Work Intelligence Can Help Your Organization Manage Change the Healthy Way
Only a third of the way into this decade, organizations have already had to adapt constantly — from a rapidly changing operational environment via a pandemic to one where shifting sands of employment and money have eroded the certainties of the previous ten years. We’ve moved from actively trying to transform our organizations to having that transformation forced upon us.
Healthy Organizations — but How?
We can judge the health of our organizations by the state of our business processes — not only those within, but also those that reach outward to partners, suppliers and customers. That health affects employees' ability to work and, more importantly, to live successfully. Therefore, it is vital for leaders to understand how those processes work so they can be tuned to meet everyone's needs and they can be sure to run rapidly, with true efficacy.
The trends that we have observed through our work at Deep Analysis indicate that the coalescence of new and established technologies can, when applied holistically, provide insights that enable initial changes in how organizations work and power ongoing operationalization to ensure continued monitoring of process health. This is not digital transformation, but rather digital augmentation. Instead of automatically thinking of automation first, organizations should think about a broader palette of ways to approach change. This positions their workforce more centrally in managing process health.
Work Intelligence: What Is the Market and What Is It Doing?
In our January 2023 report, Work Intelligence: Improving Processes By Balancing Human Intelligence And AI, we outlined how we saw that approach and the technological approach that would support it as an emerging trend. In the accompanying analyst note, we wrote, "Work Intelligence can provide organizations a path towards process analysis, augmentation and improvement, through an equal partnership between human and machine intelligence."
We have just released our comprehensive Work Intelligence: Market Analysis 2023-2028, further reinforcing this belief. This market analysis details the dynamics and movement of the Work Intelligence market at large — expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.6%, from $13.5 billion to $22.5 billion, during the analyzed timeframe — and the identified sub-markets within: mining intelligence, programmatics, task execution and work engines. Each sub-market shows distinct and separate growth characteristics. Work Intelligence is already a significant market and one projected to grow at a healthy and sustainable rate in the measurable medium term.
Diversion of Energy, Existing Technology
The existing market footprint is large because Work Intelligence encompasses the use and ongoing reuse of well-established business process management (BPM) tooling. This sub-market is growing much less quickly than the rest of the Work Intelligence market, at an estimated 2.41% CAGR across the analysis time frame. A prior decade of digital transformation did little to unseat this foundational technology. Instead, the technologies we see coexisting and interoperating with it will grow significantly faster — albeit from a smaller base. These range from platforms that make sense of existing processes and suggest enhancements, to those that allow simple coding, to those that coordinate the automation of identical, repetitive tasks. Growth for these sub-markets ranges from 10.7% to over 31% in that same timeframe.
Our discussions with organizations and suppliers alike tell us that in 2023 there is little appetite for the big, transformative projects we might have seen sponsored in the previous decade. Instead, there is an ethos of zero budgeting. You want to spend money? First, you have to generate that money — this, along with an eye on reducing the number of overall suppliers retained.
3 Big Opportunities (and One Big Threat)
Within this market dynamic, there are several opportunities for organizations and those who supply them; the report details these. Here, though, are three opportunities and a parallel threat that we discovered from our analysis:
Learning Opportunities
Opportunity: Insight at Scale Without Many of the Traditional Data Challenges
Previous generations of process analysis have required significant data wrangling and integration work to gather the information needed to understand processes. The emerging generation of Work Intelligence platforms can often assemble their own data collection, normalization and analysis without that overhead, providing a significantly reduced time from deployment to value.
Opportunity: Engagement Across the Organization; Workforce in the Loop
From those tools of analysis that often do not require data wrangling to platforms that allow for processes to be built and deployed without code, the ability to include larger groups of the workforce within the entire lifecycle and operation of Work Intelligence ensures that a far greater range of insights can be included from the get-go. Balancing organizational knowledge with artificial intelligence insight — "workforce in the loop" — provides a more inclusive team to help maintain process health.
Opportunity: We Know What Has an Impact and What Does Not
One of the many ultimate benefits of Work Intelligence is that it provides real insight into what impacts and adds value to the organization's operation. This can be from within the workforce — specific teams or geographies — or from within the IT landscape. Work Intelligence provides understanding from the desktop activity through to high-volume automation and workflow, meaning that the roles of each in delivering value can be more simply and visually analyzed.
Threat: We Know What We Use and What We Don't … so Prove Your Value!
In an environment where organizations are already looking to reduce suppliers to generate money to spend elsewhere, the counterpoint incumbent suppliers must be aware that the insights that Work Intelligence offers can lay bare where existing systems do not provide a value according to their costs. Ensuring your value to your customers — always vital — has become more operationally focused. Seats that are rarely active, licenses that have usage ceilings way above their active use and applications that are never used can all be much more easily identified and eliminated from renewals.
Healthy organizations, here’s how
When we first started to whiteboard what became Work Intelligence, one of our primary aims was finding a way to ensure organizational health that was technologically enabled but human in scale. The result is a set of principles that establishes the need to balance human intelligence alongside artificial intelligence in a way that allows technological reuse and analysis designed to augment rather than transform our organizations. In a healthy and steadily growing market, Work Intelligence defines the direction of travel for organizational processes, the technology surrounding them for the coming decade and its collection of challenges.
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About the Author
Matt has worked in the software industry for near-30 years, first as a developer, later as a consultant. He's currently a lead analyst on AI applications for Deep Analysis.
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