Logo
Become a Client

It’s rapidly becoming apparent that digital transformation (DX) is not a finite destination, but rather a journey. Early DX initiatives were siloed and focused on short term gains. Organizations later scaled these initiatives across the enterprise, with a broader set of long-term goals, Today, organizations are looking at how they can leverage their digital capabilities for new value creation. This includes new operational efficiencies, how an organization engages with customers, how it attracts and retains employees, as well as new digital products and services. At IDC, we are calling organizations in this stage a “digital-first business”.

Because a digital-first business seeks to increase operational efficiency and productivity and improve both customer and employee experiences, these organizations need a new category of technology solutions for managing content. Cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and new services-based architectures have made the legacy categories of capture, enterprise content management (ECM), content sharing and collaboration (CSC), digital asset management (DAM), and web content management (WCM) obsolete. In reality, these older labels refer to a set of use cases which are all supported by a common library of content services. These application categories made sense in the era of on-premises, standalone monolithic applications, but are cumbersome and inefficient in the context of the modern cloud and services architectures of the digital-first business.

Instead, IDC is proposing a new way to approach the content supply chain— a Unified Content Model that supports a common set of content-related services related to security, governance, archiving, measurement and analysis as well as the tasks to manage the supply chain stages shared by all content applications. The model also recognizes the need for sets of specialized services that may only apply to certain types of content or use cases. These services can be accessed and utilized via low-code/no-code tools to construct solutions for explicit jobs to be done that lead to specific business outcomes. In other words, the job to be done is separate from the supporting “plumbing” underneath. Solutions based on the Unified Content Model will orchestrate the content supply chain throughout the organization.

The Unified Content Model

The Unified Content Model has the following components:

  • Interface to one or more data repositories – Repositories include structured and unstructured data, including text, image, audio, video, QR code assets and atomic componentized content.
  • Measure/Analyze – A library of services to measure the usage and effectiveness of content. There is a closed feedback loop between measurements and the experiences that present jobs to be done.
  • Manage – A set of services that are common to all use cases, including version control, templates, and permissions management.
  • Domain–Specific Metadata Model – Common metadata that is shared across the content supply chain to facilitate interoperability, processing, and personalization.
  • Plan, Produce, Publish, Promote – Categories that correspond to the “verbs” that describe actions performed on content as it traverses the supply chain journey. These are a set of services that may be chosen for a specific job to be done. These activities may be accomplished by a human, a machine, or both.
  • Jobs to be Done – These are the content-centric activities that lead to specific business outcomes. Activities vary widely. Examples include
    • Retain and dispose of documents correctly
    • Execute non-disclosure agreement
    • Collaborate for image review and approval
    • Communicate quarterly financial results
    • Update product pricing information
    • Remove expired licensed materials
    • Stream episodes at a virtual event 
  • Delivery Channel – Content may be delivered via a broad range of channels or edge devices – frequently delivered via more than one – depending on producer and consumer preferences. Content must be responsive and displayed in a manner that is appropriate for the channel.
  • Experience – This layer describes the final recipient of the content. Note that recipients can be humans or technology.
    • Audience App Experience – Consumption/usage by employees, partners citizens, patients, students, accountholders, and other end users
    • Industry App Experience – Consumption/usage by industry users or applications, for example healthcare systems and portals, banking, or insurance policy systems
    • Departmental App Experience – Consumption/usage by the business user or business application, such as enterprise resource management (ERP) or human capital management (HCM)

Benefits of the Unified Content Model

Why should an organization adopt a Unified Content Model? Solutions architected according to the model will increase operational efficiency by eliminating content silos and duplicative applications and/or platforms. This will afford several benefits to organizations:

  • Enforce a common brand and company “voice”
  • Support a 360-degree view of the customer
  • Efficiency in content creation, management and reuse across solutions and applications
  • Scale in using best in class cloud-based services
  • “Future-proof” technology by making it easier to add or substitute services and delivery channels
  • Improve the overall experience for both content producers and content consumers

What the Unified Content Model Means for Organizations

In IDC research early in 2022, 46% of respondents indicated that improving operational efficiencies is the top business objective for content services investments. Of course, organizations can’t scrap existing workflows and related solutions overnight, but as modernization initiatives progress, organizations should adopt the Unified Content Model as a blueprint for that modernization. We are seeing implementations of the model appear in the marketplace as technology vendors leverage the opportunities afforded by cloud computing and services-based architectures to redesign the content repository and open it up for interplay between systems and actions. The value for these vendors comes not from reproducing the “plumbing” of content management but rather in the expertise in tasks of the content supply chain, jobs to be done or applications at the edge.

How to get started? Begin by evaluating your current content-centric workflows, stakeholders and applications asking the following questions:

  • What content is your organization creating and for what purpose? How much of that content is redundant (or worse, uncontrolled)? What content can be (or should be) reused and/or used for multiple purposes?
  • Who is producing, reviewing, approving, delivering the content? In other words, who participates in the content supply chain? What actions must be performed on that content?
  • How is that content updated, revised, retained, redistributed, disposed of?
  • Who (or what) is consuming the content and when? Is similar content consumed at various stages of a relationship or supply chain? What integrations are required with other enterprise systems? What formats are required for delivery at each stage?
  • How are you measuring the use and effectiveness of your content?  Have you established a feedback loop? How do you know what is working and what is not?

Once you answer these questions, develop a plan to architect a solution that maximizes the storage, analysis, management and data descriptors of content based on the Unified Content Model with your developers, vendors and/or partners. Develop a migration and change management strategy to minimize disruption. Proceed down the path to greater content agility and becoming a digital-first business.

