Research Note: Concrete vs. Abstract HCM: The Power of “And”

Posted on April 20, 2021January 6, 2022 by Brent Skinner

We launched the 2021 Research Agenda for the human capital management practice area at 3Sixty Insights with an exploration into a new way of looking at HCM. The idea we advanced resonated deeply with vendors and users of HCM technology alike—that HCM has two hemispheres, the concrete and the abstract. To thrive, employers must appreciate and embrace both these understandings of HCM (3Sixty Insights BWSRP20111 Concrete vs. Abstract HCM: A New Way for Organizations to Look at HCM, November 2020). Accountants and others focused on the nuts and bolts of business understand concrete expressions of HCM such as gains in efficiencies and productivity. Others gravitate to abstract expressions of HCM, which comprise employees’ feelings and focus on the tributaries and outcomes of employer culture. Reality […]

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Research Note: Exploring the Necessity of Modern Customer Success in the Cloud

Posted on February 22, 2021October 30, 2021 by Brent Skinner

When did customer success become a department, a division, a role, at vendors of business software for the enterprise? It was when their leaders first feared that customers’ dissatisfaction with, or ambivalence over, the product would begin to affect the bottom line in uncomfortable ways. When and where was this? According to The Customer Success Association, it was in 1996 at Vantive, a company that produced software for customer relationship management. This surprised me. My guess was a cloud company as the first. But the rationale at that CRM company, Vantive, was similar. And, once it becomes relatively easy for customers to discard with one vendor’s product in favor of another product to address the same need, vendors are more apt to sense the urgency […]

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Research Note: The Software and Technology Decision-Making Cycle—How it Has Changed

Posted on January 29, 2021November 9, 2021 by Nicholas Biron and Brent Skinner

The past 15 years have seen dramatic changes in software and technology: leaps from flip phones to smart phones, desktop computing to laptops and tablets, on-premises software to cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, and others. With these new technologies and platforms have come an explosion of software vendors profoundly shifting the information technology and software landscape. As an example, we’ve seen a jump from 1,876 vendors in the marketing space to over 8,000 in just the past five years in marketing technology—not the only industry that has seen this exponential rate of growth. Almost every technology and software segment over the past few years has seen similar growth. However, we are not just seeing a fundamental change in the solutions available; there have […]

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Research Agenda: Human Capital Management 2021

Posted on October 26, 2020October 31, 2021 by Brent Skinner

The future of work is forming quickly even as it is challenging to track. Exacting acute effects on the workplace, COVID-19’s unprecedented disruptions have also quickened the inexorable march of long-term trends in human capital management. As 2020 promises to cast a long shadow over the future, the HCM practice at 3Sixty Insights plans to explore several themes over the next 12 months. Concrete vs. Abstract HCM: A New Way for Organizations to Look at HCM COVID-19, WFH, and the Long View: Can HCM Protect the Employee Experience? The New Best-of-Breed Point Solutions: Workforce Management and Talent Experience Lead the Charge Vying for Business: How Do Increasingly Similar HCM Vendor Suites Differentiate? Reskilling the Workforce: Making it Happen, and Making the Business Case Moving from […]

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