HPE and PTC join forces to deliver best manufacturing outcomes from the OT-IT productivity revolution

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer edge computing trends discussion explores the rapidly evolving confluence of operational technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT). 

New advances in data processing, real-time analytics, and platform efficiency have prompted innovative and impactful OT approaches at the edge. We’ll now explore how such data analysis platforms bring manufacturers data-center caliber benefits for real-time insights where they are needed most.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

To hear more about the latest capabilities in gaining unprecedented operational insights, we sat down with Riaan Lourens, Vice President of Technology in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at PTC, and Tripp Partain, Chief Technology Officer of IoT Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Riaan, what kinds of new insights are manufacturers seeking into how their operations perform?

Lourens

Lourens: We are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is really an extension of the third, where we used electronics and IT to automate manufacturing. Now, the fourth is the digital revolution, a fusion of technology and capabilities that blur the lines between the physical and digital worlds.

With the influx of these technologies, both hardware and software, our customers -- and manufacturing as a whole, as well as the discrete process industries -- are finding opportunities to either save or make more money. The trend is focused on looking at technology as a business strategy, as opposed to just pure IT operations.

There are a number of examples of how our customers have leveraged technology to drive their business strategy.

Gardner: Are we entering a golden age by combining what OT and IT have matured into over the past couple of decades? If we call this Industrial Revolution 4.0, (I4.0) there must be some kind of major opportunities right now.

Lourens: There are a lot of initiatives out there, whether it’s I4.0, Made in China 2025, or the Smart Factory Initiative in the US. By democratizing the process of providing value -- be it with cloud capabilities, edge computing, or anything in between – we are inherently providing options for manufacturers to solve problems that they were not able to solve before.

The opportunity for manufacturers today allows them to solve problems that they face almost immediately. There is quick time-to-value by leveraging technology that is consumable.

If you look at it from a broader technology standpoint, in the past we had very large, monolith-like deployments of technology. If you look at it from the ISA-95 model, like Level 3 or Level 4, your MES deployments or large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP), those were very large deployments that took many years. And the return on investment (ROI) the manufacturers saw would potentially pay off over many years.

The opportunity that exists for manufacturers today, however, allows them to solve problems that they face almost immediately. There is quick time-to-value by leveraging technology that is consumable. Then they can lift and drop and so scale [those new solutions] across the enterprise. That does make this an era the likes of which nobody has seen before.

Gardner: Tripp, do you agree that we are in a golden age here? It seems to me that we are able to both accommodate a great deal of diversity and heterogeneity of the edge, across all sorts of endpoints and sensors, but also bring that into a common-platform approach. We get the best of efficiency and automation.

Partain: There is a combination of two things. One, due to the smartphone evolution over the last 10 years, the types of sensors and chips that have been created to drive that at the consumer level are now at such reasonable price points you are able to apply these to industrial areas.

Partain

To Riaan’s point, the price points of these technologies have gotten really low -- but the capabilities are really high. A lot of existing equipment in a manufacturing environment that might have 20 or 30 years of life left can be retrofitted with these sensors and capabilities to give insights and compute capabilities at the edge. The capability to interact in real-time with those sensors provides platforms that didn’t exist even five years ago. That combines with the right software capabilities so that manufacturers and industrials get insights that they never had before into their processes.

Gardner: How is the partnership between PTC and HPE taking advantage of this new opportunity? It seems you are coming from different vantage points but reinforcing one another. How is the whole greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to the partnership?

Partnership for progress, flexibility

Lourens: For some context, PTC is a software vendor. Over the last 30 years we targeted our efforts at helping manufacturers either engineer software with computer-aided design (CAD) or product lifecycle management (PLM). We have evolved to our growth areas today of IoT solution platforms and augmented reality (AR) capabilities.

The challenge that manufacturers face today is not just a software problem. It requires a robust ecosystem of hardware vendors, software vendors, and solutions partners, such as regional or global systems integrators.

The reason we work very closely with HPE as an alliance partner is because HPE is a leader in the space. HPE has a strong offering of compute capabilities -- from very small gateway-level compute all the way through to hybrid technologies and converged infrastructure technologies.

Ultimately our customers need flexible options to deploy software at the right place, at the right time, and throughout any part of their network. We find that HPE is a strong partner on this front.

Gardner: Tripp, not only do we have lower cost and higher capability at the edge, we also have a continuum of hybrid IT. We can use on-premises micro-datacenters, converged infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud options to choose from. Why is that also accelerating the benefits for manufacturers? Why is a continuum of hybrid IT – edge to cloud -- an important factor?

Partain: That flexibility is required if you look at the industrial environments where these problems are occurring for our joint customers. If you look at any given product line where manufacturing takes place -- no two regions are the same and no two factories are the same. Even within a factory, a lot of times, no two production lines are the same.

There is a wide diversity in how manufacturing takes place. You need to be able to meet those challenge with the customers to give them the deployment options that meet each of those environments.

It’s interesting. Factories don’t do enterprise IT-like deployments, where every factory takes on new capabilities at the same time. It’s much more balanced in the way that products are made. You have to be able to have that same level of flexibility in how you deploy the solutions, to allow it to be absorbed the same way the factories do all of their other types of processes.

We have seen the need for different levels of IT to match up to the way they are implemented in different types of factories. That flexibility meets them where they are and allows them to get to the value much quicker -- and not wait for some huge enterprise rollout, like what Riaan described earlier with ERP systems that take multiple years.

