Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica and Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras.
This time it is Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research. He pioneered coverage of the Professional Services Automation (PSA) category two decades ago.
We talk about how the pandemic has affected services firms and the PSA category. He also discusses initial findings from his annual survey of the market - way more promising than he anticipated earlier in the year.
We also discuss why just about every application vendor has developed PSA functionality but are loath to develop operational functionality for so many other, wide-open industries. As he points out when he was at Oracle in the late 90s, the PSA functionality did not require as much investment as that in manufacturing or financial services, and yet generated a nice, predictable revenue stream. Also, since then just about every industry has had a growing services revenue component - field services, training etc - what he calls embedded services and have become new candidates for PSA.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests like Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.
The BLM movement this summer has brought more urgency for HR and procurement groups to diversify employee and supplier bases. Related to this, I did interviews with two prominent African-American tech executives, Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer at Salesforce and Charles Phillips, Chairman at Infor. Also a presentation by Barbry McGann of Workday on their new VIBE product which allows companies to better visualize employee diversity from multiple dimensions. The Tech sector should be proud of its efforts.
While the recent intense focus is nice to see, it would be remiss to not point out we have been making steady progress for a long time. I invited Cindy Jutras, President of Mint Jutras to talk about her 45-year career at software vendors and analyst firms, and draw from her experiences on how gender and ethnic-based diversity have evolved in the industry. I add my own experience as an immigrant and someone who has worked in and traveled to 70 countries and seen the US "from the outside in" in the video below.
I particularly liked Cindy pointing out the movie, "Hidden Figures" about a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a critical role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. As she says "we have come so far"
We also touch on age discrimination. Silicon Valley and outsourcers tend to be focused on young recruits, but even corporate IT tends to be ambivalent about older employees. The pandemic has resulted in many older employees who are traumatized or those who finally having spent more time at home with families and have relished the experience. Both categories are opting for early retirements. These accelerated (and unplanned) exits may also bring more of a focus on the age attribute as companies refine their diversity policies.
It is a not a "woke" conversation. It is a realistic discussion about why a system of meritocracy, more enlightened executives and driven individuals work better than forced mandates for diversity.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting and Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel have joined us.
This time it is a special episode with two of the longest tenured players in IT world - Frank Scavo at Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.
We cover three major topics:
- At 0.40, we take a walk down memory lane going back over 15 years when each of us was pioneering blogs focused on enterprise tech - you will enjoy the photo archive we banter around
- At 7.08, we look back at 2020. Hint - it is not all negative.
- At 17.52, we look ahead to 2021. Fair warning - none of us is dumb enough to make forecasts after a year like 2020:)
As a special episode, it runs twice as long as others in the series. But I promise there are plenty of laughs, and lots of name dropping. Watch it, you may have a mention!
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here
For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers. Last couple of weeks Rob Kugel of Ventana and Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting have joined us.
This week, it is Bonnie Tinder, founder of Raven Intel which monitors project management trends and SI quality metrics.
We discuss how project management has undergone a major transformation during the pandemic. The accelerated clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccines have certainly raised the bar. In IT projects, especially HR projects she tracks, the key word as she says is "shift". Some have been postponed, some shortened, a new category of projects has been fast tracked,
We also discuss how SIs have been doing during the pandemic. Many smaller and midsized SIs are being squeezed out by the larger SIs as bigger projects disappear.
She provides a nice Raven's - bird's eye - view of the state of project and program management.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
"When we look back on the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll realize that one of the unhailed victims of the devastating virus is the touchscreen. Not only did the virus make us wary of unhygienic surfaces, but the lockdowns and social isolation that followed also spurred renewed interest in interacting with a human-sounding voice. Both realities have served to catalyze the beginning of a large-scale shift toward the voice interface."
So, I looked forward to their webinar titled "From Eyes to Ears" featuring Jason Pedone, SVP Mobile Banking and Emerging Channels at Truist, the 6th largest US bank and Mark Taylor, SVP at Cognizant Interactive. It was moderated by Manish Bahl, AVP at the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work.
I have excerpted below about a third of the webinar. I would encourage you to watch the whole session by registering here - it has audience polls and questions in addition.
