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      [1]   Creating an Outbreak of Innovation in a Pandemic
      [2]   What Enterprises Should Know about Fever Screening as Employees Return to Work Facilities
      [3]   Held Captive? Preparing Your Global Operations for the New Future

Creating an Outbreak of Innovation in a Pandemic

Innovative thinking often gets worn down by the traditional focus on delivery, but COVID-19 is breaking down old ways of thinking about work, productivity and people management. Now is the time to rediscover and reinvigorate the entrepreneurial roots that made your organization great long before there was a global pandemic.

As you lead your organization through the next few months, seize the opportunity to spur innovation in delivering new products and improving operations. Engage employees in remote design-thinking workshops that encourage questioning across a broad spectrum of functional areas. Suspend organizational hierarchy to get at the widest possible spectrum of ideas and create a diverse network of individuals who vary perspectives but share common threads of experience to elicit new and productive insights. Develop a virtual lab for experimentation to test ways to positively impact the employee working experience. Then challenge employees to translate these concepts into the end-customer experience and execute the most innovative ideas.

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What Enterprises Should Know about Fever Screening as Employees Return to Work Facilities

As regions around the world lift stay-at-home restrictions tied to the pandemic, many enterprises with shared workspaces are considering fever screening. Existing technologies that quickly detect elevated skin temperature claim to be a first line of defense, allowing organizations to pull aside employees and visitors at risk for further assessment before allowing them to enter.

While the potential for fever screening to help get people back to work is alluring, the reality of implementing such a practice is complex and uncertain. Many of the hardware and software solutions claiming to support fever screening have not gone through extensive clinical testing. Questions about accuracy and privacy abound in addition to a host of other challenges: Will proper equipment usage require a qualified board-certified clinical thermographer? Or can a robot do the job? How is the collected data processed, retained and secured? What sort of policy changes does a company need to implement these programs?

Fever screening and other health screening tactics will be an important component of enterprise planning going forward. All companies will need to navigate their way toward three "horizons" over the next 18 or so months while they continue to strengthen business continuity plans, take out unnecessary costs and boost efficiency. Focusing on these horizons will encourage thinking that is appropriately focused on the need to build an operating model for resiliency.

Held Captive? Preparing Your Global Operations for the New Future

The global pandemic has negatively affected every business - with the few notable exceptions of online retail operations, pharmacies and grocery store chains, and specific consumer goods manufacturers. Companies that emphasized digital and platform solutions before the pandemic are faring significantly better than organizations that did not - which is a useful observation for preparing global operations going forward. Creating a game plan for enterprise operations in this dynamic environment is tricky.

As companies strive to create their new future in the compromised economic environment, they should focus on three overarching goals: taking costs out in an intelligent way - in particular by sunrising new solutions, technology and platforms and sunsetting the old - monetizing captives with carefully negotiated deals and driving operations to the cloud. Although the cloud imperative has been paramount for many years, the current crisis is accelerating demand across all potential cloud target environments. With investments in the physical office on the decline, a highly secure cloud architecture is now the expected foundation for moving forward.

Issue #124

      [1]   The Client-Provider Relationship: A Secret to Innovation and Growth
      [2]   Visual AI Boosts Retail E-commerce
      [3]   Enterprises Turn to the Public Cloud to Enable Online Services During the Pandemic

The Client-Provider Relationship: A Secret to Innovation and Growth

Enterprises today need real value and innovation from their service providers. To create a contractual relationship that undeniably adds value, sourcing buyers must take a hard look at the performance of both parties. It's easy to point fingers across the divide and find fault with the way the provider delivers contracted services or fails to meet service levels and project milestones. But the more productive move for enterprise sourcing buyers is to look at their own behavior and accept responsibility as an active partner in a living, breathing relationship.

This begins by asking even the most basic of questions: how well does our organization understand the nature of the services it's contracting and how a contract relationship works?

We have found this fundamental element of outsourcing - understanding the nature of the services being outsourced - is often missing or insufficient. ISG research shows that improving an enterprise client's engagement in its sourced services relationships is the only sure way to produce the innovation it is looking for. Focusing on the relationship also functions as a risk-management activity; it improves outcomes, matches expectations with service delivery, and reduces the long-term costs of changing providers. ISG calls this improved relationship condition?Coactive Governance. It ensures both clients and providers can thrive in a competitive market, achieve greater innovation and generate growth.

