Detecting and Eradicating Slavery and Other Labor Risks Across Global Supply Chains through Business Networks

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Ariba and Made in A Free World have joined forces to provide companies deep labor abuse insight into their worldwide supply chains.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Podcast series, coming to you from the 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

Gardner

We're here in the week of April 6 to explore the future of business commerce. We'll learn how innovative companies are tapping into business networks to harness the power of communities to discover, connect and collaborate with peers and partners across the street -- or around the world.

Not only are these leaders better managing their spend in buyer/seller interactions, they're also gleaning insights and intelligence to learn from the past, capitalize on the present, and chart an effective course for the future, all in real-time from a single platform.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next business networks best practices panel discussion focuses on the issue of unsavory and illegal labor practices that may be hidden deep inside supply chains and what companies and consumers can do about it.

We’ll hear from Made in a Free World, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. It's partnering with Ariba, an SAP company, and regulators to shine more light across the supply chain to not only stem these labor practices, but also reduce the risks that companies may unwittingly incur from within their own ecosystems.

To explain practical and effective approaches to forced-labor risk determination and mitigation, we're joined by our guests, Tim Minahan, Senior Vice President of Ariba, an SAP Company. Welcome back, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Thanks, Dana, it's great to be here.

Gardner: And we're also here with Justin Dillon, CEO and Founder at Made In A Free World in San Francisco. Welcome, Justin.

Justin Dillon: Thanks for having me, Dana.

Gardner: Our pleasure. Justin, tell me how Made In A Free World came about?

Non-profit organization

Dillon: Made In A Free World is a nonprofit organization that was started few years ago. I learned about the issue years ago, almost about 10 years ago now, just reading an article in The New York Times, and really wanted to figure out a way to get more people involved, not only in knowing about it, but in finding very practical ways to do that.

Dillon

So that started with consumers, just everyday individuals getting involved and being able to leverage their own network, their personal networks. That's now graduated into figuring out how to get businesses to leverage their own networks.

Gardner: What is the problem we are talking about? Is this slavery? Is this breaking the law in terms of labor regulations? Tell me a bit about the panoply of issues that you embrace.

Dillon: Just for definition’s sake, we define slavery as anyone who is being forced to work without pay under threat of violence, being economically exploited and unable to walk away. There are over 30 million people who fall under that definition today. In some cases, these people find themselves in the sex industry, but in most cases, they're in informal sectors, agricultural or service industries, much of which is finding its way into supply chains.

Part of what we believe is that we have to find a way to be able to connect the dots and figure out how we can use the systems that currently exist to protect the world's most vulnerable resource.

Gardner: Justin, you've been working on this for 10 years, but Tim, why is this becoming such an important issue now for businesses?

Minahan: Over the past decade, as companies begin to outsource more processes and manufacturing and assembly to low-cost regions, they've really looked to drive the cost down. Unfortunately, what they haven't done is really take a look at their sub-tier supply chain.

Minahan

So they might have outsourced a process, but they didn't outsource accountability for the fact that there may be forced labor in their suppliers' suppliers. That's a real issue, getting that transparency into that problem, understanding whether there's a potential risk for the threat of forced labor in a sub-tier supply chain.

Gardner: How big of a problem is this in terms of scope, depth and prevalence? Is this something that happens from time to time in rare instances or is this perhaps something that's quite a bit more common than most people think?

Minahan: Dana, this is far more pervasive than most people think. Slavery really has no boundaries. There are incidences of forced labor in all industries, from conflict minerals in the Congo to fishing in Malaysia to, unfortunately, migrant workers right here in the United States.

Gardner: Justin, any additional depth that you can add to how this manifests itself and how common it really is?

Palm oil problem

Dillon: It's really not a problem that “exists over there." Just one statistic alone: by 2020, half of all the products you can purchase in a grocery store will have a commodity, palm oil, which has a huge incidence of forced labor, particularly around the Malaysia region and Indonesia.

This small commodity, mostly because it's so easy to pick and harvest, is now finding its way into a myriad of products -- and that's just in agriculture.

Gardner: Why should companies be concerned? Isn’t that someone else's issue, if it’s below the level of their reach?

Minahan: You can certainly outsource process or manufacturing, but you can’t really outsource accountability. Secondly, there is a big movement afoot from regulators, both here in the United States, Federal laws, California state laws, as well as overseas in the UK to hold companies accountable, not just for their first-tier supply chain, but for their sub-tier supply chain.

Gardner: And, Justin, of course visibility being so prominent now -- a camera around every corner, social media -- people can easily react and irreparable damage to a company's reputation. Do you have any examples of where this has come to bear, where not knowing what's going on within your supply chain can be such an issue economically and otherwise?

You can certainly outsource process or manufacturing, but you can’t really outsource accountability.

Dillon: Well, people love to hate the ones they love. So everyone is complaining about Apple products, while they're using their Apple iPhone. But in a recent article in The New York Times, one of the supply-chain folks for Apple said that the days of sloppy globalization is over and they're taking this quite seriously. I would argue that some Apple's work is some of the most innovative human rights work that we've seen.

They've dug deeper down into the sub-tier suppliers and, if their reputation as innovators has anything to do with their products, it certainly has to do with their supply chain as well. They are a great example of a company who sees these challenges, sees the connection to not only their brand, but also to their products and they're taking some remediation work against it.

Gardner: Okay, we understand the depth of the issue and why it’s important. Now, now how do we do get the tools to combat this effectively? What have you done? I understand you have a database, and it’s ongoing. Tell me a little bit about the tools that you’re bringing to bear to solve this problem and to help companies take better accountability.

Dillon: The most important thing to do first is to realize where we are in history. We aren't operating in the 1990s anymore, in the sweatshop era. That was an era that where we found problems in supply chains and we started to build solutions around that, auditing, monitoring, all the rest of that. That was 25 years ago.

Era of big data

We're now in the 21st Century, in the era of big data, and we need to be able to use those tools to be able to combat 21st Century problems. For us as an organization, we've realized this was a space where we could be helpful to business. Our mission is to use the free market to free people. That’s what we do as an organization.

We've realized that there is a lot of data missing, and there is a lot of synthesis of data missing. So we, as an organization, decided to pull together the bible of databases, when it comes to supply chains, the UNSPSC. Then, we built off of that taxonomy a risk analysis on every single thing good, service, or commodity that can be bought or sold. That becomes the lingua franca, so to speak, when it comes to supply chain, risk management.

That database and analysis are now available to anyone, any size, any sector, to leverage their influence to the extent that they can. We've recognized that you can't be everywhere at all times but you’re somewhere at some times and that's the place we feel like any company can make the greatest influence.

Gardner: Now, Tim, the labor issues that we’re talking about are certainly a risk issue, but at the same time, we’re looking to find more ways to automate and make visible other types of risk, any kind of risk, in the supply chain in procurement, buy-and-sell environment.

That database and analysis are now available to anyone, any size, any sector, to leverage their influence to the extent that they can.

Tell us a little bit about how this particular risk fits into a larger risk category, and then how the databases for each of them, or many of them, come together for a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Minahan: As Justin said, the information here is shining a light on a particular issue, being able to mass, for the very first time, data points from hundreds of different data sources around the world to predict and project the threat of forced labor.

Extending that further, that's one risk indicator that companies need to manage. Companies are managing a whole host of sustainability issues around social and eco-responsibility, but also financial risk, and threat of disruption risk.

Being able to pull all those together into a common risk factor is what we're attempting to do through the power of business networks. By connecting the world’s businesses and connecting their supply chains and automating their processes, that was phase one.

Phase two is harnessing all the information from all of those interactions to provide a better level of visibility that raises that transparency for everyone. Then, you can predict future risk. Being able to tap into what Made In A Free World has done in this particular area, pull that into the network, and expose that as another risk factor that companies can evaluate is a very powerful opportunity for us together.

Gardner: As we've seen in other aspects of the networked economy, the better the data, the more influence, the more action as a result of that data, that encourages more people to see value and add more data back into the pool and so on and so forth. Tell us a little bit about the news here at Ariba LIVE and how that works into this notion of a virtuous adoption cycle.

New partnership

Minahan: Ariba and Made In A Free World are announcing a new partnership to bring the power of the Made In A Free World database together for predictive analytics of forced labor with the power of the Ariba toolset and the Ariba Network to help the Global 2000 and beyond be able to have the transparency they need to identify potential risk, in this case, of forced labor and their supply chain, and be able to take action and rectify it.

