[Music] hi chris thanks for joining us today i'd like to ask you about how you see what has happened recently we're having this conversation um remotely because of the pandemic because of the things that all of these cios have done to make their teams work remotely and their colleagues work remotely but that's had a big impact and we've seen a big change in the way that people have worked and i wonder from your experience of talking to cios how you see the next 18 months or so working out thanks chris and it's great to be here and i really appreciate the question because i do think we have figured out how we're all going to be productive working from home and as i talk to cios around the world there's really three big themes that are popping up and the first one is around how do i protect and grow my top line and as traditional supply chains have been disrupted it's all about delivering that much better customer experience a customer experience which creates loyalty which creates upsell creates and maintains that connection and it's about the operations that support that customer so protecting and growing the top line is the first big theme the second one actually gets a number of different names pursuing productivity scaling operations optimizing the financial model or good old-fashioned cost takeout and regardless of the umbrella heading that one would put on it the destination is always the same moving work and manual work especially to digital platforms and digital platforms that scale across the enterprise so we're seeing a big you know push on the use of virtual labor on automation you know in full automation we've all been at the automation game for decades but getting to that last mile of automation to really eliminate the work and move it to digital platforms and just as a data point um in our cloud we've seen a 360 increase in chatbot conversations in the last 90 days and whether it's organizations like state agencies here in the states or its massive corporations insurance companies increasingly using virtual labor to help scale their operations so the second one is all around pursuing productivity and hyper automation if you will and the third one is around prioritizing risk and while we've all looked at technology resiliency for a long time in each of our organizations it's also now about the human resiliency how many layers deep does your human resiliency go in your enterprise and if 10 of your workforce gets sick with the pandemic how do you stand and getting an integrated view of risk across the enterprise a place where you're continuously monitoring versus finding out for some instance that you have some risk that you weren't managing so those are the three big themes massive implications in terms of programs that everyone is driving and underwriting all of it i just say and i'll close out here chris and hand it back to you is speed i have talked to so many cios who have said initiatives that would have taken 14 months to get done are getting done in six weeks decisions which would have taken four months are happening in hours and the speed of everyone leading into digital transformation innovation transformation in general has has only increased and i don't think there's any going back that's really interesting i i think what you're saying we see reflected in a lot of the organizations we talk to and work with one of the one of the issues with that though is that people people's experience of how they work has changed a lot right the the way that they are onboarded the way that they are trained the way that they start new programs and work with different teams this is a really different way of working there isn't it so how do organizations deal with that how can you see them um making sure that their teams and their people can work effectively in the future and keep up with the technology you've just been talking about yeah i think it's a great point and there's a there's there's a lot to unpack there from my standpoint but i'll try and be concise and i'll just i'll use the term employee experience employee experience has become more and more important for companies and and let's let's talk about the why from my perspective i think the consumer tech companies have shown us the power of experience and experience isn't just about pretty screens the right experience can actually enable and accelerate the behavioral and economic outcomes that we're looking for as enterprises and what those outcomes are employee engagement productivity speed we want people to do a certain way the experience will make or break that in terms of getting to that business outcome the other aspect of it i think employee experience is going to become a competitive differentiator there are lots of articles written about the shortage of tech talent and we all know with every company becoming a software company tech talent the demand for it is only going to rise and the companies that have invested in employee experience where it's easy to get things done where employees aren't forced to navigate what i call the org chart of the company to get the simplest thing done versus a company which hasn't invested in it and it feels old and clunky guess who's going to attract the higher level talent right it's a pretty simple answer so i think increasingly it's going to become a competitive differentiator in terms of talent acquisition and talent retention but you also hit on another thing which is this is a lot and it's a lot of change that we're throwing at a lot of our workforces and i think part of our jobs as cios is to make sure we are enabling the workforce of the future and i do think that's part of our responsibility as we enable all this and i talked about work moving to virtual labor that doesn't mean all of our you know workforces go away what it means is we have to invest in those workforces to make sure they understand how do they coexist along with these big platforms to get work done to be a force multiplier for their own organizations that's i could pick up on a couple of things there because what you just said about how you and empower people how you get you get them to to work more effectively along with that removing the need as you say to navigate that org chart of the organization sometimes that's a bit you have to give them agency you know really to to so that the i.t team and the cio isn't the the one version of everything that has to be done because we're in a very flexible situation the the companies are going to go through more changes we're going to have potential recession around the world and organizations are going to have to deal with that so can we help people to solve their own problems rather than relying on going back to the one version of the truth is that part of the answer yeah i mean self-service you know enabling employees to get their work done easier without you know phone calls and emails and again taking a book at a consumer how do we get things done on consumer life you just search for it so and that's what i meant by not having the employees navigate the road charging company think about unified portals where there's not department names at the top right hr at facilities payroll etc it's just a search for imagine that um and i was actually had the pleasure of talking with a number of shared services leaders in emea last week and the concept is something that everyone is leaning into because while employee experience can feel a bit oh it's experience and squishy and what's the real roi i think experience and productivity are two sides of the same coin and if you think about those departments that are serving up that employee experience and it is it hr facilities payroll finance etc we have seen in our customer install days on the front end for employee experience driving you know 50 60 self-service and really transforming the employee experience but the other side of that coin is for those departments that are serving up that employee experience 40 45 productivity increases which is you know margin expansion which is the ability to do more with that labor which is all part of the strategic objectives at every single company whether they call it a shared service or not oh thank you well chris that's been really fun fantastic really interesting thank you very much for that thanks chris appreciate the invite