To find out, Capgemini has conducted industry research, including a series of in-depth expert interviews. The results show that several gaps need to be filled before even the most advanced cars are as smart as smartphones. For example, car makers need to combine a comparable range of everyday functions seamlessly into a single platform. (And that’s before we even consider whether the smartphone is really the model that we should ultimately be aiming for.)

In this article – the first of three – we discuss some ways in which cars fall short of the smartphone model. Building on this analysis, a subsequent article will define a series of measures and strategies for closing the gaps. A third and final article will discuss the infrastructure that needs to be provided before this can happen, including 5G, cloud processing technology, and vehicle architecture. We’ll also look beyond the smartphone analogy to consider how the automotive industry can achieve a level of success comparable with that of smartphones and the associated mobile applications.

It’s almost a truism to call a car a smartphone on wheels. It may have been Toyota president Akio Toyoda who first used the analogy, back in 2011. Subsequently, the same analogy has been repeated by OEMs worldwide (see panel) when they want to emphasize product features such as advanced connectivity, user-friendliness, customizability, and versatility.

Indeed, the automotive industry’s developments around digital and connected services have often followed, or been shaped by, those seen in smartphones. This influence is not surprising. Smartphones have achieved a unique position in our daily lives over the past few years, from the moment when Apple’s iPhone first appeared. This success has been due to their groundbreaking combination of functions: phone, camera, music player, browser, calendar, and more, all integrated into a single platform.

Of course, a car is never going to be a smartphone, and in many ways it is very much more. Nor do automotive manufacturers lag behind their phone industry counterparts in general. They are already making rapid progress in areas that smartphone makers don’t have to worry about, such as drivetrains, autopilot, and predictive collision avoidance.

Yet smartphones do provide a useful model of how technological progress and connected services should be delivered and integrated into a platform, and the automotive industry has benefited from this model. Many major milestones in the smartphone evolution were achieved by vehicles approximately three to five years later. For example, voice control was provided in smartphones in 2009, but the first voice applications in vehicles didn’t appear until 2013 and beyond. Mobile payments were available on phones in 2017/18, but in cars they have only recently been introduced, or have yet to appear^[6]. In addition, there are several areas where even the most advanced and intelligent of today’s cars still fall short of the smartphone model.

It’s useful to understand these gaps, so in this article we’ll consider some aspects of smartphones that we believe explain their success and their central role in our lives. We’ll compare those aspects of phones with how cars currently look, using three perspectives:

1. usability & customer interaction,
2. app landscape & operating system, and
3. innovation & updatability.

This will help us understand what developments are required before cars’ functionality can become as indispensable as that of smartphones.

Usability & customer interaction

From the customer perspective, there are two major value drivers: usability and customer interaction.

In terms of usability, smartphones score more highly than cars because they can satisfy a wide range of user requirements and everyday purposes. They can serve as cameras or timers, allow the user to watch videos, and so on. This flexible and broad value proposition is a major success factor for smartphones. Indeed, for most users making phone calls is no longer the smartphone’s main function – a disruptive change.

Compared to smartphone usage, the driving situation demands significantly more attention, and so the range of tasks that can be safely performed is limited. Hence, transportation remains the major value proposition of today’s cars, though this picture could change dramatically as automated and autonomous driving functions mature. In the future, if driving is no longer the main activity while spending time in a vehicle, the driver can become more like a passenger, able to make greater use of in-car services.

As well as having a more limited range of functionality available to them, car drivers miss out on the seamless user experience that smartphone owners enjoy. Thanks to the use of a single account across all devices, if a smartphone user updates a calendar entry or contact, say, that update is instantly visible on the user’s tablet, laptop, and so on. With a car, even if the driver logs in to use a connected service, or has a phone app to lock and unlock the vehicle, they can’t expect that updates will get transferred between the car and their other devices, because they probably need to use a separate account for the car. In other words, the car is not yet part of the “digital portfolio.”

We’ve seen that cars fall short of smartphones’ usability in a few respects. Let’s now turn to customer interaction. Smartphone producers and app or service providers are good at interacting with customers, and they leverage the customer data they collect to take better care of their customers. People expect to receive personalized offers and recommendations while they are using smartphones, and to be able to engage in direct communication (e.g. via chat).

App landscape & operating system

The smartness of a device depends on the variety of ways in which it can deliver value to the user – which in practice means the variety of third-party apps – and on how well these services or apps are integrated to support different aspects of the user’s driving experience and wider lifestyle.

A vast number of third-party apps – perhaps 2–3 million in total – have been designed and developed for smart devices. Cars fall short of smartphones in this area, with far fewer apps. Smartphone users can find apps to address virtually every purpose you can think of, in both B2B and B2C segments. For cars, the connected services apps are mostly focused on infotainment, telematics, safety & security, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity. Examples of V2X functionality include traffic lights alerting vehicles to adjust their speed to take account of an impending change from green to red, and vehicles warning each other of hazards to prevent collisions.

There are several reasons for the difference in the size of the application landscapes for phones and for cars. One is the smaller user base. There are almost 4 billion smartphone users worldwide, but probably only around 120 million connected cars on the roads^[7]. That small user base, coupled with the fact that people don’t use the connected services in their cars as intensively as those on their phones, makes connected cars a less appealing market for third-party app developers.

The way services are supplied and integrated is another major area of difference between cars and phones, and one that further explains the difference in the app landscape. The phone app market is centralized around two players, Google/Android (with around 72% of the market) and Apple/iOS. These two have massive negotiating power, can define guidelines and standards, and run app stores via which the vast majority of apps are offered to customers. This structure has led to the growth of a huge ecosystem of third-party developers, who can take much of the credit for the richness of functionality available to smartphone users.

For cars, the ecosystem is far more fragmented. Regarding operating systems, some OEMs want to offer their own: For example, Daimler is aiming to launch MB.OS by 2025. Volkswagen has bundled its software competencies into a newly formed entity, CARIAD, to develop the VW.OS operating system (a pre-existing VW project targeted to complete in 2025). However, more and more OEMs – including Polestar and Ford – are adopting Android Automotive. Clearly, this fragmented landscape is less open, and less attractive to app developers, than that presented by smartphones. Smartphone app developers need to consider just two operating platforms, but anyone launching an app for cars is likely to have to create – and, worse, to support, update, and maintain – multiple versions.

