Business 2 Employee Digital Services

Interesting saturday early morning bike ride with COOs and Strategy heads of five budding organisations.  They are on the verge of breaking into the big league fighting competition that they chose to avoid so far. Having spent nearly a decade to grow from a startup / revival of an age old defunct organisation - to mid market size - to now, having to confront the big boys, as their size and customer segment now, no longer allows them the luxury of separating themselves as either new kids on the block or as niche players.

The moment, the gorgeous valley at the edge of the cliff, in the early morning light at Khandala stopped being a distraction, the discussions hovered around the issues that have been giving these 5 guys sleepless nights. The intent to chart a new path in this digital age, one that is different from their competition. The desire not to compete with the usual big guys on their terms or home turf but rather traverse a different path ahead, a path which none has conceptualised or had taken before.

This set me thinking. For an enterprise to create the unconceptualised, to chart the uncharted what does it take w.r.t skills, culture and management practises. My view is an organisation that takes business to employee service delivery seriously are the organisations that are best placed to brace the challenges and meet them at a level that is beyond the ordinary. I believe starting at home, is the best model for an organisation to go digital... provide digital business to employee services. Only one of my four friends saw merit in this line of thought. The reason being, the other four started viewing B2E digital services more in terms of capital expenditure towards ipads and iphones and the associated eco-system to sustain it effectively within the enterprise network. Automating payroll MIS and HR services for presence on smartphones! The discussion went in the predictable direction, with Microsoft Surface and wearable computing devices that are now part of healthcare accessory market getting added to the list! This is a very narrow view of B2E digital services. 

An effective digital enterprise, in my view, is an enterprise that delivers digital experiences as a part of Business2Employee services. Only when employees experience life at work, where the eco-system and workplace experiences get digital, only then they would be able to conceptualise new age digital services for their customers. Some level of experiential learning and a digital experience workplace eco-system, will set the tuning of the thought process at a very different frequency. Employees, during non work hours, weekends and holidays ; as regular consumers undergo some very sophisticated digital experiences just by carrying cell phones and tablets along with them. Location based services predominantly dominate this space. However, location is just one attribute. Digital experience tend to add a significant amount of nuisance value to one's life when they become irrelevant to the task at hand or the time of the day or the event one is experiencing does not resonate with experience being delivered. Context and experience need to be in perfect synch for meaningful digital experience manifestation to add value to one's life. This too, once achieved soon tends to assume a nuisance / irrelevant factor when not laced with personalisation of digital experiences powered by learnings from behaviour analytics of users. To achieve this enterprises need to start stepping into the realm of internet of things, making IoT part of corporate IT & digital strategy.

A full profound and effective digital enterprise strategy for business to employee services, should actually not involve capital expenditure on gadgets, gizmos and wearable devices, but rather focus on creating an eco-system that at a very basic level, entertains BYOT not with an view to restrict, but rather fully leverage without impacting either enterprise security or freedom to personal digital lifestyles on personal gadgets. Once this is achieved, a digital enterprise should start delivering context aware services that goes beyond the singular attribute of location.

Creating an eco-system that delivers business to employee digital services is a very significant and defining aspect that forms the foundation of a digital enterprise.  To envision, conceptualise and architect these services as context aware, event driven and event triggered digital experiences; will not just dramatically improve productivity, cut costs over and above the existing automation layers, but also pushes the employees to think around similar context aware digital experiences for their customers.  Without this layer being built, the entire management push towards being a digital enterprise might just end up being a hollow affair.

Customer Insights Paradox of the Digital Enterprise

Enterprise India is going through the most exciting and disruptive phase it have ever seen so far. Having said that, I concede having such strong similar sentiments in the year 2000 , 2003, 2007, 2010 and in 2012 ! I get excited when a radical new piece of technology erupts on the scene, and then get disappointed when adoption takes its own sweet time, and then get all excited and crazy when adoption accelerates to life changing gear!

Walking down the memory lane, digitization meant conversion of physical records to electronic data format and automation of workflows that were simple rule based tasks. That is what we did as CIOs and IT Heads between 1990 -2002. While most of IT India was making money on Y2K projects and dollar arbitrage (which it still does - dollar arbitrage) , a few corporates in India were discovering the excitement of going online with customer service and sales. One of the banks I worked for back in year 2000, my Chairman insisted in withdrawing money for the ATM and seeing that transaction the very next moment on his internet banking transaction query screen, and on pull based sms mobile banking transaction screen. We took 8 days to make it happen for credit cards, and I was told by my boss then, that my employment with the bank now feels justified!

