2023 - the year in Thought Leadership

the year in Thought Leadership

Skip to main content

(Partner logos)

Over 140 articles were published by our partners sharing practical advice, project authority and experience during 2023. Unlike last year, there wasn't a stand-out theme when reviewing the wealth of content. Rather, this year was notable for its breadth of industry expertise, insights from what business leaders are seeing on the ground with customers, and the latest developments in factors such as AI, sustainability and automation.

In other words, there's something for everyone. Here's a selection of examples from our partners. 

Acumatica - User-driven AI automation - a path to efficiency and job satisfaction 

Hiring and holding onto skilled employees is an ongoing challenge, especially for small businesses aiming for growth. AI automation has helped to take the strain through data entry, warehouse shipping, and intelligent advice. Doug Johnson shares the example of Phoenix Renovation and Restoration who realized substantial efficiencies and empowered business process experts to achieve automation with just a few clicks. COO Eric Hugunin recalls what it was like before the transition: 

I can’t emphasize enough how heavy the use of Excel was across the business to keep it all together. We relied on scanned or hard copy reports that, by the time they were generated, were already outdated. If management wanted to follow up with questions or see what red flags came up on a project, the data was already too old to make any impact. Project managers were dealing with financial aspects on their own, and we had trouble figuring out where we were off.

ASUG - What are the biggest challenges to large scale ERP upgrades? Learning from SAP S/4HANA projects

Community knowledge is power – especially when preparing for a large ERP upgrade. With 33% of SAP customers having made the transition to S/4HANA and a further 10% on their way, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration:

SAP S/4HANA presents an opportunity to take a business forward. A successful migration, however, is contingent on a deep understanding of the benefits SAP S/4HANA offers, the associated risks and costs, and the support and planning required, ASUG research reveals.

Turner breaks down the findings from technology executives – the lessons learned, and challenges overcome during the migration journey. From making the business case to expenses and training, it’s a worthwhile read. 

Celonis - What’s next in process mining - evolution and innovation

Anyone who has done a process mapping masterclass will be familiar with the whiteboards, post-it notes and running through scenarios with users and employees to find ways to create efficiencies. Wil van der Aalst points to examples from the aviation industry that are using modernized process discovery to continuously improve processes and keep customers happy.

Process mining modernizes process discovery by creating models using event information extracted from business information systems (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.). The data is stored in event logs and analyzed to create objective, data-driven models that show how processes actually work, not how people think they work. With process mining, we no longer have to waste time and money creating BPMN (business process management and notation) models that say little about the actual processes.

Certinia - Knowledge is power - the need for certainty in today’s service businesses

Scott Brown reflects on the state of project managements over time. How it started - custom systems and spreadsheets;  to how it’s going - siloed applications (more spreadsheets) and the job of integration sat firmly on the shoulders of IT.  Disparate systems make for a stressful implementation, and unsatisfied customers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) plaforms providing a single sense of certainty can help bring all of that knowledge together:

With a powerful SaaB platform, instead of having multiple disparate API-centric ERP systems — with a dozen or more customer masters and inventory masters — a service business gains a single end-to-end process that works together. The system is the integrator, so IT doesn’t have to be. Everything is connected in real time, so from the time a customer interaction is initiated, a project can be quoted all the way through to the delivery process.

Confluent –  Tapping into new technology - how data streaming is transforming the payments industry 

Digital payments are prolific, as customers seek instant, seamless transactions. From buing a cup of coffee, making online payments while gaming, to a thumb-print verification, a lot of data is being moved around at high speed. With such a vast increase comes higher risk, and the need for regulatory compliance. Peter Pugh-Jones shares the example of Moniepoint’s use of data streaming technology to process payments quickly, bringing valuable time efficiencies:

They can focus on developing the product. We don’t need to think about databases anymore. Instead, we can get creative on how to use the things we have, rather than fixing things when we scale up. Confluent is a solution that works and is flexible. And we can scale up or down according to our needs, and that's very important.