In addition, OEMs have tended to limit the range of apps that get integrated into their cars – often for good reasons such as safety considerations – and this has made it a difficult market for developers to access. This represents another major gap between phones and cars, and one that the industry needs to close. In fact, the gap may start to close very soon whether we like it or not, because regulations such as the EU’s Digital Markets Act are likely to enforce the availability of third-party app stores within cars, and will limit OEMs’ ability to act as gatekeepers to their platforms.

On balance, this opening up of the market is good news for OEMs. The creation of an ecosystem that encourages third-party apps will be crucial for the industry’s ability to combine diverse valuable functionality into a single platform in the way that has been achieved with smartphones. Furthermore, OEMs can start to earn money from software as well as hardware. There is more than one way to do this. One approach is through revenue sharing models like those from which smartphone vendors such as Apple already benefit. Another approach is for OEMs to develop operating systems and license them to other OEMs, perhaps on an as-a-service basis. There will also be opportunities for exploiting the wealth of data generated by connected services. OEMs can derive insights that help them (and their ecosystem members) to offer the individualized services that customers really value.

Innovation & updatability

At present, cars do not keep up with technological innovation anywhere as successfully as phones do. We’ll discuss two main reasons. One is about the rate at which manufacturers and their ecosystem partners can innovate. The other reason is to do with the way innovation is distributed to customers using the finished products.

It’s relatively easy to ensure that most smartphones are equipped with the latest technology. Development cycles are short (around one year), and users tend to replace their phones around every two to three years. This rapid innovation results in a sophisticated device, with very fast processing and response times, and advanced use of many different types of data; for example, interpretation of sensor and image data. This is supported by mobile cloud services that smartphones often use to offload heavy data processing and storage outside the device.

Vehicles have a much longer development cycle of up to five years – so much so that hardware can already seem outdated when it is launched. In addition, cars tend to have a longer lifespan of around seven years (or two to three years for commercial vehicles). It’s one reason why a car is currently a less streamlined device than a phone, and more limited as to the amount and type of data it can work with, and what it can do with it.

It isn’t possible – or desirable from the sustainability viewpoint – to make people change their cars more often. So the main way to bridge this gap is for OEMs to adopt a more customer-centric development process that reduces time to market and ensures that evolving customer expectations (and technological possibilities) are reflected in the models they deliver.

Another way to keep cars up to date is to add innovative features once they’re on the road. That brings us to a second key differentiator between cars and phones in the technology area: the ability to distribute innovation in the form of software updates to an existing device. Smartphones are usually permanently online and can receive regular updates, processed in the background. By contrast, smart cars tend to be offline a lot of the time, even if they can be remotely activated, for example for climate control purposes. Even when they are online, this does not mean that they can necessarily receive over-the-air (OTA) software updates the way a smartphone can; this depends on the car’s architecture, plus the availability of updates and of the infrastructure necessary to enable those updates.

Progress is already happening here, with Tesla’s lead being followed by the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW. But at present, only the newest models in a range tend to have these capabilities, so there is still a way to go before cars have the updatability of phones. Wider adoption of OTA updates can greatly improve the automotive industry’s ability to deliver innovation to customers.

Closing the gaps

We’ve discussed several gaps between smart cars and smartphones. We believe that it’s essential to close these gaps if the industry wants to meet the needs of today’s consumers. Closing the gaps will also enable automakers to reach their goals of transforming into “original experience manufacturers”.

From the customer perspective, it’s important to improve flexibility and usability. The rise of automated and autonomous driving brings a lot of opportunities for smartphone-like user interaction. It is, however, crucial that OEMs identify the applications that will really be used.

The app landscape needs to catch up, particularly in terms of the way functionality is created, delivered, and integrated. The emergence of app stores for third-party apps may improve matters, and offer OEMs additional revenue streams from revenue sharing and as-a-service operating system delivery, as well as opportunities for data utilization and monetization.

In the innovation area, the key is to adopt faster, more customer-centric processes, and to find a way to deliver innovation more effectively to cars on the road – which depends on making OTA software updates pervasive and effective, and providing the necessary infrastructure.

Beyond the smartphone?

Some industry players are now questioning whether the smartphone model is really the one they should be aiming for. It’s been proposed that cars should, in fact, be computers on wheels as suggested by Nio, or maybe sci-fi living rooms on wheels (BMW). Arguably, though, the automotive industry needs to create its own vision of the future, rather than imitating other sectors. We’ll return to these issues later in this series.

Whatever we think about these more futuristic ideas, for now, at least, the smartphone sets the standard that cars need to match in terms of integrating diverse everyday functionality into a single platform in order to provide a seamless, interactive user experience that truly meets user expectations about connectivity and functionality. In the next article of this series, we will discuss in more detail how the industry can close up the gaps between cars and smartphones, which we believe is an essential first step.

Referenced links:
[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] Statista, “Connected Car Outlook.”

Authors:

Sebastian Tschödrich Vice President – Automotive, Capgemini Invent	Dr. Marc Cäsar Director – Automotive Digital, Capgemini Invent

Contributing Authors:

Marc Pauli, Yue Ma, Simon Monske, Michael Röller, and Christopher Hofmann

Organizations increasingly understand the importance of improving employee experience, but the need for supporting a homebound workforce increased the urgency to act decisively to make the necessary changes.

Indeed, the rapid shift to equipping employees to work from home forced some organizations into rushing to engineer employee experience strategies that they otherwise would have spent a lot more time developing.

The Capgemini Research Institute surveyed 500 organizations and 5,000 employees around the world and spoke with academics and executives, and found that remote working is definitely the new normal – 75% of the organizations expect at least 30% of their employees to work remotely, while over 30% expect 70% of their workforce to become remote. As they transition, organizations are finding that remote work boosted productivity and cost savings by up to 24% in Q3 2020.

However, more than just enabling workers, employee experience technology plays an essential role in how employees feel about their day-to-day work experience. It’s part of a comprehensive strategy that must include multiple components, including listening to employee feedback, measuring essential IT metrics, optimizing HR policies, and of course, improving the physical workplace – wherever that happens to be.

While the human touch is undeniably important, emerging technologies and digital transformation are crucial tools for business leaders who want to drive meaningful change in their employee experience, thus setting the stage for improving the bottom line.

