In Full Bloom

Reflections On A Long Career — Part I — Life-long Learning

"If I could turn back time"

I’m a year older than Cher, and we would both “turn back time” if we could. Who wouldn’t? We also share having had a very long career — if nothing else — and mine is still in high gear. But it’s about what it takes to develop and sustain a long career that I’m writing here. Mostly, for Cher and for me, it takes staying in shape (mentally and physically), staying au courant, and working your ass off.

Lifelong learning and personal growth are at the heart of any long career. But for a marathon rather than a sprint career, that lifelong learning, that personal reinvention, must be a passion, not just a chore. And it’s our responsibility to learn and grow; it’s not the responsibility of our employer of the moment. By all means take advantage of every employer-provided opportunity, of those tax breaks and government programs that support lifelong learning and career programs. But, in the final analysis, it’s your job to build and preserve your own KSAOCs.

Everyone must adapt to aging, must learn to work differently as they age. But the burden of figuring out how to stay relevant, how to accommodate the inevitable loss of physical prowess that comes with age, how to cope with health issues and more, resides with us and not with our employer. If you’re fortunate enough to have an EAP program at the ready, say thank you and use it. If you’re entitled to adaptive technology, to public programs in support of your health issues, by all means use them. But with or without that support, the figuring out part lies solely with us.

How do you think an aging performer or athlete feels when they realize that everyone in their profession is young enough to be their child? How do you think a long-standing manager feels when his/her boss is a generation younger? How do you think I feel when I face a new group of clients who studied many of the major events of my life in their history classes? Well, you either get over it and show them what you can do — or you’re done.

Staying competent and relevant is really hard work, and your career today is much less about what you did in the past and very much about what you’re able to do right now. What matters at work is what you contribute today and tomorrow. ALL of my clients are much younger than I am, and that affords me some really wonderful learning opportunities as I am constantly exposed to their way of viewing our world of HRM and HR technology. But what they expect from me in terms of contribution is not conditioned on what I produced a generation ago but rather on what I can produce now. And that’s entirely reasonable.

Except for the very few, you’re all going to be working as long as I have and beyond. With defined benefit pension plans (public and private) on their last legs and people living — and functioning – so much longer, I really think that the concept of automatic retirement at 60 or so is entirely outdated. Yes, there are definitely people whose work has been so soul-deadening or physically and emotionally challenging that they really are burned/worn out by 60. But for most of the people reading this post, your work is of a very different sort, or at least you have the wherewithal in intelligence, education, and other resources to aspire to more knowledge-based work. And for you, planning a career that goes well past 60, one which adapts to aging but isn’t ended by it, may make a lot more sense, both economically and psychologically.

So, since “we can’t turn back time,” we may as well learn to flaunt what we’ve got.

An Open Letter To HR Executives

There But For The Grace Of G-d Go Any One Of Us

Dear Sir/Madam,

We may not have met, but I’ve got your back. I’m on your side when it comes to using effective HRM practices and business rules to drive improved business outcomes in your organization. I know how hard it is to draw those lines of sight from needed business outcomes, like faster time to market, lower costs of higher quality customer service, greater insight into customer profitability by market segments, and greater organizational capability to support global growth, to the specifics of what HR does to improve HRM. And I know absolutely that information technology is not the answer but rather just one of the critical tools in your arsenal when it comes to attacking your toughest challenges.

Information technology can be a real power tool, providing enormous leverage when used well. Or it can cut you and your career off at the knees when mishandled. And all too often, through ignorance, benign neglect, delegation to whoever leads comp and benefits, or knee-jerk subservience to the IT powers that be, you’ve been cut off at the knees.

Help (which is just one letter off from hell, so we can’t afford to wander) is on the way. But there’s a fair amount of work ahead if you’re going to take charge of how, when, at what cost, against what objectives, with what redesigned processes, using what types of high quality data, with what governance, etc. you deploy the power tools of IT to the benefit of your firm’s effectiveness in HRM and, more importantly, to the achievement of needed business results.

First up, you need to get comfortable with the idea that technology per se is not the answer to any important business question any more than 42 is the answer to “what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?” There just aren’t simple answers to important business questions, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t answers. And where technology is concerned, driving business outcomes via effective HRM is much more about knowing what effective HRM would look like, knowing what practices applied to what parts of the organization would generate the most overall benefit. Once we understand what’s needed in HRM to drive those business outcomes, we can figure out what combination of technical tools, deployed how, with what functionality and so forth are needed to support those practices.

For many years I’ve used the metaphor of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” to describe the thought process that takes us from well-defined business outcomes to well-defined HRM practices/organizational designs/analytics/etc. and right on to the design and delivery of the needed operational capabilities, the HRM delivery system, needed to conjure up your own Emerald City. You can read about that approach at your leisure using the links at the end of this letter.

After you’ve slogged your way through all of that, and having cured any insomnia from which you may have been suffering, I’d like to suggest that, with the help of a select team of business, HR and HR technology/delivery system leaders, you begin work ASAP to refine your HRM and HRM delivery systems strategy. But how and where do you begin this journey?

