Beyond intranets: LumApps’ take on the future of DEX

Episode 142: Beyond intranets: LumApps’ take on the future of DEX

[00:00:04.200] – Sean Winter

Whether it’s everything from learning management to technology services, employee services, workforce management, tasks, etcetera, it’s all common stuff. But I think that’s super interesting to basically, the way we’re thinking about this is there are a series of core applications that any employee needs to get work done. We’re not saying those are good or bad. We’re saying, in fact, all of those pretty much do certain things better than what we would do on our own. The beauty of an intranet being the true kind of hub or digital headquarters for these actions is that the content is there and the content could be anything from who are the people I need to work with to get this done? How do I get it done? What’s the policy and procedure to get it done? How can I learn about X, Y and Z? How does my work tie up through my organization to my company’s goals? All of this traditionally exists in an intranet, so I could learn about work.

[00:01:01.010] – Nancy Goebel

In this episode of Digital Workplace Impact, I chatted with a longtime friend and industry colleague, Sean Winter. Sean is the general manager at LumApps, North America. In addition to reminiscing about our shared history in industry, we delved into the evolution of intranets and digital workplaces. We also talked about how digital employee experience platforms like LumApps are solving for digital friction by creating seamless, personalized and integrated experiences. We talked about that with a few chapters of DEX book, learn, connect and share, do and think. Sean offers both thoughtful insights and a little bit of future gazing, hallmarked by continuous learning, AI enabled coaching, data driven insights and more. Sean also shared some practical advice for digital workplace leaders and their teams. This is Nancy Goebel, your host and DWG’s Chief Executive. Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you, as always, by Digital Workplace Group. Join me now in conversation with Sean Winter. Happy listening.

[00:02:28.370] – Nancy Goebel

Sean. What could I say? But welcome, welcome, welcome to the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio.

[00:02:36.170] – Sean Winter

Well, thank you, Nancy. I’m happy to be here. It’s good to see you as always.

[00:02:39.630] – Nancy Goebel

Same here. And I have to say I was particularly excited about coming together for a chat because of course we have quite a lot of history between us, not only having collaborated on a number of activities over the years, but of course we’re also kindred spirits who have spent a lot of time in the practitioner seats before moving into our present day roles. And we’ve seen quite a lot of change in industry from the birth of intranets to the digital workplace and of course have since moved into the age of AI and everything that it means from hype to progress and points in between early days now, I just thought it would be kind of interesting to get a little bit of perspective from you on some of the fun highlights from that reel as a starting point for today’s conversation. I know we’ve talked about as an industry, intranets are dead. Long live intranets.

[00:03:56.000] – Sean Winter

Definitely a market with a PR problem at times, that’s for sure.

[00:03:59.180] – Nancy Goebel

Exactly. And so when you stop and think a little bit about the course of our history together, what are some shining moments for you?

[00:04:10.540] – Sean Winter

First of all, it’s great to see you. I always enjoy seeing you and catching up. I know we have a, a lot of, lot in common and I think if we think back to, I don’t know, it’s probably about, what, 16, 17, 18 years now in terms of this intranet to Enterprise 2.0, to ESNs to digital workplace to employee experience platforms, this sort of journey, I like to reflect into it just in terms of how I actually got into this line of work. And it was sort of accidental. And I know there are a lot of practitioners, or ex practitioners in this space that probably had a more specific path in mind in terms of changing the way people work. Mine was more selfish in that I worked for a very large financial services company. I like to have absolutely nothing negative to say about it, met a lot of fantastic people there, and worked my way from sort of an analyst type of career path into a web design career path, kind of by accident. Growing up, I. I was in a lot of musical bands and you had to make your own posters and walk around town and staple them to everything you could staple them to.

[00:05:16.620] – Sean Winter

So I had a long history of sort of playing around in Photoshop and eventually got into understanding HTML and CSS and a bunch of coding. And so I made this sort of massive career change within this company and the project I was put on was being the front end designer encoder for a new company portal, basically an intranet. And I love this. I played all day writing code, designing things, building out these, what I thought at the time were beautiful, effective, engaging websites for the company, for people to use internally. I was not overly passionate about it being an internal versus an external project. I just loved designing things and writing code and I loved it so much that I wanted to do it all day. And as I. I guess I was good enough at it that I started to work my way up the company and found myself a lot less time to actually do the work that I liked to do as of what happens. So now, instead of writing code for 8 hours a day, which at the time was like all I wanted to do. I was freelancing on the weekends, building websites.

[00:06:18.370] – Sean Winter

I just really enjoyed it. And now I’m spending 6 hours in meetings a day and I don’t get to write code anymore. So this is where this sort of world was starting with Enterprise 2.0 and this group of practitioners that we’re talking about. Maybe there are better ways to work, right? Maybe there are better ways to use technology to get work done across teams, across regions, across time zones, etcetera, that don’t require us all to be in a meeting all day, or meetings all day. And that just like clicked this thing inside me that said, oh wait, I’m actually working on this type of a project, but it doesn’t do these types of things. And if it did these types of things around collaboration, community, etcetera, like this makes my life easier because I can go write code more. So that’s how I got into it was this sort of self preservation idea of how do I get out of meetings? There’s got to be a better way to make decisions, there’s got to be a better way to gain consensus, there’s got to be a better way to source work and to find like minded people.