Every company wants to keep its employees satisfied and productive because a great employee experience translates to great business results. As more people work from home or remotely, the employee experience becomes increasingly critical to employee satisfaction and many other key factors that impact business performance.

The Capgemini Research Institute’s (CRI’s) premium journal for CXOs, Conversations for Tomorrow, covers this topic in its latest edition, The Future of Work Starts Now.

In addition to surveys and monitoring tools, using the right applications is essential to ensure employees have a great experience. The tools that are used – from expense reporting to meetings and collaboration – have a big impact on employees’ perception of their experience of everyday work.

Employee experience technology

Talented employees who are happy and engaged are more productive and less likely to leave. Even before the pandemic, many organizations were looking at ways to better engage their workforce, improve employee retention, and differentiate themselves in the constant battle to attract and retain the best talent.

Previously, organizations had focused on capabilities such as employee self-service, and learning and development to engage employees. But many organizations weren’t gathering feedback across the workforce, listening effectively, and analyzing this information. While many organizations traditionally use annual – and sometimes more regular – reviews and periodic touchpoints, the data from these events was typically more informal or couldn’t be aggregated in a way that could be analyzed. But with modern tools and the right approach, this is now possible.

Challenges implementing employee experience technology

As with the implementation of any new solution, focusing too much on the technology and not enough on the users, business processes and outcomes can lead to the wrong results. When implementing employee experience technology, it is important to focus on the outcomes and to understand what the strategy should be to assimilate and act on employee feedback.

When building employee surveys, it is important to write questions carefully to ensure that they match the strategy and produce the desired outcomes. Often, organizations bring in psychologists and data scientists to help define outcomes and build out the corresponding questions.

It’s also important to consider the needs of everyone who works for the organization, including contingent workers, temps, and other members of the extended workforce. While these types of workers are only with the organization on a temporary basis, many of them spend a significant amount of time working for it. Engaging and including these types of workers – and ensuring that they share as positive an experience as their permanent counterparts – helps boost their productivity and their incorporation into work teams.

Many organizations have business units and departments that operate in a siloed manner, but allowing this disconnected approach to interfere with an employee experience technology deployment will have a dramatic effect on the success of the implementation. Employee experience affects every worker, so cross-collaboration between different business units and departments is important to ensure that employee experience technology can be implemented effectively.

How to improve the employee experience with technology

The employee experience can be improved using modern technology. It may be through a solution that functions as a de facto employee experience platform covering most of the touchpoints in the employee lifecycle using an integrated measurement solution across systems, such as Capgemini’s employee experience index, or it could be technology more focused on employee experience, known to have the most impact, such as collaboration tools.

Here are eight strategies critical to improving employee experience:

1. Implement an employee experience monitoring technology: Technology dedicated to monitoring employee experience will be essential and will directly influence the employee experience strategy. Gathering data and feedback from the workforce and analyzing the aggregated feedback trends over time to measure the employee experience will identify what needs to be changed and help guide the steps to improve it. This could include collecting feedback on topics such as a new policy or application that was rolled out, the existing application landscape or help desk ticket response times. Capgemini’s Employee Experience Index is a comprehensive way of tracking employee experience across an organization.
2. Improve productivity: One of the biggest winners for a business and the bottom line is to improve employee productivity. Using employee experience monitoring technology and implementing organizational, policy, and culture changes based on the feedback received, will help ensure employees are happier, more engaged, and more productive.
3. Digital adoption: If a new solution requires significant effort, such as necessitating a manual or assistance from a colleague, they will lag in adoption by employees. Lack of use, in turn, brings data-integrity issues or motivates employees to seek workarounds that only redistribute the workload elsewhere. Use of a digital adoption solution can help close what Gartner calls the dexterity gap – which is measured between an organization’s digital workplace technology and their employees’ ability to use the technology to its full potential.
4. Employee choice: Giving employees choice, creative freedom, and the digital tools to do their job more effectively is a flexible and powerful way to provide an experience that they will find engaging and rewarding. While creative freedom and choice come from policy and corporate culture decisions, providing employees with the right tools to do their jobs is a technology decision that augments the chances an organization can attract and retain top talent.
5. Review your portfolio of applications: Not every aspect of improving the employee experience involves implementing employee experience technology. Every business application an employee uses affects their experience. These applications can range from common systems, such as time entry and expense management to business-specific applications, such as an inventory or content management system. A recent survey found that 90% of C-suite executives believe their company pays attention to people’s needs when introducing new technology, but only about half (53%) of staff agreed.
6. Gathering feedback from employees, rationalizing the application landscape, ensuring you have the best applications and they are correctly implemented, and integrating the applications across the application landscape will make a significant difference in how employees work. Ensuring a consistent user experience across enterprise applications should be a high priority.
7. Optimize self-services: Self-service capabilities in HR and IT systems provide significant time savings for the business, but the applications must be simple to use. In some cases, an employee may only need to change their personal data, view their pay slip or look up another employee on the organizational chart. Ensuring that the system is easy to use, works well, can be accessed on mobile devices, and has simple workflows that can easily be followed to completion will create easy wins.
8. Enhance information security: Enabling a more dispersed workforce also increases the attack surface for cybercriminals. Ensuring that corporate information remains protected is challenging. Research suggests that 77% of remote employees are using unmanaged and unsecured devices to access corporate systems. Protecting information with a distributed workforce is challenging for IT staff who are already stretched thin.

Finally, a host of collaboration tools have become popular in recent years, enhancing the way employees work together. Tools such as Microsoft Teams and Google Chat & Meet have proven to make working together easier, which is something that employees need, particularly as organizations adjust to a post-pandemic world.

Before signing off, I would recommend that you read the latest edition of our Conversations for Tomorrow – The Future of Work Starts Now, and two of our recently published research reports –The Future of Work, and the Fluid Workforce Revolution, and check out the podcast, End of the office or return to the office?, in this podcast industry experts are discussing the impact of the global pandemic on how and where we work, innovate, and collaborate and impact of COVID-19 in accelerating the disruption.

Gary Taylor

Expert in Digital Transformation and Innovation

I’m passionate about workplace solutions having worked most of my career in this area. I’ve had many different roles throughout my career, ranging from delivery (including design, transformation and support) to pre-sales, sales and portfolio design (including offering architect and offering manager). This has resulted in a well-rounded deep knowledge of workplace solutions which has greatly helped in my understanding when dealing with the issues that affect organizations and the potential solutions that can help.

