deal architect

Analyst Cam: Blink – Empowering Frontline Workers

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Sean Nolan, CEO of Blink, which offers mobile access for frontline workers in a variety of verticals – “nurses, refuge collectors, retail staff, hospitality staff, aged care workers, anyone who doesn't sit behind a desk all day, they probably don't have a workplace device, like a laptop or a phone given to them so probably has got personal devices. Most don't have a workplace email address or sort of digital identity necessarily.”

He provides a use case at the UK transit carrier, Stagecoach – where drivers use his app to access Trapeze rostering, GreenRoad telematics and Oracle HCM applications. The more useful the applications. the more engagement of the frontline workers and more chances they will adopt even more digital functionality

I know I am a broken record asking vendors to verticalize but it is heart breaking  to hear so many essential workers are in his words “to a large part digitally disconnected from the organization.” His goal is to fix that but giving them access to a variety of relevant applications like training, benefits and even accident and near miss reporting, which he says is one of the more attractive use cases for their software.

Listen to his pitch and applicability in the verticals they are targeting. Nicely done in under 20 minutes. He was introduced to me by Workday Ventures, one of their investors.

Analyst Cam: Limeade – all about employee well-being

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Dr. Patti Fletcher, CMO and Larry Colagiovanni, Chief Product and Technology officer at Bellevue, WA based Limeade.

There is a lot of talk about “employee experience”. Of course, everyone wants happy, productive employees but a better UX in a transactional system may make them a bit more productive, but by itself does not contribute much to employee happiness.  

Employers face a daunting set of challenges – coping with the “mass resignation” trend, employee burnout, trying to get the right mix of work-from-home and in physical office. They are responding with a variety of perks – Google offers employees free electric scooters to get them back to the office, many offer mental health aids in addition to many traditional benefits. Limeade helps employees navigate this menu of myriad benefits. Just as important via its "immersion" in ERP systems, employees have a personal reason to interact more often with the system.   

As Limeade founder and CEO, Henry Albrecht commented in Forbes “Why can’t there be a great company that does for human well-being what Intuit software does for financial health, aligning what's good for people and what's good for business toward a common mission?”

Patti and Larry go through how Limeade aims to deliver both – what's good for people and what's good for business

Analyst Cam: pymetrics – Talent matching with a focus on soft skills

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Dr. Frida Polli, co-founder and CEO of pymetrics which utilizes neuroscience and AI to assess candidates and employees across a range of cognitive, social, and emotional traits and algorithmically recommends the best-fit talent to companies. Using algorithms that are trained on high-performing employees at a company, Pymetrics builds a trait profile of a company's top performers to select best-fit talent.

Their major differentiators include their focus on soft skills, AI fueled by plenty of data which maps skills to wide range of occupations and validation across several global customers. Throughout the presentation, the word “unbiased” came up often (especially when it comes to ethnicity and gender), with concerns about bias being built into machine learning algorithms.

She makes a strong case for why measuring soft skills is critical. She quotes that 89% of HR leaders believe that failed hires lacked appropriate soft skills. She believes such skills are inherent, durable and future-facing.

Pymterics has patented a set of 12 core exercises which capture cognitive, emotional and social traits. They measure soft skills like generosity and focus which have been matched to various occupations. They are supplemented with assessments of quantitative and communication skills.

It is a testament to how the workforce environment has changed when she says half the use cases she sees now have an internal mobility/reskilling and workforce insights focus. When they started a decade ago, it was primarily focused on talent acquisition. 

She covers wide ground including ROI from her platform and 3 case studies (including two in Asia/Pacific). That brings out nuggets about soft skills across global cultures, and the applicability of her tools to entry level staff v experienced hires.

I was introduced to them by Workday Ventures. They are an investor along with many others like General Atlantic and Khosla. It is a fascinating conversation with someone who is a Harvard PhD and has spent plenty of time in the cognitive sciences.

Burning Platform: Experiential Design in Enterprise Software

In the 70th episode of Burning Platform, we host Jeff Gelfuso, Workday’s first ever Chief Design Officer.

The pandemic has exposed all of us to the most honorable of customer services and in reverse, some incredibly disappointing experiences – in what I have called COVID copouts and Brexit BS. I worked on a project last year where I had a chance to ask a number of executives to catalog their good and bad personal experiences and I heard plenty around eCommerce, auto dealers, travel and other services. Accenture's design agency Fjord, has coined a term "liquid expectations" — "when you experience a service in one industry, it raises the bar for what you expect from other industries." I have a corollary to that: employee experiences play a huge part in customer experiences. Their frustration, fatigue, fear all negatively affect how they manifest themselves to the outside world.

