deal architect

Enterprise Software: Emergency Apps and Empathy

I was talking to a vendor exec last week and I mentioned the agility and innovation I am seeing in various sectors - agile manufacturing, re-jigged supply chains, reshaped shopping experiences, last-mile delivery, telework, telemedicine, teleschool- as we are fighting the COVID-19 war. Examples are here, here and here.

He turned around and showed me under NDA in our Zoom session the impact and innovations they are cataloging in their B2C and B2B customers. I am willing to bet their R&D team is already factoring them for their next-gen vertical apps. I have had similar conversations with other software and SI execs. Most are taking similar notes but are not ready yet to publicly talk about them. Two reasons - One, they don't want to come across as bragging in this traumatic phase. Second, it will provide them or their customers competitive advantage and they will discuss their plans when and if they are ready.    

However, many of them have publicly shared what they are doing. The common thread is most of these are timely and they show empathy.

In an analyst briefing yesterday, Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow talked about the incident management structure to lead the outbreak response they developed with the State of Washington, which was the first US "hot spot" for the outbreak. They have since released emergency response apps - for outreach, employee self-reporting and exposure tracking. They are offering them free through September 30 to other public health entities.  

Plex has been presenting dashboards on the impact on global supply chains. It has 20 years of anonymized, compiled operational data from the approximately 700 manufacturers on its software. This group collectively runs 1,200 active production facilities in 29 countries, representing the aerospace, automotive, fabricated metals, food and beverage, industrial machinery, and plastics and rubber industries. I will have more from the CTO, Jerry Foster. Here is a graph on their China dataset. They have others for Italy, the US and other markets here.

Zoho has been helping the work-at-home economy by offering 11 of its apps free (see video below) till July 1. The Remotely free offer started in early March and they already have over 15,000 businesses availing of it. They are also offering existing customers with up to 25 employees a 3 month fee waiver. Details here. They also have a live global dashboard for COVID-19 case tracking.   I am planning an interview with the CEO, Sridhar Vembu - he always has such a positive world view.

Every day, we are hearing of massive dislocations in supply chains - shortages of certain products in one area, plenty of supply of the product elsewhere. SAP has opened up access to Ariba Discovery for free for 90 days so any buyer can post their immediate sourcing needs and any supplier can respond to show they can deliver. SAP has also opened up other workforce and program management apps as detailed here 

Salesforce has launched its Care package (see video) free for 90 days for up to 10 licenses.  Its Tableau unit has various COVID-19 related visualizations. 

Plenty of empathy

I have been impressed with the empathy software vendors have been showing to their customers and employees.

Workday has sent two-weeks additional pay for the majority of employees to help accommodate any unforeseen costs and needs at their discretion. It has also opened up a year's access to Headspace, a research-backed app that offers meditations on everything from stress and anxiety to focus and sleep.  

Alex Shootman, CEO of Workfront, who is an impressive executive and human wrote a really inspirational blog post about resilience in demanding times.

"I’ve always believed that great leadership is forged in the crucible of adversity, but great leaders are those who respond with empathy and vulnerability even when making the toughest decisions. We all need reserves of determination and positivity at precisely the moments those qualities are stretched thin. Where do those reserves come from? In my book, Done Right, I explored a number of ways to build resilience."

Read more here. I have an interview planned for more of his guidance.

Salesforce has paused all customer outreach including requests for customer references for analyst evaluations. I listened to a SuccessFactors analyst briefing last week and was struck by how little bragging there was about recent competitive wins. I also listened to several SAP vertical industry webinars. Peter Maeir, who is President of SAP Industries, somewhat humbly opened each with a statement that SAP had considered canceling or postponing them. I had a chance to tell him I am glad SAP ran them. We have to keep going - our sector has to keep the lights on while businesses scramble to change their priorities.

I heard someone say the medical profession and pharma sector have a chance to come out shining from this crisis after years of brand damage from price gouging and other negative stories. You can already see the adulation for front-line medical professionals around the world.

