Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer, GANNETT CO INC
RPA will be a commodity in ten years| SVP Shared Services at Gannett - Cindy Gallagher| S2 E1
About Season 2 In this engaging conversation, GBS leaders answer the DEAD or ALIVE Questions related to the ...
About Cindy Gallagher
Cindy Gallagher, Controller, Chief Accounting Officer & Principal Accounting Officer at Gannett, has shared her perspectives on the future of global business services (GBS) in several podcast appearances. In a 2022 interview, Gallagher stated that robotic process automation (RPA) in its current form "will be dead" within ten years, predicting it will become a commodity similar to a Microsoft Office product. She also said that physical service centers will be "more dead than alive" but that a hybrid model will persist, and she expressed the view that artificial intelligence has not yet proven to be all it was hyped to be but has not been given a long enough runway. Gallagher emphasized that GBS leaders must challenge their teams to explore new service offerings and adapt delivery models to keep the centralized model alive as the "backbone of the organization." In earlier appearances, Gallagher discussed the importance of upskilling and reskilling the workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, arguing that traditional learning and development platforms are necessary but insufficient. She advocated for C-level leadership dedicated to learning and development separate from traditional HR. Gallagher also described her approach at Discovery Communications, where she said the organization needed to listen more to customers and stakeholders, and she changed recruiting practices to seek people with a mindset of change and transformation rather than purely transactional skills. She noted that humans remain essential for cultural empathy, problem solving, and decision making, even as automation advances.
Transcript (27 segments)
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Sashi Narahari0:01
We need to listen to our internal business partners, we need to understand what they're looking for while also anticipating what they're going to need in the future. If we can't do that, GBS will die a quick and probably very painful death.
Welcome to the GBS Masterminds podcast, the one and only platform for global business service leaders to share their experiences of building world-class shared service organizations. My name is Sashi Narahari, founder and CEO of HighRadius, and I'll be your host.
Welcome to the GBS Masterminds podcast season 2. In this season, we're going to ask global business service leaders six dead or alive questions related to the future of GBS. My name is Sashi Narahari, founder and CEO of HighRadius, and I'll be your host. Today I'm honored to host Cindy Gallagher, a shared services leader with over 20 years of experience. Cindy is a recognized member of the SSON advisory board and has worked in top organizations such as AOL and Discovery Communications. She is currently serving as the SVP of Shared Services at Gannett. Cindy, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show.
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Cindy Gallagher1:22
Thank you, Sashi. It's good to speak to you again.
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Sashi Narahari1:22
All right, Cindy, so tell us a little bit about yourself and your career journey.
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Cindy Gallagher1:27
Yeah, happy to. I began my career in consulting with a regional accounting firm in Baltimore. At the time, my husband was in the Navy, we didn't have kids, so I didn't mind the Monday through Friday travel. I loved working on new projects with different clients, but over time I felt myself craving the opportunity to implement many of the recommendations we were making for our clients. So when an opportunity came up at AOL, I jumped on it. From there, I moved to Discovery Communications, leading the global business services practice. And congruent time both at AOL and Discovery, I worked very closely with Deborah Cox and Steve Hosley, who I know you spoke to just last month, launching an onshore BPO model called Liberty Source. Resources near and dear to my heart given our social mission of employing military spouses into career opportunities that were once very elusive for them, as a former military spouse myself. Now, Sashi, having worked with global organizations my entire career, I knew remote work was possible even back then, so I wanted to leverage the capabilities of remote work to enhance the lives of military spouses. And it was so much fun to work with Deborah and Steve on that project. When Steve moved to Estee Lauder, I took over the reins at Liberty Source and led the company for another three years until we sold the company in 2020. November 2020, I started here at Gannett with the mission of shaping and scaling the future capabilities of our shared services organization.
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Sashi Narahari2:50
All right, I think the Liberty Source is a very unique thing. Thank you so much for doing that. Tell the other GBS leaders if they want to consider that, what should they do today? Where can they find more information?
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Cindy Gallagher3:01
Go to libertysource.com, reach out to me personally. I'm happy to put you in direct contact with the new leadership there.
