The ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ In Enterprises

How work graph, a new technology by Soroco, is changing the way people experience work

Most CXOs globally are focused on growing revenue, optimizing costs, delivering superior customer and employee experience, and managing risk and compliance. To deliver these business imperatives, enterprises invest significantly in driving several transformation programs.

Despite this, a McKinsey study suggests that 70% of transformation programs don't deliver the desired business outcomes. An Everest Group report found 68% of enterprises undertaking transformations haven’t realized their envisioned goals.

Why do transformations fail? While enterprises have many key ingredients in place, they're blindsided by a significant blind spot.

I call this “the dark side of the moon.”

What is this "dark side of the moon"?

Enterprises generally have good visibility into how their “systems work,” which comes from structured interactions with systems of record (SOR) applications like ERPs and CRMs. The primary source of visibility is via application logs that SOR applications write. Enterprises assume that by knowing how systems work, by default, they understand how teams and processes work.

This is where the big blind spot lies.

As per Soroco research published in HBR, people spend over 60% of their workday outside SORs, interacting with different applications, executing tasks, and entering data into custom applications.

As people interact with software, they generate a huge digital footprint — 70x bigger than interaction data generated by social media. It is intrinsically complex, undocumented, unstructured, and ubiquitous and touches every application, team, process, and customer.

This dataset contains a goldmine of enterprise insights and is untapped. By generating structured, actionable insights from interaction datasets, enterprises can improve the success of transformations with powerful insights.

How enterprises can “light up the dark side of the moon”

One such technology is the work graph from Soroco, which represents a paradigm shift in how enterprises execute transformation programs. Several F500 companies have adopted it, and its impact is similar to how Google Maps changed the face of travel.

Soroco ScoutTM, powered by the work graph, provides a new way of viewing work as a map of interactions between people and software across millions of nodes and edges, creating powerful insights and enabling actions. It provides a near real-time, detailed, intelligent, and scalable map of how work is done on the ground.

Why should enterprises adopt the work graph?

Ways the work graph enables successful transformations:

Puts interactions between people and software at the center of change: Large enterprises face a fragmented landscape where systems don’t talk to each other. A study by Soroco shows an average user toggles 3600 times between 22 applications in a day to get work done. To patch this problem, enterprises traditionally throw people at the problem – to act as “glue or middleware” to connect data and context between applications while the root cause remains unaddressed. Viewing initiatives through users’ longitudinal journeys is key to understanding how people experience work. The work graph helps shift the mindset and puts interaction between people and software at the heart of the transformations.

Streamlines processes from the ‘eyes of the users’: The biggest challenge with automation today is not “how to automate” but “what to automate.” Analysts estimate that about 50% of RPA licenses in enterprises are unutilized. Hence, enterprises need a deep understanding of the interaction dataset that is captured by the work graph. Enterprises can’t build a credible automation pipeline without insights from the users' perspective.

Reinforces privacy protection: Rudimentary technology, such as computer-vision-based capture of user activity, has significant privacy issues. A recent Deloitte survey on intelligent automation cautions against traditional process intelligence tools that surface individual’s personal information. A fundamental and non-negotiable property is to preserve the privacy of individuals while revealing patterns of how teams work. PII is redacted at source; insights are anonymized across a team, never at an individual level.

The ZEN

The work graph is fundamentally a new category of enterprise software that can create powerful insights from interaction datasets and change how people experience work within enterprises – just like Google Maps.