I enjoy working with technologies that help to make organisations more productive, flexible and secure. I have worked in teams delivering large scale workplace solutions, where we have designed, deployed and migrated to these new services. This has given me first-hand experience of the challenges that occur when businesses try to adopt new technologies. Every enterprise has unique challenges, and each is at a different place in their adoption of workplace technologies. My skills have helped organisations to adopt modern digital workplace services that enable mobility, enhance security and deliver excellent user experiences.

Workplace solutions have the capability to have a massive positive impact on how people work and to greatly improve user productivity. This is an exciting time for workplace solutions with cloud services, the internet of things, analytics, automation and machine learning bringing new approaches to how people interact with technology in the workplace. Everything is changing – from the way enterprises manage users and devices to the way’s users consume their apps and data. The level of insight enterprises will gain in coming years will enable productivity and security enhancements never seen before.
I’m focused on analysing these new developments to help provide enterprises with new services and products that can help them along their digital journey – or for the most advanced organizations to remain at the leading edge of innovation.

This blog highlights the business impacts around the world. Most organizations have responded in three phases:

1. React – organizations jumped into action just to sustain the business. Some countries were hit harder than others because it was not a common practice to work from home (WFH) and the necessary infrastructure was not in place. Other countries had limited capabilities for small numbers of people to work from home. This meant organizations faced challenges that differed from country to country – but the key was to react quickly.
2. Next, organizations needed to remediate the solutions deployed in the react phase. Often, reacting quickly resulted in deploying traditional solutions to sustain the business. Normally, such solutions would have taken months of planning and testing – but the pandemic did not allow this. This resulted in the deployment of vulnerable solutions and increased the number of cyber-attacks. This called for a higher degree of remediation.
3. Now is the time to reinvent remote working and review how your organization works. As the immediate impacts of COVID-19 subside, organizations should take stock and digitally transform. The effects of COVID will be with us for some time, so organizations need to reinvent themselves to allow all employees to work remotely.

Let’s look at the three phases in detail:

React

The uptake of flexible remote work was steadily growing even prior to COVID-19, driven by several factors, including environmental concerns, sustainability goals, and work/life balance initiatives. COVID-19 caused a sudden acceleration of flexibility, meaning that organizations had to react suddenly – at unprecedented scope and speed.

The ability to react and the speed required to do so differed from organization to organization. Those with established infrastructures to support remote working or those that had previously embraced cloud technologies were better placed to expand their existing environments. For others, it was a sudden re-evaluation of their strategies and IT priorities.

Either way, the key question was: “What devices will people be using to access corporate information and applications on so that they could continue to do their work – and how can corporate data be kept secure?” Organizations did what they could. Some committed to large hardware purchases of laptops for remote users (leading to ongoing shortages of hardware endpoints and components). Others sent staff home with armfuls of existing desktop computers from their offices. Still others allowed employees to use their own devices. While these approaches met immediate needs, several additional IT challenges on how to secure, manage, and support remote working accessibility ensued.

Remediate

Many organizations want to move more permanently to a flexible remote working environment (see Gartner reports CFO Survey Reveals 74% Intend to Shift Some Employees to Remote Work Permanently and Workplaces with Shared Seating Will be the New Normal After COVID-19). This makes ensuring the IT strategy is resilient, flexible, and secure more challenging. Balancing remote employee needs for a great, seamless experience against continual and growing cyber threats is tricky. Making remote workers jump through too many security hoops creates a poor experience, but lax security is not an option.

The growing number of cyber-attacks targeted at edge devices since March 2020 has led many organizations to reflect on how they deliver ongoing remote access. Given the steps organizations took during the react phase and the current budgetary and supply challenges of just replacing new hardware, how can the security of a remote/cloud solution be extended to a broad range of endpoint devices such as laptops, desktops, thin clients, and BYOD?

Reinvent

Now is the time to look at how remote working is enabled for your organization. Instead of a traditional transformation, digitally transform your environment using new, secure cloud-based solutions that can grow/shrink on demand.

Many organizations turned to VPN, a staple that allows remote employees to connect to internal resources remotely. However, VPN is showing its age, and has a host of concerns, including security problems, performance issues, scalability issues, and complexity. It was designed for the problems companies faced twenty years ago. Because it secures the channel of communication between the end user and the corporate network, this means you are placing the end-user device (and any cyber threats it may contain) on the internal corporate network alongside other corporate machines.

Digital transformation is a much safer solution in this day and age. So how can you digitally transform? Let’s look at collaboration and corporate applications separately:

• Teams is Microsoft’s cloud-based collaboration solution and part of the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suite of applications. Microsoft was inspired by the challenges raised by COVID-19 and developed Viva as a new employee experience platform and part of their digital workspace offering. Designed to work with Teams, it acts as a portal for both employees and organizations to assist with challenges of working from home. Viva is a little like a traditional intranet, presenting all the essential tools and information from a central location (within Teams).
• To support corporate applications and desktops, many organizations turn to Windows Virtual Desktop. Windows Virtual Desktop is Microsoft’s cloud-based service, which provides virtualized Windows 10 operating systems-based virtualized desktops and applications from the cloud. Alternatives include Amazon WorkSpaces or Google Workspace. IGEL Technology’s solution has over 90+ different technology integrations built into the IGEL Linux-based operating system and optimized to support the growing multimedia and video collaboration technologies that more and more people rely on in these times (see the Capgemini/IGEL Podcast one and two).

Some organizations have already started this digital transformation and have seen productivity gains, simplicity in management, and significant cost savings as they implement solutions that are optimized for cloud-delivered desktops and applications. Those that haven’t, should consider how to reinvent themselves and deliver a great experience for their employees, keep them engaged, and give them a fully connected employee experience.

At Capgemini, we design solutions that help organizations on their digital transformation journey. Our Connected Employee Experience brings new levels of choice and flexibility for employee interactions, engagement, collaboration, and support. We can expedite your journey to building a superb experience with the Connected Experience Framework and offer outstanding collaboration experience’s through our Connected Collaboration solutions and best-in-class virtual applications and desktops, including IGEL options through our  solutions – in addition to many other workspace solutions that can be delivered individually or integrated to meet your requirements.