For more information on IDC’s research on unified content models, read our perspectives:

Learn More

Holly Muscolino - Research Vice President, Content and Process Strategies and the Future of Work - IDC

fill bio

Q3 marks a turning point for companies as they consider a budget-constrained future in a cash-strapped world

 

At IDC Cloud Pulse, a quarterly survey that takes in views from up to 1,700 cloud consumers, we have been tracking how companies are being impacted by, and how they are responding to, macroeconomic trends. We then consider how this relates to the consumption of cloud. Questions around Inflation and Energy Costs were added to our survey first in Q1, 2022. The Possibility of a Recession was new in Q3. And we will now be adding Recession into future surveys.

These new additions tell a story about the challenges businesses have had to endure over this last year. Not as much, however, as the responses we received when we asked about the likely impacts to businesses.Each quarter companies are asked what events are most likely to cause disruption to their business over the course of the year. They can respond using a sliding scale of 0-10 with 10 being the highest amount of disruption. The above results show only those responses between 8-10 (what we would consider as ‘high impact’).

During Q1 and Q2, not too many more than a third of companies said they felt they were experiencing major impacts from the macroeconomic trends we asked about. In Q3, this rose to around a half.  Inflationary costs were seen across more of the business, energy price rises became a reality, and national and global recessions became less likely to avoid. At the same time, markets still battled ongoing supply chain challenges, in part brought on by continued to reactions to the COVID pandemic. Many of these impacts are intertwined, making the current macroeconomic landscape even more difficult for companies to navigate.

Budgetary Impacts

During Q3, for the first time, we saw companies shift towards a more pessimistic view of the business environment. Early indications from our Q4 data suggest we will see even higher rates of pessimism moving forward.

This pessimism impacts budgets. Cloud makes up around 31% of IT budgets – this is up only slightly from around 30% seen in Q4, 2021 despite previous years showing higher annual rates of growth in terms of cloud as part of IT budgets. The real challenge is, however, that IT budgets are decreasing when viewed as a proportion of overall company revenue. As we know, company revenue is also being challenged (and where it isn’t, margins are suffering from increased costs).If we focus on the area of inflation – where we see some of the earliest impacts on industry in terms of economic stress – we gain valuable insight into why we are seeing budgetary constraints across IT. Companies operating or consuming a cloud environment first felt inflationary pressure in the form of increased professional services costs, and then application software subscriptions. These are two areas where companies are more likley to operate with rolling monthly contracts.

During Q3, we started to see more companies (25%) saying they could now see increases across private cloud infrastructure (most likely brought about as a result of increased equipment and energy costs). Internal skills costs were also a major challenge.

Public Cloud as a Response

Responding to these challenges, a quarter of respondents said they will be looking to migrate more of their environments to public cloud/ Software-as-a-Service. Around the same amount again (23%) said they will be looking to find reductions for spend across their cloud estates.

With almost a fifth (18%) of respondents saying they are still waiting to assess the impact of inflationary pressures, these figures could grow.

Cloud Pulse findings also show that the number of companies that say they are ‘Public Cloud First’ when it comes to their cloud adoption strategy is more (32%) when companies say they are directly impacted by inflation compared to just 21% for those that are not.

Note, the rate of Public Cloud First companies has been decreasing annually. Q3 marks an increase overall in the number of companies relying on Public Cloud before taking a hybrid approach – though hybrid remains the number-one approach to adoption).

Qualities that Count

Another shift is in the qualities companies are now requiring of their cloud providers. In Q3, 2020, the most important Company Attribute sought by cloud consumers was a global/international footprint. What companies now seek are providers they can label ‘trustworthy’.

In this case, Trustworthy relates to a provider’s ability to be reliable and responsive, to meet contractual requirements, to be transparent about pricing and to keep promises made to the business (we did ask). During this time of macroeconomic uncertainty, customers also want to work with technical experts that can deliver services at speed with guarantees along the supply chain.

We also see shifts in what companies require in terms of cost and pricing. In 2020, the focus was on flexible payment terms and enterprise-wide agreements. Now it is more about flexbile licencing and credits that allow companies to move their applications and workloads across cloud and even non-cloud environments as they require.

Many companies know their business could have to alter the way they consume and gain access to IT over the coming year. Where rising costs – from inflation or energy increases – are already felt the requirement for flexibility gives way to predictable pricing,  with many IT departments focussing more on cost optimization and forecasting.

Many cloud vendors have already started to notice these shifts across their own businesses, from customer conversations they are now having to the budgtary bottom line. Those who will succeed will be those that can quickly pivot and reinvent solutions – in particular with the right financial models.

Companies want to continue to benefit from cloud as they navigate uncertain times but companies will be more selective about what they are deploying and how over the coming year. Many will be taking stock on current digital transformation agendas and application portfolios to create leaner, more efficient, IT responses to current business needs.

For more on these key cloud trends, including how individual providers aligned to current market sentiments and needs, ask further about IDC’s Cloud Pulse data. Cloud Pulse’s rich insights cover a range of cloud topics from deploynents to application landscapes, vendor selection, ROI and more.

A workplace management solution is a platform using advanced software and other integrated systems to optimise the use of space and energy, improve employee productivity and enhance overall employee experience by providing an enjoyable, modern, safe and practical workplace environment.

Organisations need a robust set of workplace management tools to give them the flexibility and resilience to work through and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Too many organisations, however, still do not have an integrated workplace management system and are using an assortment of applications.

