success and failure. The battle between City centralized licensing management of Taxi Services and Uber as an example is a fore taste of what is to come! Smart Cities will find difficulty in continued control of centralized services in the rapidly emerging world of IoT; a future of highly responsive, high value , locally optimized, Services that rely on User support for much of their value generation capability.

Grasping the difference between IoT based Smart Services, and classic Services that have been moved to Web based access, is a critical point in the journey of making a City, or an Enterprise ‘Smart’. The frequently applied term ‘Business Disruption’, or books such as ‘Digital to the Core’ do not refer to the use of current online Web eCommerce, accepting that as both an expectation and a fact of life in 2015. Instead these terms, books, reports, and of course social discussions, are all drawing attention to the impact of a fully connected, interactive, intelligent world of IOT Devices offering a new generation of localized autonomous Smart Services.

The current, and predicted, numbers of connected intelligent devices capable of participation in Smart Services vastly outstrip the resources the City has to deploy its own IoT devices. A successful Smart City is created by its vision as to how its City Smart Services will work with its Smart Citizens and Smart Enterprises to create a wholly new generation of value… for the City, its Businesses and its Citizens.

Though there is a dependency on decentralization for across the City success this does not preclude National or Local Government leading, and encouraging, Smart Services in their own Cities. Quick wins on current programs to reduce cost and improve efficiency are readily available in areas such as Building and Energy management, or any other Asset Management covering equipment from Gritting Equipment to Rubbish collection. There is much to be gained commercially as well as in experience from these deployments in more familiar commercial areas that will assist in providing leadership in a wider range of City activities.

The big challenge is to ensure the introduction of Smart Services of a decentralized open nature to encourage other providers and users to participate. Travel and Transport or other infrastructural based areas are natural starting points for any City Management, but imagination is needed to gain the attention, innovation and participation from Citizens and Businesses to create the connected, interactive, intelligent city wide economy that justifies the title Smart City.

An Example of some innovative ideas for Smart City Services

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/manchester-wins-10m-prize-to-become-world-leader-in-smart-city-technology

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Consumers Can Research a Company and Schedule Appointments Faster and Easier

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Often times, as a customer, you want to know a little bit more about what a company offers and when you find that information you want to be able to act on it. With the partnership between Verint and TimeTrade, customers will have more seamless omnichannel experiences for consumers.

How Will This Partnership Work? The TimeTrade platform will integrate with the Verint Branch Workforce Optimization^™ solution, enabling customers to research financial products and services, and schedule an appointment to meet with a branch professional on a desired date and time in their preferred branch location.

Can Customers Find Remote Specialists if They are Not At the Branch? In addition to scheduling appointments with branch employees that have the right skills for a given topic, the combined offering can schedule remote financial specialists to meet with customers and branch employees by video conference for even greater omnichannel customer engagement. This enables the broader sharing of resources across the bank enterprise, whether they are in a contact center or another location. For example, for mortgage appointments, customers can schedule an appointment in their preferred branch but be connected with a mortgage representative in another location via video conference.

How Will Brands Measure Success? Following these interactions, key metrics can be automatically added into the bank’s performance management scorecards, enabling them to track customer satisfaction, gauge customer wait times and other efficiencies, determine interaction success rates, and identify areas for training and development.

What Do The Executives Have to Say? Chris Zaske, global vice president, strategic operations, Verint Enterprise Intelligence Solutions,^™explains, “A top priority of the retail banking organizations we serve is to provide superior experiences to their customers—both on- and off-line—with the goal of also growing revenue. Partnering with TimeTrade and integrating with its platform supports this goal by helping our financial institution customers optimize branch personnel by scheduling their time to meet with customers and better utilize their capacity. By making it easy for customers to schedule appointments in advance, banks are connecting digital interactions with skilled branch associates that can improve close rates, as well as provide follow-up on future cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.”

Gary Ambrosino, CEO of TimeTrade goes on to say, “In-branch service has been suffering, and banks are losing customers as a result. We recently did a study and found that 60 percent of consumers lack a personal connection to their banks. In the same study, we found that a significant majority (83 percent) are willing to come into a branch during a week day if offered a guaranteed time to meet a representative. We believe the responsibility is on the associates and bank managers to re-build these relationships. Our goal in bringing a TimeTrade and Verint solution together is to provide the tools banks need to make this vision a reality, so they no longer risk losing out to the competition.”