Gather all of the organizational strategy, current state HRM and HRMDS information you can find. Read it all through the lens of strategic HRM, looking for the specific impacts on business strategies and outcomes that must come from well-executed strategic HRM. See the patterns in those strategic HRM requirements and design HRM policies etc. to deliver them. Then prepare to update your HRM policies, practices, and operations to support converged HRM and HR technology.
Assign someone to inventory your current HRMDS, including all the “informal” components. What software are you using — brand/module/release – and what is it costing, including both out-of-pocket and opportunity costs? What outsourcing are you doing — provider/scope of service — and what is it costing, including both out-of-pocket and opportunity costs? What spreadsheets, Word documents, private databases, and even paper files (gulp!) are you depending on for some of your HRM processes?
Learn all you can about the differences between poor, good and great HR technology, and about what the market offers — continuous learning needed here. There’s a ton of material on my blog (here, here and here are some good starting points), and an absolute must is attendance at a major HR technology conference. I’ll be speaking (every year since it’s inception) at the big Kahuna of such conferences, HRE’s HR Technology Conference , as well as at the newer European HR Technology Conference.
Clean up your HRM data — including organization data, people data, competency models, business rules, and data granularity — to support converged HRM and converged HR technology. Start with the most important roles, organizations, KSAOCs, whatever, but you really can’t do anything decent with analytics unless your data is sufficiently reliable, granular and properly structured.
Insist upon detailed product roadmaps, with dates, against which to evaluate vendors and providers for evidence that they’re on top of converged HRM and converged HR technology — and do probe for their strategies around all eight convergence themes mentioned in the blog post on this you will have read in step #3 above.
Determine what components of your current HRMDS platform are serving you well, which are not, what needs to be upgraded/enhanced/replaced, what can remain as it is (but keep on eye on this as all components “age”). Design your future HRMDS to deliver those strategic HRM requirements and then make your HR technology decisions. Be disciplined/methodical in evaluating potential HRMDS platform component changes, or changes in people and process, and don’t be a victim of vendor “promises.” Weed out/de-emphasize vendors and providers who can’t take you to a converged future — and run away from those that don’t even know that the converged future is coming.
Do not judge the needs of tomorrow’s workforce or HRM by yesterday’s standards, but do judge your own responsibilities and their results in terms of driving business outcomes.

You obviously don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself; there’s a ton of staff work discussed above that’s properly delegated. But it’s important that you get just as comfortable discussing — and then making “bet the farm” decisions about the technology-enabled aspects of HRM as you’ve become (or been expected to become) discussing and making decisions about the financial aspects of HRM. And there’s not an MBA program of any substance that leaves out any of this — IT, finance, HRM, and operations management — which is why I’m so grateful for that degree.

We may not have met, but I’ve got your back. Sincerely yours, Naomi Bloom

Follow The Yellow Brick Road Part IV/Finale: The HRM Delivery System!

If you feel like you’ve been stranded along the way or that we’ve (or you’ve) been off on various scenic detours, my apologies for not providing the final installment of our Yellow Brick Road travelogue as quickly as I had hoped. Life just keeps happening; we keep up as best we can. And if you’re just [...]

April 5th, 2010 | Category: Business Outcomes, Enterprise Software, Follow The Yellow Brick Road, HR Tech, HRM BPO, HRMDS, Strategic HRMDS Planning | 2 comments | Edit this post

Follow The Yellow Brick Road Part III: HRM Strategies, Outcomes And Design

My apologies for the long detour from the Yellow Brick Road while I attended to heavy business travel, client deliverables, more shoulder rehab, and the final business details for closing on M/V SmartyPants. More on SmartyPants in a later next post, complete with pictures. For now, we’ve got a lot more work to do along [...]

March 22nd, 2010 | Category: Business Outcomes, Follow The Yellow Brick Road, KSAOCs, Strategic HRM, Strategic HRMDS Planning, Talent Management | Leave a comment | Edit this post

Follow The Yellow Brick Road Part II: Vision, Strategy And Outcomes

In Part I of our journey down the yellow brick road to great HRM and HRM delivery systems, I set the stage in terms of the environment in which our organizations must operate and what they must do to be successful. By now you should have decided for your own organization – or will do this shortly [...]

March 1st, 2010 | Category: Follow The Yellow Brick Road, HR Tech, HRM, HRM BPO, HRM Software, HRMDS, Metrics/Analytics, Strategic HRMDS Planning | One comment | Edit this post

Follow The Yellow Brick Road Part I: Business Environment And Challenges

In my 2/9/2010 post, I announced that I would be publishing my strategic HRM delivery systems planning methodology on this blog, so I thought I’d better get started. Although there’s a very geeky set of materials to guide me on these projects, I call the version of my methodology intended for clients, “follow the yellow [...]

February 22nd, 2010 | Category: Follow The Yellow Brick Road, HR Tech, HRM, HRM Software, HRMDS, HRO, Strategic HRM, Strategic HRMDS Planning | 7 comments | Edit this post

Ruminations On Being Overweight And Smoking

This post was inspired by a discussion thread among the Enterprise Irregulars about the challenges of quitting smoking and maintaining a healthy weight, one of which I’ve overcome and the other of which will always be a work in progress. It really does take a village, and I’m grateful to mine, to deal with life’s challenges.

: Climbing Mayan Pyramids Sept 1983

I started smoking in 1960 when it was absolutely the norm in my family/social circles/etc. When I came home from school or work on one of my Mom’s mahjong party days (yup, that’s what Moms did before everyone went to work, in the days when one modest income bought a pretty middle-class lifestyle), the fug was thicker than Bubbi Bloom’s Yiddish accent.

I quit smoking for good, after some very tough times, in 1987, about the time I launched my solo consulting practice. I still reach for that never there cigarette when the jazz is smoky and the drinks are flowing. And I remember very well that the first thing I did when I conquered “The Tomb of the Inscription” at Palenque (that’s really me in the picture!) — a challenge to anyone’s lung capacity — was to light up. But I can say now with absolute confidence that I’ve kicked permanently the smoking habit, an accomplishment which I cherish.

And then there’s my weight. Having been given up for essentially dead on arrival, then slapped into responding and later determined to be a “blue baby,” I spent most of my earliest years being fed (probably continuously), and I guess my fat cells have never gotten over that. Did you know that, no matter how much weight you lose, once you’ve got a fat cell, you’ve got it forever? They deflate as you lose weight, but they lurk and connive to replump themselves — unless you get them sucked out, a truly disgusting thought.