Enterprise software has a similar opportunity. I am proud of what enterprise software vendors are doing during this crazy phase. I will be even prouder if they learn from the agility of their customers and reshape their offerings. No industry sector will come out of this unscathed. Industry-specific agility and innovation will be at a premium. Bureaucracy, huge price tags and compliance functionality much less so.

It will open up all kinds of opportunities to rethink enterprise software as the economy turns around. For now, I look forward to cataloging all the positive stuff software vendors are doing.  

More COVID-19 impact - the age of agility

The one thing I vividly remember from my first few days as an audit rookie at PwC was a class where the instructor said "never forget - an internal control should deliver more savings than the burden it puts on a process. If it does not, don't be pedantic. Let it pass"

I did not stay on the audit side for long, but over the years I have seen SOX, HIPAA, GDPR and many other compliance-oriented acronyms forget that simple guidance and the cost-benefit lens. As a result, while well-intentioned, they have slowed down innovation, made processes complex, cumbersome - and slow.

A wise man once wrote "Many of our job designs, work flows, control mechanisms, and organizational structures came of age in a different competitive environment and before the advent of the computer. They are geared toward efficiency and control. Yet the watchwords of the new decade are innovation and speed, service and quality." That wise man was the late Dr. Michael Hammer. He wrote that in 1990.

Three decades later, it is taking a disaster for us to say - screw old thinking and change old laws. Just do it! I wrote about agile manufacturing and rejigged supply chains last week. Here is this week's installment. 

Fedex is running its Memphis hub like a military base on high alert. Countless distilleries are now re-purposing their alcohol to make hand sanitizers. Sysco which has traditionally focused on the food service industry (restaurants, hotels) is shifting its vast supply chain to stock grocery stores. Carnival is offering its cruise ships to be turned into floating hospitals The Navy is already preparing to deploy its floating hospitals, the Mercy and Comfort. 

3M is doubling production of its N95 respirator masks. Nike is looking at making protective equipment for healthcare workers.

Siemens and Aucma developed in just one week, from design to sample production, intelligent disinfection robots which have joined the battle against the virus in hospitals.

Medicare did not previously cover telemedicine. At least for this crisis it will. Also HIPAA rules for telehealth will be relaxed. This will be useful to limit exposure and free up hospital capacity. 

A couple of startups are trying to reduce two annoying occurrences in US healthcare, made worse during this crisis. Yosi is trying to eliminate the countless paper forms you fill every time you go to a clinic. Navimize is trying to eliminate the doctor's waiting room - saving you time and allowing for social distancing.

I have heard of countless companies whose IT was well prepared for a work from home scenario, and many others which have struggled. Guess what - that is going to be a critical element of business continuity plans going forward.

Jason Perlow writes at ZDNet "Previous privacy concerns about revealing our whereabouts and tracking for the sake of convenience will give way to how best to service a population with a demand for goods and services while still maintaining social distancing requirements." and " With a home-based work population, the regular, 9 to 5 business days are likely to shift to more flexible working days, and a more significant segment of the workforce is expected to become "night people" and have off-hours and rest during the daytime while others are working."

Finally, listen to Lt. Gen Todd T. Semonite, commander of Army Corps of Engineers discuss in video below plans to quickly convert hotel and college dormitory rooms into ICU-like units. He talks about "super-simple" and "good enough" solutions to an "unbelievably complicated" problem.

Just do it!

The positive impact of COVID-19

Somebody once told me I could make a brown paper bag sound interesting. Not sure if that was a compliment but I do find interesting aspects to most anything. While there is so much doom and gloom around the coronavirus and the impact on the economy, I am also seeing amazing agility and innovation.

