Soroco’s Scout work graphs can streamline operations, but are organizations ready for it?

The Situation: Process intelligence vendor Soroco is doing something different with its technology in this fast-growing software category. Instead of just improving data mining and processing, it contextualizes data usage to drive change programs for how work gets done through its Scout platform and “work graphs,” connected sequences of steps teams execute to do work.

Soroco was founded in 2014 as a category-agnostic process intelligence company by Harvard, MIT, and CMU graduates; it won its first Fortune 500 client in 2015.

Soroco identified the need for an efficient way to manage how teams work

Soroco observed that the biggest challenges many digital initiatives encounter include blindly automating processes without fully understanding them, streamlining work in hybrid environments, one-off artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) consulting gigs rather than partnerships, an absence of enterprise metrics, and only relying on log file analysis for understanding work.

Soroco devised a solution that considered enterprise change programs as a whole and developed the idea of a “work graph.” According to Soroco, a work graph is a real-time, detailed, and scalable map of your teams’ digital journey across 1000s of documents, and 100s of applications they use, to get work done. It lies at the intersection of people, work, and technology and enables teams to collaborate and work more effectively. It maintains employees’ privacy and addresses inefficient work across organizations.

Soroco’s Scout platform aims to improve employees and teams’ workday management across organizations

Scout helps clients stitch fragmented tasks into end-to-end process discovery journeys using a combination of process mining and discovery techniques, primarily human-machine interaction data supplemented by techniques like log files in the future. The company combines both capabilities for a comprehensive picture of what people do during their workdays. Post process discovery, Soroco uses the information to create data-driven recommendations to help clients act with team-level recommendations for training, automation opportunities, and process simplification. All these use cases of the work graph data are powered beneath by SODA – Scout Open Data Architecture, a set of APIs and services to access the underlying work graph.

Exhibit 1: Scout uses the work graph to drive a software-driven continuous improvement loop, from discovery to realization

Source: Soroco, 2022

Soroco’s Harvard Business Review (HBR) write-up’s point to a larger enterprise challenge in managing change—during the pandemic, change has been about managing teamwork in hybrid working environments

In a joint perspective published in HBR by researchers there and Soroco 187 individuals across six Fortune 500 companies were observed to understand the patterns and implications of team overlap during remote work. All these workers previously had well-defined office locations and office hours; however, post-COVID, virtual work has changed work styles substantially. Researchers found that overlap is important to consider when developing new norms for remote and hybrid work. However, we need to be cognizant that this is not a simple proposition.

Another HBR article published by Soroco in collaboration with researchers at Harvard Business School and Wharton highlights how managers across four Fortune 500 Soroco clients were largely unaware of their teams’ activities. There was a work-recall gap in most cases and using machine learning in different firms helped managers gain insight into how teams spent their time doing work, thus reducing the manager’s work recall gap.

Soroco clients are asking for a variety of results. They want help gaining visibility on employees’ work, attributing effort, and reducing work to plug the talent drain, increase decision velocity, speed last-mile turn around, and reduce effort by potentially 30% to 70%.

Technologies like Soroco’s Scout can surface useful data points that operations and transformation leaders can get behind when driving specific projects. But using work graphs to dynamically track and manage multiple change programs requires a mindset shift. Today’s reality for many organizations includes siloed insights and data and a race to achieve efficiency above all else.

The Bottom Line: Soroco’s work graph platform, Scout, is expected to be a valuable addition for organizations facing the downside of dealing with remote work if enterprise leaders understand how to use it to drive change.

Remote work is here to stay, and to get the best out of your people, HBR and Soroco suggest there should be times of team overlap and simple strategies for dealing with the cons of remote work. In this context, Scout, Soroco’s work graph platform, can possibly pave the way to better collaboration across teams if the end users are bought in and the business stakeholders understand the benefits over what competition is offering and prioritize the adoption of a change mindset.