IFS - Closing the gap - encouraging women in STEM, from early years to the workplace

Marne Martin reflects on her education and career path in the technology industry when discussing the importance of encouraging women and girls into STEM. She points to a range of research studies that suggest that although progress to close the gender gap is being made in the industry, there’s still a way to go:

Across the globe, major tech companies have publicly pledged to enhance gender parity by boosting the number of women in leadership and technical roles. Yet despite this increased focus on gender equality, many organizations lack a supportive culture that enables their current female staff to advance into higher positions of authority, and you see this primarily in the levels of VP and above, including on both public and private Board and Private Equity sponsor operating partners.

There are practical takeaways and advice to be found in this piece – including the steps that IFS has taken to make a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Culture change takes time – but there are some useful ideas of where to begin. 

Oracle - Cloud customers want security and control that goes beyond the hyperscale model

Choices, choices – cloud customers of all sizes are bound by various security and regulatory requirements. They all want the same thing: to run services without delays, regardless of the configurations needed. That’s easier said than done as Mahesh Thiagarajan observes: 

For example, a large French bank may want to utilize full cloud services in its own data center and ensure that it is managed and maintained by French citizens employed by the bank, not the cloud provider. Or a South American government agency needs a super-secure cloud that is air-gapped (ie, isolated) from the rest of the world but that still runs the same cloud services that are available in the public cloud.

What is the solution, when needs continue to grow and change? The days of ‘one size fits all' are gone – what businesses need now is choice. 

Pure Storage - Creating an all-flash data center - the final nail in the coffin for legacy hard disk

Patrick Smith highlighted the importance of sustainability when considering the benefits of moving from hard disk storage to an all-flash data center. Although positives range from performance to cost, sustainability has been an important topic for partners this year – here are just some of the reasons shared:

• Unstructured data is complex and power-hungry, and disk is inefficient and space-hungry. Put them together and you have mounting issues for data centers, bottom lines, and the environment.
• Power utilization may not have been a key driver behind moving data sets before, but with rising unpredictability of energy availability, plus an increased focus in reducing emissions, this becomes an investment in the future we can’t afford not to make.
• As a result of rising energy costs, energy consumption by information technology has become not just a concern from an environmental standpoint but now also a significant economic one.

There’s also a helpful breakdown of the strategic elements that organizations need to consider on the path to an all-flash data center. This piece is packed full of advice.

Sage Intacct - Are we ready for the profound impact of generative AI on accounting and finance? Here's what lies ahead

Generative AI has been the topic on everyone’s lips this year. It will undoubtedly have a disruptive impact on accounting and finance, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will replace people. It does mean new tools and ways of working, however. Aaron Harris breaks down the top use cases from LLMs and automations. The findings (and an excellent dad joke) are detailed and practical examples of lessons learned - and what we need to do next.

Give an LLM access to balance sheet data for the last 24 months and ask it to identify the most significant trends. Give it access to detailed ledger data and ask it to forecast future cash flow. More generally, AI will make every knowledge worker more productive. A few paragraphs ago, I was really struggling to write a concise, understandable definition for generative AI and LLMs, so I asked ChatGPT for help. Its suggestion wasn’t perfect, but it gave me something to work with and unblocked the writing process.

Salesforce - Don’t put off buying a ladder

Peter Coffee gets combative with cliches – starting with phrases such as “tech spend” and “everybody’s in the hole”. Speaking of holes, the third cliché is “When you’re in a hole, step one is to stop digging”. At times of recession when decisions must be made, plain speaking is needed. Look no further for what that means in real-world terms:

It means investing in the customer connection capabilities that make your company the easiest to discover, and the simplest to engage as a provider. It means investing in the machine intelligence capabilities that let an employee with two months’ experience deliver levels of next-best-action execution, and customer-serving insight, that used to require two years’ experience to achieve. It means creating new customers, and strengthening the loyalty of current customers – the only two sure pathways to sustainable profitability. 

Samsara - Understanding value is the first step to monetizing vehicle data

Matt O’Brien shone a light on the potential that can be realized from connected digital systems and the data produced in the transport and logistics industry. Telematics have been used for years in dashcams and engine monitoring - but the bigger data picture can make a sizeable difference to savings, safety and sustainability. Two examples below: 

US-based Summit Materials, for example, saves around $1 million a year by using connected telematics to monitor fuel usage and reduce engine idling across its fleet.

Artera — another US firm which provides integrated infrastructure services to the natural gas and electric industries — used data to identify equipment that was simply not paying its way. As a result, it sold $10 million of underutilized equipment, freeing up cash flow to invest in areas that matter.

