HFS Highlight: The OneOffice Emerging Tech Stack enables enterprise-wide decision-making when certainty is in short supply

Today’s C-suite are tackling a tsunami of uncertainty that established, deterministic rules-based business processes are ill-equipped to make sense of, let alone make value from.

HFS Research’s OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform (Exhibit One) advocates what enterprises need to thrive in today’s complex business environment: The use of data and cognitive technologies to shift from today’s rules-based automation to tomorrow’s nimbler operations – informed by, learning from and adapting to data to make better, real-time decisions. The result will be increasingly better work delivered through cycles of Listen-Learn-Respond.

Tools to thrive in increased complexity*

When the way enterprise operations worked was merely ‘complicated’*, any quick study could establish how A caused B with a high degree of deterministic certainty. Unravelling the process paths may not have been easy – but the routes were certainly knowable. Its rules-based nature demands you know the outcome before you can automate to deliver it.

The age of digital, globalization and the web introduced new orders of complexity; Where once we managed supply chains, we now found ourselves nodes in networks with little line of sight beyond our immediate neighbors. Where we previously found our customers awaiting the broadcast of our TV message on their couch, now we had to go find them in complex webs of communication from Fortnite to Facebook.

So often, mapping the link between A and B became unknowable. Discerning the causal links between them, even more so.

To add to this maelstrom of unknown-unknowns, we are also living through the transformative power of a behavior-changing pandemic. As explored in the HFS Highlight Emerging Tech is the nervous system to make transformation real:

“Every enterprise leader has seen for themselves how each new system shock shifts the context in which customers experience their lives. The more those contexts change, the more the needs the enterprise must serve change, too. The thicker and faster they come, the greater the urgency to transform – to operationalize toward keeping pace with customer needs and enhancing their experience.”

There is no established best practice to handle all of this. To work out what to do next takes much more than experience. We must have the humility to embrace that we do not know and must therefore Listen-Learn-Respond our way to emergent practices (and processes) to give us the power to decide. This is the world of NATIVE automation and processes which continuously learn from interactions and feedback.

Not only is the tech emergent – the processes that deliver value must be, too

Exhibit One: The HFS OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform

The HFS OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform (Exhibit 1) is a tangible and actionable response to that challenge. It enables the enterprise to:

Listen: Data for Decisions is your strategy.

To deliver on your strategic promises, what do you need to learn about? Who, where and when? What data sources could you probe to start gathering?

Learn: Intelligent processes designed in the cloud deliver the insight

Designing processes to deliver that data in the cloud must be your native discipline; Crucially these processes must be responsive to new data, infused with the intelligence to learn their way to better – a better that is constantly emerging.

Respond: Emerging Tech empowers business decisions at the speed of need

Emerging Tech:  Finally, the label matches its function. The platform is one which enables constantly emerging practice in real-time response to the always-emerging needs it is ‘listening’ for. It augments and learns from human expertise to enhance decision-making – predicting future needs and therefore future states it can choose to embrace.

In orchestration, the business becomes ever-more capable of making value-creating decisions at the speed of need to benefit and anticipate improved customer and employee experience.

The Bottom Line: We all want to be able to predict the future. But if we continue to automate our business processes based on rules rather than data and cognitive insights, then we remain stuck in a faster and cheaper version of a world that no longer exists.

*Complex and Complicated environments and Best and Emergent Practices are used here in the sense established by Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework. Cynefin uses the terms probe-sense-respond in reference to the discoverability of emergent practices in complex environments.