Healthcare: in spite of the huge size of the industry or probably because of it, it has always been bureaucratic and wasteful. We are starting to see telemedicine take off, clinical trials get accelerated, new diagnostics, vaccines and therapies being investigated. We are seeing infrastructure changes - drive-through tents for testing, operating and other rooms being turned into ICUs at hospitals.  China constructed a 645,000 sq. ft hospital in just 10 days in Wuhan! In the US, the Army Corp of Engineers is being brought in to increase hospital capacity, floating Naval hospitals like the Mercy are on standby (I wrote about the Mercy way back in 2009. It is a massive former oil tanker.)       

Re-jigged supply chains: Since the outbreak in China in December, most supply chains have been scrambling. McKinsey has this nice graph about impact of China on supply chain of various industries. The ripple effects will continue to be be felt for months with people evaluating other global sources, re-evaluating modes of transport, rethinking stock at distribution centers v. shipping direct to customers and so many permutations.

I wrote about Amazon's Kiva and other robots in its distribution centers after a visit here. It uses concepts like "chaotic storage". It is adding to the chaos by prioritizing medical supplies and household staples in its orders. Hard to imagine it could do that quickly with traditional warehouses. 

Agile manufacturing: 3M is ramping up production of its N95 respirator masks, GM and Ford are shuttering auto production for a few weeks and looking to make medical equipment like ventilators. Paper product makers are shifting production to more toilet paper. Distilleries are churning out hand sanitizers. Scaling production or changing assortments of products is not unusual - the speed at which they are being done is striking.

Last-mile delivery: The US last-mile delivery infrastructure has been evolving over the least few years (I recently wrote about it here)  is now being tested at scale. Downloads of Instacart, Walmart's grocery and Shipt apps have doubled and tripled. Domino's is offering contactless delivery - adding features to its already extensive delivery capabilities.

Drive-throughs - most fast food restaurants, banks, pharmacies are seeing massive use of their drive-through infrastructure, their kiosks and other automation. Pioneered in S. Korea we are starting to see drive-through tents in the US for testing for the virus.

Re-purposing of technologies: It is nice to see creative uses of technologies. I was one of Gartner's first remote analysts starting in 1995. Since then I have done thousands of calls, interviews, webinars from my home office, more recently with extensive use of Zoom. Most of us improved home infrastructure to cut cable and install smart appliances. Now, it is being used like never before for work from home.  This infrastructure is allowing for home schooling and telemedicine.  As Peter Diamandis writes "drones above various parts of China are sharing information on loudspeakers, carrying signs with QR codes (for no-contact registration purposes), spraying disinfectant, delivering packages, and taking people’s temperatures." Singapore has required citizens to scan QR codes at various public places and even in taxis to be able to allow for digital tracking. Israel is using its surveillance technology to similarly track people flows.

Of course, as the crisis shrinks, we will hear complaints about too much automation, too little privacy, loneliness in work from home, the slow start to testing for the virus in the US. For now, we are seeing an amazing use of technologies and concepts we have been maturing for years, and brand new ones.

And yes, about that humble brown paper bag. I find it even more interesting with the increase in drive-throughs and home deliveries we  are all experiencing. 

Stay safe and sane, folks!

The Passion Play

It is the start of the new decade. Which means the beautiful town of Oberammergau in Bavaria, Germany will be hosting its 42nd once-a-decade Passion Play this summer. It is also the 15th anniversary of both my blogs, Deal Architect and New Florence, New Renaissance. They have been prolific logging over 12,000 posts on a wide range of science and technology topics.

To celebrate all these milestones, I decided to re-start the Tech and my Passion guest series. The response of contributors has been overwhelming, and since late January I have run the following columns. Many more coming. The timing has also been right for readers - a nice distraction from angry politics and scary virus stories.

Some interesting patterns. Lots more ladies are sharing their passions. You appear to have an unfair advantage if you have the name "Bill". Lots more STEM is showing up in columns - wearables, mobile apps, smart homes, material science. Lots more exotic travel locations, charities, musical interests and foods are being featured.