Gary Taylor

Expert in Digital Transformation and Innovation

I’m passionate about workplace solutions having worked most of my career in this area. I’ve had many different roles throughout my career, ranging from delivery (including design, transformation and support) to pre-sales, sales and portfolio design (including offering architect and offering manager). This has resulted in a well-rounded deep knowledge of workplace solutions which has greatly helped in my understanding when dealing with the issues that affect organizations and the potential solutions that can help.

I enjoy working with technologies that help to make organisations more productive, flexible and secure. I have worked in teams delivering large scale workplace solutions, where we have designed, deployed and migrated to these new services. This has given me first-hand experience of the challenges that occur when businesses try to adopt new technologies. Every enterprise has unique challenges, and each is at a different place in their adoption of workplace technologies. My skills have helped organisations to adopt modern digital workplace services that enable mobility, enhance security and deliver excellent user experiences.

Workplace solutions have the capability to have a massive positive impact on how people work and to greatly improve user productivity. This is an exciting time for workplace solutions with cloud services, the internet of things, analytics, automation and machine learning bringing new approaches to how people interact with technology in the workplace. Everything is changing – from the way enterprises manage users and devices to the way’s users consume their apps and data. The level of insight enterprises will gain in coming years will enable productivity and security enhancements never seen before.
I’m focused on analysing these new developments to help provide enterprises with new services and products that can help them along their digital journey – or for the most advanced organizations to remain at the leading edge of innovation.

Unleashing the full potential of learning

An upskilled and well-trained workforce provides companies with a clear competitive advantage. But while the need for effective learning strategies is clear, few organizations truly prioritize upskilling. Neither do employees make learning a priority in their daily job life. Like a security update notification on your smartphone, everyone knows learning is important, but it is still being de-prioritized and delayed. With increasing virtual ways of working and a fast-paced working environment, employees face multiple barriers to learning, including:

• Endless digital notifications and distractions
• Distributed locations that reduce information sharing
• Divided focus as employees handle multiple projects

Ineffective learning on the individual level can have devastating consequences for an organization’s medium- and long-term competitiveness. Given that an effective learning program takes time, delays today can have knock-on effects for years.

When organizations try to address these challenges with a conventional upskilling program, the results are disappointing. Capgemini Research institute found that feedback on upskilling programs includes responses such as “not fully relevant” (28%), “hard to understand” (18%) and “boring” (18%). Only 25% of employees say their upskilling programs are “relevant and exciting.” What employees need is content that is relevant not only to the organization (read about this in our first blog) but to each employee and their jobs. Learning formats will need to be more engaging, interactive, and seamlessly integrated into daily routines to create a learning experience that unleashes employees’ full potential.

Leveraging the science of learning

Why can you remember song lyrics from decades ago, but not your learning content from last month? Because you were intent on listening to those songs, you were engaged, you were emotionally involved, and you heard these songs on repeat. Neuroscience research shows how each of these factors can be incorporated into an effective learning design, thus giving rise to neuro-learning.

Neuro-learning is based on the ways in which our brains naturally process information in order to foster deeper learning and better retrieval. There are four pillars to neuro-learning:

• Attention: the ability to maintain focus – optimized through short and animated sequences
• Commitment: a learner’s internal drive to master a subject – enhanced by demonstrating relevance and engaging learners’ emotions
• Testing & feedback: the ability to make mistakes and learn from them, especially in contact with others – learners need space to experiment and make mistakes without negative consequences
• Consolidation: the ability to memorize, recall and transfer – primarily driven through repetition in combination with resting moments over longer periods of time

Translating the basics of neuro-learning into learning design

Micro-learning: now more than ever

Micro-learning is a learning trend that leverages all four neuro-learning pillars. This consists of breaking down subjects or skills into small, easily digestible lessons that build knowledge in a given direction. Small packets of information are easier to focus on and engage with than conventional courses (as anyone who’s attended an all-day training can attest). More importantly, by presenting learners with a series of small lessons, micro-learning builds on the power of repetition and incremental challenge. Micro-learning adds just enough new material to continuously guide the learner forward, steadily building skills over time.

Micro-doing: the power of action

To make time for learning is hard, to transfer learnings into practice is even harder. This is where micro-doing comes into play. Micro-doing is easy to visualize in sports, where a coach continuously makes small adjustments to an athlete’s position, guiding them towards peak form. So why not have a digital learning coach as well? Imagine being presented with small learning challenges, suggested learning videos or even digital guidance through a new IT system – all seamlessly integrated in your digital workspace. That way learners actively put skills to use through practice, while being nudged in the right direction.

Gamification: open the league for learning

Gamification infuses learning with fun and emotion, driving both engagement and long-term memory. Learners experience a series of successes, creating lasting motivation throughout the learning experience. The element of competition is also a powerful motivator, especially when learners represent teams, and see how their own success affects their teammates. It also creates a learning culture where failure is not something to be feared, but an integral part of the learning experience.

Blended learning: the right mixture makes the cocktail

Working from home brings challenges, limiting both interpersonal relations and personal communication. Through blended learning, remote work can be turned to an advantage. Participants take online courses at their leisure, discuss through Teams, Slack etc, and then meet up in person to put skills into practice with a far lower time commitment and cost than traditional trainings require. Blended learning affords extra flexibility to employees and to management, who can choose from a vast array of online materials. Combining different online, hybrid and face-to-face formats sends learners on a journey with repeated touchpoints – making learning content stick. The challenge is to design blended learning in a flow that balances guidance and flexibility. The right mixture of online, hybrid and offline learning can vary depending on learning content and target group. In other words, don’t follow an exact recipe – mix & match it to your needs!

No learner-centric experience? No results

What unites the above learning trends is that they put the learner’s needs in focus to create a targeted, personalized and learner type-centric learning experience. Innovative, data-driven technology provides the foundation for this approach. Our next blog will go one step further, discussing the game-changing potential of learning technology to accelerate the learning experience. The distances that workforces need to cover in the next few years are daunting. Fortunately, the tools are waiting.

For more discussion of workplace learning with industry leaders, read our Conversations for Tomorrow.