Gardner: Justin, how do you see this announcement benefiting your cause?

Dillon: Well, it moves us past the point of saying there is nothing that you can do as a company. That is no longer an option on the table. What you're going to do is the next question. We have removed the word "if" in this conversation -- and we couldn’t have done that without Ariba.

Gardner: Is the awareness that you are creating from such announcements also impacting what happens in the public sector and in the regulation field?

Dillon: It truly is a virtuous tsunami of activity that’s happening in government. We've been doing this for a while, and we've realized that it requires the public, the non-governmental organization, and the media. We all create this ecology of movement around this, but we're seeing this happen in the federal government as well, particularly for our country’s supply chain, the biggest buyer in the world.

That’s exactly what Ariba and Made In A Free World are trying to do --  provide the tools necessary for companies to get started.

There are now standards that are not suggestions. And being able to step up to those standards and exceed in those standards is going to become the new normal. We're a part of that database as well, if you will, that network. And we can see how the Ariba Network is going to be helpful in that, because companies are coming to us and coming at the federal government saying, "What are we supposed to do? How do we move forward? This seems like a huge problem." They're right, and the solution is right in front of them.

Gardner: Tim, for organizations that are now more aware of this problem, and of the general risk issue across supply chains, how do they start? Where do they go to begin the process for getting better control that allows them to have better accountability?

Minahan: That’s exactly what Ariba and Made In A Free World are trying to do --  provide the tools necessary for companies to get started. We mentioned together the technical solution that we 're bringing to bear to allow folks within the Ariba community to be able to access the Made In A Free World input and be able to project potential issues of forced labor in their supply chain.

We've been working together as organizations for a number of years now and we've been working collectively with the Ariba customer community to help understand this issue, to help dig into this issue, and begin to share best practices on how to get started. Together, through that effort, we've developed a playbook that provides suggested guidelines for folks to get started.

In addition, there is a whole ecosystem of companies that are really looking at this issue hard. The thing that’s most exciting about it is that everyone is very transparent and they're willing to share. So you have companies from Patagonia to Apple and the like that are sharing their practices freely, because this is an issue that we want to address. The business world has the opportunity to address probably the most serious issue facing us today, and that is modern slavery.

Learning more

Gardner: Justin, any suggestions for resources that companies and individuals can go to, to learn more about this to take a start themselves?

Minahan: Well, you can’t fix what you don’t know about. You can’t improve without having some understanding of where you fit in the mix. We believe that data and doing an analysis on the freedom platform is the best way for a company to get started.

We think it’s the best synthesis of practices, data, influence, and the network effect that anyone can begin to take. We suggest that they start to look at their own risk based on what they are buying and based on their own exposure. Every company that comes to us, we're able to do this risk analysis with them, and they're are getting new insights.

What’s great about being at this point in the story is that we're already getting from our partner companies ideas about how to improve and what to do better. We have every expectation that our partnership with Ariba is going to improve this tool, not just for us, but for the planet.

We have every expectation that our partnership with Ariba is going to improve this tool, not just for us, but for the planet.

Gardner: Just quickly, Justin, how does it work? When a company comes in and gives you information about who their suppliers are, how do you come up with inference, insight and some sort of a predictive capability that identifies the risk or the probability that they could be in trouble?

Dillon: We are using all the best databases that currently exist on the issue. Everything from forced-labor databases to child-labor databases to rule-of-law, governance, migration, trade flows. All of that is synthesized into an algorithm that can be applied to any individual’s spend data. You're able to get a dashboard on all that spend, which gives you some optics into your sub-tier suppliers, which is where we need the optics. It’s not a crystal ball, but it’s the next best thing.

Gardner: It strikes me that this is a game of numbers. If enough companies examine their supply chain sufficiently and then eradicate the areas where there is trouble, the almighty Dollar, Peso, or what currency it may be, comes to bear, and things like corruption don’t work and bad labor practices don’t get supported. Is this a rolling-thunder sort of thing. If so, what’s the timeframe? Is this something that can be solved in a fairly short amount of time if people actually come together and work on it?

Dillon: To me, it’s the greatest story ever told. This is the thing that we all appreciate, and frankly we all benefit from it. We're all benefiting from a free market and the way that we look at change in our organization is that we say that change is more about judo than karate. How can we use the force against itself to actually change it, and the marketplace is the way to do that.

So yes, this can move quite quickly. In my opinion, it's much quicker than governments can move. We think that they're going to be followers in this case and we highly expect them to be followers.

Gardner: Tim, if companies do this right, if they leverage data, if they examine risk properly, what do they get, other than of course the direct reduction of that particular risk? It strikes me that we are not just tackling risk, but we're putting into place systematic ability to manage risk over time, which is way more powerful. Is that what we're going to get?

Looking at risk

Minahan: Absolutely. Companies are looking at risk holistically, and this is one key vital input into that. As they continue to address that and, as Justin said, we're using free markets as a powerful lever to free people. They can, through their buying patterns and their buying policies, begin to adjust the market, shine a light not just on their own supply chain but change the sub-tier supply chain practices to make sure that there is fair labor. It becomes unappealing to have forced labor and it becomes a detriment to their ability to win new business by doing that.

That's really what the power of data and the power of business networks can deliver in this scenario.

Gardner: Last word to you, Justin. What’s missing here? What did we not talk about that a company should be aware of in order to get a better handle on this to benefit themselves, the ecosystem,, and ultimately workers in a far-off land perhaps.

Dillon: Businesses are the heroes in the story. It's not the non-profit, and it’s not government. Anytime you associate business with human rights, businesses are often qualified as Darth Vader who actually think that they are Luke Skywalker in the story. And for us an Ariba, I don’t need to put that on them, but we are just Yoda.

We're giving them the tools that they need to fight the evil empire and we are going to do it together and celebrate it together.

We're giving them the tools that they need to fight the evil empire and we are going to do it together and celebrate it together. But this is one thing that we'll have to do in concert. We all have individual roles to play, and business has a very clear, distinct role to play.

Gardner: Very good, I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been exploring the issue unsavory and illegal labor practices that may be hidden deep inside supply chains and what companies and consumers can do about it.

So a big thanks to our guests, Tim Minahan, the Senior Vice President of Ariba, an SAP Company. Thank you, Tim.

Minahan: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And we've also been joined by Justin Dillon, CEO and Founder at Made In A Free World in San Francisco. Thanks, Justin.

Dillon: Thanks so much.

Gardner: And thank you to our audience for joining this special Podcast coming to you from the 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Ariba and Made in A Free World have joined forces to provide companies deep labor abuse insight into their worldwide supply chains. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Networks: The New Model for Business

Transcript of a discussion on how business networks are fast emerging as trusted, efficient hubs for cloud-based and data-driven commerce.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Our discussion today explores the role and impact of business networks, the often virtual assemblages of interrelated business services, processes, and data that are transforming how companies and consumers conduct commerce.

Gardner

These business networks are unlocking the ability for companies to extend processes and insights broadly and affordably to customers, suppliers, and other partners. Therefore, they're better able to engage with the participants across these networks in new and innovative ways.

We'll look at the historical record for how open markets and communities are rapidly changing business platforms. We'll see how today's consumer business models -- exemplified by Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb -- are extending to business-to-business (B2B) commerce, allowing buyers and sellers to find and know each other openly and accelerate B2B transactions and commerce efficiencies.

To learn more about the trends that are making business networks more powerful and more important than ever, please join me now in welcoming our guests.

We're here with Marshall Van Alstyne, Professor at Boston University School of Management and Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Marshall.

Marshall Van Alstyne: It’s a pleasure to be here, thanks for having us on-board.

Gardner: We're also here with Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer SAP Cloud and Line of Business. Welcome back, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Thanks, Dana, it’s great to be here.

Gardner: Professor Van Alstyne, we've seen a great deal of network effects in business over the past decades. Yet nowadays, the confluence of cloud, mobile, and social and an emphasis on data-driven business processes seems to be accelerating and empowering these shifts. Some organizations call this the Third Platform. How does your research define business platforms, and how are the impacts from these Third Platform technology advancements newly impacting businesses?

Van Alstyne: I emphasize the network effect as one of the driving forces. Indeed, if we can create a positive feedback loop throughout the network effects, that’s where you see the efficiency in the scale happening so quickly.