[00:07:19.960] – Sean Winter

And so that was at this time where intranets slash portals, which were primarily content management systems and enterprise search, and this ESN notion of social communities kind of merged into this one thing. And it was just like this serendipitous timing where I met all these people. And it sort of personally incented me to want to figure this out. And the company was super respectful and receptive to that at the same time. So then I sort of got into this line of work. I met people like you and a bunch of other people that I’ve stayed in touch with and still work with to this day. And I’ve watched this industry sort of ebb and flow for a long time. And to like a really exciting place right now where I think intranets or whatever word you like to use are finally doing a lot of things that we’ve promised over the years as places where people can get work done, not just like learn about work or organize around work, but it can actually get work done. And so that to me is super exciting. It’s been a long road. I had a lot more hair at the start, but yeah, no, that’s how, that’s how I got into this was sort of a how do I not attend meetings all day?

[00:08:29.110] – Sean Winter

Personal project that evolved into a career.

[00:08:32.790] – Nancy Goebel

I think it’ll be funny to draw a little bit of a parallel and probably will surprise people when I say this, but once upon a time, I was probably IT’s biggest nightmare.

[00:08:43.820] – Sean Winter

I think we all would. We were like change agents that were saying, okay, how can we, how can we blow up the status quo?

[00:08:50.310] – Nancy Goebel

And so I was someone who, fresh out of college, ended up working for a large financial services company. Most people know I talk very openly about the fact that it was J.P.Morgan, and I was put into various specialist roles early on recruiting, and then compensation analysis and so on and so forth. And I was always frustrated by the fact that the systems that I had to work with couldn’t do what I needed them to do. And so I started using spreadsheets to make magic happen and to tell stories. And the more I did that, the more I became known internally as the person you would go to if you needed to automate something, if you needed to fix a broken process, et cetera, et cetera. And so I actually set up the first distributed bonus planning tool at J.P.Morgan that was based on what is now an archaic relational database, because I needed to go beyond a spreadsheet. But it wasn’t much further than that at the time. And to be able to get managers to submit all of their increases and bonuses and then to be able to bring them back and do the analysis that was needed to help tell that story.

[00:10:20.350] – Nancy Goebel

And it was on a staff level. From there, ended up moving into a role where I stood up the first digital HR program internally, HR for HR, and then for employee self-service. And so I kind of fell into the digital workplace arena and crossed over from the dark side, so to speak, as the skunkworks it person who just was trying to get stuff done and then became legitimately part of the digital enablement agenda, albeit called something different once upon a time.

[00:11:04.660] – Sean Winter

That’s wonderful. Yeah, it makes sense. I get it, especially back in that time, how difficult it was to get things done. I have a similar story, but maybe it’ll come in later in the conversation. But I get it. I’m glad you found your way to this world. I think it’s an interesting space. It’s a highly nuanced space. It’s complicated, it’s emotional. That to me, it drives me crazy 49% of the time and excites me 51% of the time. And so actually, more than that, I just say that. But no, I love this space. I love the complexities of it. It’s always an adventure, for sure. It’s not a boring space at all.

[00:11:45.590] – Nancy Goebel

No. And I have to say, the fact that I’m standing here, as many years later, still as passionate about what we’re doing from a digital enablement standpoint, I think speaks volumes. And I see that same passion and sparkle in you as well. And so the thing that is a constant is the idea that friction in the system and the friction that employees have to deal with day to day is still a paradigm that organizations like ours are trying to help solve for. And so I would love to talk a little bit about your thoughts there. In terms of how do you characterize digital friction? At a time when a lot of organizations are rationalizing spend, why should they care about it?

[00:12:44.010] – Sean Winter

It’s certainly a thing. I think it changed or became really more understood during the pandemic, at a time when employees probably had more leverage than they did before. A lot of knowledge workers during the pandemic, kind of pre-tech layoff, you know, the job market was fantastic, and suddenly, and companies were really spending on technology because of the pandemic. Right. People weren’t coming into the office anymore. So whether it was whiteboarding technology or chat or video conferencing or, you know, you name it, task management, everything, companies were investing, whether they knew it or not, whether these were enterprises making decisions, or whether they were teams or departments using a credit card to start something up that for good or for bad, that happened during the pandemic. The beauty of that is that in a lot of scenarios, employees told us then how they like to get work done. And this was like, this was a real flip from, I think, the world pre-pandemic where companies would be, use this tech for this thing, use this tech for this thing, use this tech for this thing. Hopefully it all makes sense. Let’s cross our fingers.

