An innovative business for digital organizations and workforce solutions: Mercer Digital

Taxi companies weren’t looking for GPS. Enter Uber. Auto companies weren’t paying attention to electric batteries. Enter Tesla. If you miss a trend, there’s a likelihood your business will get disrupted. Falling behind is risky. With the rapid development of business technology and an irrevocable shift towards digitization, the days where a business could resist the call of digital is over. It used to be that if you wanted to improve your business processes, you looked for newer technology to meet your needs. Then came SAP with its enterprise resource planning system: the biggest complaint from business was that they need to adapt their process to fit the ERP system not the other way around.

Innovation in technology is leading even faster, opening a plethora of previously hidden business opportunities and insights. By large, businesses aren’t keeping pace. In an era of digital disruption, your people matter more than ever. Mercer Digital provides organizations with the insights they need to transform their business and unlock the full potential of their workforce. Mercer Digital helps companies empower their employees — helping their people live better, work better and plan effectively for the future — while readying their business for tomorrow.

Mercer Digital embraces best-of-its-class technology solutions to help companies prepare for a tech-dominated future and empower them to transform their organization accordingly. What differentiates Mercer Digital from other Global SIs? It has CPSG Partners as its foundation.

The Beginning: CPSG Partners

In 2011, Rohit Mehrotra, now the CEO of Mercer Digital, aimed to create an organization based on two questions: what would happen to a business if everyone, from bottom to top, was extraordinary? Moreover, when everyone is outstanding, how does the organization remain humble? He looked for organizations that already fit this principle and found the United States Navy SEALs. An officer advised him that the way to keep the organization loyal to each other was to create a continuously challenging problem set for these bright employees to solve. That way, the group must work together and lean on each other to solve it. Rohit and his business partner Jessie Mann found their “problem set” in Workday – a growing tech product with major success and growth ahead.

Rohit and Jessie founded CPSG Partners in 2012. Workday implementation services became the firm’s main offering, and with its philosophy of only hiring “stellar” colleagues, CPSG earned Inc. 5000 Awards in 2014, 2015, and 2016 for culture, astonishing growth, and quality of growth.

Peaking Mercer’s interest due to its talent model, CPSG Partners was acquired by Mercer in January 2016. Mercer Digital began as a natural progression of CPSG’s core culture that excels in combining HR and people strategy. Founded by people who truly understand technology and paired with Mercer’s 70-year legacy as a trusted advisor in HR, Mercer Digital is organically built ground up to advance people strategy with digital services. Rather than offer a hodgepodge of popular software to be carelessly implemented, Mercer Digital brings to the table a curated, thoughtful set of digital solutions that make data analytics, AI, and advanced technologies part of the business and help clients transition to technologically-driven environments that streamline work processes. 

The Present: Mercer Digital Now and the Motivation behind It

Businesses close and start up every day. So what differentiates those that prosper and those that fall away to other companies? It’s the ability to adapt to change. 

“Here’s an example. Imagine you are the Chief HR Officer of a multinational business and, as is often the case, you need a steady stream of talent. How are you identifying that talent?” asks Mehrotra. “We used to depend on recruitment agencies and job ads to hire; today we have technology that connects us directly with potential employees, wherever and whenever. If you don’t digitize, watch your competitors hire away your next generation of talent.”

While the potential of a truly digitized working environment is a much talked about trend, only 7% of executives worldwide consider their organization to be digital. According to Mercer’s 2017 Global Talent Trends research, executives view technological disruption and enablement as the trend likely to have the most critical impact on their organization over the next two years. Yet most executives claim they are not doing enough to proactively address the challenges of technology or to realize the benefits.

Employees today expect a level of digital interaction that companies have yet to deliver. Customers, employees, and partners are based on new relationships almost instantaneously, and it’s an always-on relationship. Moreover, the millennial workforce expects to use different types of systems and to interact with executives, with customers, with each other in a very different way. “This is where Mercer Digital is playing,” says Mehrotra. “If you look at organizations who have large platforms available and those platforms are innovating at a very fast pace because these organizations also have leadership that is looking far out, we want to be able to partner with those companies, understand those platforms, and bring services around that technology to our customers.”

