Workforce Management Fundamentals Series

The Future of WFM

Jeremy FinneyChief Technology Officer, Sability

Scott BrownPresident, Sability

Predicting the Future

Approach

• Talked to WFM Vendors– What’s in your future?– What do practitioners want?– How do you see things currently changing?

• Talked to Practitioners– What’s in your company’s future?– How can WFM best sustain and enrich the

organization?

Technology Adoption (i)

• Hardware realization– Initial capabilities

• Software realization– Can lag hardware significantly

• Sociological/community acceptance– Resistance to change– Video phones– Reversion

Technology Adoption (ii)

• Sociological Model• Diffusion of Innovators

– Everett Rogers• Normal distribution• Describes acceptance

– Demographic factors– Psychological factors

• Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore

NEAR TERMWorkforce Management

Suite vs Best of BreedTopic Suite Best of Breed

Interfacing Suite! It’s all done! New technologies enhance timeliness, reliability, and effort

Expertise Seek it out Focused

Nimbleness Battleship Turn on a dime

Competitive Customers locked in Must continue to earn your business

Analogy Kindle vs. iPad

Global

“Customers below multinational in size are managing WFM systems through separate instances.”

“I’m sure the future will be the Fortune 500 will demand a consistent applications and consistent solutions, […] but we have not found that to be a requirement.”-- Ernie Pozzobon, TiMETech, CEO

"Over the last 5 years – there has been a clear distinction between cultural acceptance and recognition of WFM and its value vs. technology’s readiness and capabilities. The technology has been there, and is way ahead of the cultural and socio-political acceptance, and constraints due to data privacy concerns and cross-country data exchange." --Ed Colby, WFM Technology evangelist

Scheduling

• Optimization– Recent discipline– Moving from team based

to individual based– Optimization algorithms

are very basic– Human store managers

are intuitive

"Hybrid approach is best. Optimizers should drive to

85%, then let store manager manage the last

15% - the last mile." -- John Orr, CSO, Dayforce

Mobile

• Mobile sector is growing 8x faster than traditional PCs did at the same stage in their evolution

• Your future workers & possibly current customers– “Children now have two states of existence, […] asleep or

online.“ -- Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

• Insure your WFM strategy includes mobile integration

MobileCaptive vs. User Owned Devices

• Captive device – Supplied by employer– Ultimate control over the device

• Security

– No multi-platform development required• User Owned Device

– Associate (employee) manages– Process required for enrollment of device– Remote wipe

Forecasting/Optimization

– Many organizations: not ready for forecasting and optimization• Not enough data in the proper format. A year of history is essential.• Socioeconomic makeup

– Dilemma• Market• What is the impact of the legal/socio/economic environment

– What are the cause and effect relationships on your demand– Continuous learning– Much ROI still on the table– Schedule optimization is the most computational intense

function in WFM

Business Intelligence

• Intelligence?– Information? – Data.

• Key Performance Indicators• Benchmarking• Goal

– Alert based

" Business Intelligence would be a success if

measured in volume. It currently falls far short on

the intelligence side." -- John Orr, CSO, Dayforce

Social Media

• Big three– Facebook– LinkedIn – Twitter

• Data moving outside the corporate walls• Integration points• Standards would help

Threats (i)

• Cybercrime – All grown up– For profit

• Structured Organization– documented by the FBI– evolved roles

• Target is bank account information– worth $80 to $700 per account

Threats (ii)

• Technological obsolescence– Hidden cost associated with staying on a platform

too long• Eroding skill sets (COBOL, assembler)• Support issues, not only software but OS, app servers

and database servers• Legal/compliance updates• Cost of changes/opportunity costs of not being able to

respond to market driven changes in a timely fashion

Threats (iii)

• Disruptive technologies– Web perfect example– Currently in another wave: Social

• Social interactions becoming very efficient• This year I have twice as many friends as last• As a society we are becoming much more connected• Employees ever more comfortable with social software• Largest current impact: recruiting• Largest threat: privacy