Co-Authors

Claudia Crummenerl

Expert in Change Management, Culture Change, Digital transformations, HR Transformation, Leadership in the digital age

After 8 years in the automotive industry, Claudia Crummenerl joined Capgemini Invent for their reputation in organizational transformation and change management. The People and Organization teams represent the employee perspective in change projects and support clients in the design and implementation of their transformation.
Claudia is an expert in the people perspective of digital, looking after how leadership in the digital age is evolving, how talents and workforce transform through automation and AI and how to engage with employees during the transformation process. Her projects mainly are in an international context, e.g. rolling out a new sales strategy to over 28 markets or supporting a client in transforming to an agile organization across key European markets. Claudia’s industry expertise lies in the Automotive and Manufacturing sector.
Claudia’s competency areas are on future leadership and talent, organizational dexterity, change management and rollout for large (digital) transformation processes in an international context. During her career, Claudia led several teams of different sizes and over 12 years of leadership experience in industry and consulting.
With Capgemini Invent’s strategic focus on Digital Transformation, Claudia has focusing her thought leadership on how digital is transforming leadership, workforce and organizations. She has been a co-author for the reputed German language “Change Management Study” in 2012, 2015 and 2017. Since 2017, Claudia has contributed to Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute research and is one of the global spokespersons for the research.
Selected references:
For an energy company with global/European focus, Claudia was responsible for building a Digital Transformation Office which included building digital skills, change management, digital KPIs and portfolio management.
For a global automotive company, Claudia was the project lead for change management of a global sales strategy rollout. Being responsible for the central change support, she focused on the integration of the different sub-projects and the development and iteration of a global implementation approach.

The unprecedented disruption unleashed by COVID-19 is among the numerous events sparking C-suite executives, corporate boards, and financial firms to pick a lane when it comes to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. Recently, many of us have stepped back and considered our influence and dependence on the environment and society, and how organizations regard stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and communities. It’s about diversity and equity across all levels of business.

Less than a year ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published a whitepaper outlining universal ESG metrics to help companies measure stakeholder capitalism. Then, this past January, more than 60 top global business leaders committed to Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics focused on people, planet, prosperity, and governance. The metrics include 21 universal, comparable disclosures, considered critical for business, society, and the planet. All companies, regardless of industry or region, can leverage these metrics to benchmark their sustainability efforts, improve decision making, and enhance transparency and accountability.

Investors, stakeholders, and consumers are loud and clear about wanting corporations to prioritize sustainability and ethical impact; and tone-deaf responses may fuel stakeholder abandonment. Organizations and nations that ignore sustainability risk market skepticism and diminished investor interest and capital infusion. By contrast, transparency and ESG champions are attracting investment, including higher-quality and more long-term capital.

Over the last few years, ESG standards have been influencing corporate decisions and gaining momentum through better operational performance and risk mitigation. A joint study by the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business and Rockefeller Asset Management examined the relationship between ESG activities and financial performance and found that corporate sustainability initiatives drive better financial performance due to mediating factors such as improved risk management and more innovation.

High ESG-rated companies have lower capital costs, higher valuations, are less vulnerable to systemic risks, and are more profitable. Not surprisingly, in 2020 ESG investing accounted for one out of every four dollars under professional management in the United States and one out of every two dollars in Europe. Many firms now seek a carefully orchestrated strategic balance between financial, social, and environmental priorities to support long-term business success.

The growing role of financial institutions

Responsible banking and skillful ESG management can improve risk-adjusted returns, enhance reputation, spark commercial opportunities, mitigate portfolio risks, and improve market positions and value, according to the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Banking. This behavior is all the more critical for commercial banks involved in lending and driving corporate clients’ business operations.

An ESG yardstick can help banks qualify commercial loan candidates and decide which client relationships to cultivate or dissolve. Financial institutions that run a significant asset management business may face complex ESG risks and opportunities.

A post-pandemic survey by Deutsche Bank revealed that more than half of private-banking clients now believe ESG investing can mitigate risks, while 74% said that COVID-19 made them realize the importance of risk management. The role of banks and environmental, social, and governance standards intersect during loan provision, financing of or investment in projects, and advice to issuers of securities.

• Bank of America tripled its environmental financing goal to reach USD1 trillion by 2030 to boost its commitment to a sustainable future.
• Goldman Sachsmerchant-banking division plans to form a sustainable investing group as part of its 10-year commitment to pump $750 billion in sustainable financing, investing, and advisory activities.
• Citi’s five-year 2025 Sustainable Progress Strategy includes a USD250 billion environmental goal to finance and facilitate global climate solutions.

The pandemic made all things more visible

As the initial waves of COVID-19 impact wane, ESG is on the radar of investors, regulators, and banks. Awareness will surely continue given the significant risk concerns (such as climate change) that ESG has thrust into the spotlight – all potential threats for banks and the financial system broadly.

Many banks have begun to integrate sustainability into their core businesses by incorporating ESG considerations into risk management processes, product design, purpose statements, and long-term strategies. The pandemic illustrated the gravity of sustainability, such as the need for continuity planning and disaster preparedness.

Consumers and businesses are more mindful of sustainable investments

Not only did COVID-19 popularize savings and safe instruments, Capgemini’s Consumer Behavior survey indicates that investors increasingly prefer assets with a societal impact, such as green bonds. At the height of the pandemic, the percentage of consumers who said they were interested in investing in assets with a positive social impact within six to nine months grew from 31% (before the outbreak) to 39%, despite potential for lower returns.

Increasingly, ESG issues are taking center stage as institutional investors exert their influence and channel more funds to investments that deliver measurable impact along with improved long-term financial returns. A Bloomberg Intelligence Report predicts that global ESG assets will exceed USD53 trillion by 2025, accounting for ~a third of total projected assets under management − USD140.5 trillion.

The way forward: A cultural shift to organizational ESG vision

These days, commercial banks are compelled to assess borrowers based on ESG criteria to filter out those with practices that may not be sustainable. Strategic lenders are integrating resources across credit platforms to measure ESG factors.

Demand for ESG integration is accelerating, which means laggards may run out of time to to thoughtfully implement appropriate structure, leadership, and skills to embed organizational ESG principles.

The planet’s future depends on us. The question is, are financial institutions considering the ESG impact of their clients’ business models?

Anirban Bose

Expert in Consulting, IT Services, Outsourcing, Payment solutions

Anirban Bose joined the Capgemini Group Management Board in January 2018 as Chief Executive Officer of Capgemini’s Financial Services Global Business Unit, as well as Capgemini’s LatAm operations.
Most recently, Bose led Capgemini’s Global Banking and Capital markets business, which serves 12 of the world’s top-15 banking and financial services organizations with teams spread across North America, Latin America, Europe, and APAC.
Working from Capgemini’s Rosemont office, Bose has more than 20 years of experience in consulting, IT services, outsourcing, and the creation of consumer and payments’ technology innovation for leading global financial institutions.

