An Open Letter To HR Executives

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

Dear Sir/Madam,

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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