Humans-as-a-Service (HaaS)
HaaS – funnily enough resembles with a well-known company specialised in automation. However, for the purpose of this note this abbreviation would be applied to the Human as a Service concept. The most niche and rare service in terms of quality, intrinsic value, trust, empathy, transparency, compassion, awareness and commons sense.
In the Digital Age whatever can be commoditised has already been scaled through multiple “as a services” (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc.). Nevertheless, multibillion cloud platforms, marketplaces, product companies turned up to their creators - humans to buy scarce value add component from the market – Humans as a Service.
Looking for Humans
Everyone from software product companies to professional services providers of all calibers end up looking for great people, teams, alliances, partnership and customer success – “humans as a service”. Apparently not only because of the higher purpose, but due a huge business bottleneck. The real picture shows, however, that being drawn into the “as a service” game scaled businesses continuously fail to acknowledge the finite nature of as a service consumerism without massive focus on the human angle.
To put it differently digital product scalability inevitably hits the constraint of the human value chain from the ability of consumers to understand the benefits, level of the market education up to those who play Human as a Service role along the way of value creation and delivery. These people take incredible professional and emotional load on them to make bolts hold, screws roll and tech being able actually serve its purpose – make humans’ life better. Tech serves us, not the other way round. Humans as a service have internal and external stakeholders to deal with, lots of unpredictable scenarios and eventually all boils down to the quality of the relationships, awareness….all human skills essentially.
Finite Tech vs Infinite Relationships
There is no way how one can scale true human relationships without impact either on quality or timeframes. Slightly tweaking the quote of T. Edison “Vision [read Platform as a Service] without execution [read people] is a hallucination”.
Some of those hallucinations are very powerful, but still temporary and finite in nature. Of course, execution is also very much about the process and tech enablers, however the value chain starts and ends with humans on both sides.
Tech product companies in Australia faced the challenge of not only quantifiable lack of people, but they are scrambling to engage “the right people” with human skills able to reach the strategic goals for the product or software offering. This entails roles like business development, alliance, and partnership managers, customer success etc.
The challenge is amplified by the isolated and remote ways of working and despite the proud and loud promises of the technology solutions – let’s be honest – everything lacks human touch. Of course, reality is we need to adapt. Probably the most feasible scenario is hybrid, where people have physical touch points while enjoying benefits of remote, WFH.
This is definitely the real-time validation of the business agility and trust culture. Ways of working, business relationships and human interaction are the vital element playing crucial role at all phases of the business lifecycle.
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