Compare that with about 6 years ago, when you started getting real time alerts, OTP on your smartphone and about 16 months ago that mobile banking apps have been made available with bill payments and internet shopping facilitated with instant merchant payments. Digitization in the yester-years was all about driving efficiency through automated workflows, and in the process enterprises ended up being sole suppliers of technology to customers. Consumerization of IT has put technology directly in the hands of the customers as a lifestyle element, by start-up companies and device manufacturers; with enterprises now playing a catch-up game. Before enterprises could figure out how to participate meaningfully ( some still are) on social networking platforms and in the mobile paradigm, consumer technology has leapfrogged into connected world of internet of things converging rich data and context; leaving behind amazing hidden insights to be discovered through the various digital footprints left by an average consumer, on the grid.  Big Data and unearthing hidden intelligent  insights has now assumed significant importance for a digital enterprise. 

Digital world today consists of 

• user's digital footprints  across

- connected devices

- social networking and general digital utility platforms that users use either directly or indirectly 

• technologies that enable one to decipher these footprints for insights
• enterprise IT plumbing that integrates into this world to loop back the learning's and data into their mainstream customer facing technology 
• and a whole host of independent apps that serve the customers better than enterprise IT solutions.

When I look at digitization projects with a few enterprises today, mostly financial services world, these are mostly around facilitating easy payments through mobile wallets and mobile devices to leverage the e-commerce boom that is on the surge. Having said that, some of the conversations that I heard during the 1999-2003 era seem to repeat these days - the ones that express anguish about digital space having created a divide between the enterprise and the customer. During the brick and mortar business era, customer relations and hence customer understanding vested with relationship managers, branch tellers, shopping mall attendants and branch managers. Technology was seen as an enabler that would turn this perceived personal asset of front line staff into an enterprise asset. All the CRM systems and online apps have failed to capture this intelligence due to the form filling approach that crept in as a part of this endeavor. Customers were happy to talk about stuff rather than tick check boxes. With consumerization of IT, customers seem less inclined to talk about stuff too. The gap between customer and the enterprise further increases with privacy concerns and the associated laws, as enterprises decide to decipher digital footprints for these insights. In hindsight, the customer touch that existed during brick and mortar era, has now completely vanished and enterprises today seem more far removed from customer insights than before.

Lessons from Sports

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There is something that is dramatically different about the Wimbledon championships of the present day  and the currently ongoing Cricket World Cup 2015. Technology is now an inseparable fabric of these events and it has catapulted digitization with the introduction of event driven systems, analytics and visualization technologies. The fact that these events are global in scale and attract massive eyeballs, does put pressure on their content, presentation and production quality. This has resulted in some amazing analytics and some extremely amazing visualization products for display of analytical results, that get presented pre and post the  matches; on television, mobile and portal. I have been a career CIO and my natural instinct is to look for lessons that enterprise IT could learn. 

Event Driven Systems :

Some of the facts leading to the introduction of technology into the game, are remarkably different from enterprise. Unlike the enterprise, were considerable resources of money, time and talent has been spent in designing systems to increase operational efficiency, reporting to calibrate performance against goals and some really sophisticated analytics leading to insights of historical trends;  in sports, technology has been introduced to induce better accuracy into existing manual decision systems.

In most sports, the grey areas that cloud a decision add to the excitement, nervousness and hence the interest in the sport. The madness of excitement and the depths of sorrow that one is subjected to when decisions are taken in unclear situations, is what the sport really thrives on. Such decision keep the sport alive in talk and in memory for multiple years after the event has finished. The game feeds on such decisions. In sharp contrast, enterprise space is less forgiving. Decisions that don’t work out sometimes result in burial of IT systems, vendors and careers. Despite this culture of getting it first time right, technology is yet to penetrate areas that increase decision accuracy or take decisions based on circumstantial evidence. 

To enable technology to take such decisions, event driven architectures that collate data from events, need to be deployed. The DRS implemented both at Wimbledon and in cricket do exactly this. These technologies marry the real with digital. The need for DRS has been created by the hype around controversies that surround the decisions. With DRS in place that map ball trajectory, bounce, speed, direction and with the flashing bails and wickets being used in the currently on world cup, what follows is very rich data that could be analysed in various situations leading to trends, forecasts and predictions. Context associated with the event and all event attributes like ball swing, speed, batter position, stroke played etc are captured and utilised in correlations. This intelligence is used to predict possible future outcomes with various scenarios.

