Through a series of interviews with leading WFM Vendors, thought leaders, and practitioners, this session will construct some tangible and hopefully likely scenarios to describe what your working life will be like in the future: not only as WFM practitioners, but from the worker perspective as well. Many factors can give us some indicators of not only what we can expect, but perhaps some insights into how we can mold the science and practice of WFM to provide a richer, more rewarding worker ecosystem for workers across the world, no, galaxy. You can watch a full video presentation here: http://ity.vc/webi300

1. Workforce Management
Fundamentals Series
The Future of WFM
Scott Brown
President, Sability
Jeremy Finney
Chief Technology Officer, Sability

2. Predicting the Future

3. Approach
• Talked to WFM Vendors
– What’s in your future?
– What do practitioners want?
– How do you see things currently changing?
• Talked to Practitioners
– What’s in your company’s future?
– How can WFM best sustain and enrich the
organization?

4. Technology Adoption (i)
• Hardware realization
– Initial capabilities
• Software realization
– Can lag hardware significantly
• Sociological/community acceptance
– Resistance to change
– Video phones
– Reversion

5. Technology Adoption (ii)
• Sociological Model
• Diffusion of Innovators
– Everett Rogers
• Normal distribution
• Describes acceptance
– Demographic factors
– Psychological factors
• Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore

6. Workforce Management
NEAR TERM

7. Suite vs Best of Breed
Topic Suite Best of Breed
Interfacing Suite! It’s all done! New technologies enhance
timeliness, reliability, and effort
Expertise Seek it out Focused
Nimbleness Battleship Turn on a dime
Competitive Customers locked in Must continue to earn your
business
Analogy
Kindle vs. iPad

8. Global
“Customers below "Over the last 5 years – there has
multinational in size are been a clear distinction between
managing WFM systems cultural acceptance and
recognition of WFM and its value
through separate instances.”
vs. technology’s readiness and
capabilities. The technology has
“I’m sure the future will be been there, and is way ahead of
the Fortune 500 will demand the cultural and socio-political
a consistent applications and acceptance, and constraints due
consistent solutions, *…+ but to data privacy concerns and
we have not found that to cross-country data exchange."
be a requirement.” --Ed Colby, WFM Technology
-- Ernie Pozzobon, TiMETech, CEO evangelist

9. Scheduling
• Optimization
"Hybrid approach is best.
– Recent discipline Optimizers should drive to
– Moving from team based 85%, then let store
manager manage the last
to individual based 15% - the last mile." --
John Orr, CSO, Dayforce
– Optimization algorithms
are very basic
– Human store managers
are intuitive

10. Mobile
• Mobile sector is growing 8x faster than traditional
PCs did at the same stage in their evolution
• Your future workers & possibly current customers
– “Children now have two states of existence, *…+ asleep or
online.“ -- Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
• Insure your WFM strategy includes mobile
integration

11. Mobile
Captive vs. User Owned Devices
• Captive device – Supplied by employer
– Ultimate control over the device
• Security
– No multi-platform development required
• User Owned Device
– Associate (employee) manages
– Process required for enrollment of device
– Remote wipe

12. Forecasting/Optimization
– Many organizations: not ready for forecasting and optimization
• Not enough data in the proper format. A year of history is essential.
• Socioeconomic makeup
– Dilemma
• Market
• What is the impact of the legal/socio/economic environment
– What are the cause and effect relationships on your demand
– Continuous learning
– Much ROI still on the table
– Schedule optimization is the most computational intense
function in WFM

13. Business Intelligence
• Intelligence?
" Business Intelligence
– Information? would be a success if
– Data. measured in volume. It
currently falls far short on
• Key Performance Indicators the intelligence side."
-- John Orr, CSO, Dayforce
• Benchmarking
• Goal
– Alert based

14. Social Media
• Big three
– Facebook
– LinkedIn
– Twitter
• Data moving outside the corporate walls
• Integration points
• Standards would help

15. Threats (i)
• Cybercrime
– All grown up
– For profit
• Structured Organization
– documented by the FBI
– evolved roles
• Target is bank account information
– worth $80 to $700 per account

16. Threats (ii)
• Technological obsolescence
– Hidden cost associated with staying on a platform
too long
• Eroding skill sets (COBOL, assembler)
• Support issues, not only software but OS, app servers
and database servers
• Legal/compliance updates
• Cost of changes/opportunity costs of not being able to
respond to market driven changes in a timely fashion