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Visual AI Boosts Retail E-commerce

Any way you look at it, COVID-19 is having a significant impact on the retail industry. For one, omnichannel transactions are increasingly becoming the norm. More than two-thirds of customers are resorting to omnichannel buying, such as buy-online pick-up in-store, and online orders have sky rocketed by more than 28 percent. Unlocking the potential of physical stores that are integrated with e-commerce platforms is the industry's biggest digital transformation opportunity. Many retailers are looking to technologies such as algorithmic retailing, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) to improve inventory tracking, workforce enablement, customer experience and operational planning.

In fact, nearly a third of retailers are adopting some form of visual AI technology. Five years ago, the ways visual artificial intelligence (AI) was being applied in fashion e-commerce was narrow and limited. Now its tentacles spread far and wide. Visual AI in fashion e-commerce is showing it can have a powerful impact in a variety of ways: it can save costs and improve catalog management with AI-assisted product tagging, improve visual search to keep pace with millennial and Gen Z shopping trends and increase conversion rates with automated human model imagery.

Given the value proposition of visual AI and other digital innovations, retailers should be taking a hard look at the new technology hitting the market in the coming months.

Enterprises Turn to the Public Cloud to Enable Online Services During the Pandemic

The pandemic has had a major impact on the way people work. Enterprises are finding running workloads in the cloud gives them the agility and scalability they need to enable a work-from-home model and continue to serve customers during pandemic lockdowns. The ISG Provider LensT?Public Cloud - Solutions & Services Archetype Report finds enterprises are looking to cloud providers to help them leverage artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities for data analysis, provide online services, host virtual business meetings and maintain customer support services.

Many cloud service providers, especially infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service providers, have seen record-setting growth in recent months. According to the latest ISG Index, global spending on IaaS is up nearly 20 percent through the first nine months of 2020, to $17.8 billion.

Instead of a lift-and-shift approach to moving applications, many enterprises are now looking for cloud-native tools to help with the transition. In many cases, a lift-and-shift approach later requires enterprises to refactor or re-architect the workload to drive better performance, which leads to increased costs. ?

Issue #119

      [1]   The CISO as a Business Enabler: Transforming Security into a Competitive Advantage
      [2]   How Banks Can Move from Being 'Physical First' to Being 'Digital First'
      [3]   Using Neuroscience and Provider Management to Enhance Cybersecurity

The CISO as a Business Enabler: Transforming Security into a Competitive Advantage

The modern enterprise is experiencing constant change. New digital technologies like big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and multi-cloud environments can present leaders with both opportunities and challenges. And this is especially the case for the chief information security officer (CISO).

The CISO of the digital age will be a role that embraces change and new business opportunities by shifting from a protective "detect and respond" model to a business-driven "predict and prevent" model. In this new way of thinking, the CISO will enable new business opportunities and explore new ways of doing business with the help of digital technologies that transform companies into agile enterprises. CISOs can meet these challenges by building and harnessing the power of alliances across the business, shifting the security organization into a proactive provider of integrated, consumable solutions and using tools with predictive capabilities to act on threats before they affect the organization.

Tomorrow's CISOs will use the right mix of people, processes and tools to help them become predictors and enablers of the business while still providing high-quality security.

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How Banks Can Move from Being 'Physical First' to Being 'Digital First'

As more and more traditional organizations are shaken from their "business as usual" slumber by their digital challengers, the typical first response is to go to market guns blazing. Though digital is the foremost agenda item for most strategy meetings with C-suite leaders today, many organizations appear to lack a coherent plan, instead sprinkling digital initiatives across their presentations and centers of excellence in business and IT.

In an industry like banking, the goals for digital transformation are continuously being reset. Customers are changing, and their expectations are changing with them. And banks that embark on a digital transformation often hit roadblocks that impede them from making genuine gains. In the long term, they may find themselves struggling despite the big dollars spent on strategy sessions, management off-site meetings and special campaigns. After all, the goals for "going digital" are often ambiguous and require significant change - two characteristics that make them inherently difficult to achieve.

To truly transform from being physical-first to digital-first organizations, banks must make going digital an enterprise-wide initiative and digitize processes from end to end. After all, a process is only as good as its weakest link. Banks must also define the value proposition for their customers and increase customer engagement through personalization, enhanced features and rewards for consistent usage.

Using Neuroscience and Provider Management to Enhance Cybersecurity

More than half of all cybersecurity breaches are social engineering cyberattacks that wreak havoc inside an enterprise - and they happen even in enterprises that should know better. But cybersecurity technology can protect your enterprise only so far. To be truly safe, your approach must include the right mix of technology, governance and employee training.