By leveraging new, hybrid, converged, and flexible environments, we allow a single plant to deploy multiple solutions and get results much quicker. We can also still work that into an enterprise-wide deployment -- and get a better balance between time and return.

Gardner: Riaan, you earlier mentioned democratization. That jumped out at me. How are we able to take these advances in systems, software, and access and availability of deployments and make that consumable by people who are not data scientists? How are we able to take the results of what the technology does and make it actionable, even using things like AR?

Lourens: As Tripp described, every manufacturing facility is different. There are typically different line configurations, different programmable logic controller (PLC) configurations, different heterogeneous systems -- be it legacy IT systems or homegrown systems -- so the ability to leverage what is there is inherently important.

From a strategic perspective, PTC has two core platforms; one being our ThingWorx Platform that allows you to source data and information from existing systems that are there, as well as from assets directly via the PLC or by embedding software into machines.

We also have the ability to simplify and contextualize all of that information and make sense of it. We can then drive analytical insights out of the data that we now have access to. Ultimately we can orchestrate with end users in their different personas – be that the maintenance operator, supervisor, or plant manager -- enabling and engaging with these different users through AR.

Four capabilities for value 

There are four capabilities that allow you to derive value. Ultimately our strategy is to bring that up a level and to provide capabilities solutions to our end customers across four different areas.

One, we look at it from an enterprise operational intelligence perspective; the second is intelligent asset optimization; the third, digital workforce productivity, and fourth, scalable production management.

So across those four solution areas we can apply our technology together with that of our sourced partners. We allow our customers to find use-cases within those four solution areas that provides them a return on investment.

One example of that would be leveraging augmented work instructions. So instead of an operator going through a maintenance procedure by opening a folder of hundreds of pages of instructions, they can leverage new technology such as AR to guide the operator in process, and in situ, in terms of how to do something.

There are many use cases across those four solution areas that leverage the core capabilities across the IoT platform, ThingWorx, as well as the AR platform, Vuforia.

Gardner: Tripp, it sounds like we are taking the best of what people can do and the best of what systems and analytics can do. We also move from batch processing to real time. We have location-based services so we can tell where things and people are in new ways. And then we empower people in ways that we hadn’t done before, such as AR.

Are we at the point where we’re combining the best of cognitive human capabilities and machine capabilities?

Partain: I don’t know if we have gotten to the best yet, but probably the best of what we’ve had so far. As we continue to evolve these technologies and find new ways to look at problems with different technology -- it will continue to evolve.

We are getting to the new sweet spot, if you will, of putting the two together and being able to drive advancements forward. One of the things that’s critical has to do with where our current workforce is.

A number of manufacturers I talk to -- and I’ve heard similar from PTC’s customers and our joint customers -- is you are at a tipping point in terms of the current talent pool, with those currently employed and those getting close to retirement age.

The next generation that’s coming in is not going to have the same longevity and the same skill sets. Having these newer technologies and bringing these pieces together, it’s not only a new matchup based on the new technology – it’s also better suited for the type of workers carrying these activities forward. Manufacturing is not going away, but it’s going to be a very different generation of factory workers and types of technologies.

The solutions are now available to really enhance those jobs. We are starting to see all of the pieces come together. That’s where both IoT solutions -- but even especially AR solutions like PTC Vuforia -- really come into play.

Gardner: Riaan, in a large manufacturing environment, only small iterative improvements can make a big impact on the economics, the bottom line. What sort of future categorical improvements value are we looking at? To what degree do we have an opportunity to make manufacturing more efficient, more productive, more economically powerful?

Tech bridges skills gap, talent shortage

Lourens: If you look at it from the angle that Tripp just referred to, there are a number of increasing pressures across the board in the industrial markets via the workers’ skills gap. Products are also becoming more complex. Workspaces are becoming more complex. There are also increasing customer demands and expectations. Markets are just becoming more fiercely competitive.

But if you leverage capabilities such as AR -- which provides augmented 3-D work instructions, expert guidance, and remote assistance, training, and demonstrations -- that’s one area. If you combine that, to Tripp’s point, with the new IoT capabilities, then I think you can look at improvements such as reducing waste in processes and materials.

We have seen customers reducing by 30 percent unplanned downtime, which is a very common use case that we see manufacturers target. We also see reducing energy consumption by 3 to 7 percent. And we're looking at improving productivity by 20 to 30 percent.

We have seen customers reducing by 30 percent unplanned downtime, which is a very common use case that we see manufacturers target. We also see reducing energy consumption by 3 to 7 percent at a very large ship manufacturer, a customer of PTC’s. And we’re generally looking at improving productivity by 20 to 30 percent.

By leveraging this technology in a meaningful way to get iterative improvements, you can then scale it across the enterprise very rapidly, and multiple use cases can become part of the solution. In these areas of opportunity, very rapidly you get that ROI.

Gardner: Do we have concrete examples to help illustrate how those general productivity benefits come about?

Joint solutions reduce manufacturing pains 

Lourens: A joint-customer between HPE and PTC focuses on manufacturing and distributing reusable and recyclable food packaging containers. The company, CuBE Packaging Solutions, targeted protective maintenance in manufacturing. Their goal is to have the equipment notify them when attention is needed. That allows them to service what they need when they need to and focus on reducing unplanned downtime.