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Sashi Narahari3:06
Awesome. All right, Cindy. So now I'm going to ask you, the second season the most debated dead or alive arguments in the GBS space, we would love for you to be bold and blunt, just your point of view. The first one is around the BPOs themselves. At Liberty Source, you were instrumental in setting up the onshore BPO model as an alternative to captive centers. Ten years down the line, do you think BPOs for outsourcing will be dead or alive?
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Cindy Gallagher3:33
I think they'll be alive, but I think they'll look very different. The BPO model has shifted a lot, as you know, over the last 30 years. There's the model where captive centers try to transform the work and send it to the BPO. As we've learned, that model results in slow transition of work and takes a lot of time to reach maturity. Then there's, of course, lift and shift, which keeps old processes and inefficiencies in place, just performs them at a different location at a lower cost. Finally, with lift, shift, and transform all at the same time, taking into account a very unique and trusted partnership and a lot of coordination to make that type of model work. But that model is focused on cutting out process waste early in the partnership, but not too early, right? Because let's be honest, there are times when you need knowledge of the process before you can transform it. And there are many GBS organizations who want their BPO provider to prove that they can do the work seamlessly and with satisfactory SLAs before they're willing to give the provider a shot at transforming. Final point I'll make on this one is captive centers have been pitching transformation as one of the key value propositions for years, so if we let the BPO provider do it, what's the fun for us?
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Sashi Narahari4:48
Interesting. So I think the bottom line is they will be alive but in a different form and a little bit more emergence of the captive standards as a complementary force. All right, the second dead or alive question is around physical service centers, especially given the pandemic era and probably the post-pandemic. You hear so much about work from home, work from anywhere. What's your viewpoint on these large physical service centers? Would they be dead or alive 10 years from now?
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Cindy Gallagher5:13
They will be more dead than alive, but we're going to find ourselves living in a hybrid model probably for my entire lifetime. In that, we began shifting 485 roles to our provider in December of 2020. So far, all of this has been accomplished without a single foot in a physical center for either the BPO provider or us. Before the Christmas holiday, we did start to work on bringing people in India back into a center, but we were still working remotely here in the US. Before Christmas, we had to send everybody back home again. The thing here is remote work works. A few of us, like I said in the Liberty Source days, we've been saying it for years. But I do think eventually we will need physical centers for work involving a high degree of security, for intense strategy meetings, and absolutely for the camaraderie and culture building needs that we've been missing. But I don't see a time in the immediate future where everybody is back into a physical space again, not in my lifetime.
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Sashi Narahari6:14
Makes sense. It almost seems like if you have to summarize that, big, large, massive physical centers might be dead 10 years from now, and then you'll still have different forms and maybe smaller for different work processes, cultural camaraderie, nature of work, and so forth.
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Cindy Gallagher6:25
Yeah, I think that's right, Sashi.
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Sashi Narahari6:30
All right, the third dead or alive question is around RPA. There's a lot of debate and controversy around robotic process automation, the level of automation it can give. But if you think about RPA in the current form, which is the as-is automation of a sub-process, do you think it will be dead or alive 10 years from now?
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Cindy Gallagher6:46
Current form, it'll be dead. RPA will be a commodity to me. It'll be much like a Microsoft Office product. New joiners into our organization will probably start to list RPA skills and tools and things they have experience with on their resume, just like they do their other credentials. RPA has been way overhyped for years, as is the case with most new technology. We hype it, we try it, we realize the actual potential, we try to harness it, and with the case of RPA, we commoditize it.
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Sashi Narahari7:21
All right, the next question on data is similar, kind of like technology and the evolution. This is more around artificial intelligence. As you know, there is a lot of hype on AI, a lot of interesting case studies like Teslas of the world. Obviously, we'll probably be in autonomous driving. What are your thoughts on AI specifically in GBS in 10 years from now? Would it be fairly active or would it be dead?