MY POV: This is a very interesting partnership in that it does extend the branch beyond the solid walls of a financial office and allows the customer to more easily access the right person, maybe even in their jammies. With the increase in work-at-home employees, this may be a very smart move!

@DrNatalie Petouhoff

VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Facing Applications of Marketing, Sales and Customer Care, Service and Experience, Constellation Research

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer

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Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

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,…...

Qlik is not retiring its venerable QlikView product, but the company’s future lies with Qlik Sense and cloud services. Here’s what stands out.

Qlik has long been known for QlikView, a product that helped move the business intelligence market toward self-service over the last decade. Qlik’s new lead product is Qlik Sense, an even more business-user friendly, visual self-service app introduced last year, but that won’t mean the end of QlikView.

QlikView 12, introduced on December 8, is the first of many annual upgrades to come, and there is no plan to retire the product, insisted Qlik executives at last week’s Qlik Analyst UnSummit in Austin, Texas. With release 12, QlikView shares the same in-memory, associative Qlik Data Indexing (QIX) data-analysis engine with Qlik Sense and all other products on the Qlik Analytics Platform (QAP). That will make it easier to migrate apps to the appropriate product.

Other upgrades in QlikView 12 include improved clustering for scalability, mobile touch improvements for better use of native functionality on iOS and Android devices, and RESTful API connectors for linking to Web services such as those used by social sites and Web content management systems.

In comparision with QlikView, Qlik Sense makes it easier for business users to analyze data and develop reports and dashboards. That much was confirmed by six prominent customers at last week’s UnSummit. Pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, for example, is rolling out Qlik Sense dashboards to several thousand internal users as well as to customers.

Qlik Analytics Platform

Demand for Qlik Sense helped Qlik increase license revenues 20% (in constant currencies) in 2015, said CEO Lars Bjork, up from 13% in 2014. The company is expecting even faster growth as it moves into subscription-based services with Qlik Sense Cloud. Launched this year as a freemium service, Qlik Sense Cloud is approaching 30,000 registered users, and the company will soon introduce a paid, Qlik Sense Cloud Plus edition offering more storage, wider sharing and larger app sizes than supported on the free service.

By mid 2016 Qlik plans to introduce a workgroup service tier on Qlik Sense Cloud that will add collaboration and data-governance features. And by some time in 2017, Qlik will introduce an enterprise-class service capable of supporting hybrid and purely cloud analytics deployments at scale.

MyPOV: Competing in a Crowded Market

The vendor stresses that Qlik Sense supports more than just data visualization. That’s a jab at Qlik’s younger and faster-growing rival, Tableau Software, which is best known for data visualization. Qlik’s differentiated is its associative QIX data-analysis engine, which keeps the entire data set and rich detail available even as you explore and focus in on selected dimensions of data. If you select customers who are buying X product, for example, and you’ll also see which customers are not buying that product. In my view, associative exploration gives QIX advantages over data visualization alone or conventional drill-down analysis where you filter out information as you explore.

Qlik’s in-memory, associative QIX data-analysis engine keeps all data and detail
in view, even as you explore selected dimensions of data.

Qlik’s biggest challenge in the coming year will be raising its brand profile in an increasingly cloud-centric BI and analytics market. Competitors will include not just Tableau, Birst and GoodData, but also Microsoft with Power BI, IBM with Watson Analytics, SAP with Cloud For Analytics, and Amazon with its recently announced QuickSight service.

Qlik is making an effort to improve its marketing so it can better compete with all these rivals. It’s starting with the simple step of ensuring consistent branding. QlikView is the company’s best known brand, and in the past this product name has been used synonymously with company names QlikTech and Qlik. Now the company is consistently using Qlik across Web sites, collateral materials and even buildings, and the Qlik Analytics Platform is the underpinning for all products, including Qlik Sense, Qlik Sense Cloud, QlikView, QlikView NPrinting, and the growing Qlik DataMarket for third-party enrichment data.

Among large vendors, Microsoft with Power BI poses the biggest potential threat to cloud upstarts like Qlik and Tableau. To stand apart, Qlik needs to just needs to forefront the combination of the associative QIX engine and the Qlik Sense interface. To my mind that will require more partnerships and word-of-mouth marketing tactics rather than branding wars against much bigger players. Qlik has more than 37,000 customers and millions of users, so it has an excellent springboard to grow Qlik Sense and Qlik Sense Cloud.

