Workforce Software continues investment in Workforce Management but needs to watch the fundamentals

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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We were invited to the Workforce Software user conference Vision2015, happening in at a non Vegas like location at Lake Las Vegas. The conference was well attended with over 200 attendees and 20+ partners and exhibitors.

 

Here are my Top 3 takeaways from the analyst meeting / conference:

Workforce Management Pure Play – It was made more than clear that Workforce Software sees itself and will remain a Workforce Management pure play – and not venture into other areas of HCM automation. Instead better and deeper Workforce Management (WFM) automation and more global support are on the roadmap. Workforce Software changed its release numbering and jumped from 9 to 15 – to better reflect – you guessed it – the release year. The vendor roadmap plans for 3 releases per year – with 15.1 being available now, the highlights being new KPIs, improvements in usability, more powerful admin tools and more data capture options on external clocks (see the press release here). From the more detailed WFM capabilities shift swapping and group messaging stood out in my view. 

 

 

The Workforce Software compliance guarantee (credit to +Mark Stelzner who sat much better to take pictures than me)

Compliance – with a Guarantee – Basically Workforce Software sees itself as the ‘compliance tool’ in the hand of the HR professional. Workforce Software monitors legislation and makes sure it supports all necessary workplace time and labor rules from currently 400 legislative bodies in North America. That the vendor does this with confidence became clear as Workforce Software used the conference to announce a compliance guarantee. So if a Workforce Software client “gets fined for an incorrect calculation or regulation that EmpCenter manages and Workforce Software certifies, Workforce Software will reimburse the client for fees and penalties”. Customers were understandably excited about this guarantee. And kudos to Workforce Software for extending its level of service beyond working software (all software vendors do this) to uptime (all SaaS vendors do this) and to legislative compliance of its software in form of a guarantee (no vendor in the HCM space is doing this to my knowledge). So we may see the dawn of CaaS – Compliance as a Service, well done by Workforce Software to be at the forefront of this potential trend.
 

Picture of the most prominent Workforce Software partners

Partner Ecosystem – WFM usually cannot stand alone and lives with the integration with other key HR systems, most notably HR Core, Payroll and to a lesser extent Talent Management. As such Workforce Software needs to partner with these vendors and the vendor has done well in this space, having partnerships with SAP / SuccessFactors, Oracle and integration capabilities with ADP, Ceridian, CloudPay, Ultimate and Workday. Maintaining and operating these partnerships is always a tricky endeavor, especially when you are the ‘junior’ partner in the relationship that Workforce Software most of the time happens to be. But Workforce Software can play well on the partner field, e.g. the vendor competes with ADP in North America, but partners with ADP in Australia. Moreover it looks like Workforce Software is smart enough to stay out of the implementation business, partnering with e.g. NGA HR, Aon Hewitt, Aasoon and many more. Not getting involved too much into implementations has double benefits for software vendors – on the one side they can focus on product – on the other side they need to make product, documentation and training robust enough for the partners to succeed.
 

Workforce Software CEO Koksi closes VisionWFS

 

MyPOV

A very good event for clients and vendor and probably also the partners attending. Customers were excited about the new EmpCenter 15.1 and the roadmap of what is ahead. Partners see where they can help customers and create value, which is important to keep them happy and expand the ecosystem. 

 

And it’s good to see how loyal Workforce Software customers are – as once you have a WFM solution that works, they are not changing it quickly and easily. It is proof that Workforce Software over the years has been able to build continuous value for its user base, and this conference is another proof of this. But with the success and tenure comes also the challenge to address technical debt and while a quick deep dive in the architecture raises no immediate red flags, the user interface of Workforce Software needs some improvement or even better a complete re-thought from scratch to be up to speed with 2015. We blogged about it before how HCM users today have probably the best user experience ever in the history of HCM – WFM software with great functionality and high productivity to use – like Workforce Software’s should be no exception.

You can find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

 

Microsoft Steps Up To Cloud, IoT Expectations

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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Microsoft followed through with the general release of an important cloud service last week, laying the groundwork for real-time insight with Azure Stream Analytics.