ServiceMax - Understanding the digital thread and the importance of service in extending the life of an asset

Coen Jeukens Draws on 25 years of experience in the field service industry to discuss the importance of breaking down silos between the different business functions of a service organization. This article gives a birds eye view into the obstacles in joining data between customers, technicians and operators - where product servicing can fall short and what it's like to close the loop between product data and physical assets:

By applying the digital thread, we can picture an alternative future that links engineering to service. Engineering designs a product with an intended use case in mind. Maintenance engineering translates the product design and use case into a recommended preventive maintenance scheme, spare parts kit and component MTBF. Wouldn’t it be great if all that knowledge flows into the after-sales and service delivery function? On the same platform?

ServiceNow - How low-code technology empowered ServiceNow’s finance team

Some of the most useful partner articles come from reflections on the challenges faced in their own organization - and an open discussion of how obstacles were overcome. Tasneem Baldiwala shares an honest and transparent account of the high number of admin-intensive tasks and manual working processes that were impacting the employee experience and visibility: 

Though building applications using low-code requires a certain level of training, inbuilt functionality means almost anyone can quickly harness the technology necessary to create automated solutions that suit themselves and their team. Our motivation was simple — nobody knows our team’s pain points better than they do, so why wouldn’t they be the ones to build solutions?

Find out how the change to low code technology was managed, and the impact it had. 

Tercera - A platform but not as we know it - the marketplace in a software ecosystem

The value of software ecosystems comes into play, as Cameron Lackpour of Black Diamond Advisory shares the key elements that make an effective ecosystem work well and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Bringing together community advocates made up of customers, evangelists, and partners within an open marketplace, there are ideal opportunities to harness exchanges that can provide specialization, working knowledge, and an atmosphere of trust.

An evangelist who publicly says, “That’s wrong, it shouldn’t do X, it must do Y.”, or “Have you thought of this, it’s what your competitors do but you’ll do better because we’re better.”, or “Look at what I can do with this tool. No other product can.”, sends the message to customers, partners, and competitors that the vendor can receive constructive criticism and praise and thus improve the product. Confidence builds trust, trust engenders enthusiasm, enthusiasm recruits new customers.

Workday - Organizational agility requires modern planning tools and a growth mindset

Joining up data for enterprise planning is a huge pressure point for businesses running scenarios amid economic volatility. Barbara Larson shares two examples of companies who have connected operational and financial data in new ways, using machine learning to help inform decision making. One instance comes from Matt Castonguay, SVP Finance at Team Car Care who needed a better way to input and manage sales data for real-time decision making:

The old system was more like a database. It wasn't predictive, it wasn't really a place where you could build forecasts out, have driver-based forecasts based on machine learning models, or be able to collaborate and have continuous forecasting with the field like we have with Workday Adaptive Planning.

Zendesk - Five customer experience trends from NRF 2023 that retailers need to know

From the Metaverse to physical retail, there have been some big changes since the pandemic. Prelini Udayan-Chiechi breaks down the highlights from the National Retail Federation's Big Show. The expansion of AI was a given, but other customer trends such as hyper-personalisation, game mechanics and sustainability were high on the priority list. Data and analytics also featured in making predictions on customer behaviour - in the words of CTO Adrian McDermott:

Consumers just want low friction experiences when they want to have a conversation.

Zoho - Update on the skills gap - technology is fueling a reskilling renaissance

The need for learning is constant, and many businesses find it is more expensive to employ a new member of staff than upskill an existing one. Raju Vegesna shares a use case from Liberty Security Systems who found the key to sustainable upskilling rather than dependency on a sole person with experience in data analytics. Best of all, it meant that employees didn't need handholding throughout the process and were able to produce better data:

The output, pulled and interpreted from the data of daily business was streamlined, sorted, and delivered to the right spots within the CRM, ensuring accessibility. Though the platform was being viewed by employees of all backgrounds, many of whom had zero experience in data analytics, the company discovered that employees welcomed the challenge of upskilling themselves. No facet of the results was watered down or simplified, meaning all employees were able to converse in the shared vernacular of data scientists. This also ensured that when employees changed departments or evolved into new positions, they maintained access to the same level of analytics.

That's our partner wisdom from A to Z. We're excited to see what next year has in store.