In this particular example, there are a number of technologies that play across both of our two companies. The HPE Nimble Storage capability and HPE Synergy technology were leveraged, as well as a whole variety of HPE Aruba switches and wireless access points, along with PTC’s ThingWorx solution platform.

The CuBE Packaging solution ultimately was pulled together through an ecosystem partner, Callisto Integration, which we both worked with very closely. In this use case, we not only targeted the plastic molding assets that they were monitoring, but the peripheral equipment, such as cooling and air systems, that may impact their operations. The goal is to avoid anything that could pause their injection molding equipment and plants.

Gardner: Tripp, any examples of use-cases that come to your mind that illustrate the impact?

Partain: Another joint-customer that comes to mind is Texmark Chemicals in Galena Park, Texas. They are using number of HPE solutions, including HPE Edgeline, our micro-datacenter. They are also using PTC ThingWorx and a number of other solutions.

They have very large pumps critical to the operation as they move chemicals and fluids in various stages around their plant in the refining process. Being able to monitor those in real time, predict potential failures before they happen, and use a combination of live data and algorithms to predict wear and tear, allows them to determine the optimal time to make replacements and minimize downtime.

Such uses cases are one of the advantages when customers come and visit our IoT Lab in Houston. From an HPE standpoint, not only do they see our joint solutions in the lab, but we can actually take them out to the Texmark location and Texmark will host and allow you them see these technologies in real-time working at their facility.

Similar as Riaan mentioned, we started at Texmark with condition monitoring and now the solutions have moved into additional use cases -- whether it’s mechanical integrity, video as a sensor, and employee-safety-related use cases.

We started with condition monitoring, proved that out, got the technology working, then took that framework -- including best-in-class hardware and software -- and continued to build and evolve on top of that to solve expanded problems. Texmark has been a great joint customer for us.

Gardner: Riaan, when organizations hear about these technologies and the opportunity for some very significant productivity benefits, when they understand that more-and-more of their organization is going to be data-driven and real-time analysis benefits could be delivered to people in their actionable context, perhaps using such things as AR, what should they be doing now to get ready?

Start small

Lourens: Over the last eight years of working with ThingWorx, I have noticed the initial trend of looking at the technology versus looking at specific use-cases that provide real business value, and of working backward from the business value.

My recommendation is to target use cases that provide quick time-to-value. Apply the technology in a way that allows you to start small, and then iterate from there, versus trying to prove your ROI based on the core technology capabilities.

Ultimately understand the business challenges and how you can grow your top line or your bottom line. Then work backward from there, starting small by looking at a plant or operations within a plant, and then apply the technology across more people. That helps create a smart connected people strategy. Apply technology in terms of the process and then relative to actual machines within that process in a way that’s relevant to use cases -- that’s going to drive some ROI.

Gardner: Tripp, what should the IT organization be newly thinking? Now, they are tasked with maintaining systems across a continuum of cloud-to-edge. They are seeing micro-datacenters at the edge; they’re doing combinations of data-driven analytics and software that leads to new interfaces such as AR.

How should the IT organization prepare itself to take on what goes into any nook and cranny in almost any manufacturing environment?

IT has to extend its reach 

Partain: It’s about doing all of that IT in places where typically IT has had a little or no involvement. In many industrial and manufacturer organizations, as we go in and start having conversations, IT really has usually stopped at the datacenter back-end. Now there’s lots of technology in the manufacturing side, too, but it has not typically involved the IT department.

One of the first steps is to get educated on the new edge technologies and how they fit into the overall architecture. They need to have the existing support frameworks and models in place that are instantly usable, but also work with the business side and frame-up the problems they are trying to solve.

As Riaan mentioned, being able to say, “Hey, here are the types of technologies we in IT can apply to this that you [OT] guys haven’t necessarily looked at before. Here’s the standardization we can help bring so we don’t end up with something completely different in every factory, which runs up your overall cost to support and run.”

It’s a new world. And IT is going to have to spend much more time with the part of the business they have probably spent the least amount of time with. IT needs to get involved as early as possible in understanding what the business challenges are and getting educated on these newer IoT, AR, virtual reality (VR), and edge-based solutions. These are becoming the extension points of traditional technology and are the new ways of solving problems.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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IT and HR: Not such an odd couple

How businesses perform has always depended on how well their employees perform. Yet never before has the relationship between how well employees work and the digital technology that they use been so complex.

At the same time, companies are grappling with the transition to increasingly data-driven and automated processes. What’s more, the top skills at all levels are increasingly harder to find -- and hold onto -- for supporting strategic business agility.

As a result, business leaders must enhance and optimize today’s employee experience so that they in turn can optimize the customer experience and -- by extension – better support the success of the overall business.

Stay with us as BriefingsDirect explores how those writing the next chapters of human resources (HR) and information technology (IT) interactions are finding common ground to significantly improve the modern employee experience. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

We're now joined by two leaders in this area who will share their thoughts on how intelligent workspace solutions are transforming work -- and heightening worker satisfaction. Please welcome Art Mazor, Principal and Global Human Resources Transformation Practice Leader at Deloitte, and Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. 

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Art, is there more of a direct connection now between employee experience and overall business success?

Mazor: There has been a longstanding sense on the part of leaders intuitively that there must be a link. For a long time people have said, “Happy employees equal happy customers.” It’s been understood.

Mazor

But now, what’s really powerful is we have true evidence that demonstrates the linkage. For example, in our Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Report 2019, in its ninth year running, we noticed a very important finding in this regard: Purpose-focused companies outperformed their S&P 500 peers by a factor of 8. And, when you think about, “Well, how do you get to purpose for people working in an organization?” It’s about creating that strong experience.