Threats (iv)

• IPv4 address space exhausted• IPv6 is coming

– Successor to IPV4– 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

unique addresses

• World IPV6 Day – June 8th, 2011– Test by major internet companies– http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/participants/

Opportunities

• What will the Internet look like in 10 years?• Internet Society

– Scenario planning exercise– Shape the future as a citizen of the internet– Nicely done videos illustrating scenarios

• http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/scenarios/

LONG TERMWorkforce Management

Building /Fitting

• Currently evolving from coding to configuring– Think of it as “Code as Data”– Code backdoors– Change control is still essential

• Next evolution: system training– Artificial intelligence

Data Gathering

• Automation of data gathering• Technically ready• Economically justifiable• Primary barrier to adoption is

sociological• Current technologies employ

wireless sensor bands or video recognition with “wand”

• Future: no augmentation required

• EA Sports Active 2– Coaches participant on exercise

• Potential to replace majority of data entry

Pattern Recognition

• Systems that watch and learn• Any gatherable quantifiable metric• Moving from systems that track to systems

that predict• Danger is generation of false correlations

User Interfaces (i)

• Best enjoyed when not seen

• Most today involve one or more levels of abstraction

• (Whisking these away/improving these) produces interfaces that require no training

• Learning UI’s must be ultra- transparent

User Interfaces (ii)

– The distance between information and our brain is getting shorter.

• The time involved could have easily have been 10 hours per question.

• Time-to-answer process has been reduced to as little as 10 minutes.

• The next iteration of interface design will give us the power to find answers in as little as 10 seconds.

--Thomas Frey - Google’s Top Rated Futurist Speaker

• WFM systems are in the 10 seconds or less category• Next step – virtual elimination of wait time

User Interfaces (iii)

• Keyboard – 130 year old “technology”– Universal adoption– Dvorak keyboard– Requires a disruptive technology

• Mouse – showing it’s age– Stopgap: Multi-touch touch-screens

• What’s the answer?– Voice Recognition– Video: gestures

Scroll up

Video

• Next generation of input/data gathering• Boil down to essential elements

– “Videometrics”– Less liability– Less privacy issues– Should be defined to a common format

• Standards based

Non Human workers

• No, not robots in the traditional sense• Chatbots

– http://www.chatbots.org/

• Gartner: by 2015 10% of your online friends will be automated

• Enterprises will not be able to keep up with the “Social Gap”• Chatbots are the only answer, teleclerks will be replaced be

chatbots “managed” (monitored) by humans. Slowly the entire line function will be replaced

• Turing test

Gartner - Top Technology Predictions• Gartner Webinar Top Technology Predictions for 2011 and Beyond• By 2015, a G20 nation’s critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.• By 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most

new Global 2000 CIOs. • By 2015, information-smart businesses will increase recognized IT spending per head by 60

percent.• By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 percent of labor hours associated with IT

services. • By 2015, most external assessments of enterprise value and viability will include explicit analysis

of IT assets and capabilities.• By 2015, 80% of enterprises using external cloud services will demand independent certification

that providers can restore operations and data• By 2015, companies will generate 50% of Web sales via their social presence and mobile

applications• By 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.• By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.• By 2015, 10 percent of your online “friends” will be nonhuman

WFM Today vs TomorrowTired Wired

Critical success factors Cost Saving Revenue/Value Generation

Productivity 100% Utilization 3M approach

Resources Manage Inspire

Reporting Business Intelligence Alerts

Data Gathering Biometric Videometric

Orientation Tracking Predicting

Conclusions

• Video is the “Killer App”• Sociological acceptance is typically the

primary factor in delaying the rollout of new technologies.

• Moving from systems that track to systems that predict

• Technology is not a solution, but an enabler of solutions

Thank You

scott.brown@sability.comtwitter: #scottabrown

#sability