Enterprises need to leverage both neuroscience and provider governance to reduce risk, curtail threats by bad actors and prevent employees from being tricked or making bad decisions. Improving your cybersecurity profile includes creating new neural pathways for employees to improve the cybersecurity mindset of your workplace, using third-party management and governance to ensure provider security, reviewing vulnerabilities and establishing security communities of practice. Companies that can facilitate "cybersecurity by design" and "cybersecurity by default" as market differentiators?will protect their enterprise and customers - and preserve their reputation.

      [1]   Future-proofing Your Shared Services Operations
      [2]   Leadership in a Pandemic Reality
      [3]   Embracing a Banking Ecosystem to Transform and Innovate

Future-proofing Your Shared Services Operations

The economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is making many enterprises question the logic of owning a captive service delivery center for non-core business activities, namely IT, F&A, procurement, HR and engineering. The fact is, many captives have not stood up well to the crisis. Some have struggled with business continuity plans that provided insufficient solutions when the workforce was ordered to stay at home. Some have struggled to scale operations up or down in the face of dramatic and swift changes in demand.

Many captive operations are not as strong as service providers in scaling resources up or down in the short term. That lack of scalability makes resource costs quasi-fixed during an economic period in which the enterprise is looking for increased variability in its cost structure - not increased rigidity. Some enterprises, especially those from hard-hit industries like brick-and-mortar Retail, Travel, Hospitality, Airlines and Oil and Gas, are experiencing substantial "losses" at their captives; volumes dropped more quickly than the companies could restructure the costs.

The pain of getting services back up and running - even just to emergency levels - has been difficult, and, in some cases, the captive no longer offers the advantages it was built to offer: high quality, low attrition and cost savings. This realization is driving enterprises to consider the possibility of monetizing their captive operations to optimize value and reduce risk. Knowing how to assess the value of your captive operation is the first critical step. Understanding the potential for divestiture and the available acquisition market is the second.

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Leadership in a Pandemic Reality

Most leaders enter their leadership role with big ideas about the impact they want to make, both personally and organizationally. But what do you do when your leadership plans suffer a blow like the COVID-19 pandemic?

This is when it's important to remember human psychology - what motivates us and our ability to stretch and achieve our visions. At the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are basic needs like food, water, warmth and rest. Though many of us are typically operating at higher levels - working to satisfy psychological and self-fulfillment needs - when something shakes our core or impacts our ability to meet those more basic needs, we shift our energy to ensure they are met. When they are not met, we have a hard time dreaming or envisioning anything beyond day-to-day survival.

It's no surprise your vision - and your motivation to achieve it - may be faltering at a time like this. Consider whether you need to recalibrate or redefine your vision and plans in the new normal. If you decide to adjust, don't forget to bring others along. Once you can clearly see your adjusted vision, communicate it. Share your rationale and intent. Others may be grateful for a change of course, especially if they are feeling pressure or stress given all the other changes happening around us. Ask yourself how effectively you are communicating and inspiring change.

Embracing a Banking Ecosystem to Transform and Innovate

In response to evolving consumer expectations and rising competitive pressures, the banking industry is undergoing multibillion-dollar digitization transformation. These initiatives are focused on fundamentally changing the entire banking technology stack, including reimagining the business with a customer-centric approach. With traditional banks increasingly relying on technology, financial technology (fintech) services adoption is also experiencing rapid growth. Fintechs raised $33.9 billion in venture capital in 2019 alone. In Europe, new entrants in the banking industry such as digital-first banks, non-bank payment institutions and big technology companies have captured one-third of all new revenue since 2005, jeopardizing the competitiveness of traditional banks.

Underlying this transformative change is a disaggregated value chain that cuts across businesses and industries, leading to increasing interdependencies on a model that relies on networks and the power of many. Through collaboration with external partners such as fintechs, advisors, third-party developers and other technology partners, banks are joining the value chains of di?erent industries to create ecosystems. The goals include a reduced cost to serve, improved efficiency and reduced friction, thus providing customers with new experiences and stimulating their desire for more. If implemented correctly, a banking ecosystem is able to create a customer-centric, unified value proposition that expands beyond what customers could previously get.

Issue #120

      [1]   Everything Depends on Network Transformation
      [2]   Healthcare Payers Use Digital to Improve Services
      [3]   The Future of Work - Redesigning Operations and Customer Experience

Everything Depends on Network Transformation

As enterprises embark on digital transformation, their need for improved performance, monitoring and security is growing significantly. Critical business applications like SAP and Salesforce that enable digital transformation require massive amounts of bandwidth. This means?companies must transform their networks?to support the new requirements of digital business.

Enterprises need networks that offer greater visibility and control with standardized and harmonized services and faster deployment cycles to increase agility. They need enhanced security controls, encryption and network segmentation to meet evolving threats and satisfy regulatory compliance. And they need greater stability via automated tooling and leading best practices.