Throw in the tendency to overweight on both sides of my family, and it’s little wonder that I’ve always been heavy, heavier, heaviest, interspersed with short (and quite confusing) periods of not being too heavy, of what I call my hotty years. 1983 was one of those years, and I remember it fondly.

Losing weight and keeping it off has been much harder than quitting smoking — at least for me — but I’m finding new determination with the general deterioration of skeletal function that comes with aging. Even as a long-distance (mile and then two mile) swimmer in my early teens, I was always the heaviest girl in my cabin at summer camp. I’m truly blessed to be free of the loss of self-esteem and general negativity that so often accompanies being overweight, but my joints haven’t gotten the message.

Frankly, this is the one big failure that I’ve carried with me from childhood, and I’d sure like to claim victory before I’m too old to remember why I’m doing this. We all carry with us some unfinished business — relationships we should have handled better, jobs at which we didn’t excel, exams for which we didn’t study hard enough, and the list goes on. I’ve got my fair share of unfinished business, but it’s mostly pretty minor stuff, perhaps because being overweight has overshadowed so much else.

I’ve reduced my workload (overload would be more accurate) for 2012 to something approaching reasonable (so full-time rather than double-time), and thereby reduced the accompanying business travel. I’m now very focused on losing a little weight each year — a little, not a lot. This is one area where achieving modest goals is much better than failing to meet aggressive goals. I have no illusions about how difficult this is, especially since I already have pretty healthy eating habits and a fairly disciplined approach to life. There’s even a body of research that confirms that the metabolism of overweight people fights to keep them that way, a phenomena to which I can truly attest. But if I could model the entire HRM domain in objects, I can certainly lose a few pounds in 2012.

Wish me luck!

So You Think You’re An HRM Business Analyst/Product Strategist?

: A Business Analyst’s Work Is Never Done

Originally published, 2/4/2011, I’ve updated this post on 1/5/2012 to emphasize the tremendous, really critical importance of understanding and making effective use of data analysis to drive improved decision-making. So that you can spot the updates, I’vedone them in italics.

As many of you know, I’ve worked extensively with HRM product strategy/product management leaders as they envision and then specify the capabilities of their HRM software products and related outsourcing services. But as our industry has moved from Victorian novel specifications to object model-based expressions of desired functionality, I’ve been unpleasantly surprised at the number of product strategy/product management folks, not to mention subject matter experts, who cannot express their domain expertise in insightful, lean and durable patterns. Folks who cannot express their subject matter knowledge in patterns, who cannot write insightful use cases, from which to abstract/help to abstract the object model implications of that subject matter and those use cases, these folks can really derail and/or delay mightily all attempts to reinvent HRM with modern software.

Thus begins the great debate about whether it’s easier to convert HRM subject matter experts into pattern-recognizing, object-based business analysts or to engage sufficiently object-based software designers and developers in the HRM domain to enable them to abstract the needed models, with confidence, from the analytical group gropings with their subject matter expert colleagues. Each of the HRM software vendors and/or software-based HRM BPO providers has faced this conundrum as they’ve evolved their software lifecycle for the 21st century and, even more so, when they’ve rearchitected their software or, for startups, when they’ve sprinted toward their first release. And many of those same vendors and providers have had to engage this issue from the moment they made the decision to license my HRM domain object model “starter kit.”

In my view, it’s just too slow and error-prone for even the best definitional or traditional application developers to extract the needed logical object model, the needed domain patterns, the implicit architectural requirements, from even the best use case “specs.” Having worked at modeling the HRM domain for much of my career, evolving from event-partitioned data and process models to full-blown object models, I know how easy it is to make a series of very hard to recover from mistakes. Two common examples are:

Confusing and mingling inappropriately the attributes of an employee with those of their employment “contract” and those of their specific work assignments. A great use case for unraveling these mysteries is to consider an employee who has signed up for full-time, ongoing employment with a personally negotiated six weeks of vacation (to compensate them for their longevity with their previous employer from whom you’re recruiting them) and whose first assignment is to a position that has a fixed term and budget of six months.
Missing the need for an overarching concept of KSAOC to tie together the myriad types of human capabilities that are essential to so many aspects of strategic HRM (aka talent management). Prior work experience verified via reference checks, academic accomplishments verified via diplomas and transcripts, licenses and certifications with their very concrete verifications and frequently needed renewals, willingness/availability to travel contributed by the person in question, physical prowess and/or disabilities verified via physical measurements (e.g. visual acuity and ability to lift a stated weight), attitudes measured via standardized and vetted tests and behaviors observed via actual performance — and the list goes on — all these and many more human capabilities may be relevant to the work at hand but characterized by quite different attributes and methods, and it takes KSAOC to tie them together into what’s commonly called a talent or personal profile and to provide an overarching structure for weighted analysis.

There are many KSAOCs needed for a long and successful career as a business analyst/delivery system strategist or director/product consultant/product manager/etc., and modeling the domain in objects is just one area of needed expertise. I would also note that the people working across corporate HR and IT organizations who see themselves as business analysts, and their colleagues who see themselves as strategic thinkers about HR operations and HRM process design, need very much the same set of KSAOCs. The foundational KSAOCs for any capable, future-proofed business analyst include:

Excellent, fast and compelling writing;
Excellent, fluent and compelling speaking;
A commitment to and investment in lifelong learning;
Attention to details combined with the ability to see/create/communicate the big picture;
Quick thinking “on your feet;”
A global perspective on business and geopolitics along with relevant local knowledge of your industry and cultural environment;
Quality education in the liberal arts — literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, and so many more “liberal” arts subjects enhanced critical thinking, writing, speaking etc. KSAOCs;
Quality education in business — you’ll need the basics of accounting, production management, marketing and sales, and so much more to understand the context within which business analysis addresses specific issues/problems;
Quality education in mathematics/science/etc. to ensure that you have a solid grounding in the statistics and scientific method that are increasingly required for effective HRM domain expertise; and
Critical thinking/visualization/classification, generalization/abstraction, enumeration and so much more in the areas of data analysis, data mining, and data-driven business decision-making.