There are plenty of good and increasingly urgent reasons for companies to invest in a workplace management solution. The top 6 are as follows:

  1. The future is hybrid. The world is changing, and hybrid working is here to stay. We predict that by 2023, digital transformation and business volatility will drive 70% of G2000 organisations to deploy remote or hybrid-first work models, redefining work processes and engaging diverse talent pools. The G2000 are just the tip of the iceberg, as the vast majority of companies are already dealing with hybrid working. This has clear implications on workplace space occupancy and this needs to be effectively managed. It’s important to note that almost three years since the start of the pandemic, many employees have still not come back to the office full time. Many of those don’t plan to come back any time soon, meaning a workplace management solution was needed yesterday. It’s clear from our research that remote and hybrid work models will be an embedded part of accepted work practices in the long term as a way to address both employee needs for flexibility and employer requirements for work that is done in more agile and productive ways.
  2. The pandemic isn’t over. Many employees haven’t fully returned to the office due to concerns they might catch COVID-19. By investing in workplace solutions that monitor the workplace in terms of air quality, ensuring proper ventilation and including other safety solutions such as touchless devices, companies will reassure employees that the workplace is safe and healthy. This in turn could encourage more employees to return full time or at least spend more days working from the office.
  3. High inflation and energy cost. A main priority for companies is to find ways to reduce the high costs related to energy and heating and make sure these costs are well monitored and under control. Such costs are very unlikely to come down significantly in the short and medium term, or return to previous levels in the long term. Investments in workplace management solutions that help control these costs are therefore a necessity.
  4. Meeting sustainability targets. Our end-user surveys over the past two years show that 60%–70% of all European organisations either have an established sustainability policy and clear targets or are planning to introduce them. This is another area where workplace management solutions can be deployed to measure, analyse and show proof of results. Environmental considerations are becoming increasingly crucial to win deals, so companies need to understand that investments in solutions that support sustainability targets are really investments in business development.
  5. Companies need to attract new talent while keeping current workers satisfied. Employees’ expectations of the workplace environment are changing and are becoming more sophisticated. At the same time, competition among employers is increasing. Companies are realising the importance of offering a whole package that includes an enjoyable workplace experience with the right “look and feel”, high health safety standards, sustainability, and digitally controlled workplace tools and space. These will not only attract new talent but will also keep current employees satisfied. The next five years will see a clear change in both the mechanics and social attitudes surrounding the future of work.
  6. Companies are likely to reduce their office floorspace in the next five years. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, one of our surveys showed that more than a third of companies said they will reduce office floorspace when things get back to normal. This means that managing space occupancy will become essential to maintain efficient use of the space and to improve employee productivity. Among other major changes, the pandemic has brought greater awareness of workspace utilisation. Many organisations have started to look closer at how spaces are used, and this has led to bold decisions on how to go about work and the workplace.

So, what should a good workplace management solution include?

  1. Booking management system for conference rooms and parking, for collaboration and efficient use of space
  2. Space management system based on data analytics of occupancy for the best use of space
  3. Environmental analytics system for a healthy and safe workplace
  4. Energy/heating/air conditioning management system to provide an efficient workplace operation and to cut unnecessary costs
  5. Asset management system to optimise maintenance of valuable items that require regular upkeep
  6. Integration and use of IoT for all deployed management systems to ensure maximum flexibility, accessibility and efficiency

 

Read More:

Top 10 Workplace Management Trends, 2022

IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Work 2023 Predictions

Spaceti Announces Collaboration with Warner Music Spain to Create “The Music Station,” a Fully Integrated Space to Collaborate, Create, Entertain, and Relax

Future of Work Technology and Services Market Size and 2020–2025 Forecast

The Future Consumer Agenda: Mapping Out How Consumers Will Use Technologies That Drive Major Market Shifts

Last year we predicted that “70% of CEOs of large European organisations will be incentivised to generate at least 40% of their revenues from digital by 2025, driving more than €4 trillion of gross value added in Europe.”

As we approach 2023, do we expect this to change?

If anything, the trend has accelerated. According to IDC’s Digital Executive Sentiment Survey (October 2022), European organisations now expect more than 50% of their revenues to come from digital business models on average in the next three years.

Listening to C-level executive priorities for the coming year, it’s clear that despite the polycrisis macroeconomic scenario, the C-suite remains optimistic about future digital investments and is increasingly looking at technology as a critical business differentiator to better deliver business outcomes, increase resilience and accelerate revenue growth. According to the chief innovation officer of a transportation company: “For the next six months our priority will be to build capabilities, including bringing people onboard, to help us build digital products.”

This is the dawn of a new digital decade — the digital business era. But even if the “what” is clear, the “how” is somewhat less clear.

There is urgency, particularly in Europe, to connect technology investments and revenue generation. The majority — 61% of European organisations — take a very siloed and disconnected approach to software projects. This results in one-off or reactive software innovation efforts that only occur in response to urgent market or customer demands. More often than not these efforts do not have a positive impact on revenue generation.

To succeed as a digital business, we argue that companies need to leverage a digital business platform. IDC defines this platform as a multilayered enterprisewide technology architecture, integrating different systems and applications, to enable use cases that ensure business competitiveness and innovation. Only 13% of European organisations have such an architecture, according to IDC’s Digital Executive Sentiment Survey, October 2022.

The platform can be segmented into 3 main layers:

  • Foundational IT. These are the key tech building blocks forming the foundational tech layer required to deliver digital products and services. This includes 12 main elements: APIs, data systems, automation and orchestration capabilities, OT technologies, microservices, programmable infrastructure, multicloud services, security, AI/ML and other emerging technologies (blockchain, AR, VR, robotics, edge, etc.), integration tools, network and connectivity. Some digital design principles and practices should guide the CIO in implementing the right digital architecture.
  • Tech use cases to build business resilience. These are specific digital products that enable the company to remain competitive, responding to the key business challenge of building resilience. This includes use cases that future-proof business, organisational and operations models such as contingency planning for the supply chain and customer churn analysis.
  • Tech use cases to accelerate business growth. These use cases to accelerate growth and innovate include ecosystem data monetisation and intelligent M&A modelling.

As organisations build out their digital business platforms, this paves the way for business outcomes such as:

  • Expanded target markets through innovative partnerships
  • Extended digital use case road maps
  • Greater opportunity to diversify the business model
  • Greater loyalty/reduced churn with both customers and employees

 

If you want more information, reach out to Giulia Carosella, Neil Ward-Dutton, Jennifer Thomson, Mark Child, Andrew Buss, Archana Venkatraman or Tom Vavra.