The good news is, the opportunity to optimize enterprise networks has never been better than it is today. The ingredients are all there: growing demand for digital transformation, greater market options, lower rates and better contract terms. Network sourcing strategies are evolving rapidly, and forward-thinking enterprises are adopting multiple approaches. One thing seems clear: the legacy "one carrier fits all" model is largely dead. And the technology and network provider market is changing the way enterprises design and purchase their networks.

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Healthcare Payers Use Digital to Improve Services

While the COVID-19 pandemic and consumer demand for more effective healthcare outcomes are putting pressure on healthcare payers to build patient-centric business models, payers and providers alike are struggling to stay apace with growing expectations for advanced and convenient digital services.

According to recent data from healthcare payers, improving the experiences of those they serve is the most important goal of going digital. Other payers cite operational improvements and growth as key drivers.

This confirms what ISG sees in the market: consumer "members" are becoming increasingly central to payers' changing value propositions. Members are experiencing the effects of changes to the payer workforce, operations, business and technology ecosystems and governance, and the pandemic is accelerating digital transformation in all these areas.

The Future of Work - Redesigning Operations and Customer Experience

The enormous challenges the world is facing today are presenting enormous opportunities. Organizations that embed new ways of working into day-to-day operations can solve for resiliency while they fundamentally improve the customer experience. This affects everything from customer engagement at the contact center to the support of operations and the supply of data. Managing these components with a digital focus should be thought of as one holistic, new ecosystem.

Organizations that have built digital elasticity and resiliency and that offer a seamless digital channel are surviving the crisis much better than those that haven't. As new challenges arise, as they undoubtedly will, companies must be ahead of the curve to ensure continuity of core operations and revenue streams.

Opportunities for building a new future of work can be found in adapting property use to match business needs, embracing a digitally elastic operating model to provide an improved customer experience and embedding intelligent automation to ensure employees are effective. Always-on IT with capabilities in the cloud and digital connectivity in the form of video, message and chat support ensures a win-win for the customer and the company.

Issue #122

      [1]   The Human Side of Digital
      [2]   Is Your Automation Journey on a Dangerous Path?
      [3]   The Power of Market Price Data at Your Fingertips

The Human Side of Digital

If you're a business leader in 2020, your teams are likely on an emotional roller coaster. Anxiety and uncertainty are at all-time highs, which means oxytocin and serotonin are at all-time lows. When you look back, you'll want to know that you did something proactive to help your people and advance your business.

This is what we mean when we talk about the human side of digital. It's about applying neuroscience, the psychology of human dynamics and empathy to digital transformation to create a culture that fosters resilience and adaptability. The goal is to help people and organizations evolve to not just handle uncertainty in the workplace, but to thrive in the new normal.

Addressing the "human side of digital" creates psychologically safer environments - a prerequisite for organizational agility and high-performing teams. When a company invests in coaching and executive insights designed specifically to support virtual and mindful leadership at the top and invests in cultural and behavioral assessments, it has put in place the structures to help it continuously adapt to whatever the future may bring.

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Is Your Automation Journey on a Dangerous Path?

When thinking about your automation journey, it may seem like you are on the yellow brick road to Oz. There is no question, dangers are lurking. One of them is just the sheer volume of tools in the market and the confusion created by such rapid change. Attended versus unattended, artificial intelligence, machine learning - what does it all mean?

When harnessing the power of automation, an organization must knit together a set of technologies to bring about true digital transformation. Of course, it may make sense to commit to just one automation technology to start with, but to optimize the power of automation and identify where these technologies can best be applied, an understanding of all the available options - and how they fit together - is critical.

Imagine various technologies working together harmoniously with humans to deliver real business value. When done right, automation can enable a process from end to end. A key to a successful automation initiative is an enterprise program that builds the foundation to your ways of working, taking into account change management, a governance framework for the entire automation lifecycle and enablement of both IT and the business.

The Power of Market Price Data at Your Fingertips

Cost containment has always been a driving force for IT outsourcing, but in recent years, buyers have begun to focus more on value-added activities like digital enablement. Now, the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is driving some organizations to pursue both digital enablement and cost containment at the same time. As a result, many enterprises today are taking a hard look at how competitive their IT services contracts are. Essential to this, of course, is benchmarking.

Today, advances in automation and analytics allow enterprises to benchmark their transactions in real time, even each time an invoice is received. With cost-effective, on-demand benchmarking, enterprises can leverage results to confirm whether their contract is price competitive, provide price-level justification to internal stakeholders, track market price movement without an RFP or RFI, perform trend analysis for budget planning, and determine timing and strategy for more formal project benchmarks, contract renewal, renegotiation or recompete.