What’s more, I was really intrigued when MIT recently published a study that demonstrated the direct linkage between positive employee experience and business performance. They showed that those with really strong employee experiences have twice the innovation, double the satisfaction of customers, and 25 percent greater profitability.

So those kinds of statistics tell me pretty clearly that it matters -- and it’s driving business results.

Gardner: It’s seemingly commonsense and an inevitable outcome when employees and their positive experiences impact the business. But reflecting on my own experiences, some companies will nonetheless talk the talk, but not always walk the walk on building better employee experiences, unless they are forced to.

Do you sense, Art, that there are some pressures on companies now that hadn’t been there before?

Purposeful employees produce profits 

Mazor: Yes, I think there are. Some of those pressures, appropriately, are coming from the market. Customers have a very high bar with which they measure their experience with an organization. We know that if the employee or workforce experience is not up to par, the customers feel it.

That demand, that pressure, is coming from customers who have louder voices now than ever before. They have the power of social media, the ability to make their voices known, and their perspectives heard.

There is also a tremendous amount of competition among a variety of customers. As a result, leaders recognize that they have to get this right. They have to get their workers in a place where those workers feel they can be highly productive and in the service of customer outcomes.

Minahan: Yes, I totally agree with Art. In addition, there is an added pressure going on in the market today and that is the fact that there is a huge talent crunch. Globally McKinsey estimates there is a shortage of 95 million medium- to high-skilled workers.

Minahan

We are beginning to see even forward-thinking digital companies like Amazon saying, “Hey, look, we can’t go out and hire everyone we need; certainly not in one location.” So that’s why you have the HQ2 competition, and the like.

Just in July, Amazon committed to investing more than $700 million to retrain a third of their workforce with the skills that they need to continue to advance. This is part of that pressure companies are feeling:

“Hey, we need to drive growth. We need to digitize our businesses. We need to provide a greater customer experience. But we need these new skills to do it, and there just is not enough talent in the market.”

So companies are rethinking that whole employee engagement model to advance.

Gardner: Tim, the concept of employee experience was largely in the domain of people like Art and those that he supports in the marketplace -- the human resources and human capital management (HCM) people.

How does IT now have more of a role? Why do IT and HR leaders need to be more attached at the hip?

Download The Economist Research
On How Technology Drives
The Modern Employee Experience

Minahan: Much of what chief human resources officers (CHROs) and chief people officers (CPOs) have done to advance the culture and physical environment with which to attract and retain the right talent has gone extremely far. That includes improving benefits, ensuring there is a purpose, and ensuring that the work environment is very pleasurable.

However, we just conducted a study together with The Economist, a global study into employee experience and how companies are prioritizing it. And one of things that we found is organizations have neglected to take a look at the tools and the access to information that they give their employees to get their jobs done. And that seems to be a big gap.

This gap was reaffirmed by a recent global Gallup study where right behind the manager, the number one indicator of employee engagement was if they feel they have the right access to the information and tools they need to do their best job.

So technology -- the digital workspace, if you will -- plays an increasingly important role, particularly in how we work today. We don’t always work at a desk or in a physical environment. In fact, most of us work in multiple locations throughout the day. And so our digital workspace needs to travel with us, and it needs to simplify our day -- not make it more complex.

Gardner: Art, as part of The Economist study that Tim cited, “ease of access to information required to get work done” was one of the top things those surveyed identified as being part of a world-class employee experience.

That doesn’t surprise me because we are asking people to be more data-driven. But to do so we have to give them that data in a way they can use it.

Are you seeing people thinking more about the technology and the experience of using and accessing technology when it comes to HR challenges and improvement?

HR plus IT gets the job done 

Mazor: Yes, for sure. And in the HR function, technology has been front and center for many years. In fact, HR executives, their teams, and the workers they serve have been at an advantage in that technology investments have been quite rich. The HR space was one of the first to move to the cloud. That’s created lots of opportunities beyond those that may have been available even just a few short years ago.

To your point, though, and building on Tim’s comments, [employee experience requirements] go well beyond the traditional HR technologies. They are focused around areas like collaboration, knowledge sharing, interaction, and go into the toolsets that foster those kinds of necessities. They are at the heart of being able to drive work in the way that work needs to get done today.

The days of traditional hierarchies -- where your manager tells you what to do and you do it -- are quickly dwindling. We are moving to a world where teams are forming in a more agile way, demanding new toolsets.

The days of traditional hierarchies -- where your manager tells you what to do and you go do it -- are quickly dwindling. Now, we still have leaders and they tell us to do things and that’s important; I don’t mean to take away from that. Yet, we are moving to a world where, in order to act with speed, teams are forming in a more agile way. Networked groups are operating together cross-functionally and across businesses, and geographies -- and it’s all demanding, to your point, new toolsets.

Fortunately, there are a lot of tools that are out there for that. Like with any new area of innovation, though, it can be overwhelming because there are just so many technologies coming into the marketplace to take advantage of.

The trick we are finding is for organizations to be able to separate the noise from the impactful technologies and create a suite of tools that are easy to navigate and remove that kind of friction from the workplace.

Gardner: Tim, a fire hose of technology is certainly not the way to go. From The Economist survey we heard that making applications simple – with a consumer-like user experience -- and with the ability to work from anywhere are all important. How do you get the right balance between the use of technology, but in a simplified and increasingly automated way?