I like to say this is the best time ever to be alive. This is what Florence must have felt like during the European Renaissance. That same joy comes through from each of the contributors below. Spend some time with each of them. They will brighten up your day.

Bonnie Tinder  Her Lab, Grommet                  

Bill Wohl  Volunteer Firefighting           

Row Henson  Animal Rescue                        

Bill Hewitt  Co-Everything                                    

Karin Tillotson  Hiking                                     

Jim Caldwell  Camerawork                          

Lexy Martin  Quilting                                  

Craig Cmehil  Ring Making                        

Erica Gunn  Baking                                     

Henry Bruce  Salt Water Fishing                 

Melissa Carpenter  Carpentry                               

Ton Dobbe High Wave Surfing                 

Margaret Newman  Day Tripping                           

Ton Brennan Bluefin Tuna Fishing              

Sukumar Rajagopal Digital Storytelling                

Bill Kutik Expedition Travel 

Bill Kirwin Humor 

Catherine Marenghi Poetry in Mexico 

Denis Pombriant Painting

Mary Keith Birding

Laura Lederman Organic agriculture/medicine

Tammy Powlas Crochet

Priya Kumar  Flute

Erik Keller  Horticultural Therapy

Roy Altman Continuous Improvement

Jeff Nolan Urban Farming and Food Security

Jason Busch Health Protocols

Norm Katz Data Driven Athlete    

Sandy Lo Piano

Susanne Beck Stained Glass

Michelle Turman Reinventing Nonprofits

Bonnie Tinder Figure Skating

Vinnie Mirchandani Stories 

Jim Shepherd Boat Building

John Appleby Smart Old Homes

Nitesh Mirchandani 'Tele-cooking"

Chris Selland Body hacking and tracking

Katie Nittler Landscape Gardening

Nancy Murrah Raptor Rescue

Sophie Bean Stupid Pet Tricks

Minal Neuman Elegant Dinner Settings

Nancy and Jim Richardson Austistic Adults

Bill McNee  Birding, Photography and Nature

Eric Dirst Quarantine Cocktail Nights

Charlie Bess Woodworking 

Nick Hortovanyi Self-driving Cars

Tamas Hevezi Effective Digital Communication

Vittorio Viarengo Producing Music

Michelle Cuilla Vintage Jewelry Craft

Sam Noto Sculpting

Barbara Boardman Beekeeping

Susanne Beck Jigsaw Puzzles

Sandy Silverberg Broadway Productions

Alan Alper Pandemic positives

Rob Kugel Diving and Reef Check

Look for more columns over the next few weeks! Lord, we need more of these positive, passionate messages in these rough times.  

A tricky time for enterprise software

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last few months talking to enterprise tech companies about verticalization and globalization. I recently talked to Mike Sicilia at Oracle and will be hearing more about their industry strategy later in the month. I will similarly be learning more about SAP's industry futures in a couple of weeks. I have already talked to several Salesforce, Microsoft, Infor, Unit4 executives about their vertical strategies.

While they each put it differently, it is becoming clear that just selling horizontal financial, hcm or crm functionality or "the advantages of cloud" is no longer sufficient. That payback in the form of retiring previous customizations is not enough to justify modernizing. That operational functionality for various industries will increasingly be their differentiator and will also deliver their customers much higher ROI and easier signoffs, and with that they can also modernize their horizontal apps.

But you cannot deliver operational functionality overnight. At NRF, the big retail show in New York this year none of the big vendors were showcasing cashierless stores or same-day delivery or 3PL support which could provide alternatives to Fulfillment by Amazon and its highly automated distribution centers. Or talking role of multi-story warehouses in last mile delivery (that Prologis and others are pioneering) or about reverse logistics which are a hot topic for retailers. I could talk about similar needs in healthcare, insurance, utilities and just about any industry.

Or take recent conversations with customer executives. The coronavirus has disrupted many a global supply chain. That could be a payback area as they look to modernize their enterprise apps. It won't be easy - some have to evaluate new countries for new suppliers, plants and logistics providers. Forget supply chains, most vendors could not support even back office functionality for many of these countries.