But we’re not just talking here about any capable, future-proofed business analyst but rather about those who work at the intersection of HRM and IT. For these valued colleagues, even more KSAOCs are needed in terms of specific, up-to-date and often strategic knowledge of:

The HRM subject matter, in terms of its breadth, complexity, geographical variations, regulatory overlay, and strategic interconnections;
The full and modern lifecycle of applying IT to HRM, from strategic planning for the HRM delivery system through evaluation/selection/implementation of both packaged HRM software and HR outsourcing arrangements, and on to the optimization and constant refreshing of all the HRMDS components;
A wide range of available HRM software and services — beware the fallacy of using a hammer on all business problems because that’s the only tool you’ve master — along with more detailed knowledge about at least a few; and
Why and how vendors/products differ, how to illuminate and evaluate those differences, and what conclusions to draw in a specific business situation about the relevance and meaning of those differences.

Are you exhausted? Well so am I, and I’m a working albeit senior business analyst above all else. And we haven’t even touched on turning your KSAOCs into industry impact and thought leadership through speaking/publishing/networking all enabled via social technology. Looks like we’re going to need another post. In the meantime, a little traveling music:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major-General’s_Song to hear George Baker singing the Major-General’s Song with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, conducted by Malcolm Sargent (1929)

The terrific cartoon that introduced this post is from a blog I recommend: http://www.stellman-greene.com/2007/08/03/qa-how-to-get-ahead-in-business-analysis-without-really-trying/

There’s True SaaS, And Then There’s SaaS InFullBloom

Monet -- Field of Flowers and Windmills near Leiden

In my last post, I provided a minimum definition of true SaaS and described the potential benefits for both vendors and customers who adhere to this now well-established concept in enterprise software. But the potential benefits are only realized as vendors move from delivering the basics of true SaaS to what I call SaaS InFullBloom, so perhaps I should trademark that phrase. Unlike the minimalist definition of true SaaS, knowing what else goes into achieving SaaS InFullBloom depends on the nature of the applications, the target market, the scope of functionality to be delivered, the geography and industry-specific readiness to take advantage/access specific capabilities, and many more factors. That said, there really are a core of preferred architectural behaviors which, taken together, separate garden variety true SaaS from great SaaS, aka SaaS InFullBloom.

SaaS done well is all about great software architecture and development practices — as well as about great capabilities that are consumed easily by customers. True SaaS, with just multi-tenancy, became mere table stakes in 2011; SaaS done well is an important indicator of durable success for the vendor and their customers. SaaS done well is about delivering on all of the potential business benefits of true SaaS.

So what’s SaaS InFullBloom? Here’s my list, in no particular order, of those preferred architectural behaviors:

Elegant, extensive, and fully effective-dated configuration capabilities, to include pre-release sandboxes, regression testing tools, plenty of configuration and feature guidance delivered through the software (see the next bullet for more on this point), and a heavy dose of user (i.e. manager, employee, non-employee worker, applicant, beneficiary — everybody!) insight about the many places where not only the customer’s administrators but also those many users will want to and/or need to adapth the software to how they choose to work. SaaS done well can meet your special needs and retain configurations through each upgrade. SaaS done well can be embedded with the configurations needed to support specific types of work and workers, the regulatory requirements of specific industries and geographies, and the unique business rules and practices of individual organizations, with those configurations done by properly trained business analysts rather than by developers.
Interrogatory configuration, which takes prospects from their earliest interactions with the vendor right through their repeated implementation cycles as their selected vendor releases several major functional releases each year along with the more frequent releases of regulatory and similar updates, has the potential for changing fundamentally the cost of sales, the elapsed time to revenue, and the underlying dynamics of the whole ecosystem of systems consultants for those HRM SaaS vendors whose underlying architectures lend themselves to dynamic configuration and whose business model sees the promise and are willing to invest in these capabilities. What TurboTax has done for US tax filing — making it possible for normal people to navigate arguably the most arcane concoction of business rules ever created — is what interrogatory configuration is intended to do for unleashing the capabilities of enterprise software.
Extensive and easily set up cross-tenant and cross-geography inheritance of every type of embedded intelligence, from the obvious regulatory rules to those proprietary materials like competency models and dictionaries, salary surveys and compensation planning guidance, which result from the partnering of HRM consultancies which have built those proprietary materials with HRM SaaS vendors who can delivery that material as embedded intelligence throughout the relevant processes at minimal additional cost whether client-specific or vendor-provided, improves service quality and business outcomes.
Models-based/definitional applications development, which is the state of the art in building business applications software, means there’s no procedural code written to create individual applications or configurations. Instead, there’s a ton of metadata that’s shared cross-tenant and then configured further by tenant. This approach to development is quite difficult to achieve because it requires considerable upfront investment in the necessary foundation tools (which, to my knowledge and specifically for the HRM domain, cannot simply be bought to support the complexity of some of these other preferred behaviors). But it offers such an enormous potential for improvement in the cost/time/quality metrics of bringing new funcionality to market that this now bleeding edge approach to HRM SaaS may create just the edge needed for newer arrivals to blow past their more established competitors.
Extensive and easily set up cross-tenant data aggregation — with the permission of all the relevant parties, for crowdsourcing, benchmarking, and many other forms of cross-tenant collaboration.
Systemic effective-dating – of business data, business rules, embedded intelligence, applications and application foundations. This is extremely difficult to do when applications are written via traditional procedural languages and much easier when it can be built into the fabric of a models-based/definitional development platform. But the payoff to customers in such a date-laden domain as HRM is in the huge reduction in errors, work-arounds, manual/shadow/logging side systems, sticky notes, mass changes (which are really about correcting what should have been correct in the first place), and the ever popular but oh so cumbersome audit database.
Fully automated retrospective, retroactive and prospective processing — critical but also very hard to do unless you’ve got effective-dating handled systemically and have used a calculation engine rather than procedural logic to deliver everything from payroll to leave accruals.
Mobile service delivery – not just reformatting but rethinking HRM, especially talent management (TM), workforce management (WFM), and strategic HRM analytics/decision-making, for a mobile world.
Social/Collaboration — not just about socializing existing transactions or processes but about rethinking HRM from a workforce collaboration and collaboration use case perspective.
Global — what platform capabilities for what target markets and in what countries backed up by what go-to-market plans and feet on the street, to include VARs and other types of distribution relationships?
Analytics including what types of actionable, embedded, and/or predictive analytics with what types of visualizations at point of sale.
Gamification — remember the suggestion box and the contests for great business improvement ideas with prizes for the best of them? Remember when, under the general heading of recognition programs, the employee of the month was given a primo parking space and you got a plaque for great attendance? Well, gamification is all of that and more. Using the same collaboration infrastructure noted above, gamification capabilities let us record publicly kudos to co-workers, earn badges for everything from good attendance to delivering great customer service, run sales contests to push older merchandise, and recognize every type of desireable behavior — and by exception call attention to those who aren’t behaving/producing/attending/etc. Although many of us still care about the ka-ching of compensation, there’s a lot of potential motivation, learning, teamwork, and even fun when HRM processes are rethought in these terms, so it’s important to have the right platforms in place to make this easy and pervasive when turned on by use case.
Embedded intelligence of all kinds including content, guidance, exogenous data, best practice processes and business rules.
Integrated HCM — core ERP/HRMS and core TM are inextricably intertwined, both as to end-to-end HRM processes as well as in terms of shared object foundations, consistent user experiences and workflow protocols, and the deepest of architectural enablers, and most customers aren’t able/don’t want to be systems integrators in perpetuity.
Integrated talent management – with deep process-based and event-triggered integration so that all the good work of talent management isn’t undone by poorly handled ripple effects.
Integration tools — true SaaS, cloud-based capabilities for the inevitable, needed integrations beyond HRM and based on the same principles as all other configurations so that business analysts can develop and manage these integrations without programmer intervention.
Complete and correct object model for the scope of delivered functionality — if I see one more talent management or broad HRM application without properly distinct concepts of job and position, I’m really going to name names.