A workspace to unify work

Minahan: Art hit the exact right word. All this choice and access to technology that we use to get our jobs done has actually created a lot more complexity. The typical employee now uses a dozen or more apps throughout the day, and oftentimes needs to navigate four more applications just to get a single task or a bit of information that they are looking for. As a result, they need to navigate a whole bunch of different environments, remember a whole bunch of different usernames and passwords, and it’s creating a lot of noise in their day.

To Art’s point, there is an emergence of a new category of technology, a digital workspace that unifies everything for an employee, gives them single sign-on access to everything they need to be productive, and one unified experience, so they don’t need to have as much noise in their day.

Certainly, it also provides an added layer of security around things. And then the third component that gets very, very exciting is that forward-thinking companies are beginning to infuse things like machine learning (ML) and simplified workflows or micro apps that connect some of these technologies together so that the employee can be guided through their day -- very much like they are in their personal lives, where Facebook might guide you and curate your day for the news and social interactions you want.

Netflix, for example, will make up the recommendations based on your historical behaviors and preferences. And that’s beginning to work its way into the workplace. So the study we just did with The Economist clearly points to bringing that consumer-like experience into the workplace as a priority among IT and HR leaders.

Gardner: Art, you have said that a positive employee experience requires removing friction from work. What do you mean by friction and is that related to this technology issue, or is it something even bigger?

Remove friction, maximize productivity 

Mazor: I love that you are asking that, Dana. I think it is something bigger than technology -- yet technology plays a massively important role.

When we think about friction, and what I love about that word in this context, is it’s a plain English word. We know that friction means. It’s what causes something to slow down.

And so it’s bigger than just technology in the sense that to create that positive worker experience we need to think about a broader construct, which is the human experience overall. And elevating that human experience is about, first and foremost, recognizing that everyone wakes up every morning as a human. We might play the role of a worker, we might play the role of customer, or some other role. But in our day-to-day life, anything that slows us down from being as productive as possible is, in my view, the element that is this friction.

So that could be process-oriented, it could be policy and bureaucracy that gets in the way. It could be managers who may be struggling with empowerment of their teams. It might even be technology, to your point, that causes it to be more difficult to, as Tim was rightly saying, navigate through to all the different apps or tools.

And so this idea of friction and removing it is really about enabling that workforce to be focused myopically on delivering results for customers, the business, and the other workers in the enterprise. Whatever it may be, anything that stands in the way should be evaluated as a potential cause of friction.

Sometimes that friction is good in the sense of slowing things down for purposes like compliance or risk management. In other cases, it’s bad friction that just gets in the way of good results.

View Video on How Companies
Drive Improved Employee Experience
To Foster Better Business Results

Minahan: I love what Art’s talking about. That is the next wave we will see in technology. When we talk about these digital workspaces -- moving from traditional enterprise applications – built around giving functions and modern collaborations tools, they are focused on team-based collaboration. Still, individuals need to navigate all of these environments -- and oftentimes work in different ways.

And so this idea of people-centric computing, in which you put the person at the center, makes it easy for them to interact with all of these different channels and remove some of the noise from their day. They can do much more meaningful work -- or in some cases, as one person put it to me, “Get the job done that I was hired to do.” I really believe this is where we are now going.

And you have seen it in consumer technologies. The web came about to organize the world’s information, and apps came about to organize the web. Now you have this idea of the workspace coming about to organize all of those apps so that we can finally get all the utility that had been promised.

Gardner: If we return to our North Star concept, the guiding principle, that this is all about the customer experience, how do we make a connection between solidifying that employee experience as Tim just described but to the benefit of the customer experience?

Art, who in the organization needs to make sure that there isn’t a disconnect or dissonance between that guiding principle of the customer experience and buttressing it through the employee experience?

Leaders emphasize end-customer experience 

Mazor: We are finding this is one of the biggest challenges, because there isn’t a clear-cut owner for the workforce experience. That’s probably a good thing in the long run, because there are way too many individual groups, teams, and leaders who must be involved to have only one accountable leader.

That said, we are finding a number of organizations achieving great success by at least appointing either an existing function – and in many cases we are finding that happens to be HR – or in some organizations finding a different way of having accountability for orchestrating the experience. The best meaning is around bringing together a variety of groups -- those could be HR, IT, real estate, marketing, finance, and the business leaders for sure to all play their roles inside of that experience.

Delivering on that end-customer experience as the brass ring, or the North Star to mix metaphors, becomes a way of thinking. It requires a different mindset that enterprises are shaping for themselves -- and their leaders can model that behavior.

Delivering on that end-customer experience as the brass ring becomes a way of thinking. It requires a different mindset that enterprises are shaping for themselves -- and their leaders can model that behavior.

I will share with you one great example of this. In the typical world of an airline, you would expect that flight attendants are there -- as you hear on the announcements -- for your safety first, and then to provide services. But one particular major airline recognized that those flight attendants are also the ones who can create the greatest stickiness to customer relationships because they see their top customers in flight, where it matters the most.

And they have equipped that group of flight attendants with data in the form of a mobile device app that they use to see who is on board and where they sit in the importance of being customers in terms of revenue and other important factors. That provides triggers to those flight attendants, and others on the flight staff, to help recognize those customers and to ensure that they are having a great experience. And when things don’t go as well as possible, perhaps due to Mother Nature, those flight attendants are there to keep watch over their most important customers.