As the name suggests, Azure Stream Analytics (ASA) is about analyzing data in flight. Examples include data flowing from devices, sensors, web sites, apps, and infrastructure systems. Analysis is done with a SQL-like language that lets users visualize, alert, and act on events in real time.

Introduced as a technology preview last fall, ASA has been used by beta customers in use cases including smart-grid management, predictive maintenance, and remote device monitoring. Japanese technology manufacturer Fujitsu, for example, used Azure servcies including ASA to capture sensor and machine data within one of its factories so it cloud pioneer environmental monitoring capabilities. That ECO-Management Dashboard (shown below) is now part of a larger IoT/M2M platform that teams Fujitsu devices with Azure services to support industrial monitoring and analytics.

Microsoft says ASA offers faster development and simpler coding compared with Java-centric streaming options such as Apache Storm. You could also read that as a dig against Google, which last week announced that its beta Google Cloud Dataflow service is available as a preview. Announced about a year ago and designed to support both batch and stream processing, Dataflow is aimed at Java and Python developers. The service includes an open-source Java SDK and work is underway to support Apache Spark, another streaming-data-analysis option.

What Microsoft didn’t mention is the fact that it’s playing catch-up on the streaming front with Amazon Web Services, which made its Kinesis streaming data ingestion and processing service generally available more than a year ago. In a reversal of those roles, however, AWS was the follower two weeks ago when it introduced Amazon Machine Learning, lagging behind Microsoft’s July preview and February general release of the Azure Machine Learning service.

Forget the horse race. We’re at the very beginning of a mainstream push into real-time analytics. Complex event processing vendors that have long supported financial trading floor operations and intelligence agencies have been talking about the mainstreaming of real-time performance for years. It looks like the cloud is finally making streaming data analysis broadly accessible. Two years from now, nobody will remember which cloud provider was the first to deliver a stream processing service.

Stream processing and analysis is table stakes for building real-time, data-driven applications. Indeed, Azure Stream Analytics and Azure Machine Learning are two key components of a Microsoft  Azure IoT Suite announced last month and set for preview release in the second half of this year. Microsoft says the Azure IoT suite will offer three ready-to-customize applications: remote monitoring (think KPIs from remote devices), asset management (controlling remote devices in some way), and predictive maintenance (monitoring and analyzing performance over time so you can avoid unplanned downtime). 

Microsoft is far from alone in the IoT arena. In fact, the likes of General Electric, Cisco, Intel, and SAP already have elaborate IoT plans in place. Constellation Research IoT expert Andy Mulholland informs me that each has an important roles to play: GE on Industrial Internet apps (where it has been a pioneer), Intel on data security, Cisco on network and fog computing intelligence, SAP on industry business processes IoT apps. None of these companies can match Azure’s global cloud footprint, so that’s where Microsoft can shine with broad services capabilities that are designed to work with it popular software.

A closer competitor to Microsoft will be IBM, which late last month announced plans for a dedicated IoT business unit. IBM says the business will be staffed by more than 2,000 consultants, researchers, and developers, and it has pledged to invest $3 billion over the next four years.

IBM, too, offers broad cloud services, but it’s also taking an industry-focused approach, eyeing vertical apps, partner networks, and entire industries. One early offering is an insurance app framework designed to tap into connected vehicles so insurers can use real driving data to set rates with a better understanding of risk.

IBM is also building out a data and industry ecosystem for IoT. For instance, The Weather Company, parent of the Weather Channel, plans to run its business-to-business weather data platform on IBM Softlayer, and IBM IoT customers will be offered both streaming and historical weather data.

Imagine real-time weather data combined with sensor data to optimize supply chain delivery or stocking of products with historical knowledge of weather-related buying patterns. Weather is clearly an important real-time decision factor (read Guy Courtin on floods, blizzards, hirricanes, and other supply chain disruptions). No surprise that Microsoft is a partner with Weather Company rival AccuWeather, which is running part of its infrastructure on Azure.

All these investments should tell you that IoT and related services are not hyped up brochureware. It can start with simple internal applications. For example, I recently talked to JJ Food Service, a U.K.-based distributor that’s planning to use Azure services to monitor its more than 200 refrigerated delivery trucks via Bluetooth temperature sensors synced with driver smartphones. Drivers and dispatchers will be alerted when temperatures fall below levels where foods like ice cream and seafood would spoil.