With this sentiment in mind, Mercer Digital recently announced a partnership with ServiceNow—a cloud-based solution that digitizes the enterprise: HR, IT, Customer Service, and more—adding to their pre-existing alliance with Workday, a leading cloud-based financial management and human capital management software. Other significant acquisitions and alliances include:

• The acquisition of Thomsons Online Benefits and its leading-edge global benefits platform.
• The acquisition of Sirota Consulting to keep a pulse on employee engagement as organizations navigate digital change.
• A strategic alliance with CareerArc, which offers social, on-demand transition and outplacement services.
• An investment in PayScale and its next-generation compensation data and software solutions.

The Future of Mercer Digital

Technology alone does not guarantee successful digitization. Organizations need an agile culture with the right people and the right capabilities to adopt and effectively implement new technologies. To assess and address the impacts of the digital world on an organization’s workforce, Mercer recently collaborated with sister company Oliver Wyman to offer Workforce for the Future, which combines consulting thought leadership on people strategy with the organizational implications, and even societal challenges, of digital disruption. Moreover, it takes time and patience. The question, though, for many executives is “How are we going to do this quickly?”

“At Mercer Digital, we want to answer this question in a way that’s easily understood: let’s adopt massive platforms, and those platforms are not only innovating themselves but they’re being offered as a service, so you should be able to bring client-specific applications on top of it,” reveals Mehrotra. For the organization, the aim is not to present a piecemeal approach to digitization. When you learn and implement digital in bits and pieces, there is a risk that you’ll end up with a Frankenstein situation that makes little sense. Instead, Mercer Digital will continue to look for companies that complement and bolster each other.

In the broad scheme of things, one of the most important reasons for organizations to digitize is to help address the societal challenge of technology disrupting jobs. In its Future of Jobs Report, the World Economic Forum predicted that 35% of core skills will change over a five-year period to 2020. Skills instability will be high for all industries – regardless of employment outlook – with more jobs destroyed than new ones created. By planning for a digital future, organizations can prepare the workforce by helping develop capabilities that will contribute to both the organization’s future success and employees’ future relevance in the workplace.

“Ultimately, we are looking for exceptional people to be a part of Mercer Digital and companies that subscribe to this idea of professional excellence to be our partners,” concludes Mehrotra. “It’s an exciting time. With the right people and companies, there is no limit to what can be achieved here.”

Mastermind behind the Masterstroke

Rohit Mehrotra, CEO: Mehrotra is a serial entrepreneur recognized for his ability to turn simple ideas into high growth businesses, bringing exceptional value to stakeholders. He brings more than 30 years of experience in building business in many industries.

In 2012, Mehrotra co-founded CPSG Partners, a professional services firm focused on moving on premise enterprise applications to the cloud. Under his leadership, CPSG became a premier partner with a high-quality ERP program called Workday, pioneered new Workday fields, and won many awards for the business’ growth, including Inc. 5000’s “Fastest Growing Companies” in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and Southern Methodist University’s Dallas 100 Businesses in 2015.

The business also flourished culturally. Mehrotra was personally nominated for the Ernst and Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award in 2015 and was featured in John Mattone’s book, Cultural Transformations, published in January 2016. In the fall of 2015, Rohit sold CPSG to Mercer, creating Mercer | CPSG Partners. In July of 2017, Mehrotra was named CEO of Mercer Digital, where he intends to build a portfolio of digital organization and workforce change solutions that enable businesses to adapt their technology and people models to operate, manage, and compete more effectively.

"Leveraging extensive experience in data and technology, and its legacy as a global consulting leader, Mercer Digital is helping organizations transition to a digital future to keep pace with the speed of business change and ensure their workforce thrives."