Data to Decisions Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Digital Officer

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The Economist's take on blockchain

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…...

An unpublished letter to the editor of The Economist.

November 1, 2015

Just as generalists mesmerized by quantum physics are prone to misapply it to broader but unrelated problems, some are making exorbitant claims for the potential of blockchain to change the world ("The trust machine", The Economist, October 31st). Yes, blockchain is extraordinarily clever but it was designed specifically to stop electronic cash from being double spent, without needing central oversight. As a general ledger, blockchain is unwieldy and expensive.

Trust online is all about provenance. How can I be sure a stranger's claimed attributes, credentials and possessions are genuine? Proving a credit card number, employment status, or ownership of a block of land in a 'democratic' peer-to-peer mesh strikes some as utopian, but really it's oxymoronic. The blockchain is an indelible record of claims, which still need to be vouched for before they are carved forever into mathematical stone.

Steve Wilson
Principal Analyst - Identity & Privacy, Constellation Research.

Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief Information Officer

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Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Informatica addresses big-data integration, governance and security through a subscription-based portfolio. But will big data remain a separate world?

One irrefutable trend in 2015 has been growing enterprise adoption of big data platforms including Hadoop and NoSQL databases. Yet as companies move beyond big data pilot projects and try to do more with their deployments, many struggle to achieve repeatability and productivity. Short on experienced talent, companies look for any way possible to avoid one-off-coding and development work.

Enter Informatica, which last month introduced Informatica Big Data Management, a three-part offering aimed at big data integration, governance and security challenges. Big Data Management replaces Informatica’s PowerCenter Big Data Edition with a separate, subscription-based product line aimed exclusively at big data environments.

Informatica addresses traditional use cases (lower-left) with PowerCenter and “next-gen”
use cases with subscription-based Big Data Management.

The first component is Big Data Integration, which runs on Hadoop and promises to save companies time, trouble and, therefore, money over hand-coded data-integration, data-transformation and development work. This has been Informatica’s value proposition in the data warehousing arena for decades. Big Data Integration extends the promise to complex big data environments with intense volumes and varieties of batch and streaming data.

The second two components of Big Data Management are Informatica Big Data Quality and Governance, and Informatica Big Data Security. These may be of less immediate interest to companies that are just starting out with big data experiments. But Informatica argues these components will become increasingly important as the number and diversity of big data sources and projects grows.

The one question I have is whether and how long enterprises will view and treat traditional data warehouse environments and big data projects as separate worlds?

Big Data Integration

Data-integration products are all about connecting to data, so vendors in this space invariably tout their portfolios of pre-built connectors. In Informatica’s case, Big Data Integration offers more than 200 connectors that speed and simplify access to data (as compared with the hand-coding) and ingestion to Hadoop and NoSQL databases. The portfolio includes two-way integrations to modern big-data platforms, real-time sources and cloud-based apps and databases. Big Data Integration also offers 100-plus data-transformation and parsing routines, including options to handle variable and semi-structured data and big-data world formats such as JSON, Avro and Parquet.

Flexibility is another draw for Big Data Integration. Running on Hadoop, it supports not just MapReduce for batch processing and Apache Spark for fast, in-memory batch or streaming-data processing, but also Tez and Informatica’s own high-performance Blaze engine, which offers familiarity to veteran PowerCenter users while taking advantage of distributed processing power and Hadoop’s YARN management layer. With all these options at its disposal, Big Data Integration can intelligently and automatically execute each workload on the best-suited engine, according to Informatica. Here, too, the idea is to speed execution while taking manual work steps out of big data projects.

Adding Data Governance and Security

Where some big-data management offerings begin and end with ETL, Informatica Big Data Management also addresses data governance and security. Governance and data quality are always important, but their importance increases as the uses of big data multiply. That’s when Informatica Big Data Quality and Governance collaborative stewardship capabilities help ensure that all appropriate data stakeholders are involved in setting data definitions and standards. The various constituents get role-specific interfaces, and policy-based workflows, approvals and auditing features ensure compliance.

BigData Governance and Quality is also about helping to find the value in big data. For example, a Live Data Map powered by Spark provides a universal metadata catalog and knowledge graph for enterprise data. This supports searching, matching and linking among transactional data, machine data and social data to illuminate behaviors and better understand customers, prospects and influencers.

Informatica started stepping up its security capabilities earlier this year when it released Secure@Source, which analyzes the metadata in Informatica PowerCenter repositories and spots sensitive data, such as payment card and personally identifiable and personal health information, as well as systems, groups and departments at risk.