While digital has come far, many organizations still struggle with unhappy employees and customers, slow decision-making, and too many employees focusing on repetitive, manual tasks. Unfortunately, order-to-cash (O2C) processes have not escaped this either. Data, systems, and processes remain stubbornly disconnected from one another – leading to a rapid increase in exceptions, higher costs, and revenue loss.

Capgemini’s integrated, AI-enabled O2C solution leverages Boomi’s data integration platform to bring orchestrated data, self-service, and AI-powered processing, insights, and analytics to the O2C process. This augments how Mary, a collections analyst, Rajesh, a disputes analyst, and Ashley, their manager complete their cash and collections tasks, enabling them to deliver an enhanced, frictionless customer experience.

Consolidating O2C the easy way

Let’s start with Mary – a hard-working collections analyst. Mary used to spend time reviewing her accounts, calling and emailing customers to collect cash – hoping they paid on time so she could achieve her targets. Now, with the help of our AI-enabled O2C solution Mary completes more important tasks – like helping resolve challenging issues with the business teams, or improving customer experience so they buy more products and services.

Her customers engage with her via self-service portals, interactive digital statements, and other channels. They also buy more because they experience fewer exceptions and invoice issues. Our next-gen O2C solution helps to connect the dots here – enabling Mary to solve her customer’s problems, forecast her month-end collections target, and recommend different approaches to improve her customers’ days sales outstanding.

O2C dispute? No problem…

Rajesh is an O2C disputes analyst. Because our solution leverages customer data from across core systems, customer and bank portals, and digital concierge systems to solve dispute and collections issues, Rajesh can now concentrate on higher-value tasks such as root cause analysis and complex business problems.

For example, next-gen, AI-enabled O2C technology enables Rajesh to orchestrate data to solve tax and pricing disputes. This means he now only needs to focus on the final steps or interactions of this process with his customers and sales team – which gives him more time to eliminate exceptions by improving this process overall.

Order-to-cash visibility at your fingertips

Finally, there’s Ashley – Mary and Rajesh’s manager. Our AI-enabled O2C solution gives Ashley visibility over her customers’ end-to-end O2C process. It also gives her a view of her team’s expected performance and recommendations on improving their performance. Because our solution consolidates real-time data from all systems into one place, Ashley can now see transactions as they’re solved in real time, in addition to any trends that might impact results – helping her to take action to optimize outcomes quickly.

At the heart of our next-gen O2C solution, Boomi’s intelligent, cloud-based platform enables Mary, Rajesh, and Ashley to complete their daily tasks more efficiently by giving them the information they need, when they need it. By enabling enterprises to integrate and orchestrate services and manage workflows, anywhere – on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge, Boomi helps seamlessly connect device and application data to accelerate business improvements and transform operations.

This makes Mary, Rajesh, and Ashley happier, their customers happier, and well, the world of finance a better place.

Watch a video (scroll down to the AI.Receivables section) to learn how Capgemini’s AI.Receivables – enabled by Boomi – helps Mary, Rajesh, and Ashley deliver frictionless, next-generation order-to-cash.

To understand how AI.Receivables can make Frictionless Finance a reality for your organization, contact: divya.bhaskaran@capgemini.com  

Divya Turner is the current global process owner for order-to-cash (O2C), the product owner for AI. Receivables, and has over 15 years of experience in driving innovation in O2C.

Why organizations must rethink learning now

The coming change will divide companies into two groups: those that prepared, and those that miss out on the greatest opportunities of our day. As the pace and scale of change gain momentum in today’s workplace, new and more effective approaches to re- and upskilling are required. Technologies such as AI and automation are disrupting business models and methodologies, and the augmented workforce is becoming the norm. At the same time, the increasing prevalence of remote work, the shift towards more agile ways of working and the transformation from line to project organizations all require new skills from employees. Organizations that fail to leverage the combined strengths of technology and human ingenuity will fall further and further behind.

The future will belong to the organizations that effectively upskill their workforces today. To quote from the 2021 edition of Conversations for Tomorrow, “Those companies that can shift their approach to learning and build a culture that prizes upskilling will enjoy a significant advantage.“ Is your organization leaving your workers to fend for themselves in unfamiliar spaces, or giving them the skills to thrive in new environments? Read our blog series to learn how to create the future of learning – to prepare and empower your people for future challenges.

Meeting the future head-on

The business necessity of learning is gaining recognition by company leaders. No longer a side project for HR, re- and upskilling has made its way into the board room, as noticeable in conversations with C-level executives. But even when company leaders recognize the need for re- and upskilling, many are stalled on the runway. According to a study by the Capgemini Research Institute, only 56% of organizations are taking adequate steps to adapt their employees’ skills to the changes brought by automation – at a time when learning is more important than ever. To meet today’s challenges, learning needs to be reimagined from the ground up, and that starts with a clear and effective learning strategy.

Identifying the skills that create customer value

The conventional way to design a learning strategy consists of identifying skill gaps and finding training materials to fill those spaces. However, learning isn’t just a tool to fill gaps, it’s a strategic tool to achieve business success. Therefore, we need to take a step back and consider something that is being left out of the frame but makes a crucial difference – the customers. Discovering what value your customers are looking for makes it possible to precisely identify what new skills will enable your organization to deliver that value. Consider whether evolving customer needs and technological advances may have changed your customers’ priorities, and how that impacts the required skill in your organization.

Assessing what the future requires from your workforce

The seismic technological changes that are underway also introduce a host of new competencies that will be needed to perform the jobs of the future. To gain a deeper understanding of the impact of coming technologies, and the precise skills employees will need to gain, a technological impact assessment reveals the current state of your workforce, the influence of current and coming technologies on job roles and competencies, and what skills will be required to bridge gaps. It also reveals potential skilling pathways that help prepare employees for new roles. Together with an examination of customer needs, the information acquired through a technological impact assessment provides the foundation for your employee skilling strategy.

