Quincy Valencia's Analyst Perspectives

I am excited to announce that I have joined Ventana Research to lead our market coverage of our Human Capital Management expertise, including focus areas of Continuous Payroll, Employee Experience, Learning Management, Talent Management, Total Compensation Management and Workforce Management.

Many who know my background will be surprised, but for me it’s the natural next step in the progression of my career. I’ve been in HCM and HCM technology as both practitioner and provider for more than 25 years. While the landscape has changed significantly and buzzwords have come and gone, the problem statements have remained remarkably consistent. Practitioners have always looked to technology to streamline and optimize processes for end users, find a source of data to continue that improvement journey and quantitatively prove HCM business cases to executive leadership. HCM technology providers have looked outside of HCM, applying advancements in technology in general to provide solutions for those problems. Sounds easy, right? And yet there often remains a deep chasm between what technology providers say and what practitioners hear and buy. So, challenges continue to be unsolved, and frustration abounds.

That’s why I’m here: to try to bridge the knowledge gap for technologists who may have outstanding products but aren’t quite hitting the mark in their messaging in a way that resonates with issues that are compelling to a buyer. I also want to provide an unbiased, data-driven and experience-backed evaluation of the technologies that buyers may be considering, but which are all starting to sound alike.

Ventana Research was particularly appealing to me because of the diversity of background, experience of the leadership and, really, the entire Ventana Research team. Here, I’m surrounded by decades of experienced, professional tenure as analysts in each area of expertise. This knowledge is built on real-life industry experience and, most importantly, primary research, conducted using a consistent and proven methodology that has made Ventana Research a trusted partner and advisor to our clients for 20 years.

So why now? In short, the pandemic. In all my years in HCM, whether as practitioner or provider, I have never seen a comparable event that highlighted the imperative of sound technology to support and execute on quickly evolving policies and practices in every aspect of human capital management. When Covid forced people home in unprecedented numbers, many organizations were at a standstill, unable to properly support the actual, physical work required to continue business operations. Workers often didn’t know how to complete timecards for payroll, for example, or had no way of being kept up to date on daily changes in work requirements, and were even uncertain as to their ability to continue working.

Meanwhile, many organizations had a desire to provide monetary compensation and mental health support t workers but were unable to deliver quickly or efficiently. Often, this was because technology providers lacked the ability to make required adjustments, timelines to complete vital system changes were longer than the immediacy of the circumstances dictated, or employers were simply unaware that technology they had invested in already had the capability. Further, the mergers and acquisition activity in the HCM technology space has been dizzying. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, there were over a hundred of M&A transactions and over $4 billion of activity in the HCM technology space. For buyers to keep track of that amount of activity is daunting at best, much less fully distill what it may mean for their own technology stack. The unbiased research and analysis that Ventana Research brings to the table, combined with decades of collective expertise in this space and technology in general, helps organizations make decisions that best support business objectives without having to be mired in all the noise that comes with that sort of investigation and analysis.

The HCM technology landscape is immense and growing. I look forward to working with Ventana Research’s clients to bring a new perspective that leads to a better understanding of what buyers want, what vendors are providing and how the convergence of that information can lead to pragmatic, fact-based decision-making that helps all our clients advance their business objectives.

Regards,

Quincy Valencia