[00:13:48.710] – Sean Winter

And then the pandemic flipped that on its head. And so, Nancy, if you wanted to live in Zoom all day, and I wanted to live in Slack all day, and someone else wanted to live in, like, a Miro or a Mural all day, that’s how you got work done. And we all had to kind of figure it out. Now, the downside of that is that a lot of these technologies aren’t built very well to work together. And I’m of the mindset that what happened during the pandemic, where employees gravitated to the tools, much like your J.P.Morgan story of you in Excel or you in a spreadsheet solving a problem, people gravitated to what they needed to use to get work done. And some people that may mean I need to talk with ten people because I like that kind of interaction. That’s how I get work done. Others, it may mean I need heads downtime in a task management system to really organize my life. It could be a mix of all of them, but I think the opportunity presented coming out of that era was not how can technology throw more capabilities and use cases at you?

[00:14:46.120] – Sean Winter

But how can it serve as a means to kind of elegantly connect these different experiences so that it’s okay if Nancy wants to live in Zoom and Sean wants to live in Slack. And this is something where we see intranets. Use the term again. Use the term you’d like. Playing a really crucial role going forward is how can they live in between different completely viable forms of technology to decrease this notion of digital friction and context switching and everything? I think there’s some study out there that the average employee uses something like 80 different apps a day. I don’t know how true that is, but it does feel more diverse than ever. I think part of that’s good, part of that’s bad. But I think this is the power of true digital workplace technology is how do we aggregate all of these in true, interesting experiences where the employee is just going to get things done? They don’t have to know what the system of record is. They don’t have to know which department runs this piece of technology. If I have a question, I just go in and it makes sense. And I think that is where digital workplaces are going.

[00:15:51.770] – Sean Winter

That’s kind of what the pandemic’s taught us is like the trains left the station in terms of people using what they need to use to get things done. That’s we’re not going back from that. So now it’s how can we use technology as a way to make those experiences cleaner, more engaging, more seamless, etcetera. And I think that’s what gets me excited about not only what Lumapps is trying to do, but where I think the space can go in the future. Because this is, and you know, there’s an AI layer to this, there’s a sort of no code development layer to this. There are a bunch of different aspects coming together. But I think this is super exciting because intranets historically have been, not necessarily, I won’t say a nice to have technology, but anytime we can move from just, you know, communications, knowledge management, search, use cases into people getting work done for the sake of whatever business outcome their business needs, like, that’s a much stronger story. And that’s what we’re starting to see a lot of that now, just in terms of how employees like to use technology and how companies need to understand and react to that.

[00:16:56.450] – Nancy Goebel

You hit an important point, which is that organizations need to go beyond the traditional intranet. And so, you know, in your orbit through.

[00:17:06.790] – Sean Winter

Or we need to redefine what that is.

[00:17:08.990] – Nancy Goebel

That is through your lens, which at the moment, we can wrap around the LumApps experience. How do you think about the key components for the digital employee experience?

[00:17:24.520] – Sean Winter

Yeah, so there’s a great, Gartner has a great digital employee experience kind of map of all the different markets where they different types of technology. Right. Whether it’s everything from learning management to technology services, employee services, workforce management, tasks, etcetera. It’s all common stuff. But I think that’s super interesting to basically, the way we’re thinking about this is there are a series of core applications that any employee needs to get work done. We’re not saying those are good or bad. We’re saying, in fact, all of those pretty much do certain things better than what we would do on our own. The beauty of an intranet being the true hub or digital headquarters for these actions is that the content is there and the content could be anything from who are the people I need to work with to get this done? How do I get it done? What’s the policy and procedure to get it done? How can I learn about x, y, and z? How does my work tie up through my organization to my company’s goals? All of this traditionally exists in an intranet, so I could learn about work. Then when we moved to the kind of ESN space or these collaboration platforms, it became, okay, how do I talk about my work with like minded people now?

[00:18:40.070] – Sean Winter

Maybe I’m trying to put together a project team. Maybe I’m just trying to work cross functionally, and that was a natural step forward. Right? So I can learn about my work now I can talk about my work. But the place we always struggled was, how can I do my work? And there’s beauty in combining the I want to learn and talk about my work with I want to do my work. A common example is if I go on an intranet today and I search for my PTO policy, very rarely is that because I want to learn about my PTO policy. Usually it’s because I want to take PTO. So what if we were to combine that experience of taking PTO with that search result and what AI’s done? And we have a product called Ask AI that allows that search result not only to give you the information from multiple sources, sort of consolidated via AI, but then take, let’s say Workday is your HRIS. Take that actual experience of submitting PTO and bring that directly into the search result. So as a user, I don’t even need to know that Workday. Or, yeah, the Workday is my system of record for PTO doesn’t mean Workday is not adding tremendous value.

[00:19:52.700] – Sean Winter

It just means we’re starting to marry together, two different experiences where the user just thinks those experiences should be together. Anyway. That’s something we’re starting to see a huge opportunity for at LumApps.