This is really an “intranet of things” app, Andy Mulholland tells me. If you want a sense of how sophisticated IoT apps can get, read Andy’s blog about how Harley Davidson has cut the time required to create a custom motorcycle from 21 days down to six hours. 

Practical intranet of things apps like the one envisioned by JJ Food Service show that IoT initiatives can start small with non-mysterious, non-bleeding-edge endeavors where you know there’s a return on investment. Look for simple, obvious use cases in your day-to-day operations to get your feet wet. With services accessible via the cloud, IoT (or small “i”, small “t”) apps will be easy to pilot without a huge commitment to building out real-time infrastructure.

Identity Management Moves from Who to What

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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The State Of Identity Management in 2015

Constellation Research recently launched the "State of Enterprise Technology" series of research reports. These assess the current enterprise innovations which Constellation considers most crucial to digital transformation, and provide snapshots of the future usage and evolution of these technologies.

My second contribution to the state-of-the-state series is The State of Identity Management: Identity Management Moves from Who to What.

Here's an excerpt from the report:

Introduction

In spite of all the fuss, personal identity is not usually important in routine business. Most transactions are authorized according to someone's credentials, membership, role or other properties, rather than their personal details. Organizations actually deal with many people in a largely impersonal way. People don't often care who someone really is before conducting business with them. So in digital Identity Management (IdM), one should care less about who a party is than what they are, with respect to attributes that matter in the context we're in. This shift in focus is coming to dominate the identity landscape, for it simplifies a traditionally multi-disciplined problem set. Historically, the identity management community has made too much of identity!

Six Digital Identity Trends for 2015

1. Mobile becomes the center of gravity for identity. The mobile device brings convergence for a decade of progress in IdM. For two-factor authentication, the cell phone is its own second factor, protected against unauthorized use by PIN or biometric. Hardly anyone ever goes anywhere without their mobile - service providers can increasingly count on that without disenfranchising many customers. Best of all, the mobile device itself joins authentication to the app, intimately and seamlessly, in the transaction context of the moment. And today's phones have powerful embedded cryptographic processors and key stores for accurate mutual authentication, and mobile digital wallets, as Apple's Tim Cook highlighted at the recent White House Cyber Security Summit.

2. Hardware is the key - and holds the keys - to identity. Despite the lure of the cloud, hardware has re-emerged as pivotal in IdM. All really serious security and authentication takes place in secure dedicated hardware, such as SIM cards, ATMs, EMV cards, and the new Trusted Execution Environment mobile devices. Hardware security is intrinsically less flexible than software security (which is part of the point). However, today's leading authentication initiatives, like the FIDO Alliance, are intimately connected to standard cryptographic modules now embedded in most mobile devices. Hardware-based identity management has arrived just in the nick of time, on the eve of the Internet of Things.

3. The "Attributes Push" will shift how we think about identity. In the words of Andrew Nash, CEO of Confyrm Inc. (and previously the identity leader at PayPal and Google), "Attributes are at least as interesting as identities, if not more so." Attributes are to identity as genes are to organisms - they are really what matters about you when you're trying to access a service. By fractionating identity into attributes and focusing on what we really need to reveal about users, we can enhance privacy while automating more and more of our everyday transactions.

The Attributes Push may recast social logon. Until now, Facebook and Google have been widely tipped to become "Identity Providers", but even these giants have found federated identity easier said than done. A dark horse in the identity stakes - LinkedIn - may take the lead with its superior holdings in verified business attributes.

4. The identity agenda is narrowing. For 20 years, brands and organizations have obsessed about who someone is online. And even before we've solved the basics, we over-reached. We've seen entrepreneurs trying to monetize identity, and identity engineers trying to convince conservative institutions like banks that "Identity Provider" is a compelling new role in the digital ecosystem. Now at last, the IdM industry agenda is narrowing toward more achievable and more important goals - precise authentication instead of general identification.

5. A digital identity stack is emerging. The FIDO Alliance and others face a challenge in shifting and improving the words people use in this space. Words, of course, matter, as do visualizations. IdM has suffered for too long under loose and misleading metaphors. One of the most powerful abstractions in IT was the OSI networking stack. A comparable sort of stack may be emerging in IdM.

6. Continuity will shape the identity experience. Continuity will make or break the user experience as the lines blur between real world and virtual, and between the Internet of Computers and the Internet of Things. But at the same time, we need to preserve clear boundaries between our digital personae, or else privacy catastrophes await. "Continuous" (also referred to as "Ambient") Authentication is a hot new research area, striving to provide more useful and flexible signals about the instantaneous state of a user at any time. There is an explosion in devices now that can be tapped for Continuous Authentication signals, and by the same token, rich new apps in health, lifestyle and social domains, running on those very devices, that need seamless identity management.

A snapshot at my report "Identity Moves from Who to What" is available for download. It expands on the points above, and sets out recommendations for enterprises to adopt the latest identity management thinking.

The State of Identity Management in 2015

Content Management Best Practices in Staffing

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…...

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Often times when I talk to marketers they are finally realizing they are becoming publishers. Most brands started out with some sort of website, though it was mostly a brochure, it had content. But with the advent of so many new channels via social and digital – the need for content has gone up exponentially. In fact a brand or an individual can build their reputation and trust amongst their customer base, based on the content they create and distribute. B2C marketers, when asked in a survey (1) said they wanted content to be able to help them:

1. Become better at converting visitors on website: 65 percent
2. Create more engaging/higher-quality content: 62 percent
3. Become better storytellers: 61 percent
4. Optimize content: 61 percent
5. Organize website content: 61 percent.

In the B2B world, marketers said measurement is a key area in which they are struggling. Though, those that used LinkedIn as a distribution channel 94 percent found it to be the most used and the most effective social media distribution platform for placement of their content. (2) That makes sense, as LinkedIn is the business social network for many people.

As we talked to content marketers, another thing was clear. It’s not free. It takes money and time — and that means staff with particular skill sets to accomplish the various aspects of creating, editing, distributing and measurement of the contents effectiveness. As a result of this need for content and the need for senior leadership to understand how important content management is, we created a report that covers some best practices when staffing up a team to deliver on a brand’s promise. 

How to Staff the Team for Effective Content Marketing

As you are creating your content management strategy, don’t forget about the people. Yes, it’s important to have technology, but you also need process and people to make it all work!

@drnatalie

VP and Principle Analyst, Constellation Research

(1) http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2015_B2C…

(2) http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/10/2015-b2b-content-marketing-…

There's nothing precise about Precision Medicine

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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The media gets excited about gene therapy. With the sequencing of genomes becoming ever cheaper and accessible, a grand vision of gene therapy is now being put about all too casually by futurists in which defective genetic codes are simply edited out and replaced by working ones. At the same time there is broader idea of "Precision Medicine" which envisages doctors scanning your entire DNA blueprint, instantly spotting the defects that ail you, and ordering up a set of customized pharmaceuticals precisely fitted to your biochemical idiosyncrasies.

There is more to gene therapy - genetic engineering of live patients - than the futurists let on.

A big question for mine is this: How, precisely, will the DNA repairs will be made? Lay people might be left to presume it's like patching your operating system, which is not a bad metaphor, until you think about how and where patches are made to a computer.

A computer has one copy of any given software, stored in long term memory. And operating systems come with library functions for making updates. Patching software involves arriving with a set of corrections in a file, and requesting via APIs that the corrections be slotted into the right place, replacing the defective code.

But DNA doesn't work like this. While the genome is indeed something of an operating system, that's not the whole story. Sub-systems for making changes to the genome are not naturally built into an organism, because genes are only supposed to change at the time the software is installed. Our genomes are carved up en masse when germ cells (eggs and sperm) are made, and the genomes are put back together when we have sex, and then passed into our children. There is no part of the genetic operating system that allows selected parts of the genetic source code to be edited later, and -- this is the crucial bit -- spread through a living organism.