With that backdrop, it was nice to host Jeff who has significant product design and R&D experience in the consumer tech world at Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. It is a fascinating conversation about the enterprise tech view of experiences and how wfh and hybrid workplaces have complicated the thinking.

Jeff talks about how he spent the first few months at Workday talking to over a hundred customer executives about their experiences and expectations. He also talks about the test bed of Workday’s own employee-centric culture and how that is helping his design thinking. His personal, virtual on-boarding experience and their HR moves like “Thank-you Fridays” during the pandemic are guiding his thinking. And how the HCM experiences are being adapted to Workday’s planning, financial, procurement and other applications.

I like his point about thinking about “end to end experiences” and being humble enough to recognize that you will never be able to anticipate how every user reacts to your software. And the resulting need to think about multiple roles, tailored experiences and to build flexibility into your design. We also discuss natural interfaces and the need to weave in external collaboration tools like Slack and Teams (and soon Metaverse tools).

He has a noble goal – simplification. He defines it as not pretending you can eliminate enterprise complexity, but pushing it more to the background. Other competitors have long promised ‘Run Simple”. Jeff is doing it in a vastly more complicated, hybrid workplace with heightened employee expectations.

Kudos to Workday for recognizing the need for a visionary design officer and recruiting someone from the consumer tech world. Jeff particularly impressed me with his empathetic approach to experiential design.

Unpacking the “Great Resignation”

There is a lot of talk these days about the “Great Resignation” wave. To start off with, its not just resignations, there also retirements and relocations. But people are not staying home watching Netflix or playing golf, many of these ‘migrants” are starting a new generation of small businesses. It is in a wave of what I call micro-capitalism.

The changes have actually been happening for a while but the pandemic has significantly accelerated them. 5 years ago, when researching labor trends for my book on automation, Silicon Collar, I observed what I called the Alt-Job economy. People were glibly calling it the gig economy – there were many cross-currents underneath. Developers in the iOS ecosystem, people selling arts and crafts on Etsy, franchise owners, ethnic grocers, alternative healthcare practitioners among them – I summarized them in this blog post.

The last couple of years have only increased the fragmentation. Lots more small merchants are taking advantage of micro-fulfillment platforms that Spotify and others provide. Many savvy real estate professionals are launching syndicates with knowledge of regional markets and getting funded via sites like Crowdstreet.  VCs are broadly investing LOTS more in startups. According to CB Insights, Global venture funding reached a record $621B in 2021, more than double the 2020 mark of $294B. According to Venture Forward, a multiyear research program from GoDaddy to quantify this entrepreneurial activity, Americans created 2.8 million more online microbusinesses in 2020 than in 2019. If they are not starting new businesses, lots of them are actively trading on platforms like Robinhood.

I have seen it first-hand at home. My daughter is a global traveler and would come back and tell of “digital nomads” working from Chiang Mai and Bali.  As the pandemic started, she left her job in the hospitality sector and started a life coaching service and has clients around the world. After a long stint at psychiatric hospitals and clinics, my wife recently retired. But it is not “retire” in the traditional sense of the word. She is inspired by Tom Brady, the ageless quarterback of our home team, the Buccaneers. I am also seeing the “Great Relocation” as countless people move to our state and others like Texas. Some moved because their employers allowed them to work from anywhere. Many others did not move for a job. They are attracted by the potential for a more vibrant, entrepreneurial lifestyle. It is also fascinating to see them move to secondary and tertiary cities. Lots more people want a semi-rural lifestyle and retailers like Tractor Supply Co are growing exponentially as they provide them with poultry and other small farming needs.

Going forward, I plan to cover this trend of micro-capitalism a lot closer. Hopefully, in doing so, I can also help investors with some of their analysis. Ditto with HR and Procurement vendors and professionals who help with talent acquisition/development and supplier diversity. There are some truly profound changes happening in the entrepreneur, talent and supply chain economies. 

Analyst Cam: Workday Skills Cloud update

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

This time it is Cristina Goldt, GM Talent products at Workday who provides an update on how nicely the Workday Skills Cloud has grown.

You would think the demand and supply of talent is largely driven by the skills enterprises need, and those that employees and contractors can provide. In reality, this matching is chaotic, not the least because building a decent taxonomy of skills is daunting. The Bureau of Labor Statistics catalogs over 850 occupations and has a paragraph describing each one of them, but nowhere near the detailed skills each requires. Of course, across industries the same occupation calls for slightly different skills, and each employer in turn adds their own unique nuances. So, many enterprises fall back on traditional talent filters - educational credentials, referrals, cultural fit etc.

