While I tend to concentrate on professional services firms a couple of questions were raised this week that got me thinking. The last two days I’ve been out in Silicon Valley in analyst briefings with Workday and SAP Labs.
Workday is noodling over and endeavouring to redefine the meaning of work. One of its trains of thought goes like this: in any organisation, it is not how many are working that matters but who is working. It’s a neat buzzy expression but true nonetheless. Understanding what is happening is the first step to resource optimisation and it is a problem that Workday is trying to solve from the ‘people first’ perspective. That’s an interesting idea that has implications for reporting and forms of measurement that are specific to HR organisations alongside which finance should be, but rarely is, working. It opens the door to all sorts of potential innovation.
Over at SAP its on-demand team has a portfolio of as yet unconnected SaaS applications that could signifiantly enhance the value of existing applications. For example, what might it mean for there to be connections between the sales force and finance as part of the collections process? What tools would be needed to enrich those interactions and how might they used in collections and other use cases?
This raises some interesting challenges such as delivery methods, capturing experiential learning, audit and the turning of barely repeatable processes (i.e. exceptions) into actionable system wide processes. An example: whereas today’s questions might go something like this: “Why does that dumbass sales guy in XYZ region always have poor collections?” Tomorrow it might turn out there are a slew of factors in play such as the person is both selling high value services but not taking care of payment scheduling. That in turn could surface many potential learnings. See where I am going?
The real value comes in the potential for dissolving inter departmental barriers that serve to keep us siloed and divorced from the mainstream while we beaver away at keeping the financial lights on.
What do you think? Have any burning ideas?
Bonus point: There is a replay of the Workday related TweetStream that includes a stack of links to different topics. It was a very high quality day evidenced by the 1763 recorded Tweet messages under #workdaytech.