Neil Ward-Dutton - VP AI, Automation, Data & Analytics Europe - IDC

Analyst Profile LinkedIn
Neil Ward-Dutton is vice president, AI, Automation, Data & Analytics at IDC Europe. In this role he guides IDC’s research agendas, and helps enterprise and technology vendor clients alike make sense of the opportunities and challenges across these very fast-moving and complicated technology markets. In a 28-year career as a technology industry analyst, Neil has researched a wide range of enterprise software technologies, authored hundreds of reports and regularly appeared on TV and in print media.

Think Talk Summary October 2022

We were delighted to host the IDC Digital Leadership Think Talk on 27th October.  Around 30 digital leaders from across Europe joined the call to share their challenges, successes and experiences of how governance is organised in their organisation and how that needs to change

Marc Dowd and Tracy Keeling from the IDC Executive Advisory team led the discussions.

Marc Dowd opened the call by asking whether current governance structures really are fit for purpose and whether the new environment with high instability and rapid change means one needs to make changes.    Examples were new facets such as API, IoT and data governance that are expanding becoming recognized as business issues, not just IT issues, that consequently need to be addressed under the governance structures and processes of any organisation.

The Digital Leadership Community members who were taking part discussed the question. One spoke about how it was more difficult to ensure you have factored in the risk across the organisation of missing an API which could lead to business losses if the correct governance hadn’t been applied and it led to data loss in the live environment.

Building an Agile Pervasive Governance Structure

The peer group meeting went on to discuss whether the CIO’s knew they had their delivery processes right or whether they needed to make changes to adapt to the new pervasive governance model.  One leader responded that they had pushed governance into individual responsibility across the organisation and away from the standard change board structure.  They went on to talk about how the business leaders asked for what they wanted without business cases, and it then became their responsibility to push the process through once the money had been granted after requesting it from the CIO.  This model was seen is more unusual as it was a marked change from the standard governance boards or periodic reviews for changes using the Agile methodology.

What Does It All Cost?

Another CIO Executive advisor, Tracy Keeling, spoke of where she had worked as a Delivery Director for a client that did not do adaptive governance.  One of the project managers costed a project to put one server into a data centre and that governance was 65% of the budget. The client had no mechanism to adapt from producing everything required in a standard transformation, to a cut down version for less complex and lower risk deliveries.  

 

A participant on the call spoke about whether that level of governance was actually valid.   He focused on the risk aspect and what the client was trying to achieve. An example was that the new server may have contained secured documents which could have incurred large financial penalties should the data be lost and, in this case, it would have justified the much increased cost to deliver.

The Starting Point and Monitoring

The conversation moved on to how you know what can be achieved with the governance model you have and what you would do differently if you could build this from scratch.   A leader talked about how you should build your governance around the industry regulation and legal requirements such as GDPR to prevent data loss and financial penalties which could result from not enough governance and something critical not receiving adequate scrutiny before go live.  This received widespread agreement from the call participants with an example given of how their company in the insurance industry did this.

The discussion moved to metrics to monitor the effectiveness of Governane vs. risk and areas that can be improved.  It was suggested that this may be around KPI’s such as “right first time” versus “rework” in a waterfall context versus “Agile sprint completion” or unexpected additions to the backlog. 

Governance for Partners

We spoke about the governance of partners in a vendor context.   The question was asked, how do you decide whether you are going to deal with a particular company.  How did you make the decision whether your processes and systems are good enough to want to contract with them and create that partnership. 

A CIO responded that they had put in a path to a governance framework for running an ecosystem partnership and keeping that level of governance.  They spoke about new levels of partner governance that is about the sustainability agenda. Also about how well they are doing against the expectation for large scale vendors such as those who sell hosting to be making an effort as in IT. They focused onmthe levels of energy consumption used to run IT systems an area which is increasingly important for most.

Right People, Right Guidance, Right Time

Marc posed the question, “Given the importance of IT in the future of your organisation are the right people involved in your Governance processes?”  This provoked an interesting discussion around the structure.  Some participants had traditional waterfall delivery with standard governance boards we all recognise, but Marc posed the question of whether IT should just be an orchestrator and an advisor to the people making those decisions elsewhere.

There was a discussion about the risks of allowing the business to be bombarded by sales calls and allow them to buy what they want without the expert advice of IT.   A CIO talked about the need to let people know that the IT expertise was there to guide them and the value from ensuring that they didn’t look at what had been purchased after the fact and wonder what the rationale was and how they were going to support it. 

There are different levels of consequence depending on the type of organisation. In some the wrong decision wouldn’t be a risk and had a smaller impact but in another could create a life and death situation because of the data loss should it go wrong.  All organisations will have varying levels of consequence if decisions are not taken as expected and governance should control that risk appropriately.

Another participant said they started with an internal audit and then look to see the risks for the rest of the company. They then placed the constraints in place to enable some freedom to be given to teams, but essential governance wrapped around the areas which could cause the most impact if it went wrong.  

An example given was around information security management and the associated reputational damage and potential fines. They then factored in the bottlenecks where governance might cause frustration and encourage Shadow IT. They used this approach to try to address governance and being a good corporate citizen to encourage compliance.

There were many other examples of good practice in a surprising variety of configurations of Governance.

The conversation closed with the two Advisors, Marc Dowd and Tracy Keeling thanking the participants for their contributions and the next call is planned for Thursday 24th November on process discovery tools.

The IDC CIO Advisory team would like to thank everyone who came to the call for their input. It is always inspiring to hear from those working with Governance challenges across the business. We hope this session was valuable and provided many takeaways for you.

 

Our next session will look in more detail at: Are Business Process Discovery Tools worth the cost and the effort?