Van Alstyne

In terms of a definition, we focus on two elements of the platform. The first is an open architecture that third parties can build upon.

The second is the governance rules. How is it that people can participate? Why would they participate? How do you share the profits? How do you resolve conflict? You think about it as a nexus of rules and architecture. If you can put those two things together, you can probably grow an ecosystem that helps to foster and stimulate some of those network effects.

Gardner: Tim Minahan, SAP has been a pioneer inside the four walls of the enterprise over the years with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business applications. Now, it seems as if you're recognizing what Professor Van Alstyne has been describing with these network effects and extending your value and business insight and processes across multiple boundaries, outside the four walls of any given enterprise into entire ecosystems.

Next productivity wave

Minahan: Absolutely, Dana. At SAP, we truly believe that the next wave of business productivity is not going to come just within enterprises, but between them. Forty years ago, when SAP arguably invented the whole concept of ERP, businesses were operating much, much differently.

Minahan

We showed them a new way to automate their internal information and process flows, but they were organized in a much more vertically oriented fashion. The employees would graduate from college, spend 40 years with the company, get the gold watch, and retire.

Companies owned most of their infrastructure, their manufacturing facilities, their inventory, their shipping fleets, but certainly this is not your father's business environment anymore. In part, this was accelerated by the recession that we're still emerging from. Companies are less vertically integrated than they were in the past.

They've adopted more variable operating models. They've outsourced everything from manufacturing to customer service, and they need to reach and compete with companies across the street and on the other side of the world. And this is creating new opportunities, as well as new challenges, for businesses today, and it’s increasing demands and expectations on individual functions of their teams.

You're seeing it everywhere. If you have an iPhone, look on the back. It’s designed in California by Apple, but it's built, shipped, and serviced by someone else entirely. Even beyond the physical device, Apple makes most of its revenue from network-based services. iTunes relies heavily on an ecosystem of mobile carriers and artists and studios.

Now, we're seeing this move into the business world, in which companies need to rapidly organize this virtual enterprise, all these resources of employees, manufacturing capacity, logistics, delivery capacity, and customer service to take advantage of certain market opportunity. Or, they need to adapt very quickly to certain market changes, and the only real way to do that is through a digitally connected network of partners, customers, and supply chain.

Gardner: Professor Van Alstyne, this is a tricky time for companies. It seems that they want to retain what works, the business models that have been tried and proven for them. They like having big margins, of course, but in order to grow and to be part of the future they need to expose themselves to these networks, take some risks, maybe lose margin in the process, but perhaps get scale and automation as a payback.

How do you view that? How do you see companies adjusting? Is this a cultural thing where some companies will take this plunge and others don't? It does seem to be a perilous time for companies. I hope they're not just freezing in the headlights.

Van Alstyne: It’s a great question. There are a couple of elements and they vary based on the where the company is currently. If it’s a relatively virgin market, then it’s fairly straightforward for them to invite others in, create the platform, and expand out in that direction. If it’s an existing market for them, they really have to worry about managing the cannibalization question.

I know SAP has also had a very interesting example of that, as you move from on-premise services to hosted services. They're doing a nice job of managing that migration. It’s a little bit tricky in terms of how much you expand the market, but you really need to. You have to realize that the scale, the innovation, the customer engagement happens on these business platforms. Long-term, one really doesn't have a choice.

Platforms vs. products

One of the arguments that we typically make is that even weak platforms tend to beat very strong products. You can look at any number of examples, whether you take a look at the Blackberry, the Sony Personal PlayStation gaming device, or the Garmin device for GPS.

All of these functions are effectively absorbed into the platform. If you manage a platform ecosystem, where third parties can add value on your behalf, you'll grow faster. The platforms almost always will be products. So, in the long-term, companies don't have a choice. They have to move in this direction.

Gardner: So if it’s inevitable that you have to change, it sounds to me from what I've seen at SAP, that they're recognizing this. They're dealing with it themselves as a company, but they're trying to put together a safe path for enterprises to expand into the networked economy. At the same time, they can have trusted partners for automating a lot of the behind-the-scenes activity and allowing them to still function within their business verticals to know what their intellectual property is and to extend to it.

Let’s go back to Tim. Am I reading that right, Tim, that SAP is trying to be, in a sense, the arbiter between risk and exploration when it comes to the networked economy?

Minahan: That’s an accurate depiction, Dana. Think about our personal lives. Whether we're engaging family and friends on Facebook, buying a book or a blender on Amazon, or trying to capture transportation services to get downtown during rush hour on Uber, we're experiencing the scale and simplicity and convenience of personal networks.

At SAP, we believe that solving this inter-enterprise collaboration challenge is one of the biggest opportunities of our era.

We run our daily lives on them now. Unfortunately the business world traditionally has been optimized within the four walls of the enterprise. Companies have invested billions over the past 20 to 30 years in re-engineering their processes and investing in systems to really automate those internal processes and information flows.

They have created what have become islands of efficiency that work very well, and continue to work well, for those that are highly vertically integrated, but very few are, as we talked about earlier.

At SAP, we believe that solving this inter-enterprise collaboration challenge is one of the biggest opportunities of our era. We feel that we're well positioned to do that and have been assembling some of these business networks. We've had the acquisition of Ariba and Fieldglass in the area of contingent workforce and, with Concur, now in the area of travel and expense.

We're complementing that with network extensions of our own, both through the addition of things like the product sustainability network, which leverages the existing connections within the network to help companies better perform tracing and trackability of their products, and the financial services network, which really facilitates and aids payment.

What we're looking at is an opportunity to extend existing IT infrastructure and business process outside the four walls of the enterprise in the most scalable and efficient way possible, no matter what systems a particular company or their trading partners use, all through a single integration point.

Integration adapters

Think about Amazon in your personal lives. You don’t worry about integrating tier trading partners or how you are going to sell that. Amazon takes care of that for you. That’s the same metaphor that we're attempting to carry through into the business world by providing single standard integration adapters or on-ramps to the network that allow you to manage this virtual enterprise in a highly transparent and highly efficient manner.

Gardner: Professor, you mentioned something about the very nature or definition of an enterprise changing. As we look to cloud computing and to these network effects, the ability to outsource so much of what a company does is based on the best value. If doing it internally makes more sense, you do it internally. If going external makes the most sense, you go external. We see this with computing. Hybrid cloud is pretty much about that.

We're also seeing a change in the workforce with contingency and part-time work. What is the new corporation about? It seems it’s mostly rules, relationships, collaboration and management. Let’s go to Tim first. As the very nature of corporations change, it's really about relationships, data, and feedback loops. The data-driven organization, is it really about that. Are we losing something, are we gaining something, or both, Tim, as we seek this new definition of a corporation.

Minahan: Yeah, I think as Professor Van Alstyne said, we're entering an age where the borders between enterprises are being taken down. Companies are moving toward a model where they're managing pools of resources, whether that’s pools of talent around expertise, as you just indicated Dana.

A third of a typical workforce is no longer on the company payroll. It's contingent, statement of work (SOW) workers. In some industries, it’s already more than half. This is fastest growing part of the workforce. HR executives, and I talk with many of them, are beginning to rethink what constitutes the workforce and are looking at pools of talent.

A third of a typical workforce is no longer on the company payroll. It's contingent, statement of work (SOW) workers.

They need to understand where the skill sets lie, not necessarily what roles someone plays today, what skills they have had in the past and be able to, when a particular opportunity or project arises, assemble that expertise very quickly to address that particular project, and disassemble them just as fast, but retain the knowledge within the enterprise for the next time that comes up.

The same thing is true if you're organizing a supply chain and need to be able to serve a new market like China. Where do you put your manufacturing? How do you address distribution, value-added taxes, and customer support. Traditionally, the model would have been to go and establish your own manufacturing facilities, build your own local agents, but no longer.

Now you can quickly assemble and address, or test, a particular market or test a particular product in any given market. Should it work, scale it up. Should it not, scale it down and move on. Networks allow you to achieve this.

I wanted to go back to something that Professor Van Alstyne said that's critically important. I fully agree that the networks go through phases. The first phase is to connect all the various parties, whether they be people, businesses, merchants, banks or all of the above.