[00:20:03.290] – Nancy Goebel

I think if I were to look at this as chapters in a book, in a sense, the learning space is taking on even more importance from here on out. And I say that because change is coming at us collectively, as leaders, as employees, as part of teams, faster and faster. And so I have been known to say that we need to be the eternal students of our craft, and that craft is changing as we speak. And so we are in a world where historically, any time organizations have had to shift from, how should I put it, from growth to productivity, things like learning and development often suffer. And some might say we’re in that world in large part where we have seen lots of organizations going through staff reductions and pullbacks on learning, budgets, conferences, etcetera. But it’s been quite interesting to see that the learning space has been an important investment priority for LumApps. And I think it’s important to give that a spotlight moment. But because it’s also foundational as part of the digital employee experience, it’s important to put that in context, too.

[00:21:37.500] – Sean Winter

Absolutely. So as we look at, to go back to that Gartner sort of DEX framework, learning is one of those hubs that’s sort of a natural extension of intranet. The reason being, learning is nothing more than an advanced form of communication. And I know that’s a very short statement and a big statement at the same time. There are a couple points here. So one is, we have a lot of customers that are moving beyond the notion of how do I judge communication effectiveness? Right? And is it your traditional analytics, or do we move into more of a sentiment type place? And what learning technology allows you to do is take that a step further to after your communication. And again, don’t think of communication just in terms of an email or a Slack message or a news article. Think of it in terms of the way that people consume things today. Whether it is a TikTok or reel-based piece of content or something more engaging whatnot. It could be something that involves sound and video and portrait mode. And there’s lots of different ways, I think, to serve up content these days that we don’t necessarily immediately go to in the enterprise.

[00:22:45.460] – Sean Winter

What learning then allows you to do is to, on top of that, not only present communications in really, really modern, cool formats, mixing visuals and sound and slides and other things, but then add this notion of the old term would be a certification, but it’s more a quiz or a game at the end to say, wait, not only did you open it, not only did you get to the end, not only does data, in our employee data layer maybe tell us that you liked it, but you actually took a quiz and proved that you understood it. So this was sort of, I think one of the foundational pieces of our investment in learning was to just recognize that communication was moving into a different place, and we needed a technology partner that allowed us to really push the envelope in terms of how we can serve up communications, but how we can also track the effectiveness of communications. And it’s not just these quizzes that we offer. They’re not just about the effectiveness. They’re also, they make it more engaging. They make it so people want to take more of this stuff. So I think that was a big part of this.

[00:23:48.310] – Sean Winter

Learning had developed, and I spent some times in the learning industry over the past 20 years. Learning developed a bit of a reputation around compliance and audit as being a focus, for obvious reasons. That was the foundational principles of the industry. Then went through sort of a reimagining around reskilling and upskilling. That had some effect, for sure, but I don’t think it got us to the point where people are wanting to naturally learn and better themselves to become better at their job. So then, more recently, after the reskilling, upskilling trend, you move into kind of in the flow of work learning, which I think does make sense. I don’t know that we’re there yet. I think AI can really help us in some of what different companies are doing in that space. But the idea of, I’m doing something, I’m stuck, help me get unstuck. And that’s something that we’re super passionate about as well. So one other thing I just want to bring up is we have a very large frontliner population using our tool. And so this is, and this is a very different mode of learning and training than traditional corporate knowledge worker audit based learning.

[00:24:53.590] – Sean Winter

It could be as simple as I work in a store, a luxury goods store and I need to know what the store setup is for the day. I need to know what this display should look like. I need to know what our promotion should be for the day. To a much larger I work in a warehouse for a huge logistics company and I need to take some training on my first day of the job to understand how to operate within this warehouse. And so as we were looking at communications not only from a traditional communication perspective, but kind of an omnichannel orchestration perspective, which then gets you into journeys around things like onboarding, suddenly communication and learning become like really intertwined. If you think of okay, I want to build a journey around an employee’s 1st 90 days at the company that’s a series of communications around. Here’s what you do, how you do it, who you do it with, here’s how you get paid, here’s your benefits, all of that stuff. But then there’s like a learning component of that that we always thought was odd, that it wasn’t part of that journey in and of itself, or it was in a separate system or whatnot.

[00:25:56.350] – Sean Winter

So we just saw an opportunity there to really evolve how companies look at the notion of communications, to say maybe we can take some best practices from the learning industry and bring those in and then also provide a really compelling learning solution for companies that are either looking to replace an outdated LMS, looking to evolve an LXP, or looking to really accomplish this kind of frontliner learning challenge that we see in a lot of places.

[00:26:23.370] – Nancy Goebel

Well that’s a powerful set of stepping stones. I think if we look to the future just a little bit, the idea that learning will extend into the embedded coaching realm is very much a reality. We’re already seeing hints of that through things like Microsoft Copilot, where there are actually some placeholders, some of which aren’t quite enabled yet, that ask you if you’d like some coaching and support and other places where that’s fully enabled, like in email or things like Microsoft Word, where you may be stuck with something and you know, it’s offering to help you level up on your writing or your tone or what have you. And so how do you think about this idea of embedded coaching as part of possible trajectory for LumApps?