Thursday 24th November 2022 17:00 CET

Every business initiative needs a solid business case. Back in the day when businesses grew by intuition rather than by design there was scope for experimentation and IT had to “catch up” and provide the systems to match the processes that were already in place.

In this session we will look at the rise of tools discover how your organisation actually works and can serve as a template for the changes that should be made to obtain the best business return.

In this session we expect to discuss:

  • The reality of using business process tools,
  • The impact of tools on business agility and successful ROI,
  • The challenges of implementing these tools and the changes they imply to the way the organisation functions.

We hope you will join us.

If you already receive invitations to our sessions, I hope to see you there. If you would like to join this community, please email us at mdowd@idc.com.

https://www.idc.com/eu/digital-leadership-advisory

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8992748/

What’s in a word? Well, quite a lot actually. My one word is “experience“.

“Experience” currently only appears in one place in organisations. That’s in the Customer Experience (CX) Department. You might not even have a CX Department. The CX Department is generally small (5–15 staff), and its job is to win over the hearts and minds of potentially thousands of employees that CX practice is a good idea.

The CX Department tries their best, but this is a big ask.

Is there a better way to engage your colleagues with the CX concept that doesn’t involve big expense in tough economic times? Here is one idea. Brand your departments with “Experience”. This may sound weird but stay with me. Just imagine you had a Sales Experience, a Marketing Experience, and a Service Experience Department. What might be the impact?

The “Sales Experience Department”

Sales has connotations of “hunters” and deal closers focused on revenue targets and commission payments. “Sales Experience” is something different. A “sales experience executive” thinks of how to provide a pleasurable experience — both delivering value and being “nice to be around for the customer”.

These are the salespeople invited into their accounts as trusted advisors to deliver higher revenue and customer loyalty for their organisations.

A “sales experience executive” also values the employee experience. Traditional aggressive sales management methods do not apply. Sales Experience Managers need to show emotional intelligence, empathy, and guidance for the many difficult challenges of the sales role and deliver excellent employee experiences (EX) for salespeople.

The “Marketing Experience Department”

Marketing Departments are often targeted on creating sales leads — and lots of them. Just imagine Marketing tasked on creating experiences rather than leads? Managers will be much less inclined to push out sub-optimal campaigns to deliver “activity”. Experience encourages quality not quantity.

The “Marketing Experience Department” understands the need to collaborate with sales and service colleagues to share data and tools to create a real-time 360-degree view of the customer. It will focus on delivering customer feelings — remember the famous Maya Angelou quote? “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The “Service Experience Department”

Of all customer-facing functions, Customer Service is most likely to deliver experiences today. Contact Centre software specialists like Genesys and Five9 champion the CX and EX cause. So do trade associations like the Contact Centre Management Association (CCMA) and the UK Institute of Customer Service (UKICS).

Now Service organisations need to go even further. Building “experience” into every customer interaction — using automation to improve both EX and CX. Becoming the central enterprise hub for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Adding the Experience moniker helps Service departments to reinforce their purpose and role and drive further operational experience improvements.

What About Other Departments?

How about the Billing Experience Department that collaborates with vulnerable customers to solve their financial challenges without calling in the bailiffs? The Finance Experience Department that pays expenses and bonuses without being chased? The HR Experience Department that champions meritocracy and every employee’s personal growth and development?

This is possible. For example, shoe retailer Zappo’s swopped out their dull back-office staff for energised individuals who were customer-centric enthusiasts when they discovered the dull guys’ negative effect on front office staff. One Swedish insurer outgrows its rivals by having every staff member accountable and bonused for reducing the internal and external customer effort (scores) they personally produce.

The Bottom Line

Experience should be a shared cultural value that delivers mutual respect, and compassion for others — whether customers, colleagues, or business partners. The word ‘experience’ helps us empathise with their struggles, successes, and journeys.

Adding “experience” into your operational organisation charts will change internal and external perceptions of management purpose and intent. It is a simple, low cost and sustainable way to reinforce the customer-centric behaviours every CEO wants. It can help change your culture for the better.

Of course, measurement systems would need re-alignment so every person that delivers quality end-to-end experiences both externally and internally is merited and rewarded. No bad thing. Try it — and share with me and others your stories and outcomes. I am sure they will be inspirational.

 

For more information, please contact Gerry Brown, or head over to https://www.idc.com/eu and drop your details in the form on the top right.

As we move beyond COVID-driven restrictions, we must now confront a new set of macroeconomic challenges – inflation, global economic instability, and flattening customer growth – while still navigating new hybrid work and organizational leadership models. These disruptions are significantly impacting customers across B2B and B2C markets.

Customers are now demanding greater value, more memorable and immersive experiences, and greater control over how they engage with enterprises, becoming equal stakeholders in the customer experience (CX) ecosystem. Going forward, customer-centric business resilience will require enterprises to move beyond transactional-level experiences and tie business outcomes to relationship-based experiences that will be fulfilled by delivering customer value and trusted customer outcomes.

IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey shows that in the 12-month period from July 2021 to June 2022, enterprises globally prioritized customer experience (CX) and operational efficiency – placing them on almost equal footing.

Building and scaling empathetic customer outcomes will require CX executives to leverage a strong technology foundation comprising customer data, AI/ML, and zero trust architectures. A few leaders are even dipping their toes into the Web3 pool. Future experiences will be tied to customer data as an enterprise service that gathers intelligence across the CX ecosystem to elevate context and deliver novel, immersive experiences that create more value parity for customers.

These CX initiatives will usher in an era of new customer metrics, greater focus on quantifying customer and business value, and the rise of trusted communities where the role of the customer evolves as an active participant in the experience ecosystem, as both creators and consumers of experiences. With digital business models becoming a steppingstone to the future enterprise, the imperative to maintain the human element in customer experiences will assume more importance.