That’s a very new kind of construct in a world where the typical job was not focused on customers. Now, in an unwitting way, those flight attendants are playing a critical role in fostering and advancing those relationships with key customers.

There are many, many examples like that that are the outcome of leaders across functions coming together to orchestrate an experience that ultimately is centered around creating a rich customer experience where it matters the most.

Minahan: Two points. One, what Art said is absolutely consistent with the findings of the study we conducted jointly with The Economist. There is no clear-cut leader on employee experience today. In fact, both CHROs and CIOs equally indicated that they were on-point as the lead for driving that experience.

 We are beginning to see the emergence of a digital employee experience officer that’s emerging at some organizations to help drive the coordination that Art is talking about.

But the second point to your question, Dana, around how do we keep employees focused on the customer experience, it goes back to your opening question around purpose. Increasingly, as Art indicated, there is clear demonstration of companies that have clear purpose and are performing better -- and that’s because that purpose tends to be on some business outcome. It drives some greater experience or innovation or business outcome for their customers.

If we can ensure that employees have the right tools, information, skills, and training to deliver that customer experience, then they are clearly aligned. I think it all ties very well together.

Gardner: Tim, when I heard Art talking about the flight attendants, it occurred to me that there is a whole class of such employees that are in that direct-interaction-with-the-customer role. It could be retail, the person on the floor of a clothing seller; or it could be a help desk operator. These are the power users that need to get more data, help, and inference knowledge delivered to them. They might be the perfect early types of users that you provide a digital workspace to.

Let’s focus on that workspace. What sort of qualities does that workspace need to have? Why are we in a better position, when it comes to automation and intelligence, than ever before to empower those employees, the ones on the front lines interacting with the customers?

Effective digital workspace requirements 

Minahan: Excellent question. There are three, and an emerging fourth, capabilities required for an effective digital workspace. The first is it needs to be unified. We talked about all of the complexity and noise that bogs down an employee’s day, and all of the applications they need to navigate. Well, the digital workspace must unify that by giving a single-sign-on experience into the workspace to access all the apps and content that an employee needs to be productive and to do engaging work, whether they are at the office, on the corporate network, or on their tablet at home, or on their smartphone on a train or a plane.

The second part is obviously -- in this day and age, considering especially those front-line employees that are touching customer information -- it all needs to be secure. The apps and content need to be more secure within the workspace than when accessed natively. That means dynamically applying security policies and perhaps asking for a second layer of authentication, based on that employee’s behavior.

The third part is around intelligence. Bringing things like machine learning and simplified workflows into the workspace to create a consumer-like experience, where the employee is presented with the right information and the right task within the workspace so that they can quickly access those -- rather than needing to log-in to multiple applications and go four layers deep.

The fourth capability that’s emerging, and that we hear a lot about, is the assurance that those applications, -- especially for front-line employees who are engaged with customers -- are performing at their very best within the workspace. [Such high-level performance needs to be delivered] whether that employee is at a corporate office or more likely at a remote retail branch.

Bringing some of the historical infrastructure like networking technology to bear in order to ensure those applications are always on and reliable is the fourth pillar of what’s making new digital workspace strategies emerge in the enterprise.

The Employee Experience is Broken,
Learn How IT and HR Together Can Fix it

Gardner: Art, for folks like Tim and me, we live in this IT world and we sometimes get lost in the weeds and start talking in acronyms and techy-talk. At Deloitte, you are widely regarded as the world’s number-one HR transformation consultancy.

First, tell us about the HR consultancy practice at Deloitte. And then, is explaining what technology does and is capable of a big part of what you do? Are you trying to explain the tech to the HR people, and then perhaps HR to the tech people?

Transforming HR with technology 

Mazor: First, thanks for the recognition. We are truly humbled and yet proud to be the world’s leading HR transformation firm. By having the opportunity as we do to partner with the world’s leading enterprises to shape and influence the future of HR, it gives us a really interesting window into exactly what you are describing.

At a lot of the organizations we work with, the HR leaders and their teams are increasingly well-versed in the various technologies out there. The biggest challenge we find is being able to harness the value of those technologies, to find the ones that are going to produce impact at a pace and at a cost and return that really is valued by the enterprise overall.

For sure, the technology elements are critical enablers. We recently published a piece on the future of HR-as-a-function that’s based on a combination of our research and field experience. What we identified is that the future of HR requires a shift in four big areas:

• The mindset, meaning the culture and the behaviors of the HR function. 

• The focus, meaning focusing in on the customers themselves.

• The lens through which the HR function operates, meaning the operating model and the shift toward a more agile-network kind of enterprise HR function. 

• The enablers, meaning the wide array of technologies from core HR platform technologies to collaboration tools to automation, ML, artificial intelligence (AI), and so on. 

The combination of these four areas enables HR-as-a-function to shift into what we’re referring to as a world that is exponential. I will give you one quick example though where all this comes together.

There is a solution set that we are finding is incredibly powerful inside of driving employee experiences that we refer to as creating a unified engagement platform, meaning the blend of all these technologies in a simple-to-navigate experience that empowers the workers across an enterprise.

We, Deloitte, have actually created one of those platforms in the market that leads the space, called ConnectMe, and there are certainly others. And in that, what we are essentially finding is that HR leaders are looking for that simple-to-navigate, frictionless kind of environment where people can get their jobs done and enjoy doing them at the same time using technology to empower them.