Instead of thinking of IT price benchmarks as discrete once-every-year-and-a-half efforts that require the help of a provider, companies can now think of benchmarking as an ongoing subscription that gives them quick access when they need it. Having market price data at their fingertips allows enterprises to quickly respond to changes in market prices and make more strategic decisions. ?

      [1]   Executive Order Suspends H-1B Visas Through 2020
      [2]   HR-Payroll Consolidation in Asia-Pacific
      [3]   Airbus Realigns Strategy in Response to the Aerospace Industry's Distress Signal

Executive Order Suspends H-1B Visas Through 2020

On Monday, the U.S. administration signed an executive order temporarily restricting new entrants to the United States under the H-1B and other work visas. COVID-19 and subsequent record unemployment levels in the U.S. are the primary rationale for the order, which is effective through the end of 2020.

The decision to suspend H-1B visas is something the IT industry in India has been expecting for some time and working to cushion. In 2019, we wrote about the impact of the "Buy American and Hire American" executive order, which saw H-1B approvals drop by 58 percent year-over-year for Indian IT services firm.

In anticipation of this latest eventuality, many Indian IT service providers have been steadily reducing their dependence on the H-1B visas. The major Indian IT firms have been investing in local hiring and - due to COVID-19 - have been increasing remote working and travel restrictions. As we discussed on the Q1 2020 ISG Index, the pandemic has shown that even critical IT and business services jobs can be managed remotely. As enterprises responded quickly to stay-at-home orders by adjusting their operating models, Indian IT service providers successfully transitioned support from remote locations.

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HR-Payroll Consolidation in Asia-Pacific

In a world shaken first by a trade war between the U.S. and China and then a global pandemic, what was a strong appetite for mergers and acquisitions in Asia-Pacific (APAC) has largely been suspended to wait out the storm.

Until now, that is. An uptick in M&A due diligence performed on APAC companies was registered in May, which is precisely when leading HR software and payroll provider Ceridian announced its intent to acquire regional payroll provider Excelity Global. Just three short weeks later, the parties announced the acquisition was complete.

With a concentration of customers in India and a handful of other countries, Excelity does not make Ceridian the immediate winner of the HR tech or payroll markets. But competitors vying for position have noted they expect the newly merged company will be a stronger competitor once it is integrated. Will Ceridian's early leap to secure greater payroll presence in APAC be blessed with good fortune and new beginnings in 2020? Regardless, the speedy and decisive move to close the acquisition is a breath of fresh air to a region and a world recently overshadowed by pandemic.

Airbus Realigns Strategy in Response to the Aerospace Industry's Distress Signal

Different verticals have been impacted differently by the COVID-19 pandemic. Pockets of the healthcare industry are soaring with significant investments being pumped in, while the already-bleeding transportation industry is striving to stay afloat. As expected, with air passenger traffic plummeting 94 percent globally, the capital-intensive commercial aerospace industry has been sustaining itself on a shoestring and holding on to its rapidly depleting cash reserves. The two major airframers, Airbus and Boeing, which were ramping up production functions to meet the increasing demands a few months back, have cut their global workforces, reduced investments and aborted production due to the sudden drop in demand for new aircraft.

Some expect the commercial aviation industry's recovery to pre-pandemic levels could be as long as three to five years, thus compelling industry stakeholders to find and hook onto new revenue channels.

But the aerospace industry has been crowded with technologies that have not all made it to commercialization. While innovations and R&D projects that are too futuristic have discouraged investors due to the uncertainty of the projected ROI, Airbus has been considerably well balanced in its investments with respect to sharpening its technology prowess and bringing in disruptive innovations, such as all-electric configurations, to its product lines.

Engaging outsourcing service providers that can deliver modern manufacturing technologies and the promises of outsourcing can bring value across the product value chain for faster time to market. The kinds of tectonic shifts caused by COVID-19 are short-term, and product design, engineering and manufacturing firms that have learned their lesson from the pandemic will plan to fire all pistons after the global recovery.

      [1]   Roaring Out of a Global Pandemic: How Airlines and Hotels Can Structure for Recovery
      [2]   Redefining Norms for the Travel, Transportation and Hospitality Sectors
      [3]   Drive Resilience with Software-as-a-Service: Save Cost and Increase Agility

Roaring Out of a Global Pandemic: How Airlines and Hotels Can Structure for Recovery

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, no other businesses have fallen as hard and as fast as airlines and hotels. The global travel industry that spurred over four billion trips a year is now staring at $880 billion in losses due to international ?ight restrictions and trip cancellations.