[00:27:23.120] – Sean Winter

I think, yeah, I think there’s a lot to it. I think there’s a, and there is a learning component, but I want to put that on the side for a second. I think when you, whenever we talked about AI, we sort of have to have the general conversation and then we have to sort of unwind the conversation and talk about use cases. Right. And I think what’s an interesting place for these types of embedded coaching within an intranet is just the access to the sheer amount of data that we have. And LumApps has an entire employee data layer is similar to the concept of a CDN out in the consumer world. We can talk about that later if we want, but we have access to a lot of data, a lot of data of who’s interacting with whom, with what, who reports to whom, pretty much everything you can imagine. And we can pull things in from various applications, whether it be Google, Workday, Microsoft as well. So the opportunity there is, if you think of things that intranets are really good at, let’s say, and this may not be an exciting example coming off the top of my head, let’s say something like an.org chart that typically is an Internet use case.

[00:28:24.880] – Sean Winter

Why not? When the chart changes in the intranet. And we know that, right, we know that Nancy used to manage two people and now she manages five. There was a reorg and she’s inherited three new employees, three new direct reports. So this is where I think embedded coaching can play a really powerful role because we know this data now, we could say, hey Nancy, do you want me to proactively set up hour long meet and greets with your three new employees? Here are times open on each of your calendars or hey, Nancy, here are the three most recent performance reviews for these three new employees. Would you like to review them before your meet and greet? Like there are all sorts of things like that, that just from that one trigger of the chart changed. Like we can go into a ton of different applications, whether they’re internal to the Internet or external, and start to bring in those experiences that not only, you know, we’ve talked a lot about orchestration and journeys in our space to say, okay, step one is this, step two is this, step three is this. We can use AI to just invent what those steps are, right?

[00:29:26.760] – Sean Winter

Based on the best practice, based on the history. So I think this gets really exciting from a coaching perspective to say we’re going to introduce a process that’s made on the fly, that’s based on data that we’re pulling from various systems. This is something that I think intranets can be incredibly powerful now. Yes. Is there a learning component to this? Absolutely right. Because you’ve just inherited, let’s say it’s your first time becoming a manager and the system knows that certainly there’s some training we could serve up for first time managers, that gets you excited about your new job, maybe gets you more comfortable with inheriting these new direct employees. So I think like, yeah, the sky’s the limit on that kind of stuff. And I love, again, I love thinking about AI in terms of the specific use case of the platform with which it sits, which we’re starting to see with things like Gemini, Copilot, et cetera. Some like really interesting productivity based use cases in those platforms.

[00:30:18.570] – Nancy Goebel

And then I immediately started to think, Sean, about the idea that as the intranet, as you’re defining it, starts to understand the data and the individuals, like this fictional manager, and suddenly the coaching capabilities expand into the idea of helping them optimize the team that’s now come together for the first time, because it can quite easily cut across all of those performance evaluations that you were just talking about and say, do you realize that your team’s natural strengths are a, b, and c, but there are some gaps around d, e, and f? And, you know, it might mean that you need to come together as a team to work through some of that. And yes, there’s some training that can be done, but you need to look at this from the standpoint of how you can start to align the work to bridge that series of gaps or mitigate that risk that you have in play, either because you need to round out the team or bring in some outside expertise or what have you. The things that people do manually now, if they have the time and can be strategic enough to think about things on that scale.

[00:31:50.100] – Sean Winter

I agree. I think it’s ambitious, but in a good way. I think what enterprise social networks did was they gave employees the chance to opt in, and that could be for a like minded interest or a community, but it could be like, hey, I want to be part of this project. This is naturally interesting to me. I want to work on this, and I think there’s a huge opportunity for AI based on the data we have and knowing what people like to do, how they like to do it, who they like to do it with, that could absolutely drive the way we source work or the way we source projects within a company in a way that we haven’t seen before. Right? Because the ESNs were predicated on, number one, you being there and you understanding what you were opting into. It’s like I always give the example of nobody goes to a website and says, was there a tornado today? You only know because that news finds you and not because you find that news. So I think there’s something there with AI that can help managers certainly organize work, organize teams based on all the data we have.

[00:32:55.740] – Sean Winter

It may exist today. I don’t know if it does, but I think that’s certainly an interesting use case looking forward.

[00:33:01.850] – Nancy Goebel

And you talked about another chapter in the employee experience, being around connecting and sharing. Are there any specific thoughts around where you think that might go next based on the work that you’re doing?

[00:33:18.660] – Sean Winter

The notion of collaboration, groups, spaces, communities, et cetera, is something we’re investing a lot in right now to try to sort of get to that next level of user experience that is super easy, super intuitive. I think a lot of companies sort of did the Facebook model ten years ago, and now we’re ready for the next iteration of that. So that’s exciting. But again, I think there’s the notion of how do we incorporate that into my daily activities, into my daily stream, into whatever that is. So it’s not this separate destination where I proactively have to, number one, learn that it exists and then opt into it. It just comes to me. And because of what we know about you and how you like to work, you’re maybe automatically served up. This is the notion of personalization that we spend a lot of time working on and recommendations, right. Which is the kind of the foundational element of AI that no one really likes to talk about anymore. But I think intranets or social platforms externally have been predicated on algorithms that serve up recommendations and personalization for a long time now. And that’s AI.