The second part is to automate their existing processes. What gets really exciting, once you've automated these processes, once you have these parties collaborating or transacting its scale, are the new insights and entirely new services you could enable.

Transactional information

Once you have these millions of companies or people transacting at scale, you can see the transactional or relationship information. It could be the generated content that helps all members of the community make more informed decisions whether it's about buying or whether it’s about, should I bid on a particular bit of business as a seller or as a bank, mitigating risk in lending to allow them to understated who the buyer is, who the seller is and what their traditional history is.

That is the ultimate big data opportunity, when you have these networks operating at scale. We're beginning to deliver this networked intelligence in the form of insight services to help our members of the communities make important buying, selling, and financing decisions in ways that they couldn’t before.

Van Alstyne: Dana, let me jump in for a second. One of the things that Tim just said is quite important. One of the most interesting elements of the platform is the extent for new business services and new products to emerge. One of the Silicon Valley descriptions of the platform is that you know you have one when your community takes it in a direction you didn't expect.

One of the most interesting elements of the platform is the extent for new business services and new products to emerge.

You need to have made it possible for that. The underlying architecture needs the support the ability to develop something new that wasn't expected, but that’s one of the ways the platform adapts to create new value.

The communities start to add new value and new services in ways that the platform meets the needs of the ecosystem, so it’s this ability to turn out new sources of value based on the underlying architecture. This is one of the key distinctions of platforms that really do add value.

Minahan: I totally agree with that. We've only just entered it into this networked economy or networked era. One of the most exciting things is that it allows you to begin to entirely rethink traditional business models that were organized in an era where, to use an economic term, transaction costs were extremely high.

Look at Uber, what Uber has done, and the challenges we're now seeing around challenging the traditional medallion livery service. That was organized out of a very real concern around safety and issues, but over time, that model matured and unfortunately got very costly.

What you saw were the medallions being aggregated in the hands of a small few who could afford them. That obviously had some implications on the level of service and cost of service to employers. Now we've removed all of the transaction costs and could add up efficiently match demand -- i.e. you as the traveler -- and supply literally anyone that is a card-carrying member of the Uber service.

That’s an entirely new business model that is fundamentally challenging hundreds of old rules and thoughts about what it means to hail a cab. So let me toss in one additional principle that’s often used for design. I'm thinking exactly of the Uber example.

One of the best ways to view a platform is that you have the best platform and the transaction cost are the lowest. If you can get those lowest transactions, you're going to get more business taking place on that platform. So do whatever you can to see if you can lower those transaction costs to get the business going.

Looking for signs

Gardner: So we've taken a look at the inevitability of these networks. We've seen them already very prominent in the business to consumer (B2C) space, consumer activities, and commerce. We’ve recognized that openness is important. So we have innovation. We also recognized the importance of governance and management.

So how do we know when we've done this correctly? Is there a sign? Professor Alstyne, you've mentioned a few that describe powerful and successful networks. Do enterprises have to view themselves differently? Do they need to look at participants in their network as a metric rather than just margin and net in gross revenues and incomes? Is there a way to be successful?

Van Alstyne: Platform businesses behave differently than traditional businesses. Silicon Valley had been using lot of these metrics for engagement. How many new users do you get, and how engaged are they with the platform? It’s a wonderful place to start. Let me give you three rules that we like to use for platform design that actually help get the system running smoothly.

One of them is "frictionless entry." You would like to make it as easy as possible for people to get onboard your platform. It doesn’t matter if that user is on the developer side. You want folks to be able to enter the platform as easily as possible.

If you're bringing in apps in your ecosystem, your users are going to get a bad experience if they are low-quality apps.

The next one is that you need to manage "riskless quality." If anyone can participate, there's a danger that folks who actually get onto the platform don't necessarily add value or they may try to siphon off value. You may worry about lower quality. Atari fell apart as a platform when it got low-quality games on it. Uber has to worry about low-quality drivers. If you're bringing in apps in your ecosystem, your users are going to get a bad experience if they are low-quality apps. So you still need to have riskless quality.

The first principle is frictionless entry, and you need to manage riskless quality from the users on that side.

The third one is "permissionless innovation." You don't want your developers to necessarily have to come to you to get permission. There is always this danger because you own the platform. You have enormous power over them and you could simply take that idea and run with it. You need the ecosystem partners to be able to run with an idea and create something novel on their own and let them have that value. They don’t need to get permission first.

These are three rules that we use for design -- frictionless entry, riskless quality, and permissionless innovation. Those are really good guidelines and are helping to get these ecosystems to grow quickly, get more users onboard, and get your value add from third party participation.

Gardner: Tim Minahan at SAP Cloud, tell us a bit about what you're doing at SAP, some of your acquisitions, besides your cloud, this ability to be frictionless and help people come on the network easily. You recently finished up the Concur acquisition, one of your largest ever. Explain how you're growing the size of your network?

Application agnostic

Minahan: What Professor Van Alstyne just talked about are principles that we subscribe to. In a business network sense, it also requires you to be open and application agnostic and largely agnostic to the on-ramps. That’s part of the frictionless entry.

So regardless of what system you are using, whether it’s SAP, Ariba, Concur, Oracle, PeopleSoft Info, etc., you need to be able to attach the systems to the network, those demand systems that allow you to connect and collaborate through the network to extend that business process and engage with your customers, suppliers, and other partners.

Think about our personal lives, whether it’s Uber or Amazon, those networks that are most powerful and most impactful on our personal lives allow a seamless process. You don’t even think about the process, but it is end to end.

In the case of Amazon you don’t think about the buying process -- how am I going to connect to those individual merchants? They're already connected for you. Ultimately, you believe you're buying from Amazon, but you might be buying from an independent provider and they are still delivering to you.

Those networks that are most powerful and most impactful on our personal lives allow a seamless process.

Likewise, you don't think about, gee, now that I have placed the order, do I have to call my bank to settle out? No, that’s handled for you, SAP has been using these guiding principles to go out and make sure that we're building the network appropriately, both in our organic means through innovation and the introduction of new services, like payments, financing, and dynamic discounting, both independently with other members and financial institutions of the network, as well as inorganically through acquisitions.

Gardner: As we close out, we've determined that the number of participants and the value of the commerce is super important in these networks. Several times we've also touched on this feedback loop in the data. So as we look to the future, we might have  competing networks. If we assume that those networks are going to have some frictionless ability to move on and off of them, then the best network is where people will go.

Is the best network the one that provides the best insights in data? Can we close out our discussion by looking at the importance of shared data and analysis and the ability to counter that analysis up from these transactions as a differentiator going forward that will pick winners and losers in open commerce network environment, if you will.

Let’s go to Professor Van Alstyne first. Who is going to win in this network environment and is the data and openness and availability of analytics going to be a major determinant of that?

Van Alstyne: I am going to argue the best platform is the one that creates the most value over time and that probably means that the data analytics, those that can use the data to create these data-driven feedback loops, will be the winners.

One of the things that I want to emphasize is that frictionless entry and the ability of the movement of data doesn’t necessarily mean that switching costs are going to be low or that it’s going to be easy to necessarily change networks. Network effects do create winner-take-all markets, they do create these behemoths. Google Search has 67 percent market share in the US and 90 percent in Europe. Facebook has 1.3 billion users. I think Amazon web services has a huge proportion of the cloud services.

We need to be careful if we think we're going to be able to switch networks easily. There are going to be some very substantial winner-take-all networks and some concentration at the top. Cloud and data is going to be an integral part of that, as the data creates these data-driven feedback loops that support these network effects.

Data and analytics

Gardner: Tim, our last word to you on the role of data and analytics as the determinant of the most valuable network.

Minahan: I agree with the professor that the key litmus test of who wins is the platform or the network that creates the most value, and I think value comes in a few flavors.

Number one is relevancy. Are my trading partners there? At SAP, typically about half of any given company's trading partners are already connected in transacting. That makes the frictionless entry that much easier. Think about Facebook. Why would you join any other personal network when most of your friends and family are already there.

The second is the aspect of value. Can I manage most of my collaborations in a single environment or do I need to join multiple networks in order to complete a transactional process? The more capabilities you can layer in to make it more convenient for all members of the network to collaborate, the more value add.

The more capabilities you can layer in to make it more convenient for all members of the network to collaborate, the more value add.

