Dark side of the moon: The $10B visibility challenge facing F500 enterprises

Organizations need visibility into the interactions between people and software to make better data-backed decisions—in the same way they need visibility throughout their enterprise platforms, operations, or supply chains.

Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst at HFS Research, spoke with Samson David, CEO, Soroco, at our recent HFS SuperSummit in New York. Soroco has moved from a startup and an HFS Hot Vendor to dozens of patents, a process intelligence company with a global presence, and over 100 customers, including 20 of the Fortune 500.

Exhibit 1: Phil Fersht (left) interviews Soroco CEO Samson David at the HFS Super Summit

Source: HFS Super Summit, 2022

Phil: I know we’re going to talk about visibility into systems—but can we just start by trying to demystify transformation and enterprise goals, as you currently see them?

Samson: Over the last several months, I have met more than 100 customers in person, and irrespective of the industry or region they come from, they are focused on four things:

• Growing their revenues
• Optimizing costs
• Delivering a stellar experience to their customers and employees and the ecosystem
• Managing risk and compliance

All of these companies are running transformation programs that are well-funded but if you look at McKinsey and Bain’s study reports – 70% of these transformation programs do not deliver the expected results. Our hypothesis is that they have a significant blind spot. I call that blind spot the “dark side of the moon.”

A study from Harvard Business Review that polled multiple F500 companies found that users spend 60% of the time outside systems of record working on documents, emails, productivity, or custom apps. In doing so, users generate a massive dataset of information. This dataset is complex, unstructured, undocumented, and ubiquitous and touches every application, team, process, and customer.

Another study by Soroco published in HBR found that in most F500 firms, the average user spends five weeks per year toggling between applications – costing an average F500 firm roughly $25M per year. Add them all up and that’s $10B from all F500 firms for effort spent just toggling between apps.

Phil: What’s the solution? I assume it’s not just to throw more automation and AI at the problem?

Samson: Usually, organizations throw people at the problem to act as “glue or middleware” to connect data and context between these applications while the root cause remains unaddressed. It is only when you understand the connection between toggling and employee experience (EX) all the way through systems— you see it’s not just about productivity any longer— it’s an enterprise empathy challenge.

To build a credible automation pipeline, they need to understand the action, sequences of those actions, the variances in those actions, effort, context around those actions and impact. Once you have all of these elements– that is where you start building an automation pipeline.

We have created an underlying graph with millions of nodes and edges, and we call it the work graph. This technology is very similar to what Google has done with its Maps.

The work graph has millions of nodes and edges and captures metadata around actions, sequences, effort, variations, context, and impact. With this data, we can tell the organization’s as-is processes, how the business is being run – different variations that happen. It uncovers hotspots within those variations, areas of friction and generates an automation pipeline for organizations at a very detailed and actionable level.

Phil: How does the Soroco ecosystem tie all this together? Any good customer examples?

Samson: At Soroco, the partnership ecosystem is important to us. We look at it from three dimensions. If you look at services, partners– we started our partnership journey with them last year and have signed up more than 50+ partners. We have invested significantly in the Soroco Academy – about 325 people trained already and a lot more getting trained by our partners.

The second is on products – we have got a technology partnership with Celonis. For example, Celonis’ prime strength is looking at logs and creating magical insights. Our dataset is on the other side – looking at how people interact with software and customers find this combination useful. Many of our customers use both Celonis and Soroco Scout^TM. We have got technology partnerships with AutomationAnywhere, UiPath, and BluePrism.

Lastly, we are working closely with some of our customers. For example, with an investment bank, we are co-creating their observability plane.

Phil: It’s good to see that customer examples and outcomes are the bottom lines of all this… and that there’s a clear link to the ecosystem… thanks, Samson!