Episode 1: Firstup
When I wrote about silo-busting last time, it was clear that vendors, systems integrators, and customers have a lot of work to do if they hope to fix their silo problems and the endemic dysfunction silos bring to the enterprise. It’s not going to be easy, as the negative culture and economics of silos are very solidly entrenched. Which means that moving to a world where true cross-silo, end-to-end (E2E) processes can thrive – regardless of the applications, clouds, technologies, and internal technology and business fiefdoms that they must transcend – is going to take a lot of change in a lot of hard-to-change places.
Since I wrote that first piece, I’ve been on the hunt for how different customers have made those hard choices, and what approaches and tools have they used to do it. Needless to say, while there’s a shortage of customers who have succeeded in creating end-to-end processes by busting down the functional silos that stand in the way, there’s no shortage of vendors, armed with a mind-numbing array of tools and approaches, trying to be the first to crack this nut at scale.
The army of vendors trying to scale up an E2E business for the moment are largely stuck selling these solutions one customer at a time. In the world of E2E success the trick is to find the executive or manager who has permission to bust silos – and maybe a few heads along the way – and build that domain/application/process-spanning application. The few execs who do have this permission are generally inundated with options from the vendor community. Maybe drowning is the better word.
Most of these vendors are household, or at least C-suite, names, so I’m going to start this series with an outlier, a vendor in the enviable position of being able to solve the end-to-end process problems of a specific and easy-to-target buyer who has the budget and buy-in to solve the problem. The company, Firstup, sells an internal communications platform to the heads of corporate communications, which happens to put Firstup in the equally enviable position of having its E2E niche largely to itself. Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned for customers and vendors trying to navigate their way out of the silo trap in more complex and crowded corners of the market.
Corporate communications… While some of us might be tempted to stifle a yawn or a smirk at that the prospect of internal comms being an archetype for silo-busting, it turns out this was a market ripe for the plucking precisely because it has a unique combination of need, access to the C-suite, and a surprisingly mission-critical function, particularly in a global economy wracked by issues regarding finding and retaining employees.
The companies at the Firstup conference I recently attended represent an array of industries that span hospitality, tech, CPG, oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare, pharma, retail, distribution, and transportation, all of which are suffering from the endemic people problems that have surfaced in the aftermath of the utter shitshow of a global economy we now live in. What these customers have all found is that one way to deal with their people issues is to better engage employees and provide them with access to the things they can’t get from an HR system alone: a personalized information flow that helps connect them to the company’s mission, marketing and sales promotions, employee incentive programs, and culture, as well as the usual HR stuff like healthcare enrollment, training, and the like. In doing so Firstup helps align these employees with key corporate KPIs – such as top and bottom line growth, improved customer sat scores, better cybersecurity, and, of course, employee retention. Especially employee retention.
Getting this personalized flow to employees can be an integration hairball, especially for large companies with a widely distributed workforce. Data and information can come from myriad sources: HR systems, training systems, corporate reward programs, sales and marketing systems – of which there can easily be more than one of each in any decent-sized company, and which are of course poorly integrated almost by design.
The ideal method for delivering this unified employee view can also vary greatly, not just because reaching out to employees in their specific roles and in their language of choice can be a daunting task for corporate comms. While companies often white label Firstups’ delivery platform, especially for employees not sitting in front of a PC all day, Firstup is happy to oblige companies that prefer to use the existing channels employees spend the most time in, such as an HRMS or SFA system (and, in Satya Nadella’s fever-dream view of the world, Microsoft Teams) to deliver the unified corporate gospel according to corp comms. Which means integration is needed on the outbound side as well, alongside a means to design and format what the employee sees in their personalized view.
If this sounds ho-hum and non-strategic, take another look. Not only does a unified comms system promote engagement, it can be used to help drive promotions that contribute to measurably increased sales, eliminate waste (one company stopped printing four-color flyers for their stores, at a significant savings, when they discovered, via a contest to find ways to save money, that the flyers’ mostly ended up being used to wrap fragile items for customers,) and help employees do things like swap shifts. This particular function seriously boosted employee satisfaction for the large retail customer I spoke to at the conference and would do so for any other shift-driven company. (This is absolutely huge: anything that helps employees juggle their shifts with their personal lives is a big win for employee satisfaction and engagement – just ask a shift worker if you don’t believe me.)
Therein lies what turns out to be the first part of Firstup’s success: making its customers measurably successful. (This should of course go without saying, but, as I have already stated, customer successing is unfortunately much more common than real customer success.) The sources of content for the kind of programs and capabilities that Firstup enables – and I spoke to customers from all over who had similar stories to tell about engagement leading to bottom and top line impacts – are often already in place, albeit scattered all over the company and its myriad content platforms. Extending the knowledge of and access to these programs, making them employee, role, location, and LOB-specific, and enabling a bi-directional engagement model wins Firstup friends from the C-suite to the field.
In other words, there wasn’t a huge process change required, nor was anyone asked to do something they’d never done before. All Firstup did was organize these silos of content and delivery into a unified platform that could rationalize them and allow each end of the content continuum to be significantly improved. And, while impressive enough, the integration Firstup enables at the front-end and back-end isn’t based on some new, never-seen-before tech paradigm either. It just gets the job done.
This is an excellent, albeit unique, case of silo-busting, and to a large extent what Firstup does in corp comms is pretty identical to what RPA and process automation vendors can do, if they can get the buy-in to do it. With one huge exception, an exception that proves the uniqueness of Firstup’s opportunity: Firstup’s primary buyer, the head of corp comms, has a mission-critical problem that gets the attention of the C-suite precisely because, in case you haven’t been paying attention, there is no single issue more germane to the corporate world – of any size or sector – than employee retention. And, even more critical, that buyer has budget. And permission.
Permission, Buyer, Budget, Buy-in…Bingo.
It’s a pretty basic formula, though of course the Permission/Buyer/Budget/Buy-in/Bingo scenario is hard to replicate in the world of silo-busting as cleanly as Firstup does it. However, the ability to demonstrably drive top and bottom line impacts, and touch on a key issue – in Firstup’s case, people – that’s close to the heart and wallets of the C-suite should be on the front burner of any vendor’s strategy, as well as at the top of the criteria lists in the RFP. Limiting change management, helping existing processes run better, personalizing experiences, and doing so in a cost-effective manner are also list-topping requirements.
It also helps to have a real partnership with your customers, one that is genuine, not manufactured, and isn’t focused on reporting sales success to Wall Street at the expense of customer success in the field. (AKA the aforementioned customer successing.)
What isn’t at the top of the list, based on the Firstup example? There’s no cool, whiz-bang tech, no myopic adherence to not-invented-here syndrome, no partner network of expensive GSIs trying to overcharge and overcomplicate the process, nor does there need to be a household brand with banner ads in all the airports leading the charge. Turns out none of that’s required. Ok, some brand advertising is allowed, provided the rest of the non-criteria are absent from the requirements list.
Once again tech takes second place to those ineffable factors at the intersection of people, process, and business for which tech must always remain a follower, not a leader. The silos were put there because people put them there, and it’s people, not technology, who are going to take down this Tower of Babel and build a replacement that hopefully won’t tempt the wrath of some supreme deity. The good news is that there are ways to do this that make extraordinary business sense and can be delivered with a modicum of technology, as long as it’s done right. Not only can silos be broken down and E2E processes can be built to replace them, there’s also value to be had for all in doing do. As long as it’s done right.
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