And third, I believe that we've only scratched the surface on these insights. I wouldn’t even say that it’s a two-sided model. It’s a multi-sided model, where once you get these parties collaborating at scale, the transactional relationship and community-generated content can deliver new insights to help folks make more informed decisions, whether it's, which trading partners to do business with or which areas of your existing supply chain might be presented with risk in the future and you need to adapt quickly or which financial settlement options you have to settle out to help you optimize cash flow.

These are new insights that were previously impossible with traditional on-premise and point-to-point integration models and it can only be accomplished in a network model.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on business networks. You've heard how open markets and communities are rapidly changing business platforms, allowing sellers and buyers to find and know each other openly and therefore accelerating B2B transactions and commerce efficiencies.

And we have heard how companies can exploit business networks to automate and analyze how they transact commerce in new innovative ways.

So a big thank you to our guests, Marshall Van Alstyne, Professor at Boston University School of Management and Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Thank you so much, Marshall.

Van Alstyne: Dana, thanks so much for allowing us to participate.

Gardner: We also like to remind our listeners that there will be a new book called "Platform Strategies" out in 2015 from Professor Alstyne and co-authors.

Also a big thank you to Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer, SAP Cloud and Line of Business. Thank you, Tim.

Minahan: Thank you, Dana, a great conversation.

Gardner: And a thanks to our audience as well for joining us for this discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Don't forget to come back next time for more BriefingsDirect.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP.

Transcript of a discussion on how business networks are fast emerging as trusted, efficient hubs for cloud-based and data-driven commerce. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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More Than Just an IT Shift, Cloud Fuels the New Engine of Business Innovation

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how cloud is sparking new business models and new forms of engagement with employees, customers, and suppliers.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Our podcast today explores the expanding impact that cloud computing is having as a strategic business revolution -- and not just as an IT efficiency shift.

Gardner

Over the past five years, the impetus for cloud adoption has been primarily about advancing the IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) fabric or utility model, and increasingly seeking both applications and discrete IT workload support services from Internet-based providers.

But as adoption of these models has unfolded, it's become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine, even across whole industries.

Recent research shows us that business leaders are now eager to move beyond cost and efficiency gains from cloud to reap far greater rewards, to in essence, rewrite the rules of commerce.

We're here today with a panel of experts and practitioners of cloud to unpack how modern enterprises have a unique opportunity to gain powerful new means to greater business outcomes. So with that, please join me in welcoming our guests, Ed Cone, the Managing Editor of Thought Leadership at Oxford Economics. Welcome, Ed.

Ed Cone: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: We're here as well with Ralf Steinbach, Director of Global Software Architecture at Groupe Danone, the French food multinational based in Paris. Welcome, Ralf.

Ralf Steinbach: Good afternoon, because it is afternoon here.

Gardner: And we're here also with Bryan Acker, Culture Change Ambassador for the TELUS Transformation Office at TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications firm. Welcome, Bryan.

Bryan Acker: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And we're also here with Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing officer for SAP Cloud and Line of Business Solutions. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Hey, Dana, it's great to be here.

Gardner: It seems to me that business, at its simplest definition, is a series of inputs transformed by processes and value adds, and then a set of outputs.

Now that's grossly simplified, but this is all governed internally by systems of record, cycles of learning and, many times, innovative processes, based on intellectual property and research. Ed, you've been doing recent research there at Oxford Economics, and so how is cloud now able to address this entire business meta process, rather than just some discrete parts like systems of record?

Questions on the cloud

Cone: Dana, we did a survey for SAP last year, and that became the basis for this program. We went out to 200 executives around the world and asked them that question, not quite so elegantly phrased as you did, but "What are you doing in the cloud? Are you still looking at it for just process speed, efficiency, and cost cutting?"

Cone

The numbers that came back were really strong in terms of actually being a part of the business function. Beyond those basics, cloud is very much part of the daily reality of companies today.

We saw that the leading expectation for cloud to deliver significant improvement was in productivity, innovation, and revenue generation. So obviously process, speed, efficiency, and cost cutting are still very important to business, but people are looking to cloud for new lines of business, entering new markets, and developing new products.

In this program, what we did was take that information and go out to executives for live interviews to dive deep into how cloud has become the new engine of business, how these expectations are being met at companies around the world.

Gardner: And we'll be speaking to some of those in just a few moments at Danone and TELUS, but before we get to the nitty-gritty of how you do this, I'm still interested in why cloud commerce is evolving to a higher value. So Tim at SAP Cloud, how you are using this shift? Are businesses doing this intentionally, or are they basically being forced by what's happening around them?

Minahan: Increasingly, as was just indicated, businesses are moving beyond the IT efficiencies and the total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of the cloud, and the cloud certainly offers benefits in those areas.

Minahan

But really what's driving adoption, what's moving us to this tipping point, is that now, by some estimates, 75 percent of all new investments are going into the cloud or hybrid models. Increasingly, businesses are viewing the cloud as a platform for innovation and entirely new engagement models with their customers, their employees, their suppliers and partners, and in some cases, to create entirely new business models.

Just think about what cloud has done for our personal lives. Who would have thought that Apple, a few years ago, would be used to run your home. This is the Apple Home concept that allows you to monitor and manage all of your devices -- your air-conditioning, your alarm, music, and television -- remotely through the cloud.

There's even the quasi business B2B and B2C models around crowd sourcing and crowd funding from folks like Kickstarter or payment offerings like Square. These are entirely new engagement models, new business models that are built on the back of this emergence of cloud, mobile, and social capabilities.

Gardner: Right, and it seems that one of these benefits is that we can cross boundaries of time, space geography, what have you, very easily, almost transparently, and that requires new thinking in order to take advantage of that.

Bryan, at TELUS as Culture of Change Ambassador, are you part of the process for helping people think differently and therefore be able to exploit what cloud enables?

Flexible work schedule

Acker: One hundred percent. It's actually a great segue, because at TELUS we have a flexible work arrangement, where we want 70 percent of our employees to be working either from home or remotely. What that means is we have to have the tools and the culture in place that people understand, that they can access data and relevant information, wherever they are.

Acker

It doesn't matter if they're at home, like I am today, on the road, or at a client site, they need to be able to get the information to provide the best customer experience and provide the right answer at the right time.

So by switching from some of the great tools we already offered, because collaboration is part of TELUS’s cultural DNA, we've actually been able to tear down silos we didn't even know we were creating.

We were trying to provide all the tools, but now people have an end-to-end view of every record for customers, as well as employees and the collaboration involving courses and learning opportunities. They have access to everything when they need it and they can take ownership of the customer experience or even their own career, which is fantastic for us.

Gardner: Ralf, at Danone, as Director of Global Software Architecture, you clearly have your feet on the path and you've seen how things have evolved. Do you see the shift to cloud as a modest evolution, or is this something that changes the game?

Steinbach: We've been looking at cloud for quite sometime now. We've started several projects in the cloud, mainly in two areas. One involves the supporting functions of our business which is HR, travel expenses, and mail. There, we see a huge advantage of using standardized services in the cloud.

Steinbach

In these functions we do not need any specifics. The cloud comes standard and you can not change, as you can with SAP systems. You can't adapt the code. But that is one area where we think there's value in using cloud applications.

The other area where we really see the cloud as valued is in our digital marketing initiatives. There, we really need the flexibility of the cloud. Digital marketing is changing every day. There's a lot of innovation there and there the cloud gives us flexibility in terms of resources that we need to support that. And, the innovation cycles of our providers are much faster than they would be on premises. These are the two main areas where we use the cloud today.

Cone: Ralf, it was interesting to me, when I was reading through the transcript of your interview and working on the case studies we did, that it is even changing business models. It's allowing Danone to go straight to the consumer, where previously your customer had been the retailer. Cloud in new geographic markets is letting you reach straight to the end user, the end buyer.

Digital marketing

Steinbach: That's what I meant when I talked about digital marketing. Today, all consumer product goods company like Danone  are looking at connecting to their consumers and not to the retailers as in the past. We're really focusing on the end-consumer, and the cloud offers us new possibilities to do that, whether it is via mobile applications or websites and so on.

One thing that's important is the flexibility of the systems, because we don't know how many consumers we'll address. It can be a few, but it could be over a million. So we need to have a flexible architecture, and on-premise we could not manage that.