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Cindy Gallagher7:36
I think it'll be alive. I think there's a lot of return on investment with AI when it's implemented and managed correctly. And AI so far hasn't proven to be all that it's been hyped up to be, but I don't think we've given it a long enough runway, and I don't think enough in the GBS field have harnessed the power of AI to let it truly transform our operations. I think we need to keep the hype going for a little bit longer, keep exploring the possibilities, and I think we need to do that for several more years before we put a final report card out on whether or not AI has achieved success.
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Sashi Narahari8:14
All right, the fifth dead or alive question is around India as a service center location in 10 years. Given the consistent wage increases, inflation, will India be a top choice for service centers? Dead or alive?
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Cindy Gallagher8:26
It will not be the number one top choice, maybe top ten. So I don't think it will be completely dead, but definitely not the top, top choice. And I say that knowing that I have a team in India today and I have had teams in India almost my entire career. There's too much talent there. Too many large organizations have invested in India, but it's not the only choice that we have. I mentioned had teams in three different cities across India, they all brought me different strengths for different purposes. I do think that GBS and BPO leaders in India need to continue to embrace change, they need to push forward with new technology, they need to listen to their clients above all else. The country as a whole, if they do these things, won't become a BPO dinosaur. And for me as a global leader and buyer of BPO services, it's not going to be my only choice and destination for talent.
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Sashi Narahari9:22
The last dead or alive question is on the GBS itself, the fate. So what do you think about the GBS as an organization itself? A lot of evolution over the last decade, but if you kind of forecast into the next 10 years, would GBS as an organization be dead or alive?
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Cindy Gallagher9:38
I think it'll be alive. I think it will continue to thrive. The term probably changes. We should be more focused on digital transformation and on providing greater enablers of front-end customer-facing initiatives, but the centralized model will still exist as the backbone of the organization. We enable all of the pieces and parts to stand strong, to move effectively, and to grow. And just as our BPO providers need to listen to us, we need to listen to our internal business partners. We need to understand what they're looking for while also anticipating what they're going to need in the future. If we can't do that, GBS will die a quick and probably very painful death. But GBS still provides many industries an opportunity to keep our costs low, to perform processes efficiently with greater accuracy and scale than any single business unit could on its own. So it's on my shoulders, it's on the shoulders of every GBS leader to challenge our teams to explore new service offerings and to adapt our delivery model in order to keep this model alive.
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Sashi Narahari10:41
Awesome. All right, Cindy. So let's summarize. I'm curious, what did we kill and what would we keep alive? I think we killed physical service centers in terms of the scale and how large they would be like today, RPA in the current form as-is automation of a small process, and then India as a top destination for service center for outsourcing. What we kept alive is the BPOs itself, the AI as an emerging technology even though there is hype, and the GBS centers itself. So I'm really looking forward to being in touch with you and then maybe grab a drink every few years and see where we are. It's kind of fun. Why don't we close the podcast with a general advice from you for all the GBS leaders out there?
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Cindy Gallagher11:30
I would say give yourself permission. And here's what I mean by that. Some GBS leaders aim to transform and to be the backbone that we talked about earlier, while others are checking boxes and executing processes. So my advice is to ask yourself which of those categories you fit in and why do you feel you fit there. If the answer turns out that you fit in either of these scenarios because you're afraid of exploring something different, you need to give yourself permission to let go of that fear and break free of your comfort zone. We also need to explore and to push boundaries and to find something we love about the work that we do. As a leader, for me, that's my people. We need to bet on our people, give them a safe space to explore and to grow, listen and take action on their ideas, embrace new technology, embrace new ways of working. GBS is always evolving and I want to position my team to take advantage of it.
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Sashi Narahari12:28
Great advice. At HighRadius, we call it feeling secure to fail because then you can never explore, right? If you're just always afraid of failing. So, Cindy, thank you so much. This has been a very valuable podcast. Thanks for being on the GBS Masterminds today.
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Cindy Gallagher12:39
Thanks for having me, Sashi. I look forward to getting that drink.
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Sashi Narahari12:44
All right, bye-bye. That was the GBS Masterminds podcast. For more information, visit gbsmasterminds.com and make sure to search for GBS Masterminds in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes, and on behalf of the team here at HighRadius, thanks for listening.