Currently, both the aviation and hotel industries are looking for creative revenue streams and are implementing social responsibility initiatives. A few major carriers are o?ering low-cost roundtrips with lifetime validity or using their parked passenger planes for cargo-only ?ights to deliver critical supplies around the world. Several hotels are o?ering their rooms for free or at heavily subsidized rates to the government for healthcare professionals and to quarantine foreign travelers.

What will it take to see a light at the end of the tunnel? For airline and hotel businesses to emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis, they must take a data-driven, action-oriented approach. They will need to have a stringent focus on restructuring the business to ensure operational resilience while building the foundation to weather such storms in the future.

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Redefining Norms for the Travel, Transportation and Hospitality Sectors

The initial "shock and awe" period for the travel and transportation sector is largely behind us, and we are all painfully aware that demand cannot sink much lower. The only thing we know for certain is that people will travel again, businesses will travel again, and demand will rise, but the quest for a "return to normal" is likely to be a futile pursuit.

The early defensive measures - furloughs, capacity cuts, vendor contract restrictions, CARES, sourcing funding, etc. - were obvious necessities. Now that there is even the slightest light on the demand horizon, it is time to switch to offense. If there was not a burning need before now to take advantage of technology to make a material difference in operational cost or customer service, there is now. It''s time to focus on quick cashflow injections and plans for scaling a socially distanced workforce. Work to generate customer confidence and increase resiliency in revenue and IT while you shift investment away from recovery and toward the new future.

Drive Resilience with Software-as-a-Service: Save Cost and Increase Agility

For many businesses, the damage of COVID-19 has come in the form of lost productivity with workers banned from the office under social distancing regulations. For others, however, productivity hasn't taken such a hit. The more resilient companies, we've found, are the more technology-enabled ones, relying on, among other things, cloud-based applications. Top software-as-a-service (SaaS) products have shown they provide higher performance and reliability for remote workers than on-premises applications.

The direction seems clear: move critical business systems to SaaS. But migrating to SaaS solutions is more than a simple technical upgrade. It has significant hidden costs and deployment risks that must be managed proactively. Companies need to think through how SaaS adoption aligns with their operational strategies and make sure the business case accounts for the true costs of migration including sunsetting legacy systems.

Migrating your core business systems to SaaS is a strategic move that requires well-informed, data-based decisions - and then it requires redesigning processes, organization structures and job profiles to take advantage of the functionality and accessibility provided by cloud technologies.

      [1]   From Digital Native to Digital Naivete
      [2]   Discover, Improve, Remove: The Trifecta for Your Contact Center
      [3]   U.S. Enterprises Rapidly Move Critical Workloads to the Hybrid Cloud, but Seek Assistance

From Digital Native to Digital Naivete

We live on a planet where we are hyper-connected, where privacy and cybersecurity are foremost in our minds. And yet biologically we have yet to build that same sense of security. Needless to say, one has dramatic effects on the other.

Before COVID-19, we were digital natives, relying on technology to "just do" what we needed it to do. Now we are finding we also were digitally na?ve to think technology would be free from exploitable weaknesses. Digital investment and security costs appeared prohibitive, and many organizations did not make them a priority. Organizations saw a flexible, digital workforce as a secondary priority and focused instead on providing employees with a mobile phone and a laptop to work remotely.

After the pandemic hit, while we may have locked down the workforce to reduce the spread of a biological pathogen, we also may have inadvertently increased the security risk for many businesses - the scale of which may not be felt for many weeks or months to come. Enterprises need to take immediate steps to ensure they can move to a flexible working model in which their corporate data is secure.

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Discover, Improve, Remove: The Trifecta for Your Contact Center

Until now, significantly altering key metrics such as inbound volume in the contact center has been like turning an oil tanker - slow. Lack of data, poor alignment across channels and residual contacts are common obstacles to improving customer experience. But intelligent automation is starting to prove itself as a powerful way to secure gains in these areas.

A single automated bot that covers all channels and generates meaningful analytics can play a transformative role. Assisted automation technology can grab customer data out of multiple systems and present it to the human agent in the first few seconds of a contact, allowing the human agent to concentrate on conversing with the customer. There is no easy path to wide-scale transformation of your contact center, but using proven enterprise-grade technologies as part of a multi-faceted approach can start to remove the existing barriers, provide a data-driven approach for automation and handle the residual contacts as efficiently as possible.

U.S. Enterprises Rapidly Move Critical Workloads to the Hybrid Cloud, but Seek Assistance

While enterprises are delaying or cutting IT spending in the short term due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ISG Research finds that spending on cloud-based as-a-service solutions in the U.S. is expected to be up 12 percent by the end of the year.