In a world of accelerated uncertainty, the next era of CX innovation will be led by those brands that improve value for the customer through empathy and delivering outcomes for customer success. Thrivers will share and apply intelligence at the speed of customer engagement, create new customer engagement models and metrics for a digital business, and tap into the power of decentralization and Web3 to create equitable value parity in customer and business outcomes alike.

IDC’s top 10 predictions for the Future of Customer Experience in 2023 are:

  • Prediction 1: By 2027, one-fourth of global brands will abandon CSAT as a measure of customer experience and adopt a Customer Effort Score correlated to outcomes as a key indicator of journey satisfaction and success.
  • Prediction 2: By 2024, 50% of the G2000 will adopt CDPs as the enterprise customer data service for real-time customer interactions like a central nervous system, increasing CX metrics and revenue by 5%.
  • Prediction 3: To foster loyalty and a competitive edge, 64% of the G2000 will own online communities by 2027 and core IT application integrations will enable a new wave of collaboration and outcome-based insights.
  • Prediction 4: By 2026, 40% of the Global 2000 will incorporate employee experience initiatives into their core CX strategies to compete in CX, talent acquisition, and retention but will struggle to measure EX+CX.
  • Prediction 5: Adopting Web3 technologies will drive 45% of global brands to create new immersive experiences, accessible content, and engaged communities and grow the CX creator economy into a $300 billion market by 2024.
  • Prediction 6: By 2026, 45% of the Global 2000 will use AI/ML to elevate context and nudge customers into unfamiliar and novel experiences that simultaneously improve sentiment metrics and brand upselling potential.
  • Prediction 7: By 2024, at least 30% of organizations will introduce new success metrics to track and measure the internal and external flows of customer value creation.
  • Prediction 8: By 2025, 50% of G2000 enterprise customers will primarily select their CX platform provider based on the efficacy of the vendor’s customer success services.
  • Prediction 9: By 2024, 30% of organizations will be forced to expand data management and privacy measures to mitigate risks of data breaches caused by ecosystem partners costing $4.6 million per breach.
  • Prediction 10: By 2026, 40% of G2000 companies will build safe communities to foster interpersonal guardrails for future metaverse platforms — and collect first-party data.

Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Customer Experience 2023 Predictions.

Watch Webinar

Sudhir Rajagopal - Research Director, Future of Customers and Consumers - IDC

Analyst Profile
Sudhir is Research Director for the CMO Advisory Service, focused on creating and executing programs and research to help companies make data-informed decisions about marketing. Sudhir's research and advisory focuses on how organizations must consider transforming their marketing function with AI at the center. In his role, Sudhir monitors the continual innovation of technologies, business strategy, and customer experiences to empower marketing leaders to make decisions on marketing strategy and operationalization.

We just released our annual top 10 predictions for utilities worldwide. The predictions enable the IDC Energy Insights team to reflect on the current year and on what the future holds for the industry. This year, it’s fair to say, there was a lot to think about.

2022 has given us the worst energy crisis in a generation, especially in Europe, with day-ahead power prices growing more than 500% since 2020, and natural gas futures spiking by more than 1,000% year on year in August. We all knew price volatility was going to be part of the game, at least in the initial stages of the energy transition (at least until we sorted out functioning flexibility markets and deployed enough storage in the system).

But no one was really prepared for a pandemic, followed by a war in Europe, by the world’s biggest energy exporter.

Let’s not forget climate change, with some of the worst heatwaves, draughts, and floods in decades (if not centuries) and the huge impact they have had on the so-called energy-water nexus. 

While these are only a few of the challenges that have grabbed the headlines in the past 12 months, utility companies are increasingly accepting the unpredictable world they operate in and are becoming more resilient, predictive, and flexible in their operations. They don’t have a choice, as there is no time to stagger slowly toward the overarching goal of net zero.

Significant investments are needed, and a critical mass of technologies must be deployed at pace to transform energy and water systems for the better.

Energy transition, climate disruptions, and social sustainability have demonstrated that utilities are at the heart of economic resilience. Utilities must become business and infrastructure platforms to lead decarbonization, foster demand efficiency and circularity, and promote electrification.

Utilities can create positive outcomes by mastering​ their day-by-day execution in:​​

  • Technology: to accelerate and scale sustainable energy, the electrification of transportation, and the sustainability of industrial clusters (and more broadly the economy)
  • Data: to drive purpose across power generation, energy and water delivery, markets, customers, energy services, and new clean energy supply chains​
  • Ecosystems and their emerging operating models: to generate new value

These elements combined will make utilities trustworthy to customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and society as a whole.

Given all this, here are the top 10 predictions for utilities:

  1. By 2025, a third of competitive gentailers will have set up integrated supply, efficiency, decarbonization, and electrification service portfolios, growing average profit per customer by more than 20%.
  2. By 2023, 60% of competitive power generators and traders will have AI-powered forecasting capabilities in production, helping to improve day-ahead demand and price forecast accuracy by more than 15%.
  3. By 2027, driven by the need to detect and manage behind-the-meter flexibility, 70% of electric utilities in advanced markets will deploy distributed resource management and demand response solutions.
  4. By 2024, 50% of gas utilities will use cloud platforms and drones, aircraft, or satellites equipped with image-based detection technology to detect fugitive emissions and deliver on net-zero targets.
  5. By 2024, 25% of utilities will invest in new talent management applications to become skills-driven high-performance organizations, boosting work productivity and quality by 15%.
  6. In 2023, pushed by energy price and security concerns, 55% of energy suppliers will leverage energy system data to identify those at risk of fuel poverty and foster more efficient consumption.
  7. By 2026, 60% of utilities will converge IT and operational technology (OT) security personnel, technologies, and processes to better protect against both cyber and physical threats, reducing overall security breaches by 50%.
  8. By 2024, 70% of utilities will use specialized sustainability SaaS platforms to track and report scope 1 and 2 and estimate scope 3 emissions to meet regulatory and financial disclosure requirements.
  9. By 2027, longer droughts and more volatile energy prices will have pushed 40% of water companies to invest in IoT- and AI-based smart applications to cut non-revenue water (NRW) and power consumption by 20%.
  10. By 2025, 50% of utilities will implement a platform approach to operations, integrating core applications, improving visibility, management, and efficiency to boost tight operating margins.