Informatica Big Data Security brings Secure@Source capabilities to big data, uncovering sensitive data and spotting the business units and individuals that have access to that data. The software gives data and security professionals insight into how such data is used and whether it’s adequately protected. Visualizations pinpoint sensitive data by geography and function while risk analytics highlight vulnerabilities that demand immediate remediation. One alerts are raised, policy-based protections and dynamic data masking can be used to secure or de-identify sensitive data.

MyPOV on Informatica Big Data Management

Informatica previously offered PowerCenter Big Data Edition, its traditional data-integration suite with added big data management capabilities and a selective ability to run on Hadoop. But that’s being replaced by Big Data Management, which is a separate, subscription-based product that’s a better fit with the times, according to Informatica.

Big data projects are graduating from exploratory experiments to separately budgeted initiatives with executive sponsorship and increasingly mission-critical expectations, according to Informatica. Thus, the time is right for a separate product, Informatica execs reason. The subscription-based approach (with software deployed on-premises but paid for annually) is in keeping with the way Hadoop subscriptions are typically handled. This keeps initial costs down and helps businesses scale up as data volumes grow.

It’s good to see that Informatica has not taken and all-or-nothing approach with Big Data Management, offering an Enterprise edition that skips some of the data-quality, data-profiling and data-masking features included in the Premium Edition. What’s more, the Big Data Security offerings are entirely optional, which is a good thing as security professionals with budget and technology oversight many not yet be familiar with Informatica.

My one concern about Informatica’s separation of its traditional and big data product lines is that we will eventually see the pendulum swing the other way. As big data sources, integration needs and data-quality and data-governance concerns become more commonplace, they will become the prevailing data challenges in the enterprise. Indeed, Informatica depicts a “crossing the chasm” movement from traditional data-warehouse use cases to “next-gen” data big data use cases (see diagram above).

When the transition is complete, big data will just be data. And when data-management professionals stop looking at big data as a separate world, they may well want and expect a single portfolio to address all data management needs, whether large or small. I suspect that day may come sooner than many expect.

Data to Decisions Chief Information Officer

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Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Workday has its European Rising event happening in Dublin this week and one of the major product news has been an improved level of partnership with ADP.

Let's take a peek:

If you can't watch - let’s take apart the press release in our customary style – it can be found here:

PLEASANTON, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 2, 2015) - Workday, Inc. (NYSE: WDAY), a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, today announced plans to expand its partnership with ADP to provide multinational organizations with a seamless and unified global payroll experience. The partnership plans to leverage the next level in integration technology to unite Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and ADP Global Payroll in a single user experience within Workday, enabling multinational organizations to more effectively manage their global workforce, efficiently process payroll, and maximize business growth.

MyPOV – Good description of problem and solution. ADP provides global payroll capabilities through its GlobalView product and Workday has global customers, so this is a ‘symbiotic’ partnership.

"With this expanded partnership, our customers will be able to manage their workforce globally and process payroll in over 100 countries," said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO, Workday. "This is the new standard for integration -- bringing together two leaders for best-in-class HCM and payroll in one seamless global solution."
"ADP's increased collaboration with Workday tightly aligns market leaders to deliver a seamless global payroll experience," said Carlos Rodriguez, president and CEO, ADP. "Through the partnership, we will help our joint multinational customers effectively address the complexity of global payroll so that they can focus on driving their business forward."

MyPOV –Good to see this is a partnership supported all the way from the top – with quotes from both CEOs, Bhusri and Rodriquez. The perspectives are worth noting – Bhusri sees global payroll capabilities, Rodriguez sees peace of mind from payroll complexity for customers as the main drivers.

Through the partnership, Workday customers will benefit from:
· One Seamless Customer Experience to Manage a Global Workforce:
o Multinational organizations can leverage ADP Global Payroll functionality from within Workday's user interface in one process for managing their global workforce.
o Customers can enter comprehensive local data directly into Workday where it is automatically validated and utilized by ADP to create a more streamlined global payroll experience.

MyPOV – This is the key innovation part of the integration. In order to run payroll in one single UI – something most enterprises prefer – payroll relevant information needs to be in the same user interface as the rest of ‘HCM’. As payroll is subject to many legal changes, it previously required the HCM vendor and any payroll partner vendor(s) to both that does not have payroll to provide all fields and validation necessary to run payroll correctly. Obviously a duplicate effort for vendors – and both ADP and Workday went for a more elegant solution.