HR leaders are navigating this complex set of technologies out there that are terrific because they're providing advantages for the business functions. A lot of technology firms are investing heavily in worker-facing technologies.

The premise that you described is spot-on. HR leaders are navigating this complex set of technologies out there that are terrific because they’re providing advantages for the business functions. A lot of the technology firms are investing heavily in worker-facing technology platforms, for exactly the reason we have been chatting about here.

Gardner: Tim, when it comes to the skills gap, it is an employee’s market. Unemployment rates are very low, and the types of skills in demand are hard to find. And so the satisfaction of that top-tier worker is essential.

It seems to me that the better tools you can give them, the more they want to work. If I were a top-skilled employee, I would want to go with the place that has the best information that empowers me in the best way and brings contextual information with security to my fingertips.

But that’s really difficult to do. How do businesses then best enhance and entice employees by giving them the best intelligence tools?

Intelligent tools support smart workers 

Minahan: If you think about your top-performing employees, they want to do their most meaningful work and to perform at their best. As a result, they want to eliminate a lot of the noise from their day, and, as Art mentioned before, that friction.

And that friction is not solely technological, it’s often manifested through technology due to certain tasks or requirements that we need to do that may not pertain to our core jobs.

So, last time I checked, I don’t think either Art or myself were hired to review and approve expense reports or to spend a good chunk of our time approving vacations or doing full-scale performance reviews. Yet those types of applications that may not be pertinent to our jobs or processes, tend to take up a good part of our time.

What digital workspaces or digital work platforms do in the first phase is remove that noise from your day so that your best-performing employees can do their best work. The second phase uses those same platforms to help employees do better work through making sure that information is pushed to them as they need it.

That’s information that is pertinent to their jobs. In a salesperson’s environment that might be a change in pipeline status, or a change in a prospect or customer activity. Not only do they get information at their fingertips, they can take action.

And what gets very exciting about that is you have the opportunity now to elevate the skills of every employee. We talk about the skills gap, but this is but one way to go re-train everybody.

Another way is to make sure that you’re giving them an unfair advantage within the work platforms you are using to guide them through the right process. So a great example is sales force productivity. A typical company takes 9-12 months to get a salesperson up to full productivity. Average tenure of a salesperson is somewhere around 36 months. So a company is getting a year-and-a-half of productivity out of a salesperson.

What if by eliminating all that noise, and by using this digital work platform to help push the right information, tasks, right actions, and the right customer sales pitches to them at the right time, you can cut that time to full productivity in half?

Think about the real business value that comes from using technology to actually elevate the skill set of the entire workforce, rather than bog it down.

Gardner: Tim, do you have any examples that illustrate what you just described? Any named or use case types of examples that show how what you’re doing at Citrix has been a big contributor?

Minahan: One example that’s top-of-mind not only helps improve employee experiences to elevate the experience for customers, but also allows companies to rethink work models in ways they probably haven’t since the days of Henry Ford. And the example that comes to mind is eBay.

We are all familiar with eBay, one of the world’s largest online digital marketplaces. Like many other companies, they have a large customer call center where buyers and sellers ask questions. These call center employees have to have the right information at their fingertips to get things done.

Well, the challenge they faced was with the talent gap and labor shortage. Traditionally they would build a big call center, hire a bunch of employees, and train them at the call center. But now, it’s harder to do that; they are competing with the likes of Amazon, Google and others who are all trying to do the same thing.

And so they used technology to break the traditional mold and to create a new work model. Now they go to where the talent is, such as the stay-at-home parent in Montana and the retiree in Florida, or the gig worker in Boston or New York. They can now arm them with a digital workspace and push the right information and toolsets to them. By doing so you ensure they get the job done even though if you or I call in we don’t know that they are not sitting in a centralized call center.

This is just one example as we begin to harness and unify this technology of how we can change work models. We can create not just the better employee experience, but entirely new ways to work.

How to Harness Technology
To Inspire Workers to Perform
At Their Unencumbered Best

Gardner: Art, it’s been historically difficult to measure productivity, and especially to find out what contributes to that productivity. The same unfortunately is the case with technology. It’s very difficult to measure quantitatively and qualitatively what technology directly does for both employee productivity and overall organizational productivity.

Are there ways for us to try to measure how new workspaces and good HR contribute to good employee satisfaction -- and ultimately customer satisfaction? How do we know when we are doing this all right?

Success, measured 

Mazor: This is the holy grail in many ways, right? You get what you measure, and this whole space of workforce experience in many ways is a newer discipline. Customer experience has been around for a while and gained great traction and measurement. We can measure customer feedback. We can measure net promoter scores, and a variety of other indicators, not the least of which may be revenue, for example, or even profitability relative to customer base. We equally are now starting to see the emergence of measurements in the workforce experience arena.

And at the top-line we can see measurements like measuring workforce engagement. As that rises, likely there is a connection to positive worker experience. We can measure productivity. We can even measure the growth of capabilities within the workforce that are being gained as a result of -- as we like to say -- learning in the flow of work, to develop their capabilities.

That path is really important to chart out because it has similarities to those tools, methods, and approaches used inside the customer space. We think about it in very simple terms, we need to first look, listen, and understand to sense what’s happening with the workforce.