Enterprises that use the hybrid cloud model have generally been able to weather the pandemic better than those that don't because it gives them the flexibility to address several challenges, such as business continuity and the running of critical operations in a secure environment. Hybrid cloud is proving to be a crucial factor in the success of work-from-home scenarios.

In their move to a hybrid cloud model, many U.S. enterprises are focused on storing sensitive and valuable data on private clouds. But after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, enterprises will need to engage with managed services providers to avoid high capital expenditures and bills from cloud providers. These services can help CIOs and CTOs with concerns about downtime and with managing their shrinking IT budgets.

      [1]   What Can We Expect from the Healthcare Industry in 2020 and Beyond?
      [2]   Healthcare Payers and COVID-19: Unlocking Value With Intelligent Automation
      [3]   Planning for Resiliency and the Road to Recovery

What Can We Expect from the Healthcare Industry in 2020 and Beyond?

The Healthcare industry has always been an evolving ecosystem, often struggling to change fast enough to keep up with regulatory and patient needs. On top of competitive integrations, increasingly stringent regulations, advances in technology, rising costs and aging populations, Healthcare payers and providers now are facing the COVID-19 calamity. There has never been a time of more intense pressure.

A clear picture of the industry shows powerful changes underway. Healthcare industry players should be prepared to address a continued shift to value-based care and an increased focus on patient centricity and patient data. Unlikely alliances and advances in technology are shaping the industry in unexpected ways - and everyone is taking a new look at the business of healthcare management in light of the pandemic. The way the Healthcare industry handles tech projects, supply chains, regulation, manufacturing of critical supplies and the overall resiliency of care will look radically different than it does today.

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Healthcare Payers and COVID-19: Unlocking Value With Intelligent Automation

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, health insurers could claim less control than many other businesses over many of the factors that are fundamental to their operations and profitability. Regulatory changes, peaks and valleys in claims volume and medical innovations that create questions about coverage all have a significant influence on the industry. Now, COVID-19 is disrupting the Healthcare industry in both expected and unexpected ways.

For example, how do Healthcare payers manage treatment coverage for patients who have been promised they do not need to pay for coronavirus testing and treatment? What does the surge in telemedicine and the lift on restrictions to licensing and interstate treatment mean for billing processes? How should health insurers respond to the mandate to standardize payer-to-payer data exchange in the coming months and years?

Health insurers must figure out how to optimize the variables they can control. Extending intelligent automation into claims processing represents one of their best opportunities to take costs out of their operations. Today health insurers spend approximately $4 to manually process a claim. An automated claim can cost as little as $1.25 and improve efficiency and customer engagement.

Planning for Resiliency and the Road to Recovery

All businesses need to start to think about a new way of building resiliency into their operations. This is not just about designing a better business continuity plan that accounts for a global pandemic. It's about re-thinking the way work gets done, enabling your company to "bend but not break" during a time of crisis. It's also about enabling your company to snap back quickly and be prepared to take advantage of new opportunities that may present themselves. The most successful companies will learn better practices from this situation and be prepared to apply them in the future.

The challenge for most organizations, especially those in hard-hit industries, is that internal crisis teams are (rightly) focused on immediate fixes and finding funding for these fixes. They are essentially in survival mode. Those that have moved beyond emergency preparedness are now focused on cost takeout. While cost takeout is taking place, enterprises should also be planning for what's next. Decisions you would normally make in a time of mere financial stress will require a different way of thinking.

The question today is this: what must we do to prepare for this new way of working? You need an operating model that can ensure process continuity and invite and nurture innovation in the face of a disaster even while your employees and customers are virtual.

Issue #118

      [1]   Prepare for Today's Data Privacy Challenges by Creating a Culture of Privacy
      [2]    COVID-19 Pulse Check: State of the EMEA Insurance Industry
      [3]   Considerations for Moving to Cloud-based Human Capital Management

Prepare for Today's Data Privacy Challenges by Creating a Culture of Privacy

Remember when a business would bolster revenue by selling its customer list to firms in other industries? This is a thing of the not-so-distant past. Today, organizations that maintain personally identifiable information (PII) for customers, employees or business partners are responsible for keeping information confidential and sharing only when authorized and appropriate.

New data privacy legislation requires new procedures, such as informing consumers of their rights and disclosing usage upfront. While data security is core to good data privacy, these new demands require more than ensuring systems are secure and data is protected from hackers and other bad actors. Data privacy is not just a technical issue; privacy is - or should be - of critical interest to everyone in your organization.