[00:34:20.410] – Sean Winter

It’s nothing more than AI. So I think that’s a huge opportunity for companies to use their data better to truly understand that notion of how can we best set up our people to collaborate most effectively, to organize most effectively, etcetera. And I think that’s that next step beyond the sort of natural grouping that I think we’ve worked in for the past ten years. That is super exciting, something that we’re investing in day in and day out. We spend a lot of time on generational AI right now, digital assistant based AI and search based AI, purely for the means of how do we bring clarity and transaction coaching moments to employees on the fly. But I think there’s a lot more in terms of sourcing work that we’ve talked about as well. And I’ll say something interesting. We had an advisory board a while back, and the number one, we presented all these radical AI use case ideas, and the number one response from our customers was, no, no, no, I don’t want the crazy stuff. I want AI to do the parts of my job I don’t want to do anymore, which if you’re in the world of content management and governance, there’s a lot of that, as you can imagine.

[00:35:28.000] – Sean Winter

So I thought that was super interesting as well, where I think because of some of the marketing and funding around AI, people get very excited about the transformational use cases and those are fantastic. But there are some like low hanging fruit use cases that can just make someone’s life a lot easier. For example, if I work in content management and I know here’s a piece of content that I know is really effective, but is not getting a lot of eyeballs, maybe it’s just in the wrong place, right? It can be something that simple. And I think AI presents us a ton of different opportunities to optimize content management and governance over time as well.

[00:36:02.250] – Nancy Goebel

The whole arena of helping to support getting work done is one that just has such opportunity attached to it. And not only is it about automating the things that people don’t want to do anymore and allowing a leapfrog to kind of the next degree of complexity or thinking and planning to come into the fold, I guess with the audience that you’re working with day to day, it’s more likely to be skewed towards internal communicators as content creators of a sort. And where do you think those roles will be going next? As things like chart announcements are taken care of, at least in large part, by AI and other basic communications that would normally have been written independently by an individual now suddenly have the jump starts from AI.

[00:37:10.530] – Sean Winter

I don’t think it’s as scary as people think. I think it’s a natural evolution to the position and to the role and to the nature of doing that job. I think, and we talked earlier before, I think we started recording about an example about you setting up a framework via AI that made your life a lot easier? I don’t know that it’s that scary. I think what we believe firmly is that these types of DEX or digital workplace platforms truly need to be a true digital headquarters for the company, and they need to be inclusive of the company culture, the company norms, the company ways of working, the company brand. And I don’t think that AI makes that go away. I have been a remote worker for almost 20 years now. It looks like you are as well. I don’t know that we go into offices, whether it’s customers or prospects or company offices from time to time, go to events, those types of things. That satisfies my personal need for that kind of interaction. But I have a company intranet where I can go and I can learn about things that are happening all over the world with my colleagues. And I think that is still important. Whether that’s partially written by a machine or that’s fully written by a human, I don’t know that necessarily matters.

[00:38:29.280] – Sean Winter

I think the communication function, now I do, like I said earlier, I think communication and learning kind of slowly come together. And I think that communication function does evolve into how can we truly represent the company in the most effective and engaging way possible? For whatever outcome you’re looking for, increased revenue, decreased cost, increased engagement, whatever it is, how do we do that in a highly distributed world where people are working across time zones, across regions, across work styles, etcetera? So I don’t think the core of that changes at all. I think, is it? Hi, I am the executive communicator for Function X, and I am a mouthpiece for my executive. I think that changes, and I think that’s a good thing that that changes. But I still think communicators play a really, really key role in representing what the company is and what the company wants to be to their employee population. The means of that will change, but I think the end state and the end goal doesn’t change.

[00:39:26.500] – Nancy Goebel

Well said. And what are you thinking about in the realm of things like knowledge discovery and access to information? In the land of the doing?

[00:39:41.410] – Sean Winter

Yeah, in a land. Oh, that’s the beauty of it is I think we all thought ten years ago, and maybe my timing’s a little off, there was a big push to Google is a single search bar on the Internet that helps me find everything I need. Why can’t that be the intranet? And I think we quickly realized there’s the old garbage in, garbage out problem. There’s the notion of governance that is way more important in the enterprise. And intranets did not evolve to a single search bar for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, people like to find information in different ways, and that’s okay. Just like earlier, we said, people like to work in different tools to get things done. That is okay. So while I think AI gives us a tremendous ability to evolve search bars into a place where people can learn and get work done, can evolve digital assistance in not only places where I can ask binary yes or no questions, but where I can actually have a conversational interface and get something done, that is like the power to me. Are there going to be people that still want to browse because they will come across things they didn’t know exist and didn’t know to ask for.