Gardner: It's interesting. When I listen to Ralf, I'm hearing agility and also speed, speed of innovation. They can let those cloud services providers be in the vanguard of things like energy, facilities, the process speeds, the speeds and feeds, the nuts and bolts. The cloud makers are really in the vanguard because their business model is based on a cost of operations where they are going to seek those efficiencies constantly.

So, Ed, the concept of speed seems to come up more and more. We're talking about speed of innovation, agility, direct lines of communication to customers and, of course, also supply-chain direct communication speed as well. How prominent did you see speed and the need for speed in business in your recent research?

We're really focusing on the end consumer, and the cloud offers us new possibilities to do that.

Cone: Well, speed was important and it's speed across different dimensions. It's speed to enter a new market or it's speed to collaborate within your own company, within your own organization.

This idea of taking IT and pushing it out to the people, to the customer, and really to the line of business allows them to have intimate contact and to move quickly, but also to break down these barriers of geography.

We did a case study with another large company, Hero, which is a large maker of motorcycles and two wheeled vehicles in India. What they're doing with cloud- enabled customer-facing technology is moving their service operation outside of dealerships into the countryside, out across India. They go to parks and they set up what they call service camps.

There, the speed element is the speed and the convenience with which you are able to get your bike serviced, and that's having a large measurable impact on their business. So it is speed, but it is speed across multiple dimensions.

Gardner: Tim, another thing that Ralf mentioned was standardization, of having consistency in how the services are delivered to them so the business can innovate at a higher abstraction.

It seems to me that the cloud provider and their role in this, is at a higher abstraction as well. As a provider of cloud services yourself with SAP, how are you seeing the ability to standardize and make consistent and automate processes and services in a way that then speeds up the general business objectives?

New innovation

Minahan: At the core, the cloud is really all about unlocking new innovations, providing agility in the business, allowing companies to be able to adapt their processes very, very quickly, and even create entirely new engagement models, and that's what we are seeing.

It is not just the cloud, though. This convergence of cloud, big data, analytics, mobile and social, and business networks really ushers in ultimately a new paradigm for business computing, one where applications are no longer just built for enterprise compliance or to be the system of record. Instead, they're really designed to engage and empower the individual user.

It's one that ushers in a new era of innovation for the business, where we can enable new engagement models with customers, employees, suppliers, and other partners.

We've heard some great examples here, but some others were very similar to the experience that Danone has seen. T-Mobile is leveraging the cloud not to replace its traditional systems of records, but to extend them with the cloud, to create a new model for social care, helping monitor conversations on its brand, and engage customer issues across multiple channels.

This convergence of cloud, big data, analytics, mobile and social, and business networks really ushers in ultimately a new paradigm for business computing.

So not just their traditional support channels, but Twitter and Facebook, where these conversations are happening and really it is empowered them to deliver what has become a phenomenal kind of “Cinderella-worst-to-first” story for customer support and satisfaction.

Now, they're seeing first time resolution rates that have gone from the low teens to greater than 94 percent. Obviously, that has a massive impact on customer satisfaction and renewals and is all powered by not throwing out the systems that they've used so long, but by extending them with the cloud to achieve new innovations and then drive new engagement models.

Gardner: Tim, another factor here, in a sense, levels the playing field. When you move to the cloud, small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) can enjoy the same benefit that you just described for example from T-Mobile. Are you at SAP seeing any movement in terms of the size or type of organizations that can exploit these new benefits? Is it something only for big guy?

Minahan: No, it certainly isn't something only for the big guy. Although what's  interesting, Dana, is that you and I have been around this industry for quite some time and the original thought was that the cloud was the big, democratized computing power.

It allowed SMBs to get the same level of applications and infrastructure support that their larger competitors have had for years. That's certainly true, but it is really the large enterprises that have been aggressively adopting this on an equal pace with their SMBs.

All sizes of companies

The cloud is being used to not only accelerate process efficiency and productivity, but to unlock innovations for all sized companies. Large enterprises like UPS, Deutsche Bank, and Danone are using cloud-based business applications. In the case of UPS and Deutsche Bank, they're using business networks to extend their traditional supply chain and financial systems to collaborate better with their suppliers, bankers, and other partners.

It's being used by small upstarts as well. These are companies that we talked about in the past like Mediafly, a mobile marketing start-up. It's using dynamic discounting solutions in the cloud to get paid faster, fund development of new features, and take on new business.

There's Sage Health Solutions, a company started by two stay-at-home moms in South Africa that is really grown from zero to a multi-million dollar operation. That is all powered by the leveraging the cloud to enable new business models.

Cone: To follow on with what Tim said about the broad gamut of usage from company sites and also earlier mentioning mobile, what we saw in our survey is that mobile is of great importance to companies as a way of reaching their customers for internal productivity as well. But reaching customers is actually a higher priority and that comes down to the old adage: You have to fish where the fish are.

The cloud is being used to not only accelerate process efficiency and productivity, but to unlock innovations for all sized companies.

Look at what Danone is doing when they're setting up direct-to-customer technologies and marketing. They're going into markets where people don't necessarily have laptops or landlines. They're leapfrogging that to a world where people have mobile devices.

So if you have mobile customers, and as Tim said, think of the consumer experience, that is how we all live our lives now. No matter what size your company is, you have to reach your customers the way your customer lives now -- and that is mobile.

Gardner: So there's a standardization of process between larger companies and smaller companies that is much greater now with the cloud. They can all play off of the same rules when it comes to supply-chain processes or business interactions as well as marketing and co-marketing.

But at the other end of the spectrum, you can use a standardized approach to deliver services out to any mobile endpoint. We're talking about smart phones today, but we might be talking about sensors or Internet of Things points that are not quite sophisticated as a phone, but are nonetheless taking data and providing data back.

So, Ed, this all boils down to greater collaboration, standardized, accepted collaboration, SMBs with larger ones down to the actual mobile cell phone or smart phones. Tell us a little bit about your research, how you have gone about it, and how that new level of pervasive collaboration was demonstrated in your findings.

Baseline information

Cone: In terms of the research, as I said, we went out to 200 execs around the world and asked them a series of questions about what their investment plans were. It was baseline survey information. What are you doing in the cloud, how much of it are you doing, and what are the key benefits that you're getting?

Then, as we went deeper in this phase of the project, we found that collaboration has different meanings. It can be collaboration within the company. It can be with partners, which cloud platforms allow you to do more easily. It's also this key relationship, a key area of collaboration between IT and the business.

What we see in this research is that IT is increasingly seen as a partner for the business as a way of driving revenue via the cloud. But across the four regions that we surveyed --  North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC -- we saw a very high percentage of companies say that they see that IT is emerging as a valued partner of the business, not just a support function for the business. I think that's a key collaborative relationship that I'm sure our guests are seeing in their own companies.

Gardner: Just to be clear, Ed, this is ongoing research. You're already back in the field and you'll be updating some of these findings soon?

We're really interested to see how people are doing compared to the targets they set and what their new targets are.

Cone: Yes, we're really excited about that, Dana. We did this survey last year for SAP. Then, we jumped in about a year later using those numbers and did these in-depth research interviews to look at the use of the cloud to drive business. This summer, we're refielding the survey to see how things have changed and to see how the view of the future has changed.

We ask a lot of questions about where they are now, and where they think they'll be in three years. We're really interested to see how people are doing compared to the targets they set and what their new targets are. So we will have some fresh numbers and fresh reports to talk to you about by Q3 or Q4.

Gardner: Let us look into those actual examples now and go back to Bryan at TELUS.

Acker: I have a tangible example that might help express the value of collaboration at TELUS and something that people don't think about, and that is safety.

We have a lot of field technicians who are in remote areas, but have mobile access. A perfect example is that we can go into situation where a technician may be a little unsure of what to do in a situation and it's potentially unsafe.

Because of the mobile access and the cloud, we've enabled them to quickly record a video, upload it directly to our SAP Jam system, which is our collaborative tool suite that we use, and share it with a collection of other technicians, not just the person they can call.

Safer situation

What happens is then people can say this is unsafe, you need to do X, Y and Z. We can even push them required training, so they can be sure that they're making the right decision. All of a sudden, that becomes a safer situation and the technician is not putting themselves at risk. This is really important because people do not think of those real, tangible examples. They often feel that they're just sharing information back and forth.

But in terms of what we are doing and where we are going, I sit in HR, and we're trying to improve the business process. We now have all of our information, the system of record, an integrated learning management system (LMS), our ability to analyze talent, so we make the correct hires.

