Every Product Will Become A Data Product
I stumbled over an underrated space lately: Workforce Management (WFM) & injixo.
I was inspecting one of the leading solutions in the space, a German solution named injixo.
And while the slogan of the software is “unlock the full potential of your people,” it seems to me that it really is about “unlocking the full potential of your workforce data.”
A workforce management solution really is about coordinating your people. Coordinating people is all about making the right decisions based on data. Data about your people and the business processes those people are engaged in.
The key is understanding that those decision processes in most companies are based on processes that aren’t taking place digitally and thus don’t produce data.
Imagine for instance, you swap a shift with a colleague. No harm done right? Well, if it isn’t recorded, it means whoever coordinates the shifts, won’t know your availabilities. He also won’t be aware of potential shortages due to unexpected shift swaps.
So, it is better for everyone to have shift swaps happen digitally and push as many of those processes into the digital realm where they produce data.
So, in reality, every workforce management solution has three value drivers. It can provide value by:
Collecting more data - by making it super easy for the creators of data (often the individual people who are managed) to share this data, e.g., by offering digital shift swaps and simple ways to call in sick or take a vacation on short notice.
Crunching this data for immediate action - usually called intra-day management, but it really just means crunching data you need to act on immediately, like a sudden shortage caused by multiple sick calls.
**Crunching this data for long-term insights—**usually, this is the realm of prediction and forecasting, helping shift managers plan, say, the next month's shift.
If even the value of workforce management solutions is driven mainly by their ability to collect and crunch data, isn’t every product turning into a data product then?