There’s a lot more to it, but this at least gives you a feel for my thinking. My preferred architectural behaviors “starter kit” is going on 250 pages of very dense slides, and the object model “starter kit” is more than 2,000 pages, so it’s not a trivial task to come up with the right behaviors and object model for even a modest HRM SaaS InFullBloom application. So it’s no wonder that vendors who start by building a modest HRM application run into some serious head winds when they decide to broaden their functional footprint and extend their customer focus.

What’s True SaaS And Why The Hell Should Customers Care?

Why Buy The Cow?

When I was barely into my teens, my mother’s (every mother’s of that era) version of the sex talk was captured in this expression: “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” This was long before birth control pills were invented, years before the “Summer of Love,” and decades before most of you were born, and I’ve often wondered if contemporary Moms still make this pitch.

What was so very insulting when applied to their daughters was central to persuading us that those nasty boys wanted something which, by our controlling the supply, we could trade for the financial security and social position of marriage. Yuck! Just be thankful that those of us in the front lines of women’s liberation did indeed free our younger sisters from being treated to this demeaning crap.

Roll the camera forward about fifty years, and it’s little wonder that I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this visual for SaaS. The vendors of traditional licensed/on-premise enterprise software succeeded mightily by following in the footsteps of my mother’s advice, and it has provided them with considerable financial security and market position. By not letting you have the milk of enterprise applications unless you were willing to take on the cow of data center ownership and operations, applications management and upgrades, and so much more, the big ERP vendors and many others of that generation have served themselves and their investors very well. But the times they are achangin’.

Enter true SaaS. Why do I call it that? I have long since felt forced to make a distinction between the muddled marketing of everything under the sun as SaaS, faux SaaS, and what I think was always intended by that term because there are huge differences in terms of the business benefits, to both customers and their vendors. So what is true SaaS? In my view, true SaaS must include all of these:

Software is subscribed to customers by the vendor;
Software and data are hosted/operated/managed by the vendor; and — this is critical –
Software architecture is multi-tenant with a single code base and data structures, including metadata structures, shared by all customers — a requirement of true SaaS; and
The vendor pushes out multiple, functionally rich, new releases per year on a mostly opt-in basis.

Well, that’s all very interesting, but why should customers, especially HR leaders, care? What is it about true SaaS that really matters? Before offering a list of those potential benefits, let me note that, just as you can screw up most business as well as technology initiatives, it’s entirely possible to produce true HRM SaaS software that’s unprofitable, unusable, badly architected, built on outdated or just plain wrong object models, etc. – and it’s being done all around us. So I’m going to talk about the potential benefits of true SaaS here with the understanding that these benefits are only realized if the vendor provides half-way decent true SaaS software.