Genetic engineering, such as it is today, involves editing the genomes of embryos at a very early stage of their lifecycle, so the changes propagate as the embryo grows. Thus we have tomatoes fitted with arctic fish genes to stave off cold, and canola that resists pesticides. But the idea that's presented of gene therapy is very different; it has to impose changes to the genome in all the trillions of copies of the code in every cell in a fully developed organism. You see, there's another crucial thing about the DNA-is-software metaphor: there is no central long term program memory for our genes. Instead the DNA program is instantiated in every single cell of the body.

To change the DNA in a mature cell, geneticists have to edit it by means other than sexual reproduction. As I noted, there is no natural "API" for doing this, so they've invented a clever trick, co-opting viruses - nature's DNA hackers. Viruses work by squeezing their minuscule bodies through the cell walls of a host organism, latching onto DNA strands inside, and crudely adding their own code fragments, pretty much at random, into the host's genome. Viruses are designed (via evolution) to inject arbitrary genes into another organism's DNA (arbitrary relative to the purpose of the host DNA's that is). Viruses are just what gene therapists need to edit faulty DNA in situ.

I know a bit about cystic fibrosis and the visions for a genetic cure. The faulty gene that causes CF was identified decades ago and its effect on chlorine chemistry is well understood. By disrupting the way chlorine ions are handled in cells, CF ruins mucus membranes, with particularly bad results for the lungs and digestive system. From the 1980s, it was thought that repairs to the CF gene could be delivered to cells in the lung lining by an engineered virus carried in an aerosol. Because only a small fraction of cells exposed to the virus could have their genes so updated, scientists expected that the repairs would be both temporary and partial, and that fresh viruses would need to be delivered every few weeks, a period determined by the rate at which lung cells die and get replaced.

Now please think about the tacit promises of gene therapy today. The story we hear is essentially all about the wondrous informatics and the IT. Within a few years we're told doctors will be able to sequence a patient's entire genome for a few dollars in a few minutes, using a desk top machine in the office. It's all down to Moore's Law and computer technology. There's an assumption that as the power goes up and the costs go down, geneticists will in parallel work out what all the genes mean, including how they interact, and develop a catalog of known faults and logical repairs.

Let's run with that optimism (despite the fact that just a few years ago they found that "Junk DNA" turns out be active in ways that were not predicted; it's a lot like Dark Matter - important, ubiquitous and mysterious). The critical missing piece of the gene therapy story is how the patches are going to be made. Some reports imply that a whole clean new genome can be synthesised and somehow installed in the patient. Sorry, but how?

For thirty years they've tried and failed to rectify the one cystic fibrosis gene in readily accessible lung cells. Now we're supposed to believe that whole stretches of DNA are going to swapped out in all the cells of the body? It's vastly harder than the CF problem, on at least three dimensions: (1) the numbers and complexity of the genes involved, (2) the numbers of cells and tissue systems that need to be patched all at once, and (3) the delivery mechanism for getting modified viruses (I guess) where they need to do their stuff.

It's so easy being a futurist. People adore your vision, and you don't need to worry about details. The march of technology, filtered through 20:20 hindsight, appears to make all dreams come true. Practicalities are left to sort themselves out.

But I think it takes more courage to say, of gene therapy, it's not going to happen.

Event Report - Equifax EFX Forum - Compliance Insights in the cross hairs - and strategic questions

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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I had the opportunity to attend Equifax Workforce Solutions yearly user conference in New Orleans this week. The event was well attended, similar to last year’s event in Scottsdale (see my event report here). Most attendees are on customer advisory boards and have a direct influence on the product roadmap, so it creates a unique atmosphere of ownership under attendees. Certainly a smart setup by Equifax. 

Here are my top 3 takeaways from the event:
 

Dann Adams open Keynote at EFX Forum

 

Insights are the Mission – Equifax is on the journey to become an insight company. It was good to see how honest executives were on what challenge this was and to a certain point remains to the vendor. Beginning from a working definition on what an insight is for Equifax, over training employees, changing and adapting product architectures – this is a long way for any vendor. Good to see the honesty and transparency of the management team – something not found often in enterprise software these days.
 