We now trust the information implicitly and we're able to make the correct decision, whether it means customer information, recruiting choices, hiring choices, or performance choices.

Now, we're in a situation where we're only going to maximize and try to leverage the cloud for even more innovation, because now people are singing from the same choir sheet, so to speak.

We now trust the information implicitly and we're able to make the correct decision, whether it means customer information, recruiting choices, hiring choices, or performance choices.

We have access to the same system or record of truth, and that's the first time we've had that. Now, recruiting can talk to learning, who can talk to  performance, who can talk to technicians and we know they all get a consistent version of the truth. That is really important for us.

Gardner: Those are some excellent examples of how mobile enhances cloud. That extends the value of mobile. That brings in collaboration and, at the same time, creates data and analysis benefits that can then be fed back into that process.

So there really is a cyclical adoption value here. I'd like to go back to the cultural part of this. Bryan, how do you make sure that that adoption cycle doesn't spin out of control? Is there a lack of governance? Do you feel like you can control what goes on, or are we perhaps in the period of creative chaos that we should let spin off on its own in any way?

Acker: That’s a great question, and I'm not sure if TELUS handles this in a unique way, but we definitely had a very detailed plan. The first thing we did was have collaboration as one of our valued attributes or one of our leadership competencies. People are expected to collaborate, and their performance review is dependent on that.

What that means is we can provide tools to say that we're trying to facilitate collaboration. It doesn't mean matter if you're collaborating through a phone call, through a water-cooler chat, or through technology. Our employees are expected to collaborate. They know that it’s part of their performance cycle and it’s targeted towards their achievements for the year. We trust them to do the right thing.

We actually encourage a little bit of freedom. We want to push the boundaries. Our governance is not so tight that they are afraid to comment incorrectly or afraid to ask a tough question.

Flattening the hierarchy

What we're seeing now is individual team members are challenging leadership positions on specific questions, and we're having an honest and frank discussion that’s pushing the organization forward and making us make the accurate correct choice at all time, which is really encouraging. Now, we're really flattening our hierarchy and the cloud is enabling us to do that.

Gardner: That sounds like a very powerful engine of innovation, allowing that freedom, but then having it be controlled, managed, and understood at the same time. That’s amazing. Ed, do you have any reactions to what Bryan just said about how innovation is manifesting itself newly there at TELUS?

Cone: When we spoke to TELUS, I was intertested in that cultural aspect of it. I'm sure the guys on the call would disagree with me on a technical level, but we like to say that technology is easy, and culture is hard. The technology works, and you implement it and you figure that out, but getting people to change is really difficult.

The example that we use in the case study, SAP on TELUS, was about changing culture through gamification, allowing people to learn via an online cloud-based virtual game. It was this massive effort and it engaged a huge number of employees across this large company.

It really shifted the employee culture, and that had an impact on customer service and therefore on business performance

It really shifted the employee culture, and that had an impact on customer service and therefore on business performance. It’s a way that the cloud is moving mountains and it’s addressing the hard thing to change, which is human behavior and attitudes.

Minahan: Dana, I'd add to that. We talk about the convergence of these different technologies in cloud, social, and mobile and ultimately we had this convergence going on in technology that we talked about all the time. There is massive change going on in the workforce and what constitutes the workforce.

Bryan talked about how there is a leveling of the organization, doing away with the traditional hierarchical command and control, where information is isolated in the hands of a few, and the new eager employees doesn’t get access to solving some of the tough problems. All that’s being flattened and accelerated and powered by cloud and social collaboration tools.

Also, we're seeing a shift in what constitutes the workforce. One of the biggest examples is the major shift in how companies are viewing the workforce. Contingent and statement of work (SOW) workers, basically non-payroll employees, now represent a third of the typical workforce. In the next few years, this will grow to more than half.

It’s already occurring in certain industries, like pharmaceuticals, mining, retail, and oil and gas. It's changing how folks view the workforce. They're moving from a functional management of someone -- this is their job; this is what they do -- to managing pools of talent or skills that can be rapidly deployed to address a given problem or develop a new innovative product or service.

These pools of talent will include both people on your payroll and off your payroll. Tracking, managing, organizing, and engaging these pools of talent is only possible through the cloud and through mobile, where multiple parties from multiple organizations could view, access, collaborate, and share knowledge and experiences running on a shared-technology platform.

Customer is evolving

Acker: That extends quite naturally to the customer. The customer is evolving faster than almost anything and they expect 24x7 access to support. They expect authentic responses and they now have access to just as much information as the customer service agent.

Without mobile, if you can't connect with those customers and be factual, you're in trouble. Your customers are going to reply in social-media channels and in public forums, and you're going to lose business and you're going to lose trust with your existing customers as well.

Minahan: I fully agree. The only addition to that is that they also expect to be able to engage you through any channel, whether it’s their mobile phone, their laptop, or in some cases, directly face to face, on the phone, or in a retail outlet and have the same consistent experience and not need to reintroduce who they are and what their problem as they move from channel to channel.

Gardner: Clearly we're seeing how things that just weren’t possible before the cloud are having pervasive impacts on businesses. Let’s look at a new business example, again with Danone. Ralf, tell us a little bit about how cloud has had strategic implications for you. You have many brands, many lines of business. How is cloud allowing Danone to function better as a whole?

The cloud is definitely the best option for us to start these new businesses and connect to all consumers.

Steinbach: We have a strategy around digital marketing and, as you know, we're operating in almost every country in the world. Even though we're a big company, locally, we're sometimes quite small. We're trying to build up new markets in emerging countries with very small investments in the beginning. There, the cloud is definitely the best option for us to start these new businesses and connect to all consumers.

Money matters, even for a big company like Danone. That’s very important for us. If you look at Africa, there are completely different business models that we need to address.

People in Africa pay with their mobile phones. Some sell yogurt on a bicycle. Women pick up some yogurt in the morning and then they sell them on the road. We need to do businesses with these people as well. Obviously, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system isn't able to do that, but the cloud is a much better adapted platform to do this sort of business.

Gardner: Again, instances where cloud is enabling things that simply couldn’t have been done with spreadsheets, email ,and sticky notes. So very interesting. Now, it’s one thing to look at the impacts of cloud, and we've certainly demonstrated that there are new benefits and that provides a challenge.

Ed, how do you compare doing something that's never been done before to something in the past that therefore create a metric of success to measure what you're doing? Is there anything in your research so far that helps organizations understand the value of cloud, some of these instances that we’ve been talking about that put into business terms. The C-suite likes to look at numbers. How do we measure innovation?

Metrics lacking

Cone: We're doing some research on another program right now on that very topic for a non-SAP program. That is showing us that metrics for success on basic things like key performance indicators (KPIs) for progress of migration into the cloud are lacking at a lot of companies. Basic return on investment (ROI) numbers are lacking at a lot of companies.

We're really old school. To go back to your definition of what a business is, we think it’s an organization that’s set up to make money for shareholders and deliver value for stakeholders. By those measures, at least by dotted line, the key metrics are your financial performance? Are you entering, as we mentioned before, new markets and creating new products?

So the metrics we're seeing that are cloud specific aren't universal yet. In a broader sense, as cloud becomes an everyday set of tools, the point of those tools is to make the business run better, and we are seeing a correlation between effective use of the cloud and business performance.

Gardner: Tim, any thoughts on measuring innovation, qualifying and quantifying it? Isn't data analytics a new currency that we need to bring to the table when we think about the fruits of doing this kind of elaboration.

There are entirely new engagement models and business models that the companies hadn’t even thought of before.

Minahan: Certainly. What the cloud, mobile, and social bring to bear in addition to new collaboration models is that they kick off an unbelievable amount of new information, and oftentimes not in a structured way. There's a need to aggregate that information and analyze that in new ways to detect and predict propensity modeling on your customers, your supply chain, and your employees. Progression and development are extremely powerful.

I think we’ve just scratched the surface. As an industry, we provided the channels through which to collaborate, as we heard today. There are entirely new engagement models and business models that the companies hadn’t even thought of before. Once you have that information, once you have that connectivity, once you have that collaboration, you can begin to investigate and trial and error.

To answer your question about measurement on this, yes, we need measurement of the business process and the business outcome. Let’s not forget why companies adopt technology. It’s not just for technology sake. It’s to effect the change. It’s to effect more efficiency, greater productivity, and new engagement capabilities.