[00:40:53.880] – Sean Winter

Absolutely. And that shouldn’t go away. There’s no reason that goes away. But can we highly evolve the way we serve up content so that, that content that’s of interesting to me, that’s of interest to me that I don’t even know it exists yet it finds its way to me. Or, Nancy, maybe you love to interact in a conversational interface, great. Someone else likes to interact solely on their mobile device, great. Someone else likes to interact with the search bar. Great. Like that’s the key is how do we use technology to democratize all of those experiences so that people can work the way they want to work? So it’s interesting to talk about knowledge discovery and information access because I think all AI does is give us more opportunities to build out the proven means that we have today. Does the world go to a simple search box and that’s all you do? I don’t know, maybe in five years. But I’ve seen that argument fail for the last ten years. So I’m not sure it’ll, and I look at the way, or I look at how little TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, these, how little search impacts those compared to the actual Intranet.

[00:42:01.500] – Sean Winter

Not saying that I’m an advocate for anything, I’m just saying I think we need to be careful and thoughtful in terms of how people like to consume and interact with things. And that’s always been the beauty of enterprise software is we are three to five years behind consumer software, so we can, in theory, pick and choose what works. We don’t have to take those big risks.

[00:42:20.430] – Nancy Goebel

And do you see LumApp specifically and digital employee experience platforms broadly playing a bigger role in supporting more data driven experiences?

[00:42:36.760] – Sean Winter

I do, I do, I do. Like, that’s where, like, that’s where this has to go for AI to work, right? We work with a lot of companies that are trying to feel out, can I use Google’s language model or Microsoft’s language model? Do I have to make my own? Can I use something on the Internet? And that’s going to be a tricky space for a while based on the size, the budget, the vertical of your company, it’s going to take a while for companies to figure that out. A lot of companies doing really cool kind of smaller scale tests right now in all of those different models. So I think that’s something that’s of interest. But I think the massive opportunity for intranets being a place of a lot of known data. I mentioned how LumApps has an employee data layer. I’ll give you an example on the sort of, in the consumer world, you’ve probably had this happen. And we talked about CDN’s content delivery networks earlier. The idea behind those is you and I are having a conversation within earshot of an Alexa about, hey, I saw this shirt online. I’m thinking of buying it.

[00:43:40.090] – Sean Winter

Two minutes later, I open up my phone and there’s an ad in Instagram for that shirt. Scary example. Employees don’t want to hear that example, but the data is there. So imagine we use that to nudge you to, hey, you seem to be struggling with this task or with this line of code. Why don’t you watch this piece of training? Or, hey, I’ve noticed you and this employee have canceled your last three one on ones. Is something going on? It’s funny. We have, there’s an HR partner we’re working with right now who said, boy, wouldn’t it be great if somebody, I don’t advise this at all, but if the system knew that someone took a loan from their 401(k) and could offer up some kind of help, I’m like, that’s too far. That’s too far. But the power to do those things exists, right? It’s a matter of how do we want to package them and use them just to make employees lives easier and companies more efficient and productive? Like, it doesn’t have to be more than that. So, yeah, I think from those data driven experiences, it’s, hey, we have the data. It’s this natural evolution of, I want to learn about the thing.

[00:44:46.090] – Sean Winter

I want to do the thing. I want to get better at the thing. Now, how can you help me understand the thing that I don’t even know? I don’t know what I don’t know. Right. So how can you start to put that in front of me? And that’s certainly the next chapter in that story.

[00:44:57.970] – Nancy Goebel

I’m thinking about it from not only a leadership perspective, but for the individual or the team at large that is looking to level up or has opportunities through these, I’ll call them coaching interventions, where the gaps in the data spotlight opportunity. And in some cases, that’s a level of remediation. Right. But in other cases, it could help unlock the door to innovation in ways that no one has even thought about yet.

[00:45:33.500] – Sean Winter

Absolutely. And I think that this is one of those things where scale helps you so much. LumApps is a 400 employee company, so we can do these types of things with our data. Although we have an HR department of a handful of people, we have a finance department of ten people or so. So it’s not as automated as one would think. If you’re 100,000 employees company like, imagine the amount of trends you have in that data. It’s more than you could even do anything with in the short term. Right. There’s so many opportunities. So I think that’s something where this is one of those use cases where it actually works better and is simpler, the larger the company is, because there’s just more opportunity to say, look, here are five trends that we can see in chart data. Let’s use AI to close the gaps on these five trends.

[00:46:22.310] – Nancy Goebel

So we’ve been looking at things primarily from the lens of the employee or the enterprise in opening up a book of digital employee experience and exploring the chapters together, right. So we had a little bit about learning, a little bit about sharing and connecting, a little bit about the doing and even nibbling at the fringes of the thinking parts, right. Supported by data driven experiences. I wonder if it might be worth connecting our origins story with this exploration of a conceptual book. And what I’m thinking about now is that we approached things in our early careers as digital workplace practitioners, wanting to solve problems, very tactical problems. And so things are changing very rapidly now across the technology landscape for the digital workplace. And so if you had an opportunity to talk to some digital workplace leaders and teams who ultimately have a level of responsibility for these platforms, what do you think they need most to be successful over the next couple of years while we find our feet in this new age of, you know, emerging technology? I won’t just uniquely say AI, because I think lots of things are changing and that’s one of the catalysts.

