Enterprise hits and misses - HR teams grapple with hybrid work, and Amazon grapples with everyone
- Summary:
- This week - the return-to-workers face off against hybrid work advocates. Amazon faces the PR heat and takes on all comers. Independent analysts find their advocate, and cloud ERP benefits get deconstructed. Your whiffs include 27 buzzwords that sink bios.
Lead story - The future of work - use cases and HR strategy dilemmas
MyPOV: Cath brought the future of work into focus with her use case, Smart Working shapes lastminute.com's organizational thinking for the Vaccine Economy. So what is "Smart Work," you ask? Well for lastminute.com, it's more than just a hybrid home/office model.
As Cath writes, Smart Work is "flexibility in its broadest sense." That means an employee could shift to a new location, and combine a workcation with an additional vacation week: "A move underpinned by mobile technology and communication and collaboration systems, such as Workplace from Facebook."
But it's not all hybrid and flex and feel-good buzzwords. In HR’s post-pandemic strategic plan, Brian reviews this year's HR Tech show. He warns that HR managers may not be up to the task. And HR luminaries are falling into the I'm pretty fancy I throw jargon at the problem trap:
Whenever I hear an HR speaker tell an audience that:
We need to do a better job of listening.
We must be more inclusive.
We have to respect others.
We should be more nimble.
We must embrace change.
Etc.
I want to come out of my chair and yell 'How?????'. What are the concrete, surefire steps that will actually change a company’s culture? How exactly will you purge dysfunctional leaders? What is actually required to ‘modernize our workforce’?That’s the HR strategy challenge today. How will CHROs and others go from unspecific platitudes to real change? And, there are a lot big changes needed today.
Yep, that's Brian, angling for my tell-us-how-you-really-feel award again. It's a hard point to argue. Platitudes without specifics might get you a keynote gig, but it won't solve HR. "Ask yourself, how would Machiavelli approach your situation?" You don't read that everyday...
Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week
- Nailing down a DIY omni-retail future - how Kingfisher plans to build on its COVID wins in the Vaccine Economy - Stuart on a retailer facing the new music: we adapted, but can we adapt again?
- Business, not IT, should build use cases for Big Data, argues Johnson Matthey CIO Paul Coby - Mark files a use case that wrestles big data away from IT.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- New Relic advances observability and AIOps - why it matters to business - Phil wades headlong into two of the biggest tech buzzwords of 2021, and concludes: it's not just marketing wheel-grease. Phil: "The context here is the ongoing digitalization of business in the wider move to Frictionless Enterprise... Observability is the response to this new context."
- Now don't laugh, but a slimmed-down, re-focused IBM might just evolve into an enterprise cloud powerhouse - I never thought of IBM as a comedy, more of a history-lesson-turned-cautionary-tale. But as Kurt argues, never fall for an easy/lazy storyline.
- Unit4 moves on from Advent as TA Associates buys in at $2 billion valuation - Unit4 just moved to a new private equity investor, but what does it mean for customers? Phil digs in, via a 1:1 with Unit4 CEO Mike Ettling.
Oracle Live 2021 coverage - Oracle puts its cloud application customers on the virtual stage:
- Oracle Live 2021 - Steve Miranda makes the case for Oracle Cloud Applications results - my back-and-forth with Miranda gets into the tedium of vendor wars, pushing for deeper cloud ERP benefits, and whether AI is mature enough to help supply chain customers.
- Oracle Live 2021 - how Marriott and Vanguard made an Oracle platform shift under a COVID cloud - Stuart delves into two of the event's use case highlights, two projects that got it done under less-than-ideal pandemic circumstances.
A few more vendor picks, without the quotables:
- ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott - ‘Linear thinking is crushing companies’ - Derek
- The future of sales when the 19th hole is out of bounds - Salesforce repositions Sales Cloud for the Vaccine Economy - Stuart
- Delivery Hero turns to Google Cloud BigQuery to improve data accessibility and sharing - Derek
Jon's grab bag - Shifting to more eco-friendly accounting principles can feel like a utopian dream, but as Madeline reports, maybe we're making strides (A crisis of values - Salesforce and Unit4 put down roots in forestry to tackle the climate change crisis). If you lean skeptical, Chris has you covered in All you’ve been told about driverless cars is wrong.
Neil opened up a can of intellectual whoop-@ss spared no egos in the insurance industry, via In search of trustworthy AI - is the insurance industry using AI to fairwash FICO scores? Derek bears down on some hard truths as well, in Loss of access to EU security data post-Brexit is ‘concerning’.
Best of the enterprise web
My top seven picks
- Suddenly, Demand is Booming for Office Space - With Google also rolling out U.S. office expansion plans, we're setting up a fascinating tussle between the flex-work companies and the back-to-the-office contingent.
- The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work—Are We Ready? I guess we can count Microsoft on the flex-work side. Remote has its substantial cons, though: "Teams have become more siloed this year and digital exhaustion is a real and unsustainable threat."
- Amazon denies stories of workers peeing in bottles, receives a flood of evidence in return - Amazon seems to make a habit of finding itself in the middle of future-of-work controversies.
- The 2021 AI Index: Major Growth Despite the Pandemic - This early March AI roundup is a gut check on progress made, and governance/diversity/ethics needs not addressed.
- Ransomware Incidents Continue to Dominate Threat Landscape - Perhaps the most concerning quote: "Commodity Trojans are easy to obtain."
- The Loneliness of the Independent Analyst – and Why We Matter Now More than Ever - Josh Greenbaum touched a chord with this one. I see a need for a healthy debate - and terminology distinctions - around terms like "independence" in an enterprise context, where everyone is getting paid by someone. But where Greenbaum and I agree 1000 percent is on this vital point: "As enterprise software buying decisions become more and more complex, it’s important to have a more diverse set of eyes on the problems."
- Deconstructing cloud ERP benefits, project meltdowns and more - I just put out a slew of audio, but you may want to catch the video for this one also, so you can see Brian Sommer's tour-de-force "what you wanted/what you got" cloud ERP satirical slide show.
Whiffs
Not sure if we're getting back to normal just yet, but hey, the Grape-Nuts shortage is officially over. Oh, and French Monks in lockdown just gave away 2.8 tonnes of cheese.
The war against the "email circle back" continues:
"I know your inbox is slammed,"... (but I don't care... because I am judged by the volume of clips I produce on news no one cares about, I know, it sucks, but I have to pass the pain along in the form of this spammy noise) https://t.co/iGhifCHTcx
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 23, 2021
Meanwhile, Frank Scavo issued a dire warning:
If this advice were universally followed, 95% of LinkedIn bios and Twitter profiles would be blank. cc @jonerp https://t.co/4yw5TGdKXo
— Frank S. Scavo (@fscavo) March 28, 2021
Zachary Jeans asked me about the dreaded Ninja Guru combo:
those two words in combination should be career-ending
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 28, 2021
I did a quick check of my bios, I'm 0-for-27, though there is one word I've used to describe myself in that article, but I'm not telling... However, to atone for that, I *will* call a Gmail whiff on myself:
My favorite Gmail mistake I've ever made, sent to about six people including externals. I think it was a keyboard shortcut accident, but this went out to all - and yes, you are looking at the entire email :) pic.twitter.com/mXVJjM27vn
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) March 23, 2021
Top priority indeed - sigh. I'll try to be on my game next week...
If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.