Designing an employee-centric learning strategy

Once target skills have been identified, it’s time to figure out how to create a learning experience that fits your workforce’s specific needs. Only when employees regard learning content and design as relevant and engaging does effective learning take place. However, according to our study, for today’s upskilling programs 28% of senior executives receive feedback such as “not fully relevant.” Training employees in subjects they already know starts the learning experience with the message that management doesn’t understand workers, their roles or their needs: “If my boss thinks I need this, he can’t possibly know what I do all day.” However, starting at too high a level leaves participants behind. The solution is to involve employees in the conversation from the very start.

To design your learning strategy, consider your target groups, and what learning preferences and possibilities they may have. Younger generations for example – being used to seamless digital experiences, as user-friendly as Amazon, as engaging as Netflix – arrive at the workplace with similar expectations when it comes to learning offers. Blue-collar workers may require more hands-on training facilitated by learning technology such as AR. Utilizing co-creation approaches and centering the learner here is essential.

Involving the whole organization

An effective learning organization is organized holistically to encourage learning at every level. Therefore, designing and implementing a learning strategy can no longer be the traditional top-down approach of defining what and how to learn – the skill requirements of today are too intricate and fast-changing. Instead, top management’s role is to align learning strategy with general corporate strategy and to set direction. HR can support learning by building communities, organizing required technological resources (e.g. learning experience platforms) and creating a culture of learning. But the place where most of the actual learning occurs is at the level of individual employees and their direct managers.

A decentralized learning structure is the only way to manage change at this scale. In the same way that mid-level managers cannot control every adjustment or foresee every change on a production floor, the precise learning needs of each employee must be addressed individually. Combining clear direction from upper management, comprehensive support from HR and individual consideration from on-the-ground managers creates the dynamic environment where learning thrives.

Building the workforce of the future

Transforming into a learning organization brings quantifiable gains. New joiners are ready to work faster. Time to competency is reduced. New projects launch sooner. Employees commit fewer errors, innovate more freely and come up with more time-saving and resource-saving solutions. Employee motivation and satisfaction is higher, leading to better employee retention und ultimately saving costs. According to the Capgemini Research Institute, upskilling can help a 50,000-strong organization save $278 million over three years. And when a holistic culture of learning takes hold, the benefits are lasting.

Organizations rely upon a skilled workforce to effectively adapt to and prepare for changing times. Knowing what customers and employees want, as well as assessing how technology impacts the workforce, forms the basis of a future-ready learning strategy. In our next blog, we’ll examine how to implement that strategy and design a best-in-class learning experience that motivates and engages people, and sets your organization on the path for continuous forward transformation.

Johann Zillmann

Expert in Digital HR, Strategy and Transformation

I am leading Digital HR at Capgemini Invent Switzerland. I support CHROs and their HR leadership teams in reinventing HR – from strategy development, operating models designs to IT landscape evolutions. In addition, I  help HR and functional leads to plan and execute workforce transformations by applying process excellence, automation, up- and reskilling as well as market-leading talent acquisition, shoring and sourcing practices.
I combine more than 15 years of HR line and consulting experience with deep knowledge in maturing and emerging technologies. After having been with SAP and Accenture as well as supporting companies of all sizes across almost all industries in multiple European countries, I joined Capgemini in 2020. Being an “New Work” ambassador and passionate trainer, I educated more than 500 professionals in design thinking, innovation and agile ways of working.

If it is properly controlled and governed, citizen development can solve the desperate shortage of dev resources. Picture this: your people have a great idea to accelerate how you deliver on new business requirements. All you need to make it happen is some professional developers. Easy, right? Unfortunately, not. Finding highly skilled developers in the current marketplace is a challenge for every enterprise and in every vertical. Sadly, you aren’t the only business in the world with an IT need … and for low-stakes, non-critical business processes, the waiting list is especially long. So, this is where citizen development comes to the rescue.

“a ready-to-go army – people who don’t need business analysts to translate what the business requirements are, because they are the business requirement!”

Of course, we need to be careful to not over-romanticize the solution. There are legitimate concerns about how you keep control when you let the business into the sacred realms of IT.  However, they need to be put into context; with strong governance financial services, organizations have a ready-to-go army of dev resources waiting to be unleashed – people who don’t need business analysts to translate what the business requirements are, because they are the business requirement!

How it can work

Done well, this is about empowering your employees, safely, to drive business forward. Citizen development enables all layers of your organization to create their own apps – without needing in-depth IT knowledge. They are given access to the right tool sets to create individual application experiences within a team that’s governed by experienced IT oversight. A shared IT backlog burden between business and IT can be shrunk at speed, by using each other’s knowledge to close the gap. Business users no longer need to rely on their “standard” office tools, but can also create the tools they need without waiting for IT to help them:

• To keep control, we provide a low-code center of excellence (CoE) enablement team to market your low code environment within the organization in a federated model, while a centralized team handles value enabling and, on the platform, multiple business and IT teams can focuses just on delivering value.
• The solution also unlocks the potential of any platform to become rapid by promoting reuse. Keeping the use case for the rapid application development in place is key to determining the architectural agility of your organization.

What you’re going to see happening

The gap between business and IT closing

By sharing the IT backlog burden between business and IT, you can start using each other’s knowledge to keep up the application creation process and improve business productivity – enabling IT to really focus on the core business critical systems for financial services firms.

An increase in company agility

The future is here. Big tech players are jumping on the bandwagon, so it’s easy to integrate with their existing IT landscape. By removing the dependency with IT, businesses can be agile to the situation and adopt quick changes to shorten the time to value.

Your workforce empowered

Today’s workforce is tired of constraint. They love freedom and agility, and they have untapped skills to deploy that will improve their own job satisfaction. By giving them the freedom to realize their great ideas, you empower them to empower your organization.

Be in control

With a community of expertise (CoE) structure you are in full control. A CoE guides your citizen developers to follow the platform guardrails, and coaches them to reuse existing components to ensure quality and integrity.

Be bold: adopt citizen development

At Capgemini, we have consultants who are masters on various low-code platforms. We do a free assessment and advise you on the right tool set based on your comfort level and preferences.

Instead of looking at citizen development as just a productivity enhancer, we think it’s about unlocking your people and your business to enjoy the full potential of rapid application development.

It’s time for a (r)evolution

By implementing a culture of citizen development, you can get the future you want and throw off the constraints imposed by scarcity of development resources. By giving your users, and therefore your business, tools to create their own agile workspace, you do much more. In short, it’s time for a (r)evolution.