· Next-level Integration Technology to Create a Unified User Experience:
o Workday combines the latest advances in integration technology with ADP's REST APIs to enable dynamic page creation, rendering the fields for local payroll information from ADP so multinational organizations can better manage payroll requirements around the world.
o Legislative updates from ADP can be made on a timely basis via the Workday user interface, ensuring that customers are up to date with country-specific and local regulatory changes for a smoother payroll process.

MyPOV – And here we are to the ‘magic’ – REST as an API standard allows ADP to expose fields and validation directly into Workday – creating one common user interface for workers – and making duplicate coding and testing superfluous.

· A Best-in-Class Approach to Global Payroll Management:
o Multinational organizations looking to invest in Workday and ADP's best-in-class HR and global payroll solutions can take advantage of a seamless experience for global payroll management.
o Workday HCM enables multinational organizations to make faster decisions, gain operational visibility, prepare for future talent shifts, and build effective teams.
o As the proven leader in payroll, customers benefit from ADP's extensive global payroll coverage and unparalleled expertise in payroll processing.

MyPOV – Good to point out the benefits – Workday provides a more seamless global payroll experience and will be able to spend more time on additional product innovation for its customers and ADP gets more utilization of its payroll capabilities. But the biggest winners are the users at clients: On an operational level they will be able to do all HCM related tasks in one common API, and on a management level they have the peace of mind of working with a proven Payroll leader with ADP.

Availability Workday plans to make solutions resulting from the expanded partnership with ADP available in Workday 27, which will be offered to customers in the second half of calendar year 2016.

MyPOV – There are few things not to like about this partnership, except for this very late and 12 months or so out delivery date. But good things take time…

Overall MyPOV

A good partnership with a modern integration technique between ADP and Workday – who both benefit as vendors. As the world goes – it is a co-opetition – as ADP will keep providing HCM solutions that compete with Workday.

But the winner is the joint customer, and a large part of Workday customers use ADP as their payroll partner. So good news for these customers, as they don’t have two vendors tracking legislative payroll compliance and spending precious development time and dollars duplicating and integrating fields, but just with one. On the global side it gives Workday customers and prospects access to over 100 countries for processing payroll – given that Workday as of today only supports the USA, Canada, and UK (and France in 2016) - a major leap going forward. Certainly a key strategy move to expand in Europe, where the announcement was made. Whether it will alleviate the pressure on Workday to provide native payroll capabilities for other large markets (with large customers, Germany and Japan come to mind) remains to be seen.

And we expect more of these partnership in the marketplace – based on REST APIs, something that to our knowledge Learning vendor Skillsoft first introduced into the marketplace almost a decade ago (but to be fair - with a more one directional nature of the interface).

For now a very good partnership, which also shows that market adversaries can be partners for the benefit of the customer. As heard often before – ‘at the end the customer has to won’ – and that’s what is the clear end result of this partnership is – so congrats for all are in order.

New Report: Few Companies Have Evolved Into a Digital Organization

New Report: Few Companies Have Evolved Into a Digital Organization

Workday Tech Summit - Progress Report

Workday Tech Summit - Progress Report

Tidbits

MyPOV

The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

The Battle For The Digital Corner Office, #CDO

So which title will win the battle for the digital corner office?

Given these priorities, how do the top-level digital titles and their accompanying responsibilities match up?

The executive interviews point to the CDO as the title most aligned with the digital transformation mission. Here's why.

What are the characteristics/competencies to look for in a Chief Digital Officer?

Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

Microsoft Power Apps Turns Everyday People into Developers

What is a Smart City? It is defined by the Smart Services used by Smart Citizens! IoT Business disruption and Service level improvement through Decentralization

What is a Smart City? It is defined by the Smart Services used by Smart Citizens! IoT Business disruption and Service level improvement through Decentralization

Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Resource

Download now: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Consumers Can Research a Company and Schedule Appointments Faster and Easier

Consumers Can Research a Company and Schedule Appointments Faster and Easier

Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

Qlik Unveils QlikView 12, Qlik Sense Cloud Roadmap

The Economist's take on blockchain

The Economist's take on blockchain

Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Informatica Takes Comprehensive Approach To Big Data Management

Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Workday and ADP partner to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience for Global Payroll

Overall MyPOV

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