Manish organized the session into three sections and my excerpts follow his guidance:
State of Voice, at the beginning
Challenge of Voice, starting at 8.55
Future of Voice, starting at 18.24
Some of the topics covered include:
why voice interfaces have accelerated during the pandemic
the brand challenge when Alexa or Siri becomes the "channel master"
privacy, trust issues
how voice can invoke empathy that visual interfaces cannot
blending of voice and visual content
many vertical examples - particularly in banking, healthcare and retail
Lots to think about when it comes to voice interfaces.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the pandemic, a lot of attention has gone to the CHRO and the CIO as companies moved to WFH, as they plan on safely opening physical sites and as companies accelerate digital transformations. The Chief Procurement Officer, in some ways, has had to perform even more spectacular cartwheels. Most have helped to conserve cash and minimize supplier risk. Many are being asked to help find suppliers in new global locations and those for diversity and sustainability initiatives.
With that background, I had a chance to catch up with Nikesh Parekh, co-founder and CEO of Suplari. I first met him two years ago when the company had just started. He walked me through a 20 minute presentation and demo below on what is branded as the Spend Intelligence Cloud.
Their service allows for aggregating supplier data to allow you to see spend across subsidiaries/locations/other tags. It aggregates spend from different sources - via PO and AP data from various ERP systems, via services like Ariba and Coupa, via procurement card etc.
I really like their library of 175 machine-driven insights. Some insights are tactical - for t&e compliance or potential fraud alerts. Other insights are more strategic - for supplier base consolidation, as an example. Nikesh mentions a relationship with consulting firms like Kearney for more of the strategic sourcing projects. New insights are being developed with a supplier diversity pov and for budgeting and forecasting processes.
At the start of the pandemic, specific insights identified opportunities to conserve cash, prevent non-essential spend, predict and forecast large cash payments, extend payment terms and enforce new policies. The service also allows for easy "case" set up and assignment to specific individuals and teams. That brings collaboration and project management to the sourcing/procurement function.
I had expected they would mostly be focused on indirect spend. I was pleased to hear him say customers are starting to use services like his for their more complex, and clearly more strategic, direct spend with their Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO of TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies with what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, relying mostly on supplier-provided data or searching for new vendors via their own web searches.
Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy had presented here in the Analyst Cam series about Discovery, Diversity, Sustainability and other use cases they help many of the Fortune 100 customers and many other organizations with.
Stephany has many examples of heroics. In the first few weeks of the pandemic she describes how the UK government, desperate for PPE supplies and looking for choices beyond China, leveraged TealBook for information on 60,000 ISO certified PPE makers. She describes 170 other requests in the first 3 weeks from around the world to help source N95 masks or their components (Matt shows that use case in the video above)
During the BLM crisis and the many diversity initiatives since customers have leveraged TealBook's 800,000 certificates for black and minority owned businesses. More impressively they have helped a number of smaller businesses self-certify (she says 95% of them find formal regulatory certification too cumbersome or too expensive) and become more visible to companies. As a result, companies have reported they found $30 to $100m in spend with minority businesses they had not identified from their existing records.
The focus is next switching to sustainability initiatives and similarly finding suppliers with appropriate focus and certification on green matters.
We also talk about shifting global chains - the "China +1 initiative" in many companies. She says it is "China +2 or 3" for some customers.
We next talk about trust in data. While in enterprise world, we routinely talk about "single source of truth", the reality is Mark Twain's comment today would be about 'Lies, Damn Lies and Big Data". The person on the street has little faith in data because so much of media has cherry picked data to suit its narrative. She has some thoughts about how to build trust.
Finally we talk about data science and careers for our young. She says "we are just beginning" and clearly is a role model and recruiter for a number of young data and ML graduates.
She is a very impressive entrepreneur and we cover a lot of ground as you can see below.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here
For the next few episodes, I will be joined by guest analysts and industry observers. Last week Rob Kugel of Ventana joined us.
This week, it is Josh Greenbaum of Enterprise Application Consulting.
We start off talking about a note he wrote a couple of years ago titled Mired in Mediocrity. I have written about vendor myopia - they have missed out on several large markets as I wrote here
There have been several moves during the pandemic which make both of us a bit more positive about the industry - and feel merry in keeping with the holiday season.
