I have been pushing software vendors to deliver vertical operational books of record in the cloud - for utilities, retail etc. There are plenty of horizontal books of record -Workday for employee data, Salesforce for customer data, ServiceNow for service ticket data etc. But as I learned from a recent briefing by Workfront, there is space for at least one more horizontal book of record - that for "work". I had previously reviewed CEO Alex Shootman's book "Done Right" and knew they were focused on making work more enjoyable and productive.
Steve ZoBell, Chief Product & Technology Officer, described to me the problem they are helping solve:
"Work happens in a very ad hoc way today. Strategy is not aligning with execution in companies. Many times, company leaders don't realize that the most important work isn't being prioritized. They have no visibility into what is happening, who is working on what, what the deadlines are and if the work is being completed.
Much of this happens because every single enterprise is reinventing process. But it is worse than that. It's every department, every team reinventing the process over and over, resulting in them working harder than they have before, but they don't feel like they're being effective.
There is a study that says the average worker only spends 39% of their day working on the job they were hired to do. That's just a travesty. We need a system which can measure anything and see everything, providing complete visibility. This is the value that we are bringing to customers who are utilizing Workfront as an operational system of record for work."
The graph below shows the breadth of Workfront’s enterprise coverage.
An example of enterprise wide visibility to work comes from one of their customers, a global real estate company. 150+ teams composed of over 6,000 associates are doing tasks like building inspections and refurbishment projects, which are all managed within Workfront. It's well beyond that traditional notion of projects and portfolio management.
Under NDA they shared examples of big brand companies where they "landed and expanded" - start off with a specific work area, and increasingly expand to other areas, particularly those involving knowledge workers.
They actually do better with creative work at digital agencies or marketing departments where by definition, work can be spontaneous, even chaotic. Below is a graph on some of the activities they help organize in a Marketing function.
I am going to meet some of their customers in the next few weeks and look forward to learning more use cases and how Workfront "lands and expands".
Image Credit - Workfront
