Research & Content.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the MeToo and Black Lives Matter social movements have led many leaders to reassess their relationships with their employees. Organizations in sectors as diverse as retail, technology, manufacturing, and government want their workforces to better represent the broader communities in which they operate. These organizations are making it a priority to treat all employees equitably, and to create the conditions to make everyone feel welcomed and included. Two-thirds of respondents to a recent survey of 1,115 North American organizational leaders conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)* is a high strategic priority for their organization.

Talent has always been a professional services firm’s greatest asset. Today, staying at the forefront of rapidly changing business and technology trends is what makes it possible for professional services firms (PSFs) to help their clients transform to a digital, data-driven future. This client-driven imperative has become even more urgent as the world emerges from the pandemic. Companies are eager for growth, and at the same time, talented professionals see opportunities to move freely in pursuit of their own goals. Attracting and retaining the best people and helping them learn, develop, and grow at an accelerated pace are critical.

In recent years, the center of gravity in business has shifted from inside the organization out to the customer. This change has taken place as customers have tapped into a world of information and choices about the products and services they consume. At the same time, a growing legion of digital businesses has shown customers in both the consumer and business worlds what a great customer experience (CX) can be: connected, personalized, and seamless. Improving CX has become a top business priority as a way for companies to attract and hold onto the best customers, including many they didn’t have access to before. CX goes well beyond customer service to encompass everything that goes into how customers perceive their interactions with an organization, from how they navigate the website to how the billing and payment process works. To deliver that complete customer experience, organizations must unite around the customer in ways they’ve never had to before.

Few industries have more data about their own customers than the health care sector. Providers and payers are awash with data from electronic health records (EHR), patient reported information (via voice, email, or text), public health data (e.g., social determinants of health), lab and pharmacy data, and data coming from an increasing array of devices, including patient monitoring tools and personal fitness devices. Yet the divide between the promise of all that data and the customer experience (CX) that results may be wider than in any other industry. In this paper we explore the current and future state of CX in healthcare.

Organizations across the health care ecosystem are in various stages of shifting to a more patient- and customer-centric model. Pharmaceutical and medical technology (medtech) companies are no exception. While this trend was underway prior to the onset of Covid-19, the global pandemic plunged health care into a state of emergency. Engaging with customers (patients, physicians, and others in the life sciences value chain) through digital channels became a requirement of doing business.

Organizations across industries shifted their digital transformation plans into high gear during the coronavirus pandemic. The sudden need for remote operations and large-scale working from home brought new urgency to changes that, for many, were already in the works. The crisis, for all its challenges, shattered previous notions of what was and wasn’t possible, liberating CIOs to do things in new ways. Organizations in general, and CIOs specifically, are operating under new rules for the next normal.

The global pandemic of 2020 has accelerated organizations’ digital workplace transformations, and few will go back to the way things were before. The mass work-from-home experiment Covid-19 imposed on most of the world proved to be a remarkable success, according to new research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. “Without question, the five-day-in-the-office week is dead,” says Michael Schrage, research fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Talent-minded organizations recognize that increasing employee engagement can improve how well their workers perform in their jobs and, consequently, bolster the results of their business. Discretionary effort, or going above and beyond the basic requirements of the job, kicks in and increases productivity and even quality, as long as it’s channeled in the right direction. “There are good business reasons for focusing on employee engagement,” says Julie Cummings, managing director and chief human resources officer at BKD, a national CPA and advisory firm that provides audit, tax, and consulting services to its clients. “When we have more highly engaged employees, discretionary effort increases.” Sponsored by Quantum

Intelligent automation (IA) is moving beyond hype and into the mainstream. Enabled by automation, cloud infrastructure, and advanced analytics that include artificial intelligence (AI), virtually every business process and function can be improved through some degree of IA. Yet many organizations either aren’t moving forward fast enough to keep pace with change, or they’re rushing ahead with isolated projects but without a greater plan. In either case, the value companies are getting from IA decreases, and business and technology leaders who don’t develop a strategy for enterprise-wide IA will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Sponsored by Oracle

Organizations across industries are under pressure to operate more quickly and with greater intelligence than ever before. Armed with new digital tools that enhance the capabilities of frontline workers, companies in the manufacturing, technology, financial services, energy, and health care sectors, among others, are extending their digital reach to the edges of their business and beyond. The challenge now is to empower frontline workers in a way that creates both free agency for them and proper controls for the organization. What makes this possible is the ready availability of high quality information and insights at the point of contact with customers and operations, along with the digital tools and procedures to ensure compliance with company guidelines and industry regulations. But we’re still in early days. Sponsored by Thoughtspot

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to significantly improve businesses’ sales and marketing efforts, and thus their fortunes overall. In fact, it may be hard for companies to move forward without it. Two-thirds of the 615 respondents to a recent survey from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services agree that AI in marketing and sales will be critical to their company’s ability to compete in the future. Today’s sales and marketing organizations have plenty of room for improvement. Sponsored by Microsoft

Talent—attracting it, retaining it, nurturing it—has been a perennial pain point for chief information officers (CIO). But the year 2020 brings completely new challenges. It represents an inflection point for how organizations manage their operations and the talent that fuels their success. Within the next few years, most organizations expect to be able to operate with more streamlined, often automated processes; with greater knowledge gained through artificial intelligence (AI); and with a customer-centric, anywhere-anytime way of doing business. Not that any organization will be “done” when they have made these changes. Forward-leaning CIOs know that one of the defining characteristics of the digital age is that nothing’s ever really done. Sponsored by Red Hat

The landscape for performance management (PM) is changing dramatically. Business leaders know they can get more value using performance management as a tool to engage and develop people rather than to just assess them. However, while they recognize the link between employees’ level of engagement and their performance, most organizations still operate performance management and employee engagement (EE) on separate tracks, according to a recent survey from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Sponsored by Glint

Organizations across the health care sector recognize that the innovative use of data—when information is combined for advanced analysis and managed across disciplines, systems, and settings—is crucial to solving the most challenging problems in both patient health and operational efficiency. Despite this widespread recognition, only 15% of respondents to a recent global survey of 742 health care leaders describe their organization today as being mature in its ability to access, integrate, and analyze health care data from diverse sources. Sponsored by Roche

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intelligent automation are commanding huge mind share among business and technology leaders today. What’s different this time is the degree to which reasonable and knowledgeable people believe that there is, indeed, a real urgency to get going with AI now. A number of foundational pieces must be in place to be successful with AI. These include talent, which is in short supply; having the right data infrastructure as well as sufficient quantity and quality of data to train your models; deciding how AI will be governed; and managing change in the organization, among other things. But where do you start if you’re not a large, tech-forward enterprise? In this paper, we share the insights and real-world experiences of over a dozen leading CIOs, chief data officers, and AI experts. Sponsored by Red Hat