Enterprises must work to create a culture of privacy by assessing and addressing behavior patterns of employees and leveraging tactics to create new neural pathways for behavior change. Organizations also must better manage their PII by inventorying their PII data and ensuring employees understand their roles in respect to it. Forward-thinking enterprise leaders also will consider building a privacy office by first assessing new and updated uses of PII across the organization and then creating a breach response plan.

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COVID-19 Pulse Check: State of the EMEA Insurance Industry

Nearly 90 percent of insurance companies in Europe expect customer behavior to change after the COVID-19 crisis - in some cases fundamentally. In particular, the demand for digital products and services will increase. A recent ISG survey of European insurers shows that this change in customer behavior will lead to upheaval in the service provider business ecosystem and accelerate technological innovation.

What do executives in the European insurance industry think about how IT solutions can address current and future risks? Will online and direct insurance continue to gain momentum? Will the customer experience change? COVID-19 is a clear wake-up call. Failure to find out what the "new normal" will look like in the insurance industry could put your business at risk.

Considerations for Moving to Cloud-based Human Capital Management

Based on a recent ISG study, the number of companies planning to adopt human capital management (HCM) software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology in 2020 is twice the number from just two years ago. While the stories about the benefits of moving to cloud HCM are enticing and the move seems straightforward, the journey to the target state can be challenging. The move from an on-premises application to a cloud-based application is much more than a mere system change. The earlier in the transition organizations realize this, the greater the odds for success.

Adoption of an HCM SaaS solution will inevitably affect various service delivery components. Taking time to prepare each of these components for change will increase the benefits and maximize the investment. We believe a transformation management office is best suited to direct and manage the effort. 

      [1]   Cybersecurity and Neuroscience - Humans Are as Important as Technology
      [2]   How to Succeed with Blockchain - the What, Why and Who
      [3]   Leadership in a Pandemic Reality, Part Three: Leading with Action

Cybersecurity and Neuroscience - Humans Are as Important as Technology

If we didn't believe cybersecurity was a digital megatrend of the decade, the?recent Twitter hack?might just convince us. It's clear this massive and dangerous hack was a people failure and not a technical failure. For many enterprises, cybersecurity has been a topic to be added on top of the cool engineering functions that promise to bring in revenue or save money. In this decade, however, cybersecurity is an intrinsic risk management essential that must be built into the core of every employee, product and service.

Doing this successfully means rebuilding the culture and behavioral patterns of employees to establish security as a core value, including creating new neural pathways, erring on the side of caution in personal responsibility, investing in active defense and establishing a cybersecurity center of excellence (CoE) that facilitates "cybersecurity by design" and "cybersecurity by default" strategies as market differentiators.

It is a brave new world with more and more work happening virtually and more potential for security threats. It's time to ensure your workplace and your workforce are using strategies that leverage both technical and human solutions.

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Visit the ISG Connection Center to sign up and stay current.

How to Succeed with Blockchain - the What, Why and Who

Companies in industries with complex supply chains face tremendous pressure from multiple sources: tightening regulatory requirements, escalating security threats, lack of inter-industry visibility, multi-channel information flows. Blockchain technology is helping solve a number of these challenges, but as is common with most emerging technology and innovation programs, implementing blockchain in an enterprise raises questions about how to prioritize projects, who to involve and why certain governance methods work better than others.

Some leaders in the field are setting up blockchain centers of excellence (CoEs) to standardize and institutionalize work involving blockchain technology. Especially when it comes to how multiple companies - perhaps even competitors - in an industry interact with each other, the work can be messy.

Hearing from professionals about the lessons they are learning on their blockchain journey can be a valuable way to avoid pitfalls and accelerate successes.

Leadership in a Pandemic Reality, Part Three: Leading with Action

Some of us make decisions quickly, moving forward when we find an acceptable course of action. Others take longer to carefully weigh and measure options so they can reach what they consider the optimal, single best answer. Understanding what type of decision-maker you are and whether your type changes under different circumstances can help you lead more confidently.

Over the last several months, we have all had to define new courses of action, namely figuring out how to collaborate, supervise and work virtually. For some, the drastic change and persistent ambiguity have been paralyzing. If this is the case for you or your employees, define actions you can accomplish and that give you some sense of control. ?Communicate those actions to your teams. Good communication is not only to inform but also to calm and support.

As you delegate and monitor team progress, keep in mind these are challenging times for us all. Much of this kind of leadership will be a function of your relationships, which are more important now than ever. Leaders help teams manage change. The science of organizational change management - or OCM - can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes for your workforce to adapt to change and realize the strengths of your teams, especially during difficult times.