[00:48:14.600] – Nancy Goebel

But the point being, you have a lot of wisdom to share. So if you put your advisor hat on, what little nuggets would you share?

[00:48:24.020] – Sean Winter

I’m going to give you a very simple answer. Not to be obtuse or anything, but I think if you break down. So I spend a lot of time in ROI for technology, whether it’s on the buy side, the sell side, the implementation side, the consulting side, etcetera. And we can talk about huge ROI studies that say this and that in terms of engagement, productivity. At the end of the day, people buy technology for one of, or both of two reasons. One is to generate revenue and another is to cut costs. Those are the only everything ladders up to that. Right? And you could say, oh, what about engagement? Well, engagement offsets attrition, which is a cost, etcetera. Like you can tie everything back to those things. So if I was a digital workplace practitioner. Now with all this crazy stuff flying around is I would, I would continue to think, imagine that my CEO is going to call me tomorrow and say I need a story for the board specific to the value of this platform and not so much value in terms of dollars and cents, but value in terms of what it’s actually doing for us as a company.

[00:49:31.410] – Sean Winter

And if you can tie that story back to generating of revenue and the 50 sub reasons under that and the hundred sub reasons under that or cutting costs, right. I think that’s always a compelling story. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but there’s so much great data out there around engagement, around attrition, around onboarding time, around productivity that it actually is a simpler story to tell than a lot of people think. And that ROI story can get very interesting very quickly. And when you’re talking about dollars and cents, it’s a really easy conversation for an executive to have or to engage in or to champion. So that would be my biggest advice. And part of that is tied back to our conversation about use cases, right? Let’s unwind use, let’s unwind AI and make it specific to use cases of which there’s value. I can correlate the value to something else and I can tell that story. So that would be the biggest thing. If someone’s saying, hey, this is neat, let’s deploy it. And I know you’re not going to have the answer nine times out of ten, but think in your head, how can I tie this to generating revenue or cutting costs?

[00:50:37.440] – Sean Winter

And I know those are very American, very capitalistic terms that I don’t want to sound that way, but because those are the two big buckets that everything else flows into in terms of how you operate a company. So that would be my, as somebody right now who’s on the other side of that, who is constantly asking people in my organization for that type of data so that I can talk to the board or I can talk to whomever I would say, think about it that way. Think about telling that story of revenue generation or cost cutting or cost controlling, not cost cutting. How do I craft what I’m doing around that story? And how do I use that story to then prioritize what I do going forward in an era where there’s something interesting and cool and neat and different every day, if not every hour.

[00:51:21.750] – Nancy Goebel

I talk about that as beginning with the end in mind. So you start the conversation around purpose, but ultimately you need to fast forward to ultimately, what are you trying to achieve what is the value you’re trying to bring forward? And it can be in the plus column or in the minus column. You know, just to boil it down to the simplest of things, you ask the why question to five times and you finally get to the root cause.

[00:51:50.270] – Sean Winter

Absolutely.

[00:51:51.150] – Nancy Goebel

So, final question, is there anything that we’ve missed?

[00:51:59.690] – Sean Winter

Is there anything we’ve missed? I don’t think so. I think we’re really excited about, you know, you mentioned your chapters of learn, do, think, and there was a fourth, wasn’t it?

[00:52:12.870] – Nancy Goebel

Well, we talked about connect, stroke, share, act, connect.

[00:52:17.050] – Sean Winter

We say understand, act and grow. So we say the understand is kind of the traditional intranet of I need to know what to do, who to do it with, how to do it, etcetera. Act is now bringing in those actions from external systems, or getting you to the external system to actually do it and then grow is the notion of how can we get better over time at it. And that’s one of the big reasons for our investment in the learning space. And we’ll continue to add there are some exciting things coming that we’re working on as a company. So it’s just kind of an exciting time to finally see the industry embrace a much larger picture. And I realized there is a difference between intranet, which was more of a self contained communication, collaboration, search content thing, and digital workplace, which has more of a history and portals and gets you into the notion of getting work done. But I think the fact that intranets are now really aggressively expanding into this world of employee experience and understanding, that that’s about more than content, it’s also about action and doing and learning and coaching and everything else like that to me is incredibly exciting.

[00:53:24.440] – Sean Winter

And I think we’ll see more. We’ll see more change in the next 18 months in this space than we’ve probably seen in a long time.

[00:53:29.690] – Nancy Goebel

That’s certainly the constant change.

[00:53:31.820] – Sean Winter

Yes, that’s the truth. That is the truth.

[00:53:36.200] – Nancy Goebel

Well, I have to say that as always, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed a chance to chat with you.

[00:53:44.400] – Sean Winter

It’s great to see you always as well.

[00:53:46.080] – Nancy Goebel

Thank you.

[00:53:46.490] – Sean Winter

I’m glad we’ve stayed in touch all these years. I’m thrilled for your success. I love your organization. Now you’re the CEO. That’s awesome.

[00:53:56.440] – Nancy Goebel

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com