Great overview slide of ACA interactions

Affordable Care Act (ACA) – The ACA is the gift that keeps giving to vendors in the compliance space. And Equifax is no difference, helping customers to master the complexity and taking out fears and concerns around this statutory topic. Equifax shared that there is an expectation that close to 8B fines will be send out to employers, definitively a good argument for any enterprise legging on their ACA plans to get going. The ACA solutions is available and has well known blue-chip customers already depending on Equifax for ACA compliance and reporting. 

 

Signficant TCO rerduction on adding Work Numbers

Compliance – This is the key area where Equifax plays today and is known for. We learnt that Equifax will re-platform its I-9 solutions, a good move that will future proof the offering. The vendor has to go through the challenge of doing this ‘in flight’ – but has split the roadmap (under NDA) as such that it is realistic to get done in the next 18+ months.

 

MyPOV

Equifax is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the compliance tsunami that is rolling towards enterprises. But like their competitors in the compliance space, Equifax is building software solutions, that clients still need to understand, implement and operate (from a business perspective). Any presentation I have attended on compliance, mainly ACA these days, shows the concern and high level of discomfort in the audience. In my view this literally screams for a service. And Equifax is familiar with the model e.g. in the unemployment space where the vendor acts as agent for enterprises. So the market is ripe for Equifax (and competitors) to take over compliance for their customers. No more stories to who all the exchange notices maybe sent or not sent – they all go to the vendor, who for e.g. a % of salary cost will manage all government interactions. Timing is ripe as enterprises now need to ramp up on ACA knowledge, define processes, select software etc. A ‘CaaS’ (Compliance as a Service) offering would be highly welcome.

The other strategic aspect that Equifax needs to make a decision on is how much the vendor wants to be on the enterprise desktop – or be a data provider (or API) being called by other vendors who have the eyeballs and clicks of the enterprise user. Not an easy decision as it changes go to market and positioning.

The good news for customers and prospects is that Equifax is working hard to help solve compliance pains across the board. The link to credit and TALX give Equifax tangible differentiators over the competition and a strong ‘true’ analytics DNA help in the effort. .

 

More on Equifax

• Event Report - Equifax Worforce - Preventive Medicine for the HR departrment and a silver lining of DaaS - read here

 

More on general HCM topics

 

• Musings - Is Transboarding the Future of People Talent Management? Read here
• Musings - How technology innovation fuels Recruiting and disrupts the laggards - read here
• Musings - What is the future of recruiting? Read here
• HRTech 2014 takeaways - Read here.
• Why all the attention to recruiting? Read here.

And  more on Payroll:

 

• Could the paycheck re-invent HCM – yes it can – read here.

• And suddenly, payroll matters again! Read here.

2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

ThinkBig and Teradata Partner for Data Consulting

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…...

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With all the data and all the opportunity, it’s really necessary to have someone focus on getting most out of that data. Otherwise, as other’s have coined, you end up with a data lake – a bunch of data but not in context and not useable in providing great, continuos customer experiences. And at the end of the day, what companies need is to have the data actually to help them run their business better. So the announcement today solves some of these issues, i.e.,  Think Big, a Teradata (NYSE: TDC) company, announced the immediate expansion of its big data consulting business.

They have announced a dashboard engine to be able to drill down capability and get to the insights using ingestion patterns and infrastructure. ThinkBig embraces a range of vendor-neutral, open source options and recommends the best combination to complement existing, proven technologies based on each customer’s unique business needs.

Think Big assists clients, across industries, to gain measurable business value from big data through implementation and integration of open-source technologies such as Apache™ Hadoop®, Apache Spark™, and NoSQL databases (i.e. Apache HBase™, Apache Cassandra™, and MongoDB).

“Hadoop and its fast growing ecosystem of open source projects have quickly become first-class technology assets, regardless of the organization’s size or geography,” said Rick Farnell, co-founder and senior vice president International, Think Big, a Teradata company. “Think Big’s international expansion will allow us to effectively share our expertise and support our customers. To support its growth, Think Big is aggressively recruiting talented individuals to fill a variety of positions in sales, data engineering, data science and project management.”