You cannot fake operational or geographic functionality. You cannot spray paint operational or geographic functionality. You can ring-fence that functionality but ten other competitors can do similarly. This is the time for R&D or acquisition capital for that specific functionality.

At the turn of the century, vendors used to sell customers on the idea of suites and promise "wall to wall" functionality. I wrote a decade-end review where I showed how the addressable market for most enterprise vendors reflected tiny corners of a room, forget wall to wall. Their ambitions had become much more modest.

Enter Wall Street correction. Given fears of recession customers may delay projects. Vendors will be under pressure to mirror that around their R&D. Wall Street will clamor for stock buybacks and trimmed expenses to reflect lowered valuations.

As Yogi Berra said "when you come to a fork in the road, take it". I will be watching and advising many vendors in the next few months about their forks.

The temptation will be to become even more modest in their ambitions. In the last decade that approach has left wide swaths of the global economy open to startups, SIs and companies like Amazon to offer that functionality. That will not magically stop.

These are tough, tough decisions.

How the heck did the great European Renaissance emerge from the depth of its Dark Ages?

I kept asking that question during a family trip to Italy in 2004. That puzzle led me to consider writing the New Florence, New Renaissance blog, in addition to the Deal Architect blog.

Both blogs are celebrating their 15th birthday this quarter. Hard to believe but they have racked up over 12,000 posts. DA has stayed true to its focus on enterprise technology, especially application software and outsourcing. NF is the wanderer - looking for innovation beyond IT in cleantech, healthtech, agritech, product design, space. And looking for it in obscure places, in any country, in any industry.

Every time I see a panic, I go back to inspiration on NF.

A few years ago, there was pitch fever around automation killing jobs. My NF research led me to write Silicon Collar which was much more optimistic. Automation makes workers much more productive, that society has speed breakers against too much, too fast effects of automation. 

I was in California during last year's forest fires. While most of the media was calling it "the new normal", I was talking to rangers about prescribed burns and learning a new set of acronyms like WUI for Wildland Urban Interface and PSPS for Power Safety Planned Shutdown. They have been around for a while - as have the terms Santa Ana and Diablo winds. The fires and outages are also leading to a slew of innovations which will result in widespread improvements in weather forecasting, fire fighting and even outage program management.

That does not mean I am gullible. DA keeps me pragmatic.  I write plenty about wind and solar power and cloud computing. But I have been disappointed that wide chunks of the economy from aviation to shipping, and even utilities who have moved away from coal have not been able to take advantage of it. I have since moved to a position we need to balance out our energy strategy and revisit nuclear and hydrogen sources. Similarly, cloud applications have not verticalized or globalized enough and they have not automated migrations enough. I now accept that custom development and ring fence/API strategies are essential components of any CIO's arsenal.

These days while people are panicking  about the contravirus, I am studying the feverish pace at which pharmas are rejigging older, proven vaccines and working on new ones, how Chinese doctors are applying AI to study lung CT scans. How they are using drones, infrared thermometers and robots as they try to contain their exposure. How S Korea is pioneering drive through clinics. Will some of that tech be used for surveillance and other improper uses? Sure. I focus on the art of the possible and positive uses. 

So, go back to what I asked at the start. How did the Renaissance spring from the depth of the Dark Ages? Because humanity does its best when we are challenged. Necessity is the mother of invention, said Plato.

With that positive outlook, I am throwing a 15th birthday party for my blogs. Every morning for the next week you will see a guest column in the Technology and my Passion series. You will hear from your fellow colleagues how they find joy and satisfaction in their hobby, interest or charity. Instead of one column every Friday, I am running one every day. It's my way of trying to distract you from all the angry political and negative contravirus news.

Look every morning for one of your colleagues as they describe how baking, fishing, surfing, quilting and so many other passions keep them motivated.