Measuring the business benefit is what we're seeing and what we’re advising our customers to do. And rather than just measuring, are we tracking towards an adoption of having more cloud in our infrastructure portfolios.

The focus today is largely driven by the fact that the lines of business are now more engaged in the buying decision and in shaping what they want from a technology standpoint to help them enable their business process. So the metrics have shifted from one of speeds and feeds and users to one of business outcomes.

Gardner: Bryan at TELUS in Toronto, you're closely associated with the human resources productivity and the softer metrics of the employee involvement and dedication that sort of thing. Are there any ways that you can think of that cloud adoption and innovation, as we’ve been describing, has this unintended set of consequences when it comes to employee empowerment or that innovation equation? How do you view measuring success of cloud  adoption?

Simplifying the process

Acker: To echo what’s already have been said, we've actually tried to simplify the process as well. We’re not really concerned with how many users are using the tool or how many conversations are happening. We measure our customers success by the likelihood to recommend. Will a TELUS customer recommend our services and products to friends, family, and peers?

We measure internal success by our employee engagement metric. If the customers are satisfied and the employees are engaged and fulfilled at work, that means that we're probably moving in the right direction. We can kind of reverse engineer to see what changes are helping us. That allows us to take our information and innovation from the cloud and inspire better behaviors and better process.

We can say, "You know what, in this pocket we’ve analyzed that our customers are likely to recommend it higher than anywhere else in Canada. What are they doing?" We can look back through the information shared on the cloud and see the great customer success stories or the great team building that’s driving engagement through the roof.

We can say, "This is the process we have to replicate and spread throughout all of our centers." Then, we can tweak it for cultural specifics. But because of that, we can use the cloud to inspire better behavior, not just say that we had 40,000 users and 2,000 hits on this blog post. We're really trying to get away from the quantitative and get into the qualitative to drive change throughout the organization.

Gardner: We're reaching the end of our time. I want to look a bit to the future. What comes next? You can certainly make the argument that cloud adoption as an IT function has been in effect for some years now and is moving into maturity. But I think we can safely say as well that the business exploitation of cloud models and effects is still rather new and fresh.

And last but not least, it's about security. We take that really seriously.

So we're still in an uncharted territory, and trying to think about where this takes us next is interesting and exciting. Let’s start with Ralf. Where do you see the impacts of cloud adoption in your business over the next couple of years? What’s likely to take place there that you can already start to see the glimmers of, the initial parts of?

Steinbach: There are still some challenges in front of us. One of the challenges is China. China is one of the biggest markets, but cloud services are not always available or they're very slow. If your cloud solution is hosted outside of China, there's a big problem. These are probably technical challenges, but we have to find solutions with our partners there, so that they can establish their services in China.

That’s one of the challenges. The other is that that the cloud might change the role of IT in our organization. In the past we owned the systems and the applications. Today, the business can basically buy cloud services with a credit card. So you could imagine that they won’t need us anymore in the future, but that's not true.

As an IT organization, we probably have to find our role inside the organization, from just providing solutions or hardware to being an ambassador for the business and to help them to make the right decisions. There are still problems that will remain as the integration between different applications. It doesn’t get easier in the cloud, so that’s where I see the challenge.

And last but not least, it's about security. We take that really seriously. If we store data, whether it's employees or of our consumers, we have to make sure that that our cloud providers have the same standards of security and there are no leaks. That’s very, very important for us. And there are legal aspects as well.

We've just started. There are still a lot of things to do in the next few years, but we're definitely going on with our strategy towards the cloud and toward mobile. And, at the end of the day, it all fits together. I think it was said before that it's not only cloud, but it's the big data, collaboration, and mobile. You have to see the whole thing as one package of opportunities.

Important challenges

Gardner: Thank you, Ralf, for bringing us a bit back down to earth, when it comes to cloud. We can certainly see the benefits, but there are still a lot of important challenges to overcome along the way as well. Bryan at TELUS, how do you see things unfolding? What do you think might be some of the impacts a few years from now that we're only just starting to realize?

Acker: On a more positive note, which is just the other side of the coin, obviously the challenges are there, but we're actually just starting to be able to experience the fact that innovation at TELUS is moving faster than it used to. We're no longer dependent on the speed at which our pre-assigned resources can make change and develop new products.

IT can now look at it from a more strategic point of view, which is great. Now, we're maximizing quarterly releases from systems that are leveraging the input from multiple companies around the world, not just how fast our learning team can develop something or how fast our IT team can build new functionality into our products.

We're no longer limited by the resources, and innovation is flying forward. That, for us, is the biggest unexpected gain. We're seeing all this technology that used to take months or years to change now on a quarterly release schedule. This is fantastic. Even within a year of being on our cloud-computing system, we're so happy, and that is inspiring to people. They're maximizing that and trying to push the organization forward as well. So, that’s a real big benefit.

Gardner: Tim Minahan, at SAP you have a unique vantage point, looking at many different aspects of business technology and cloud. Do you have any thoughts about where this can lead us in the next few years that we haven’t yet hit upon, things you're just starting to see the first really glimmers of it?

I think the biggest thing is that the cloud is going to unlock new business models and new organization models.

Minahan: A lot of it has been touched on here. We're seeing a massive shift in what the role of IT is, moving from one of deploying technology and integrating things to really becoming business process experts.

We talked a bit about the amount of data and the insights that are now available to help you better understand and predict the appetites of your customers to help you even determine when your machines might fail and when it's time to reorder or set a service repair.

I think the biggest thing is that the cloud is going to unlock new business models and new organization models. We talked a bit about TELUS and their work patterns, in which most of the workers are remote and how they are engaging the field service technicians in the field.

We talked about the growing contingent workforce and how the cloud is enabling folks to collaborate, onboard, and skill up those employees, non-payroll employees much more quickly. We're going to see your new virtual enterprises. We're talking about borderless enterprises that allow you to organize not just pools of talent, but entire value chains, and be able to collaborate in a more much transparent way.

We mentioned before about Apple Home. You're beginning to see it with 3D printers. It's this whole idea where more and more companies become digital businesses. This isn’t just about on-the-channel commerce providing a single customer experience across multiple channels.

It's actually about moving more and more of what you deliver, the solutions you deliver, the former products your deliver, to digital bits that can be tested, experienced, and downloaded all online.

All of this is being empowered by this massive convergence of cloud, mobility, social and business networks, and big data. 

What comes next

Gardner: Last word to you, Ed Cone. Any thoughts about what comes next,  something that could not have been done before these cloud models emerged.

Cone: To follow on what Tim said about the borderless enterprise, when we ask people what’s in the cloud now and what’s going to be substantially cloud based in three years, three of the highest growth areas were innovation in R and D, supply chain, and HR. All of those go straight to this idea that boundaryless digital enterprises are emerging and that cloud will be the underpinning of these enterprises.

We're working with Tim right now on a big global study about the workforce. When I talk about culture and the way companies function internally, a year ago, when we started this research, HR was the least likely function of the ones we queried to be in the cloud, and it's going to have massive growth in the next couple of years.

These stories start to converge of boundaryless and culture, all coming together via the cloud.

These stories start to converge of boundaryless and culture, all coming together via the cloud. That’s the segue to say that we're really excited to see how these numbers look when we refield this survey this summer, because that progress is snowballing and accelerating beyond even what people thought it was the last time we asked them.

Gardner: We’ll look forward to seeing that research and discussing it the next time we get together. I appreciate that. I am afraid we will have to leave it there.

You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the expanding impact that cloud computing is having at the strategic business level and not just as an IT efficiency shift. And we’ve heard how companies like TELUS and Danone are gaining refocused stability to extend processes and insights broadly and affordably to their customers, suppliers and other partners inside and outside of their organization.

So, please join me now in thanking our guests, Ed Cone, Managing Editor of Thought Leadership at Oxford Economics; Ralf Steinbach, the Director of Global Software Architecture at Groupe Danone, the French food multinational in Paris; Bryan Acker, Cultural Change Ambassador for TELUS Transformation office at TELUS, the Canadian Telecom firm based in Toronto, and Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer for SAP Cloud and Line of Business Solutions.

And a big thanks lastly to our audience for joining us. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Don’t forget to come back next time to BriefingsDirect.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP.

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