I have a great slate of analysts and industry observers lined up who will bring other nuanced perspectives on enterprise tech in the next few episodes
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the pandemic, a lot of attention has gone to the CHRO and the CIO as companies moved to WFH, as they plan on safely opening physical sites and as companies accelerate digital transformations. The Chief Procurement Officer, in some ways, has had to perform even more spectacular cartwheels. Think of how many supply chains have broken down (think PPE, toilet paper, meatpacking plants, anything sourced from China etc). Or how many customers have entered new markets to survive or thrive during the pandemic and how many new suppliers they have had to explore. Think also about new demands as companies accelerate diversity and sustainability initiatives.
I had a chance to catch up with Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO and with Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy at TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies develop what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from over 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, rely mostly on supplier-provided data or search for new vendors via their own web searches. The supplier job is also easier as they can build on what TealBook has already harvested.
I especially like that their focus is not just on indirect spend. With so many companies re-shoring or entering new markets, there is growing interest in new Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
In the presentation/demo below Matt provides a product perspective (especially what he calls Autonomous Data Foundation in their stack) with a number of very nice vertical (particularly biopharma) and global examples. Lots of discovery, diversity, sustainability support. As he says just about every Fortune 100 company is now a customer.
Later in the week, I will run an interview with Stephany about megatrends and heroics in the procurement function.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Stacey Harris, Chief Research Officer and Managing Partner at Sapient Insights Group presented highlights from their "2020–2021 HR Systems Survey White Paper, 23rd Annual Edition” As she says, there is a lot of conjecture about how HR groups have reacted during the pandemic, so it's nice to have results from a huge sample polling 1,900 organizations in 64 countries, representing 27 million employees.
Stacey provided more background on the survey: "The survey stands alone as a global view of the current and future plans for HR Technology adoption, crucial practices, and emerging technology trends from. The research covers organizations in all ranges of size, industry, and location and is focused on capturing the Voice of the Customer - reaching beyond over sampled early adopters and global brands; to gather realistic data from HR and HRIT leaders working every day, often in anonymity, to achieve outcomes for their organizations .This is a valuable resource for anyone making critical decisions about HR Technology and its value to organizational outcomes and the future of HR Tech."
The research shows lots of shifts in HR systems spend and direction in a year dominated by COVID-19 and WFH in a year where the world turned upside down. One example: "15% of organizations are planning on decreasing traditional HR Technology Spend in 2021, by an average of 23% of their current budgets. In contrast 28% of organizations are planning to increase spending in non-traditional HR Technology areas like infrastructure and remote working tools."
As we discuss, HR may not still not be considered strategic by many, but nobody will argue with the point that it has become Essential with a capital E. We cover a lot of ground - how talent management tech has paid off during the crisis, automation trends, moving from WFH to blended models,
Watch the video below, and also download the full report here. The report is about 100 pages, but skimming the graphics - almost one to a page - is just as rewarding. You will find it is one of the most realistic looks at the day in the life of the new, dramatically changed HR function.
Burning Platform: Diversity Trends in Tech
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests like Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica.
The BLM movement this summer has brought more urgency for HR and procurement groups to diversify employee and supplier bases. Related to this, I did interviews with two prominent African-American tech executives, Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer at Salesforce and Charles Phillips, Chairman at Infor. Also a presentation by Barbry McGann of Workday on their new VIBE product which allows companies to better visualize employee diversity from multiple dimensions. The Tech sector should be proud of its efforts.
While the recent intense focus is nice to see, it would be remiss to not point out we have been making steady progress for a long time. I invited Cindy Jutras, President of Mint Jutras to talk about her 45-year career at software vendors and analyst firms, and draw from her experiences on how gender and ethnic-based diversity have evolved in the industry. I add my own experience as an immigrant and someone who has worked in and traveled to 70 countries and seen the US "from the outside in" in the video below.
I particularly liked Cindy pointing out the movie, "Hidden Figures" about a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a critical role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. As she says "we have come so far"
We also touch on age discrimination. Silicon Valley and outsourcers tend to be focused on young recruits, but even corporate IT tends to be ambivalent about older employees. The pandemic has resulted in many older employees who are traumatized or those who finally having spent more time at home with families and have relished the experience. Both categories are opting for early retirements. These accelerated (and unplanned) exits may also bring more of a focus on the age attribute as companies refine their diversity policies.
It is a not a "woke" conversation. It is a realistic discussion about why a system of meritocracy, more enlightened executives and driven individuals work better than forced mandates for diversity.
December 17, 2020 in Burning Platform, Diversity Inclusion, Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)