Now is a great time to seek solace in Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."

Multi-generational HCM

Dan Patrick, the sports talk host; Home Depot and the recently announced union between Kronos and Ultimate Software inspire this post.

I have heard Dan tell the world his Sleep Number bed setting. I have heard people share their What Three Words as their address. Think of how many more health metrics we routinely track compared to the height, weight, blood pressure our parents did. Think of how many channels people can reach us via social media, email, mobile apps etc. Think of how many countries each of us has traveled to, the languages we speak,  and the wide range of skills, hobbies and interests we have. Now ponder this - how little of this makes it to the employee master in the "book of record" at our employers.

A decade ago I sent Dave Duffield, who has started several HCM companies over time, an email asking if he had an image of the employee master record at his first HCM company. I don't think his archives went back that far but I am willing to bet it was mostly name, date of birth, social security number, title, some vital statistics, organizational entity type fields. In today's instrumented world, the employee master could easily have 100X the number of fields. That's if we had no privacy restrictions and were willing to share all that with our employers. It would not be a stretch to say Facebook and FitBit know a lot more about employees than do our HCM systems.

I could have sent a similar email to Aron Ain and the Scherr Brothers. They are also veterans in our industry - Kronos is over 40 years old, Ultimate, 30 years. They have survived and thrived. And done it over and over.

When you talk about companies like Kronos, you invariably hear "yes, but they are legacy vendors". Tell that to more than 40 million people in over 100 countries who use Kronos products almost on a daily basis. (Ultimate, by the way, has over 50 million people records.)

Which brings me to Home Depot. As spring arrives, it is starting to ramp up hiring of 80,000 seasonal workers. That's not a typo. Lowes is not far behind. During the holidays, Amazon, UPS, USPS hire similar huge numbers. In the summer, camps do; in the winter, ski resorts do similar. Smart companies are learning to keep track of these seasonal workers - they actually are a nice source for more permanent employment. They are also learning to retain employees longer. I have called it the new Gen Y - as in Yold, the "young old" who are retiring late, or coming back into the workforce after retiring. Never before have we have had so many generations of workers walking our halls.

And that's just one dimension. I have written about the "clover-leaf" talent economy - in many companies, there is more talent in their suppliers, their franchisees, and their platforms than on their books.

Then there are growing number of machines in the workforce. In Silicon Collar I wrote about how automation - robotics, drones, wearables, bots are increasingly working side by side with humans, making them wildly more productive. When I wrote that book 5 years ago, I was disappointed to find few HCM execs to interview. In most of my case studies, plant managers and operational executives described their automation initiatives. That is evolving - more HCM execs and systems are becoming savvy about how automation aligns with their workers. They are factoring them as they evolve their budgets and their learning management systems. That's leading to more complexity and even more multi-generational workforces. And for HCM to manage them.  

People ask me if the new combined Kronos/Ultimate company to be called People Inspired is worth $ 22 billion. Honestly, I am not a banker and don't speculate much about valuations. What I do know is "legacy" is turning out to be far stickier than we would have imagined a decade ago. It is just too darned expensive to migrate away from them without new functionality which can retire extensions and add-on applications companies have bought or built around them. I also know legacy vendors have as much opportunity as newer ones to deliver functionality for the clover-leaf and man-machine world we have moved into. They typically also have bigger R&D budgets. And if they don't deliver, we will continue to "ring fence them" and "API" new functionality around them. Like our workforces, our HCM is destined to be multi-generational.

Brian Sommer and I are keynoting at the Select HR Tech show this June. We are presenting on the theme of  "Don’t Let the Past Dictate Your HR Tech Future". The event site describes us as the "“Penn and Teller” of HR software" - it's in Vegas, after all - "they’ve been tricking and gaming each other for three decades. You’ll be entertained and educated."

Three decades - yes, the two of us have seen a few generations of HCM in our time. We will share our thoughts on multi-generational HCM to go with our multi-generational workforces.