Will be very interesting to see how the partnership evolves and the case studies that result. Remember – send your clients to the enter into the Super Nova Awards to be considered. It’s a great honor and Constellation Research is looking for innovators who are disrupting business models and using data to do that. Especially in click-stream data.

@drnatalie

VP and Principle Analyst, Constellation Research

Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service to Provide Great Customer Experiences

Data to Decisions: Are You Missing Something Big?

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

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

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You’re sitting on a gold mine, and it’s your data. Yet despite all the hype about big data and the Internet of Things, lots of companies still don’t see it.

I’ve covered data and data technologies for more than 17 years, most recently as executive editor at InformationWeek. Over these years the volumes and varieties of data have exploded and new tools and techniques to make sense of the information have flourished. I’m excited to be joining Constellation Research to help businesses navigate the next developments through our data-to-decisions research theme.

One sign that companies are taking data opportunities more seriously is the emergence of chief data officers. The CDO role first emerged among Internet companies looking to cash in on big data. Companies facing tough governance and compliance challenges were also early CDO adopters, with financial services leading this pack. Now the CDO is practically mainstream, with manufacturers like Ford being among the latest to hire a C-level exec strictly to focus on data strategy.

What’s really surprising is when seemingly data-savvy companies uncover “new” opportunities in data that look like no brainers. Twitter, for example, announced last week that it’s going to stop giving away its entire API-accessed “fire hose” of half a billion Tweets per day to third-party resellers at wholesale rates.

You’d think a company so sorely in need of profits would have recognized this opportunity long ago, but today Twitter gets only about 10% of its revenue from data licensing, while the lion’s share is from advertising. Recognizing the value of data, Twitter last year acquired Gnip, which was in the business of aggregating the Twitter feed, along with other data sources, and reselling that information to leading brands.

“In the future, every significant business decision will have Twitter data as an input,” Chris Moody, the former chief of Gnip and now Twitter’s VP of data strategy, told financial analysts in November. “Why wouldn’t you add into your business decision-making, ‘What does the world think about this topic at this particular time or at a previous moment of time,’”

That’s an example of an information-driven company waking up to unrealized value in data. Among governance-and-risk-minded companies, JPMorgan Chase has revealed that it’s analyzing internal information to take on a very expensive governance and compliance problem. The company is building an electronic surveillance unit to monitor digital records and communications in an effort to spot rogue traders and compliance problems, reports Bloomberg News.

We’re not talking about reinventing business models or opening up a new source of revenue, here. But to put the problem in perspective, JPMorgan Chase has spent more than $36 billion (with a “b”) on legal bills since the financial crisis, according to Bloomberg. The most recent cases included responses to a government probe into fraudulent mortgage-bond sales and the company’s $6.2 billion London Whale trading loss.

JPMorgan Chase is bringing together data on compliance training attendance, violations of personal trading rules, and breaches of market-risk limits and it’s feeding it into predictive software to spot suspicious patterns of behavior. The idea is to spot bad actors and prevent damaging acts before they happen. JPMorgan says these efforts will increase the company’s return on equity to 13% from 10% last year just by cutting legal fees and other regulatory expenses.

JPMorgan is also well aware of the threat of digital disruption and transformation, another of our research themes. As Constellations Orbits member and analyst Gavin Heaton writes this week, the company is casting a wary eye at PayPal, Bitcoin, and other technology-driven payment companies and it’s going to “work hard to make our services as seamless and competitive as theirs,” CEO Jamie Dimon recently wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

The point here is that data awareness – recognizing what you have and what you can do with it – is as important as the sort of business situational awareness that has JPMorgan Chase looking over its shoulder. Follow this space to learn more about how companies are using technology to turn data into decisions, new sources of revenue, and smarter ways of running a business.