We need to generate and prioritize different ideas of ways in which the experience for the workforce can be moved. Then we need to iterate, test, refine, and plan the kinds of changes you might prototype that provides you that foundation to measure. And in the workforce experience space, it’s a variety of measures that we are starting to see to get down into the granular levels below those top-line measures that I mentioned.

What comes to mind for me are things like measuring the user experience for all of the workers. How effective is the product or service that they are being asked to use? How quickly can they deliver their work? What feedback do we get from workers? So kind of a worker feedback category.

We need to generate and prioritize different ideas of ways in which the experience for the workforce can be moved. We need to iterate, test, refine, and plan the types of changes you might prototype that provide a foundation to measure.

And then there are a set of operational measures that can track inputs and outputs from various processes and various portions of the experience. There is that kind of categorization “in those three buckets” that really seems to be working well for many of our clients to measure that notion of workforce experience to your point, of, “Did we get it right?”

But in the end, as I shared at the beginning, I think it’s really critical that organizations measure that workforce experience through the ultimate lens, which is, “How are we dealing with our customers?” When that’s performing well, chances are pretty good, based on the research that we have seen, that the connection is there to the employee or workforce experience.

Minahan: When we are talking about the employee experience, we should be careful -- it’s not synonymous with just productivity. It’s a balance of productivity and employee engagement that together ultimately drives greater business results, customer experience, satisfaction, and improved profitability. Employee experience has been synonymous with productivity, it’s certainly a key integer into it, but it’s not the only one.

Gardner: Tim, how should IT people be thinking differently when it comes to how they view their own success? It was not that long ago where simply the performance of the systems -- when all the green lights were on and the networks were not down -- was the gauge of success. Should IT be elevating how it perceives itself and therefore how it should rate itself when it’s successful within these larger digital transformation endeavors?

Information, technology, and better business 

Minahan: Yes, absolutely. I think this could be the revitalization of IT as it moves beyond the items that you mentioned: keeping the networks up, keeping the applications performing well. IT can now drive better business outcomes and results.

Those forward-thinking companies looking to digitize their business realize that it’s very hard to ask an employee base to drive a greater digital customer experience without arming them with the right tools, information, and experience in their own right in order to get that done. IT plays a very major role here, locking arms in unison with the CHRO, to move the needle and turn employee experience into a competitive edge -- not just for attracting and retaining talent, but ultimately for driving better business results.

Gardner: I hope, if anything, this conversation prompts more opportunity for the human resources leadership and the IT leadership to spend time together and brainstorm and find commonality.

Before we sign off, just a quick look to the future. Art, for you, what might be changing soon that will help remove even more friction for employees? What is  it that’s down the pike over the next three to five years -- technologies, processes, market forces – that might be an accelerant to removing friction? Are there bright spots in your thinking about the future?

Bright symphony ahead

Mazor: I think the future is really bright. We are optimistic by nature, and we see enterprises making terrific, bold moves to embrace their future as challenging as the future is.

One of the biggest opportunities is the recognition of the imperative for executives and their teams to operate in a more symphonic way. And when I say that I mean to work together to achieve a common set of results, moving away from the historical silos that were emerging from a zeal for efficiency and that led to organizations having these various departments, and then the departments working within themselves and finding it a struggle to create integration.

We are seeing a huge unlocking of that, in the spirit of creating more cross-functional teams and more agile ways of working -- truly operating in the digital age. As we talked about in one of our recent capital trends reports, the idea of driving this is a more symphonic C-Suite, which then has a cascading effect for teams across the board inside of enterprises all to be working better together.

And then, secondly, there is a big recognition by enterprises now around the imperative to create meaning in the work that workers are doing. Increasingly, we are seeing this as a demand. This is not a single-generational demand. It’s not that the younger generation needs meaning or anything like that, that fits into stereotypes.

Rather, it’s a recognition that when we create purpose and meaning for the workers in an enterprise, they are more committed. They are more focused on outcomes, as opposed to activities. They begin to recognize the outcomes’ linkage to their own personal purpose, meaning for the enterprise, and for the work itself.

 And so, I think those two things will continue to emerge on a fairly rapid basis, to be able to embrace that need for symphonic operations and symphonic collaboration, as well as the imperative to create meaning and purpose for the workers of an enterprise. This will all unlock and unleash those capabilities focused on the customer through creating terrific employee or workforce experiences.

Gardner: Tim, last word to you. How do you foresee over the next several years technology evolving to support and engender the symphonic culture that Art just described?

Minahan: We have gotten to the point where employees are asking for a simplification of their environment, a unified access to everything, and to remove noise from their days so they can do that meaningful, purposeful work.

But what’s exciting is that same platform can be enabled to elevate the skill sets of all employees, giving them the right information, and the right task at the right time so they can perform at their very best.

But what gets me very excited about the future is the technology and a lot of the new thinking that’s going on. In the next few years, we’re going to see work models similar to the example I shared about eBay. We will see change in ways we work that we haven’t see in the past 100 years, where the lines between different functions and different organizations begin to evaporate.

What gets me excited about the future is the technology and a lot of new thinking that's going on. In the next few years, we're going to see new work models. We will see change in the ways we work that we haven't seen in the past 100 years.

Instead we will have work models where companies are beginning to organize around pools of talent, where they know who has the right skills and the right knowledge, regardless if they are full-time employees or a contractor. Technology will pull them together into workgroups no matter where they are in the world, to solve the given problem or produce a given outcome, and then dissolve them very quickly again. So I am very excited about what we are going to see in just the next five years ahead.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Citrix.

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