Enterprises capture lots of data but fail to strike correlations and run other statistical models that generate insights around multiple scenarios with context attached. Hence lack of digital resources to belt our relevant predictions has always plagued most enterprises. This result, is that most revenue and business forecasts made by sales heads meets with little challenge in the board room in the absence of scientific predictions and their analysis for probability of success.

Stakeholder Participation :

One thing that the world of sports and the news media is doing now, is ensuring exceptionally effective stakeholder participation and create a well rounded data view on all view points. Comparisons between analyst views, public view, public sentiment and constant calibration of  the event progress with these different view points and opinions, bring a completely different excitement level to the game. Viewers get instantly connected with the buzz that now is no longer limited to their living room or the confines of the sports bar. Technology has plucked each individual out from the confines of their solitude and promptly plugged them into the ever buzzing chatter of the global social fabric – the internet. People tweet as a form of expression letting know the whole world what they thing or are experiencing.

For sports and news media, these people are their stakeholders and customers. Everything they say and do means a lot to these industry domain players. While the India South Africa WC 2015 match was on, different people started to tweet different statistics, views all around.

Enterprises that sell to customers either directly or indirectly have started tracking tweets specially around product and service feedback.  Many companies today are plugged into the information super highway with their ears to the grid and are keenly listening to everything that is being said. However the same as process or format is never pursued when organisations role out changes that impacts their employees. Business to employee services are the most unprofessionally managed services with absolutely no meaningful and effective feedback looped in. One most important lesson that an enterprise can take away from the world of sport is about creating a platform that can engage each and every stakeholder on every initiative.

Data Visualization :

As the event driven systems that digitize physical world activity into data points meets the world of software that effectively co-relates this data and once the platform that engages all the stakeholders is in place, you will need a vehicle that serves this data and collects the reactions and presents them effectively to deliver a complete perspective. Today effective presentation is a tool that goes beyond just representing findings in a manner that is digestible, but rather the larger goals of presentation is to vow and awe the eyeballs to ensure stickiness. Style, slickness and a bit of wackiness in presentation styles, somehow ensure stickiness of eyeballs.

Consumerization of IT has resulted in electronic gadgets and gizmos being bought as lifestyle elements, that connect the consumer to the grid. The small screen real estate and the target device being a lifestyle element, poses a presentation challenge. No one likes to look at simple drab and dull visuals on lifestyle mediums. Even Mahatma Gandhi’s picture gets jazzed up as bit without compromising personality values; when the picture gets featured in Vogue or GQ ! Visualisation that vows at first impression gets eyeball to take interest in a space where content is fiercely competing for consumer attention.

While enterprises presentation goals are about driving the point home, there are multiple initiatives, themes and programs that are stakeholder facing where just making the point might not ensure enrolment and participation. Visualization to make the data & results look appealing to the theme and the initiative at hand; can go an extra mile to ensure enrolment. Why do some people go to Starsports app instead of yahoo sports app or vice-versa to view results of the same match. Data Visualization apart from various types of analytical output that gets belted out, forms an important attribute to consider if eyeball stickiness is the goal.

Summary :

Lessons from the world of sports for enterprise IT are as follows:

1. Venture out in spaces of customer engagement that bridges the physical world or brick & mortar with digital. Internet of Things is in place today that can get one started on this track at reasonably humble budgets. Content is king!
2. Collect all data. Correlate, detect patterns, run statistical models, but always attach context with each insight. Enterprise BI initiatives capture insights but forget to tag them with context that prevailed when those results were experienced. Big Data technologies are in place an in SaaS model that prevents this exercise from becoming an expensive affair. Insights are invaluable!
3. Create a platform to get all round stake holder view and present without prejudice alternate view points that decision/policy makers can either choose to look at or ignore. If you choose to ignore this, one would question the business value of your judgement of not collecting feedback that is being voluntarily given 24X7 about your brand / initiative / product / service / culture / HR policy/…… Perception is reality!
4. Data visualization in all output is a must. The board members who harp about being presented simple data, all appreciate a good visualization output. The same guys talk about how fantastic the soccer match results and analytics presentation was and have their preference of apps and portals and news channels to go to, based on visualization. This is the age of content competing for consumer attention, so make it look awesome.