17. Threats (iii)
• Disruptive technologies
– Web perfect example
– Currently in another wave: Social
• Social interactions becoming very efficient
• This year I have twice as many friends as last
• As a society we are becoming much more connected
• Employees ever more comfortable with social software
• Largest current impact: recruiting
• Largest threat: privacy

18. Threats (iv)
• IPv4 address space exhausted
• IPv6 is coming
– Successor to IPV4
– 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
unique addresses
• World IPV6 Day – June 8th, 2011
– Test by major internet companies
– http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/participants/

19. Opportunities
• What will the Internet look like in 10 years?
• Internet Society
– Scenario planning exercise
– Shape the future as a citizen of the internet
– Nicely done videos illustrating scenarios
• http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/scenarios/

20. Workforce Management
LONG TERM

21. Building /Fitting
• Currently evolving from coding to configuring
– Think of it as “Code as Data”
– Code backdoors
– Change control is still essential
• Next evolution: system training
– Artificial intelligence

22. Data Gathering
• Automation of data gathering
• Technically ready
• Economically justifiable
• Primary barrier to adoption is
sociological
• Current technologies employ
wireless sensor bands or
video recognition with
• EA Sports Active 2
“wand”
– Coaches participant on exercise
• Future: no augmentation
• Potential to replace majority
required of data entry

23. Pattern Recognition
• Systems that watch and learn
• Any gatherable quantifiable metric
• Moving from systems that track to systems
that predict
• Danger is generation of false correlations

24. User Interfaces (i)
• Best enjoyed when not
seen
• Most today involve one or
more levels of abstraction
• (Whisking these
away/improving these)
produces interfaces that
require no training
• Learning UI’s must be ultra-
transparent

25. User Interfaces (ii)
– The distance between information and our brain is
getting shorter.
• The time involved could have easily have been 10 hours
per question.
• Time-to-answer process has been reduced to as little as
10 minutes.
• The next iteration of interface design will give us the
power to find answers in as little as 10 seconds.
--Thomas Frey - Google’s Top Rated Futurist Speaker
• WFM systems are in the 10 seconds or less category
• Next step – virtual elimination of wait time

26. User Interfaces (iii)
• Keyboard – 130 year old “technology”
– Universal adoption
– Dvorak keyboard
– Requires a disruptive technology
• Mouse – showing it’s age
– Stopgap: Multi-touch touch-screens
• What’s the answer?
– Voice Recognition
– Video: gestures
Scroll up

27. Video
• Next generation of input/data gathering
• Boil down to essential elements
– “Videometrics”
– Less liability
– Less privacy issues
– Should be defined to a common format
• Standards based

28. Non Human workers
• No, not robots in the traditional sense
• Chatbots
– http://www.chatbots.org/
• Gartner: by 2015 10% of your online friends will be
automated
• Enterprises will not be able to keep up with the “Social Gap”
• Chatbots are the only answer, teleclerks will be replaced be
chatbots “managed” (monitored) by humans. Slowly the
entire line function will be replaced
• Turing test

29. Gartner - Top Technology Predictions
• Gartner Webinar Top Technology Predictions for 2011 and Beyond
• By 2015, a G20 nation’s critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.
• By 2015, new revenue generated each year by IT will determine the annual compensation of most
new Global 2000 CIOs.
• By 2015, information-smart businesses will increase recognized IT spending per head by 60
percent.
• By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25 percent of labor hours associated with IT
services.
• By 2015, most external assessments of enterprise value and viability will include explicit analysis
of IT assets and capabilities.
• By 2015, 80% of enterprises using external cloud services will demand independent certification
that providers can restore operations and data
• By 2015, companies will generate 50% of Web sales via their social presence and mobile
applications
• By 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.
• By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
• By 2015, 10 percent of your online “friends” will be nonhuman

30. WFM Today vs Tomorrow
Tired Wired
Critical success factors Cost Saving Revenue/Value Generation
Productivity 100% Utilization 3M approach
Resources Manage Inspire
Reporting Business Intelligence Alerts
Data Gathering Biometric Videometric
Orientation Tracking Predicting

31. Conclusions
• Video is the “Killer App”
• Sociological acceptance is typically the
primary factor in delaying the rollout of new
technologies.
• Moving from systems that track to systems
that predict
• Technology is not a solution, but an enabler of
solutions

32. Thank You
scott.brown@sability.com
twitter: #scottabrown
#sability