Those potential benefits include:

Improved economics for the vendor — can be passed along to the buyer;
Improved economics for the buyer — SaaS always turns CAPEX into OPEX;
Improved time-to-market, quality-to-market, cost-to-market — innovation and agility matter;
Much more frequent and lower cost/risk upgrades, bringing new capabilities much faster and with much greater adoption;
Value added and/or new offerings via inheritance and aggregation across tenants;
Ability to share a single instance of 3^rd party embedded intelligence by those customers/tenants who select that option, thus reducing greatly the cost/pain of doing so;
Vendor’s ability to focus, via crowd-sourcing, on areas of greatest functional need/interest/ROI, to include transformative ideas in HRM;
Customers’ ability to share best practices, issue resolution, configuration artifacts, etc. with every other customer because whatever one does works with exactly the same software as all other customers; and
Vendor and customer agility, with vendors being able to respond much more quickly to market requirements, to include the pace of change in mobile devices, and customers being able to respond much more quickly to the needs of their businesses.

Are there more potential benefits? I’m sure there are, and it’s early days for realizing all of them. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Yes, but only when you pick the right vendor/product with which to partner. So how do you recognize the vendors and products which are making these potential benefits a reality? Stay tuned for my next post.

A Bloom’s Christmas: Inventory Management And Retail Retold

A Page From Bloom's Camera 1950 Catalog

On Christmas Eve, my Dad’s retail camera shop closed early, and we knew we’d have him with us all that next day. Really just with us, even if he was too tired for much conversation after working the very long hours of the retail Christmas season. New Year’s Day was for taking inventory, and it was all hands, even my very small hands, to the wheel. But Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were really special. Time alone with my father Jack Bloom, who ran a modest camera shop with his brothers Paul and Herman (who published his “romantic” novels under the name Harmon Bellamy), was rare and precious.

When I was really young, my Dad left for work before dawn and rarely got home before I was put to bed. Friday nights were usually spent having Shabbat dinner, with all my Bloom aunts/uncles/cousins and even great aunts/uncles (those without their own children), at my grandmother’s house. After dinner, Dad went off to Schul with his brothers. On Saturday mornings, we were all off to Schul, but we were orthodox so only my one male first cousin Elliot got to sit with his Dad. The store was open on Saturdays, so my Dad, in spite of the Orthodox prohibition against working on Shabbat, went from Schul to work on many Saturdays, especially if they were short-handed by employee illness or vacations. Summer Sundays were for golf in the mornings and family time in the afternoons, often spent visiting family who lived far away. In those pre-turnpike (yes, before there were highways, there were turnpikes) days, the trip to Hartford, less than thirty miles away, took well over an hour. But on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we didn’t go visiting; we stayed home so that Dad could rest, and that meant me sitting beside him as we watched TV (once we had one) or read from the World Book Encyclopedia. My Dad was a great reader, something my sister and I have “inherited” from him.

In the run-up to Christmas, everyone worked long hours, and it was rare to see my Dad during December. My cousin Ronni and I, from about age seven, ran the strange machine in the open mezzanine above the shop floor that took addresses on metal plates and transferred them to labels for the Christmas mailing of catalogues (like the one pictured here) and calendars. Long before it was fashionable for small businesses, Bloom’s Photo Supply was into direct marketing, and we carefully collected the names and addresses of every customer and caller, all of which were entered in the perpetual address files that my Uncle Herman kept.

Sitting in the mezzanine, Ronni and I bickered over whose turn it was to load the metal plate (not fun), load the next item to be addressed (not bad), or turn the wheel (most fun) and discussed what we saw going on all around us. Excess inventory, the bane of every retailer then and now, was a major topic, along with fanciful ways of getting rid of it profitably. While I can never be sure, I think those conversations with Ronni must have been the origin of my now famous story about the invention of Christmas as an inventory management scheme. In that story, the wise men were retail merchants who saw in the humble birth of Mary and Joseph’s son a solution to the already age-old problem faced by retailers everywhere of how to ensure that the year ended without extraneous, highly unprofitable inventory. This is one interpretation of the Christmas story that my Christian Wallace family had never heard until they met me.

By the time we were ten, Christmas season found Ronni and me, the two youngest Bloom cousins, helping behind the counter after school and on weekends, ringing up sales, selling film and other simple products, watching for shop-lifters (you thought that was something new?), recording those sales in the perpetual inventory files kept by my Uncle Herman (there never was nor ever will be again a filer like my Uncle Herman!), and generally learning the business. Everyone worked, including our mothers who were otherwise traditional homemakers, during the month before Christmas, and by Christmas Eve, we were all exhausted. But the lifeblood of retail is the Christmas shopping season — always was so and still is — so our family budget for the next year was written by the ringing of those Christmas cash registers. And I can still hear, ever so faintly, that special ka-ching when I’ve made a big sale.

My Dad was buried on my 50th birthday. My cousin Ronni, just four months younger than me, died in her mid-thirties. Cousin Elliot took over the business from our fathers, built it into something completely non-retail but VERY successful, and sold it many years ago. But if you’re ever in Springfield MA, you can still see the four story mural of long gone camera and photographic supply brands on the exposed wall of Bloom’s Photo Supply’s last retail address, on Worthington Street just up from Main Street.

For me, sitting in my usual place at the keyboard, Christmas Eve will always be special. Years after my Dad retired and I had a business of my own, we talked daily, with me updating him on my business in response to his questions. You can’t fail to hear the ghosts of a retailer’s Christmas past even as my very non-retail business thrived. ”How’s business?” “Business is great.” “Are your clients paying on time? “They sure are, Dad.” “And are their checks clearing the bank?” “Absolutely.” This Christmas Eve, I’d give every one of those checks for another Christmas with my Dad.

Disclosure: If you think you read this last Christmas, you’re quite right. And you may read it again. I learned so much about business through my pores as I worked at Bloom’s Camera (later, Bloom’s Photo Supply and then just Bloom’s, Inc.), lingered at my grandmother’s kitchen table after Friday night Shabbat meals where all the important decisions were made for that business, and was then apprenticed to all the other small businesses run by various non-Bloom relatives. I went on buying trips to New York for the fancy ladies wear shop run by one aunt (they used to model the dresses at high end shops), learned the uniform business from another aunt, and was taught the basics of the Borscht Belt hospitality business by a great cousin. By the time I got to my MBA program, cash flow, supply chain, human resource management and more were already baked into my world view.