Registration Opens for Inaugural Constellation Digital Disruption Tour

First Stop Scheduled for April 22 in Melbourne

Executives Learn How to Identify Disruptive Trends and Craft Digital Business Models

Today Constellation Research announced that registration is live for the inaugural Digital Disruption Tour, a series of executive-level seminars that show attendees how to effectively conquer disruptive forces in the era of digital business. The first stop of the tour is scheduled for April 22, 2015 in Melbourne, Australia at The Deck.  Constellation will host subsequent events in San Francisco, Atlanta, London, and Amsterdam. Speakers including Constellation analysts, early adopters, and founder, R “Ray” Wang will will identify disruptive trends that business leaders must address in the digital era. R “Ray” Wang will share insights from his book Disrupting Digital Business, published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Many of the rules that governed business in the 20^th century do not apply in the digital era. Since 2000, fifty-two percent of the Fortune 500 has fallen off the list as a result of mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, or replacements. Success in the digital era requires a new business education and a new skill set that enables the executive to create business models that take advantage of the digital economy. The Digital Disruption Tour will identify the trends governing business in the digital era, and equip executives with the knowledge to excel in digital business.

The Constellation Digital Disruption Tour is particularly suited to senior executives from non-technology companies.

“The impact of digital disruption is real. Savvy leaders will recognize the great opportunity the digital economy presents, learn all they can about the new business landscape, and be prepared to dominate digital disruption,” said Constellation Research founder, R “Ray” Wang. “Digital Dariwinism is unkind to those who wait.  The Constellation team is looking forward to preparing the brightest minds in business for the challenges of the digital economy.”

Digital Disruption Tour Dates:

• April 22, 2015 - Melbourne, Australia
• May 4, 2015 - San Francisco, California
• May 14, 2015 - Atlanta, Georgia
• June 18, 2015 - London, United Kingdom
• June 22, 2015 - Amsterdam, Netherlands

 
To register for the Digital Disruption Tour please visit http://www.constellationevents.com/.

Follow the Digital Disruption Tour on Twitter with the hashtag #cxotour.

For sponsorship opportunities, contact [email protected]

Death, Taxes and Supply Chain Disruptions!

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Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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It is that time of the year again here in the United States…tax day. You know how the saying goes:

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

—Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 1789

• Acts of nature are unpredictable. Yes floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, blizzards, ash clouds, hurricanes and the list goes on, of natural events are unpredictable and constant. While one day we may be able to control the weather and other natural phenomenon (according to some James Bond villains) today we remain at the mercy of Mother Nature. Our abilities to predict acts like the weather are better but certainly not 100% accurate. And we have have to find good ways of pinpointing where earth quakes and volcanic eruptions will occur.
  

   

   

• Macroeconomic drivers are constantly changing. Exchange rates, the price of oil, deflation and other economic characteristics are driven by government, corporation and human action, but sometimes we cannot really understand the outcomes of these acts. Of course at some level of supply chains entities can afford to pay for influence at these economic levels…but even that does not ensure full control or understanding of outcomes.
• Humans…yes we are unpredictable at the end of the day. When I studied political science and economics I always struggled with the notion of a “rational” actor or state. What is rational to me might not be to you and vice versa. Yet all of our theories started with some assumptions around “rational” behavior. Of course the same is true within our supply chains. Whether it is a buyer, a worker, a partner or any other human within the supply chain we cannot always assume we understand their behaviors and actions.

So what does this mean? When it comes to our supply chains we should focus on three rules:

1. Embrace the growing amounts of data and sources of that data. While data is not the panacea for our ills,it can provide clearer picture of what is happening and where things are being impacted. The growth of data as well as what is producing the data (think IoT) opens the door for companies to get a greater understanding of their supply chain. This digital disruption will only continue to grow in importance – maximize the value for your supply chain.
2. Constantly push yourself to keep an eye on possible new business models. Anyone who has been in business, gone to business school or just read a business publication knows that the secret is to always be ahead of your competitors with “paradigm” changing models. True. But not easy to identify. However within our supply chains we do not need to always identify but more – be open to discovering and leveraging these opportunities when they present themselves.
3. Focus on what you can control. Understand what you cannot control and think about how it can impact your supply chain, but focus on what you can control. The data should help you better understand what is possible as well – but there must be a discipline as to what is controllable and what is not. Within the context of modern supply chains, this discipline is even more crucial.
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Like death and taxes, disruptions to your supply chain will be a constant. The good thing is that new digital aspects have given supply chains a fresh arsenal of solutions and business processes to offer solutions to meet this disruptive realities.