Workday has been on a mission to respond to what Cristina calls the "Skills Imperative" and training their machines using data from their customer community with over 55 million employees.  She does a really nice job describing their journey over the last several years, their skills "foundation" including their ontology and inference algorithms, how the Skills Cloud is being used by over 1,000 organizations over the "lifecycle" - hiring, up-skilling, retaining etc. their workforce, and the growing number of Workday products including Talent Marketplace, Career Hub, and Learning which leverage the skills infrastructure.

She mentions a press release during her comments. It is available here with a lot more detail about Workday's response to the Skills Imperative. 

Really invigorating half an hour.

Analyst Cam: Alpine Supply Chain Solutions and Warehouse automation

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

This time, it is Tom Ryan, my former Gartner colleague. Along with Michael Wohlwend, Managing Principal at Alpine Supply Chain Solutions, they recently presented an hour-long webinar "Battle of the Bots" focused on warehouse automation. They kindly allowed me to excerpt about 18 minutes below.

One of the most sophisticated examples of warehouse automation has shown up in Amazon's massive fulfillment centers. I wrote about my tour to one here. I also excerpted from their virtual tour of 5 of their centers in the Analyst Cam episode here. I also interviewed the co-CEOs of 6 River Systems (now part of Spotify, both Amazon alums) last year, and also had an Analyst Cam episode on their bots here.

Tom discussed 6 fulfillment methods/use cases where robots increasingly participate. I have excerpted 3 below - Goods to Person, Order to Person and Long Distance Product Moves. He also discusses some of the vendors and models for each.  I have also included his commentary on economics of such automation.

Very nicely done in plain English and with crisp graphics.

The full webinar which contains more commentary on the evolution of warehouse automation, some polling and q&a during the webinar and 3 other fulfillment scenarios is available here. 

Analyst Cam: Jobcase

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ), as part of my Analyst Cam series. 

This time, it is Fred Goff, CEO of Jobcase.  More than just a hiring site, Jobcase calls itself "a “people-first” social platform – "built to help you improve and manage your work-life." I was introduced to them by Workday Ventures - it is a portfolio company and Jobcase and Workday have 200+ joint customers.

As he says, Jobcase is focused on 80% of the employment market which may not have college degrees - baristas, trade, blue collar jobs etc. Also it is pragmatic as its over 100 million community members provide real-world advice to peers about opportunities, risks etc.

We cover wide ground about the changing labor market - shortages, automation, anxiety in the work force, college degrees and student debt, middle class trends and how his company is working with various state labor/reemployment agencies - W. Virginia and Rhode Island among others which are committed to helping people find opportunities and stay positive about the future of work.  

 

Analyst Cam: Cognizant "Timeline of Next"

A few months ago, Cognizant asked a few market watchers to look at how we would live, work and learn differently as a result of the 2020 pandemic. Our forecasts were published in 16 themes in their Timeline of Next report - download a copy here. 

A week ago, Cognizant invited three of us: Beth Porter, CEO of Riff Analytics and Managing Partner of Esme Learning, Clay Griffith, Director of Product Marketing, Cognizant Softvision and me to a hour-long webinar on the themes from the report. Manish Bahl, AVP of the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work moderated the discussion.

I have excerpted below 2 segments from each of the living, working and learning sections of the webinar. We covered a lot more ground in the webinar. I would encourage you to watch the whole session by registering here and to read the report.

We got a lot of questions during the webinar - we answered some live, and responded to many others in writing after the session. If you have any questions, send me an email and I will similarly get one of us to respond.

BTW, I mention a business travel survey I recently conducted - you can read details in this post . 

Burning Platform: More work anywhere

In the 46th episode of the series we have Monty Hamilton of Rural Sourcing.

While the COVID-19 pandemic and related WFH protocols have turned many of us into recluses, the big realization is you can WFA - as in Anywhere. We have seen an significant acceleration in relocations - for tax, weather, safety, many other reasons. We had Mark Brooks who has been working and living for ages across the world - Shanghai, Bali, Malta, now Dubai.  Next, we had Tammie Hilend, CIO at Maxar who discussed how she has done her demanding job on the road in her RV  Then we had Raju Vegesna of Zoho Software talk about secondary and tertiary city locations in India, Japan, Netherlands, Mexico, the US 

I had written about Rural Sourcing in my 2010 book, The New Polymath, and I periodically get an update from Monty. They keep growing in secondary US cities - he talks about his 7th and 8th locations, the "features list" they use to decide on locations, how his practice has evolved a lot more to cloud deployments, product engineering and analytics.

I have always loved his approach - go to where the talent is, don't force them to relocate, unless they want to. Of course, after last year, many of them do want to relocate.