Lars From Mars, The Wookey, Carmen Miranda And Me

Island Of Lost Souls -- 1932

When Ron and I moved near DC in 1977, there was a late night TV program, called “Creature Features,” that we loved. It was hosted by Dick Dyszel who, for reasons lost in the mists of marital life, I nicknamed Lars from Mars. Dick played rarely shown early SciFi films, many black and white and loaded with zombies and other scary creatures. A particular favorite of mine was the 1932 Island of Lost Souls (the trailer is here).

Now this host was as much of a draw as the films he played. He was outrageous in many ways, but what always struck me about him was that his movie critiques were VERY astute, very well-informed, very sophisticated. Lars from Mars, as I called him, was one smart cookie, especially when it came to promoting his program. So perhaps that’s why, from my first awareness of Lars Dalgaard and his ambitions for SuccessFactors, I’ve always called him Lars from Mars (not to his face — yet!). I’ve considered him a force with which to be reckoned — and not just in terms of strategic HRM software.

So, when I got the press release around noon on Saturday 12/3 (and notice that I’m not fussing about the intrusion into my weekend), nothing could have made me happier than the ensuing orgy of attention paid to the importance of HR tech in the wake of SAP’s enthusiastic, some even suggested desperate, acquisition of SuccessFactors. The sheer joy of having every major business news writer focused on how HCM “in the cloud” is going to lead SAP to that promised land for the rest of their product portfolio was almost too much to bear. Yes, my friends, HR technology is going to lead SAP to the SaaSy promised land, and Lars is on point to get them there.

Then, just as the excitement over all things HR tech appeared to be dying down, none other than Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com and the cloudiest of cloud potentates, took us even closer to the pearly gates. Marc declared that not only would HR tech take us to the cloud, but it would socialize us along the way. With his acquisition of Rypple, and putting one of the most well-respected applications development leaders, John Wookey, in charge of a new business unit dedicated to cloudifying and socializing HRM in one fell swoop, Marc reinforced the belief — true of course, but not everyone knew it before 12/3 — that I’ve been living at the center of the known enterprise software universe throughout my career. I may even, as a result of my first payroll programming efforts, now qualify for an IT pioneers badge a la Rypple.

So now I’ve got this movie in my head of The Wookey, Lars from Mars, Carmen (aka Steve) Miranda (Oracle’s Apps leader), “Stan the Man” Swete (Workday’s products and technology leader), Al (aka Mike) Capone (ADP’s products and technology leader), Buck (aka Adam) Rogers (Ultimate’s products and technology leader) and (in my movie, it’s a crowd scene) more, all wearing their Naomi Bloom t-shirts (you know, the ones with my avatar on the front) and doing the HRM SaaS InFullBloom rumba. And now you’ve got my movie in your head!

What Just Happened To The Talent Management Technology Spend?

What Happened To The Rest Of My Pie?

Updated 12-16-2011 after the 12-15-2011 announcement of Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Rypple. If there was any doubt left in your mind that I’ve been working in the hottest, sexiest corner of enterprise software, you’ve been living under a rock. After all, in a world of subscribed software where subscription pricing is most often correlated with “seats,” there’s no group of applications that touches more people, that can be priced with more “seats,” than HRM. We touch absolutely everyone. And in an enterprise software push toward the consumerization of the user experience, nowhere does this create more stickiness at subscription renewal time than when you’ve touched everyone in an organization — and beyond. With Salesforce.com now focused on expanding their product offering into my space, let me welcome Marc Benioff to the neighborhood and wish him well. And please don’t hold your breath on my ever completing a magnum opus on the consolidation in the HRM enterprise software market. If last night’s email/DM/etc. flood is an indicator, there’s no way even my fabulously nimble fingers can keep up with all of this while the rest of me has a life.

I’m still working on my magnum opus (perhaps never to be finished?) post on the SAP/SFSF/Jobs2Web/all things consolidation in the HRM enterprise software market, but one question keeps pushing its way to the surface, demanding a quick post. It’s a much broader question: what just happened to the talent management (TM) technology spend? SFSF faced some impressive headwinds and did the best possible deal — an incredibly good financial deal — before those headwinds were obvious to all. But they’ve been obvious to me for some time — and not just those facing SFSF. One of those headwinds goes like this:

Especially for larger companies with a big investment in their ERP/HRMSs, they’re now getting (something that wasn’t true even a year ag0) a very plausible “stay with your current partner” for TM story. Oracle now has Fusion TM ready to go — lots to build out, but it’s moving – and now SAP has SFSF. With both of these ”stay with your current vendor” stories, there are the usual enticements, including (1) fewer vendors with whom to deal, (2) fewer moving parts to integrate, (3) a good bit of the integration, if not done by at least made easier by vendor-provided tools, and (4) “have we got a deal for you” on pricing.
These same companies, if they decide it’s time to ”rethink, rip & replace,” also have a new set of options. Workday, for example, is ready to take these folks on with considerable organically built TM and fully integrated, “in the cloud,” partners for the parts of staffing and learning that Workday doesn’t, as of WD15, do.
And, these same larger companies still have the option of staying with their ERP/HRMS vendor and augmenting what that vendor delivers with one to many TM applications, from one to many vendors of same, to include getting several from a so-called talent management suite vendor (knowing that some of those are truly integrated suites and many others are not).