For each of these predictions, the IDC Energy Insights team has developed a detailed analysis, with associate drivers and IT impact and guidance for utilities. A selection of these predictions will be presented by IDC Energy Insights analysts in an live webinar on Thursday, December 1, at 16:00 CET.

To complement the top 10 predictions, the IDC Energy Insights analyst team also develops a series of recommendations for utilities that have embarked on the energy transition journey. This year’s recommendations are:

  • Deliver on your purpose. Sustainability, decarbonization, and electrification offer endless opportunities, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the possibilities. Balance immediate urgencies around security of supply and consumer protection, without losing momentum on long-term net-zero goals. Focus resources and efforts on energy transition use cases and initiatives that support and enrich your company’s future business portfolio.
  • Nurture your internal resources. The decade-long talent drain in the utilities industry has been exacerbated by the global skills and talent crunch that affects all sectors, including technology companies. The old practice of relying on technology partners and IT and business service providers to cover skill gaps is no longer sufficient as many of these companies have themselves also been negatively affected. It’s imperative to focus on internal workforces to boost productivity and work quality and to improve employee experience and ward off the “Great Resignation.”
  • Rekindle your relationship with customers. The global energy crisis and economic uncertainties have made energy consumption (and related costs) top of mind for customers across all sectors. Now is the time to become true energy advisors, supporting customers with personalized, timely, and valuable offers around sustainability and new energy products and services. This could have a long-term impact on customer experience and revenues from new business models.
  • Engage in ecosystem innovation. Collaborative innovation and co-creation are crucial to successfully navigate the accelerating pace of energy transition. In many cases, emerging utility business and operating models also require cross-industry ecosystems, so an ecosystem-first mindset is a powerful tool. Establish an internal engagement platform that brings together business stakeholders, technology partners, end users, and start-ups with a focus on idea conversion and incubation and an end goal of driving operating models to generate new value.​

Support the integration of the energy system. Work with regulators and policymakers to link different production modes with different types of demands through the most sustainable and cost-efficient physical, digital, and market infrastructure. Support the creation of markets where price signals guide consumers to the cheapest and most efficient decarbonization option. Drive the creation of physical links between existing and new energy carriers. Digitize the system to harmonize demand and supply, orchestrate markets, and link energy flows.

IDC Energy Insights analysts Jean-François Segalotto, Gaia Gallotti, Daniele Arenga, and Roberta Bigliani will be onsite in Frankfurt for Enlit 2022. They look forward to meeting you and discussing their predictions and more.

The past always informs the future, so it would be hard to discuss the Future of Trust without, at first, acknowledging the significant impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on computing. Pushed into supporting remote and hybrid work models, organizations scrambled to set up the necessary infrastructure to continue operating, while people incorporated more technologies and digital identities into their everyday experiences.

In the Future of Trust, we see the push and pull of digital services. With the growing prevalence of cloud-based services, greater volumes of data are collected and analyzed, driving the need for more automation to provide insights into the data, as well as artificial intelligence innovations that promise to alleviate pain points experienced by organizations and their customers.

Meanwhile, consumers are ever more aware of and sensitive to data breaches as cyberthreats increase in number and sophistication. Privacy by Design principles are being re-evaluated as customers become more curious and cautious about how their personal information is used. And, while rules and regulations regarding where and how data is stored and transmitted are changing, businesses recognize that their customers cannot tolerate disruptions to the digital infrastructures that undergird their work and daily lives.

All of this uncertainty is prompting organizations to turn to “the certainty of data.” In our top 10 Future of Trust predictions, we see the thread of data-driven insight running through privacy, security, compliance, risk, and ESG – the elements comprising the Framework of Trust. This relationship between data-driven insight and Trust is cyclical. Customers confer Trust onto organizations that transparently share data driven insights, but Trust is a prerequisite to overcome consumer reluctance to share the personal data required to generate high quality organizational insight.

  • Prediction 1: By 2026, 30% of large enterprise organizations will migrate to autonomous security operations centers accessed by distributed teams for faster remediation, incident management, and response.
  • Prediction 2: By 2024, 35% of organizations will employ a privacy engineer to operationalize Privacy by Design principles into IT systems, processes, and product development strategy.
  • Prediction 3: By 2024, 30% of heavily regulated organizations will adopt confidential computing technologies to combine and enrich sensitive data critical to multiparty compute applications while preserving privacy.
  • Prediction 4: By the end of 2024, 65% of major enterprises will mandate data sovereignty controls from their cloud service providers to adhere to data protection and privacy regulatory requirements.
  • Prediction 5: By 2026, driven by steep regulatory growth, talent gap, and cost efficiency measures, 40% of organizations will invest in compliance-as-a-service offerings to meet their regulatory mandates.
  • Prediction 6: By 2027, 60% of G2000 companies will adopt continuous risk assessments over annual security audits, leveraging service providers to limit the burden of policies, practices, and technical debt.
  • Prediction 7: By 2025, the SEC will publish standards for cyber-risk scoring, and publicly traded companies will be required to update and report this score on an annual basis.
  • Prediction 8: By 2024, 30% of organizations will advance their ESG metrics and data management beyond reporting capabilities to generate sustainably driven cost and competitive advantages.
  • Prediction 9: By 2024, 75% of large enterprise firms will implement purpose-specific ESG data management and reporting software as a response to emerging legislation and increased stakeholder expectations.
  • Prediction 10: By 2025, 45% of CEOs, fatigued by security spending without predictable ROI, will demand security metrics and results measurement to assess and validate investments made in their security program.

Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Trust 2023 Predictions.

Watch Webinar

Grace Trinidad - Research Director, Future of Trust - IDC

Analyst Profile
Grace Trinidad is Research Director in IDC's Security & Trust research practice responsible for the Future of Trust research program. In this role she provides strategic guidance and research support on approaches to trust that include risk, security, compliance, privacy, ethics, and social responsibility. Dr. Trinidad has published peer-reviewed research on privacy and trust in healthcare, exploring public attitudes towards commercial use of personal health information. Other areas of Dr. Trinidad's research include the ethics of artificial intelligence and data sharing, trust in healthcare providers and in healthcare organizations, genomic database use and accessibility, and data equity.

Home Office is an Advantage, But Security Risks Remain

Would you work for a company that wants you to spend 40 hours a week at the office? Three years ago, you probably would have raised your eyebrows at the question. But times have changed — and the answer may not be as evident as it used to be.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered how we work. Lockdowns and social distancing made the introduction of home office working inevitable for many companies. For a period, this was necessary to keep companies afloat without putting the health of employees at risk.

But home working has now become an expectation for many employees — and it is widely offered by employers to attract and retain workers.

To stay competitive, enabling a hybrid home-office model, full-time home working, or remote working is an increasingly popular strategy for organizations. But it requires the deployment of substantial security measures to limit risks in a digital environment that remains highly threatening.

Home Office: A Key to Attracting Professionals

Our research reveals that companies are using hybrid and remote working models to strengthen their competitiveness. From the employer point of view, offering a home office opportunity can improve employee satisfaction. In many cases, it also boosts productivity, resulting in better products and services and greater customer satisfaction.

Companies want to keep employees motivated — and hybrid working models are one way to do so. IDC’s European Industry Acceleration Survey 2022 found that 37% of the 1,500 respondents regard hybrid working as an external force that positively impacts the organization. Among all listed options, hybrid working won the most support from survey respondents.

Job seekers increasingly prefer companies that enable them to work from home on a regular basis. Many employers have supported this preference to avoid losing applicants. IDC’s 2022 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey (Wave 6) offers confirmation: One-third of respondents cited offering a hybrid working opportunity as their top strategy for attracting and retaining IT professionals.

The survey also found that 29% of organizations regard offering a hybrid model as having the most impact of a range of strategies. Offering competitive compensation packages or designing inspiring workplaces were lower-ranked options.

Almost half of respondents said choosing the right strategy is crucial in the recruitment of IT professionals, particularly those who possess key skills that are in high demand.

Same Road, Different Stages

Companies are generally open to taking the necessary steps to satisfy the home office-related needs of their employees. But they are at different stages of introducing hybrid working models.

Around one-quarter of IDC survey respondents said company leadership had expressed interest in learning more about employee perspectives on hybrid or fully home-based working. One-quarter of respondent organizations have introduced short-term policies for it. Nearly one-third have invested in technologies to support ongoing remote and hybrid work based on feedback from employees, while 13% intend to maintain hybrid and remote working models over the long term.

Of course, not everyone has a positive view of home/remote working. But the Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey found that only a minority of enterprises face a situation in which the leadership and employees have completely divergent views on the subject.

What does home office working cost employers? IT investments, mostly related to infrastructure, are a major spend. IDC’s Future of Work Spending Guide reported that European companies are expected to spend $4.3 billion on remote team enablement this year. Increasing storage capacity and scaling VPN solutions are two of the most common upgrades that organizations implement.

Home Office or Remote Working?

The focus on VPNs illustrates that organizations must address the security risks of working from home. From the security point of view, there is a difference between home office and remote working. In the case of home office, employees are restricted to working in a specified location, their home, using equipment provided by the employer. In remote working, employees may work from anywhere and use personal equipment.

Remote working poses a much higher security risk. Unsafe networks, weak passwords, and unverified software are among the leading risks. People around the employee may also jeopardize the security of sensitive information. At home offices, unsecure networks, employee exhaustion, a sense of comfort and security, and distractions are among the risk factors. Security measures implemented by the employer can alleviate many of these concerns.

Increasing Focus on Security

After data management, cybersecurity is the second-ranked focus area for organizations. More than two-thirds of IDC survey respondents cited cybersecurity as a focus of skills acquisition and training. Having security experts at the company is essential for technology projects. Many respondents highlighted that IT security professionals remain in high demand, especially for key initiatives.

Security is indeed an increasingly crucial sector for investments, especially in the current era of cyberwar. IDC’s Security Spending Guide reveals that European organizations spent more than $42 billion on security technologies in 2021. A nearly 11% increase is expected in 2022.

The results of IDC’s European Industry Acceleration Survey 2022 align with this trend: 32% of respondents regard cyberthreats as an external factor that negatively impacts the organization. It is thus not surprising that 34% of respondents expect cybersecurity regulations to have a major impact on business in the next two years. In 2023, cybersecurity will continue to be among the top priorities driving digital investment.

There are many ways to boost an organization’s cyber-readiness. Among the listed security services in the Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, security training received the most votes (33.6%). When working from home, employees leave the secure working environment provided by the office, exposing employers to greater risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.

Increased spending on cybersecurity, however, is not solely due to the risks posed by home and remote workers. Private and the public sector organizations may be targeted for cyberattacks no matter how many employees are physically present in the office. Because an inability to secure sensitive data poses operational and reputational risks, security budgets must not become victim to budget cuts by organizations trying to survive inflation and recession.

Home office has become widely popular and, for many, the default way of working. It remains to be seen whether the rising cost of living will force employees back to the office. But for now, labor market competitiveness depends on whether companies are willing and/or able to satisfy employee demands for home office. And this trend will continue to influence security sector spending.