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.

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.

Architectures for the new age

The next generation workforce that enters the organisations, come from a world of funky and cool mobile apps and gaming interface users. As this workforce starts interacting with the enterprise apps, comparisons will start being drawn. Two aspects will stand-out as sticky sore points:

1. The user interface and information arrangement on the screen
2. The lack of asynchronous approach to processes

Most of us know how screens of enterprise systems look like. Even though access to corporate digital assets are aligned to the needs of the role and the type of responsibilities employees carry, the screens typically display the master-detail relationship of data with very little effort spent on the GUI design to highlight focus on the few data items that would be responsible for initiating the next set of actions or have a significant role in the decisions that need to be made.

Most enterprise systems are hardwired on context definition and this comes across when we view the screens against the backdrop of changing context on the same shop-floor. The issue repeats itself with enterprise processes. The approach to architecture design around the  context - process - screen design relationship,  reflects organisational preference of operating in the manageable environment of the synchronous, and the sequential, delivering on the first time right paradigm. Having said this, there is a huge management thrust towards getting people to multi-task, be asynchronous, take risks and be flexible on sequencing events and actions in a process to stay relevant in a world of changing contexts. This is the only way organisations maximise efficiency and quality on a fixed cost base.

This is a great paradox enterprises live in. Once this paradox manifests itself on a large scale and starts affecting relevance of delivery to the end consumer, IT systems get labelled as inflexible, rigid and legacy. In the real world, the word legacy has such a positive connotation to it. We all want to leave a legacy behind that we would be remembered for long after we have gone. Legacy however is an uncharitable word when used around IT system! That however is a topic for a different blog post.

Enterprises will find personal devices increasing their sphere of influence in the domain where enterprises will see individuals in employee role, traversing down a path where enterprise data access only on enterprise devices policy will be a hinderance in delivering results. Class of devices will expand beyond smartphones and tablets as we know it today. Multiple devices that are personal, public and enterprise assets will come into play as internet of things expands to consume every thing that has a potential to store, compute, persist, connect and digitally perish. The GUI of this world will dictate the tastes and preferences of the users and will drive behaviour. GUIs of enterprise IT systems will need to align to avoid high training costs and larger learning TATs to get Gen-Next employees effective and productive.

When I take a look at the Metro framework, at a very high level, I see a lot of thought that has been put in to :

•  create a digital UI fashion trend - and an infectious one

•  chart a path forward for enterprise IT systems as they undertake a journey to manifest themselves on the list mile on personal consumer devices.

Metro stands out on the following aspects:

1)    Its a scalable framework ( tempted to say standard, qualifies in my book to evolve as a standard) that could become a standard as it gets device agnostic and OS agnostic. At this moment the framework for mobile smartphones is different from that of tablets. Metro defines, usable and unusable screen areas assuming the world needs only 16:9 surfaces and hence the different framework for smartphones.

2)    Framework has provision to represent master-detail relationships and has guidelines that drive programming behaviour around handling data that is multi row - column tables and scroll. Best practises and the right model to manage activity needed NOW to move forward a process on the timeline in a contextualized environment.

3)    Nudges developers to make asynchrony as the underlying to define behaviour that is responsive to now and always ready for the next. The  nature of next being that no one can foresee the future and hence a tight synchronous process is not the way to build on personal devices. Asynchrony is central to engage, based on decisions and choices consumer make to progress ahead on the timeline.

4)      Guidelines around content being front and central to enable readability puts the consumer instead of enterprise (process ,data and events) in the the centre.

5)    Framework to Win As One that keeps you firmly rooted in the present for you to decide on the next moment, enabling developers to stitch the data of events, relationships, communication threads, facts and status all in a grid format on one screen. Imagine your grid shows the meeting that comes up in the next 5 mins where the agenda is discussion around performance management. One square shows calendar data (just the meeting name and time). Next square shows discussion threats from email around appraisals, one that matter for this meeting. A third square shows the bell curve of your team. a couple of grids displays pictures of your top 5% of your team with rating. This picture is not complete without that one red grid that shows payroll budget over-run telling you that you cannot have a top 5% but a top 3% of your team as high performers! Its your choice if you want developers to write code, that makes this choice!!

The dilemma I have in my head is that Enterprise IT systems are stitched for rigidity and robustness. Hence the processes are sequential. Any data entering thru points of integration, will necessarily have to go thru a synchronous, end-to-end experience.  Last mile architected around asynchrony integrating into a central system architected around sequential end-to-end process thread, are like chalk and cheese. Some thought will need to be given to Enterprise IT Architecture to make this work.

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