As recently as a year ago, a considerable portion of the total flow of TM software $$ was going to TM software vendors. Now that flow is going to be split among (1) Oracle and SAP pushing their own new TM products into their installed base, (2) more “rethink, rip & replace” deals where there’s a lot of TM functionality and more coming every day from a next generation ERP/HRMS vendor, and (3) those TM single and suite vendors. So while I’m absolutely not a financial analyst, this sure sounds like a smaller proportion of the overall talent management spend will be going in the future to TM vendors than has been going to them over the recent past. If so, wouldn’t you expect those vendors’ revenue growth trajectory to be affected? Their costs of customer acquisition to be higher? The value of these companies as acquisitions or via stock market valuations to be lower?

If I’m right, then there’s another 1+1=3 aspect to the SAP/SFSF deal. But that would also mean that the remaining independent TM vendors will be sharing a smaller piece of the overall pie. Hmmmm..

SAP/SuccessFactors — Help Me Count The HRM Codebases

Shall We Leverage Your Code Or Mine?

[Update 12/5/2011 @ 1:40 PM EST -- After an always great conversation this morning with Paul Sparta, Chief Integration Officer at SuccessFactors, here's his update (as confirmed by Paul) on some of the important product and technology questions arising from the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors:

1) "SAP and SFSF are committed to providing a high degree of speed and transparency in regard to future product and technology plans post close. The team is hugely excited about the breadth and depth of assets that both parties bring to the table, are committed to bringing a complete suite of applications to the cloud, and recognizes the complexity and effort involved in doing so."
2) "The team also believes that its go-to-market position today is broadly the best in the industry, despite the broad set of different technologies and delivery models."
3) "The deal isn’t closed yet, and the companies will operate independently until the deal closes. This is to be expected, so many key decisions will not be made until then."

Of course, there are many unanswered questions, including the “how”, “what”, and “when” of everything from product roadmaps to go-to-market across all their combined HRM-related products, and those answers are what we really need. But, if you take Lars and team at their word -- and we'll all be watching this closely -- those answers, per Paul, will be forthcoming soon in 2012. End Update]

I’m working on a mega-post about the SAP/SuccessFactors deal, but in the meantime I could use your help in making sure I’ve got the full list of HRM-related codebases that must be addressed — strategically and tactically — as a part of this deal. Much of this post is written from (my aging) memory, old notes, and possibly conjecture, and I’m sure it’s flawed. Your help in getting this right and up-to-the-minute would be much appreciated.

So far I’ve counted (but this is based on information gathered after the Plateau acquisition by SFSF but without benefit of knowing what dramatic changes, if any, may have been made by SFSF/Plateau in the last few months):

Plateau LMS on-premise — this is the codebase that was the heritage of Plateau in the LMS business long before it became SaaSy, which it did with an architectural overhaul and adding talent management modules to its LMS prior to its acquisition by SFSF — the generous view (prior to the SAP deal) was that SFSF would support those on-premise customers and this codebase while working hard to migrate as many of them as possible to a SaaS LMS codebase even as some competitors were getting pretty snarky about SFSF’s having lost their SaaSy street cred by doing so.
Plateau’s newer and quite SaaSy integrated talent management with LMS codebase just prior to its acquisition by SFSF — here the general view has been that SFSF stopped all marketing through sales of Plateau’s talent management modules, but I’m not sure for how long SFSF is (or was, before the SAP deal) committed to supporting existing customers (were there any?) who weree using the pre-SFSF acquisition Plateau talent management modules.
Then there’s SFSF’s core, organically grown code base, to include Employee Central (although this may well have been built somewhat separately and it certainly required significant extensions, however underestimated, to the talent management object model) as well as all the talent management modules — all of this is SaaSy but does not have the most modern architecture (e.g. business rules are embedded in procedural logic rather than being entirely abstracted to effective-dated metadata) or object model (e.g. it doesn’t address both job and position as the separate and critical objects that they are), although I suspect that the SFSF/Plateau codebase rationalization efforts (pre-SAP deal) would have been considering how to infuse the best of SFSF’s core with the best of Plateau’s (#2 above) — and now I’ve used that fuse word.
SFSF’s acquired codebases beyond Plateau, which I’m lumping together because, important as they were, they were more add-on or enabling technologies rather than purely HRM functionality codebases — nonetheless, these acquired codebases will need some level of attention post-SAP/SFSF deal closing.
SAP BS7 — this is SAP’s current licensed/on-premise HRMS codebase, with its enormous heritage, breadth of functionality, globalness of business rules/regulatory and compliance support, etc. I can’t imagine that SAP is going to mess with this, having now extended support through 2020, until they’re ready to replace it with their not yet obvious next generation codebase (but more on this in my mega-post which may be like waiting for Godot).
SAP R/3 — SAP made some important changes in its core HRMS object model some years ago, e.g. to handle multiple concurrent positions, as well as incorporated the full NetWeaver underpinnings, which then became part of their BS-sequenced releases, but I believe there are still SAP customers running on various earlier R/3 versions for which SAP provides at least basic regulatory/compliance support and, therefore, which codebase is still being supported.
SAP Career OnDemand — this is reported to have been built on the Business ByDesign architecture but with sufficient use of or similarity to the BS 7 HRM object model to enable an easy attachment of Career OnDemand (and such further OnDemand HRM modules as may have been planned) to BS 7′s HRMS — while I think this codebase will be killed off early days in the rationalization of SAP/SFSF’s HRM codebase assets, there’s a lot of really valuable ideas/learning here that I hope will be conserved.
SAP ByD — last but by no means least, the HRM components of Business ByDesign which, while not ready for enterprise prime time, are nonetheless their own code base which competes, at least spiritually, with SFSF’s modest Employee Central.

With many thanks to http://perro.si/spaghetti-code for the amazing illustration and discussion on his post.

Full disclosure — Neither SAP nor SuccessFactors nor Plateau have been Bloom & Wallace clients over the last many years although I have done work with SAP as recently as Q1/2007.

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