Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pega. Don joins me today to talk about a new report they have just released called Workforce Trends Report 2022, the headline findings, complexity in the enterprise, how it affects us, the impact and what we should be doing about it.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Unlocking the hidden value of language to drive personalisation – Interview with Assaf Baciu of Persado – and is number 433 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Don:

• Check out Pega’s new report: Workforce Trends Report 2022: Demystifying complexity in the modern workforce.
• The technology that we use to serve our customers and support our employees is frankly getting more complicated.
• And, sometimes in our efforts to add powerful new tools, we make the experiences of both our customers and employees harder and more complex.
• Complexity: Things that get in the way of employees and customers getting to the outcome that they’re looking to achieve.
• 42% of workers feel that digital transformation efforts have made their job more complex.
• I don’t think the lesson of all of this is that digital transformation is bad or a failure. However, it’s important to understand that it also has side effects and we should keep that in mind.
• From a customer’s perspective, they might be contacting people on a number of different channels, but in their mind, they’re only really having one broad conversation with you and if an organization can’t knit that together, then that’s not their customer’s problem. That’s the organization’s problem and that’s an example of the complexity you have to deal with.
• 31% of women indicated that the sort of hybrid work world that we have entered has created this huge impact on their ability to maintain balance between work and life.
• There’s this feeling from the survey respondents that complexity is accelerating.
• One in three workers reported that their jobs are more complex today than there were three years ago.
• Hybrid workers feel this more directly than workers that are all remote or all on site.
• 90% of workers are experiencing “information overload” at work while 89% of folks stated that navigating internal processes was another reason driving complexity.
• To start to solve this we should start by finding and improving those micro journeys that matter. Both from a customer point of view and an employees point of view.
• How do I streamline and design that micro journey so that it’s focused on getting me to the outcome that I want as fast and as efficiently as possible.
• We have to keep in mind that we’re not really transforming, we’re continually evolving over time. And, the only thing that we’re really transforming are those micro journeys.
• I feel that sometimes in a lot of our process engineering efforts we do a lot of analysis of as is processes and to be processes and we get very tied in the current state of stuff as opposed to taking a moment to step back and ask what business reason does this process exist? What value does this add to the customer to the employee? And, given the known limitations around our current set of systems and regulatory obligations etc, what’s the fastest path I can get somebody to an outcome.
• Big shout out to Jo Richardson who was a star at Pegaworld iNspire.
• Don’s positive stories:
  • 1. Great article on Slate about Oxo and their kitchen devices – what was interesting about it was reading about the philosophy of the company and one that takes design really, really seriously.
  • 2. When Don’s dog encountered a blue crab in a tidal pool.

About Don

Don Schuerman is CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pega, responsible for Pega’s industry-leading platform and CRM applications. He has 20 years of experience delivering enterprise software solutions for Fortune 500 organizations, with a focus on digital transformation, mobility, analytics, business process management, cloud and CRM. Don has led enterprise software implementations and provided technology and architecture consulting to senior business and technology executives from Fortune 500 organizations, including American Express, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and BP. Don holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College.

As a longtime improv comedian, Don believes that “Build for Change®” is more than a tagline – it’s a mindset, and that great teams bring adaptability, diverse voices, and a sense of fun to all they do.

Check out Pega, dive into their new report: Workforce Trends Report 2022: Demystifying complexity in the modern workforce, say Hi to Pega and Don on Twitter @pega and @donpega and feel free to connect with Don on LinkedIn here.

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay