In Full Bloom

“I’ve Looked At Clouds From Both Sides Now”

I’ve Looked At Clouds From Both Sides Now

Coming of age in the 60’s, I was so blessed to be there when some of the greatest folk music ever was written and performed, often by the same person. It was the Golden Age of singer/songwriters, and Joni Mitchell was one of the best.

We all played guitars then and sang of ending the Vietnam war, eliminating poverty, and finally getting equal rights for all. We wanted to right the wrongs of the past and carve out new paths through life that were different from those of our parents. And then, somewhere along the line, we became our parents.

Like me, Joni has aged along with her voice, but her music lives on. And with all the talk of cloud this and cloud that, I wanted to dedicate this homage to one of Joni’s greatest songs, “Both Sides Now” to Mike Capone, Steve Miranda, Sanjay Poonen, Adam Rogers, Stan Swete, and John Wookey, my wonderful panelists at the HR Technology Conference 2012 in Chicago.

The lyrics are below, and here are two Joni Mitchell performances, one from the 60’s when I too was young and singing folk music is smoky clubs, and one in 2000. I had intended to end our panel with my own rendition of this wonderful song, but clouds got in my way. Nonetheless, this will always be the theme song for my “Bringing HR Into The Cloud” panel.

Lyrics: Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”

Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
You leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “I love you” right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I’ve looked at life that way

Oh but now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost but something’s gained
In living every day

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From WIN and LOSE and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

Reprise — Harry’s And Naomi’s Rules

Sunset At Bloom & Wallace HQ

[An earlier version of this post was published 3-11-2011.]

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life lessons, about rules to live by, and about how to make the last third of my life as productive, full of joy and meaningful as possible. I’m inspired by my Uncle Paul Bloom, who will be 97 in January. Paul’s writing his memoirs, leading the opera program he started at his retirement community, giving his name and resources to important philanthropies, and is as engaged in life as anyone I know. Closer to my professional world, my friend Dave Duffield just took Workday public shortly after his 72nd birthday.

Now good genetics are at work here, and none of us can count on that. But there’s a ton we can do to prepare for and then execute a terrific last third of our lives. I’ve taken Harry’s rules from a very yellowed newspaper clipping I keep in a large file of same. No date remains, but thanks to Google, I now know who Harry was, and his rules are well worth noting:

Exercise 6 days a week for the rest of your life.
Do serious aerobic exercise 4 days a week for the rest of your life.
Do serious strength training, with weights, 2 days a week for the rest of your life.
Spend less than you make.
Quit eating crap!
Care.
Connect and commit.

And now for Naomi’s rules:

Philanthropy isn’t about extra credit; it’s an obligation. Actually, this isn’t a rule of my own devising. The Hebrew term is tzedakah, literally fairness or justice. And lest you think that all philanthropy is equal, Maimonides offers a hierarchy of giving, with the first item listed being the most worthy form, and the last being the least worthy. I find it interesting that the most worthy form is to help a person in need to become not only self-sufficient but also to join the circle of tzedakah in their own right, not unlike the much later Christian notion of teaching a man to fish. Translated from Maimonides:

             a) Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need; so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others.
             b) Giving tzedakah anonymously to an unknown recipient via a person (or public fund) which is trustworthy, wise, and can perform acts of tzedakah with your money in a most impeccable fashion.
             c) Giving tzedakah anonymously to a known recipient.
             d) Giving tzedakah publicly to an unknown recipient.
             e) Giving tzedakah before being asked.
             f) Giving adequately after being asked.
             g) Giving willingly, but inadequately.
            h) Giving “in sadness” – it is thought that Maimonides was referring to giving because of the sad feelings one might have in seeing people in need (as opposed to giving because it is a religious obligation; giving out of pity).

Your successes are not solely of your own making, so don’t take too much credit for them. As it happens, we are all either blessed or cursed by the good fortune of our birth and by the good fortune, the mazel, that has accompanied our journey to this point. Born in the US? Mazel. Born healthy, intelligent, and loved? Mazel. Wanted by two reasonably together and prepared parents? More mazel. Managed to get through school, university, life-to-date without dread diseases, terrible accidents, loss of your freedom or life in civil unrest? Pure mazel. What you build on top of all that good luck through your own hard work and perseverance is absolutely yours for which to take credit, but it’s important to remember just how much of what we become, of who we are, and of what we have is just plain dumb good luck. Thinking about life this way, as a three-legged stool of which you only control one leg, makes clear why tzedakah is an obligation for those of us whose stools have three good legs.
When in doubt, reboot. This really started out as when in doubt, trim your sails. One of the first lessons that every sailor learns is that, when you first think the wind is kicking up, it’s time to reef (shorten) your sails. It only gets harder and more dangerous to do so as the winds get stronger, so it’s best to reef early. Then, if the winds ease, you can always unreef those sails. Not sure about the significant other in your life? Don’t race to the alter. Not sure about the fit of a job offer? Sleep on it. Uncomfortable about the economy, about the markets, about your own financial future? Hold cash, spend less, work more. Computer behaving oddly — and when don’t they? Reboot. When I was leaving for college, my father, who was more of a buddy than an advice-giver, offered me the following advice when it came to dating: “If the boy makes a move with which you’re not comfortable, think about it overnight. No boy will ever say no if you call him the next morning to accept his offer.” When in doubt, reboot!
Life is short, fragile and amazing; live large. Several of my closest friends never made it through college. Horrible accidents, Viet Nam, and more ended their lives before they could drink legally. My Mom died before her 40th birthday as did two of my very closest friends from childhood. And the list goes on. I really do believe that we should pack two years of living into every calendar year, working hard, playing hard, making time for friends and family and ourselves. Ron and I travel a ton, try to find time for boating, and are already planning how we’ll spend big chunks of 2013. G-d willing (now we’re back to mazel) we’ll “live long and prosper” and be the life of the party at the old farts home.
Your friends will see you through, so invest in relationships far more than you invest in everything else. I’ve been blessed with wonderful friends, but it takes being one to earn and sustain friendships. Did you really drop everything and get on the next plane when they needed you? When you didn’t have plane fare without missing a rent payment? Have they done the same for you? Have you listened for hours when you’re exhausted because they really need to talk? When you knew a deliverable would be overdue or worse? Do they do the same for you? Store up friendships like squirrels do nuts because it’s going to be a long winter during which age and life take their toll on those you love. Having lost so many of those I love, and having watched my Uncle Paul outlive so many more, I know the importance of building, sustaining, and renewing more friendships (to include with your own family) than you ever think you’ll need.

Impressions From HR Technology Conference 2012

Trumpie And Me!

I’ve just reread my observations from last year’s conference, and you should too. If I say so myself, it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of what was happening then, much of which is still happening but which is much farther along, at least in some (but by no means all) vendor products and some end-user organizations. Rather than repeat myself, I thought I’d take a very different tack on collecting my thoughts from this year’s conference and focus not on the substantive trends in HR technology but rather on the show’s gestalt.

Big, Big, Big!

I’m sure that Bill Kutik will report that all the numbers were sky-high, from vendors to sessions to attendees to international representation to miles walked. But for once I think I’m going to believe him.

Sessions were jammed, the show floor was buzzing, and my two sessions — Master Panel on the main stage Tuesday morning and “Expert” session Tuesday afternoon — were both standing room only. I felt badly that quite a few people were turned away from my “Expert” session because of fire code limits on the number of people the room could hold, and I’ve had lots of requests for recordings.

Hopefully, LRP’s 2013 preparations will include live streaming of the main stage sessions and at least record and playback for all others (especially any that I may do). I sure wish there were a recording of this year’s “Expert” session; it was lively, to say the least. And anyone with a video of our panel could get top dollar for it. So please let me know if you are the proud possessor of either.

Master Panel — What Wasn’t Said!

With just about sixty minutes of talk time and six panelists, we worked hard to make sure each panelist’s voice was heard across a meaningful range of topics. I couldn’t be more proud of the panel members in how they cooperated on the preparation for and delivery of our session. And I was truly honored to be on the same stage with so capable a group of gentlemen. But I couldn’t help noticing that they were all gentlemen — and neither could you. Hopefully, if we organize another panel of this type, there will be some women chief architects, CTOs, executives over all products and technology, etc. ready to join us. There are a ton of women in HR technology, but they rarely hold the top technology positions, and that’s a bloody shame.

The big takeaway from our panel was the absolute consensus that the train to the cloud (however defined, but which appeared to include consumerization of IT, integration of core HRMS with full talent management capabilities, and so much more) has left the station. Even the most laggard of these vendors are now not only now on the cloud train (does anyone remember the clue train?) but they’re shoveling coal into the train’s engine as aggressively as possible.

It practically took drugging myself to restrain Naomi from wanting to go deep into the very real differences across the vendors and their products. And there are MANY! From how easy they are for customers to do business with, to the simplicity and clarity of their pricing, to the healthiness (my bias is showing here) of their corporate cultures in terms of the presence or lack of internal competitiveness and political machinations, to how they deal with NO when prospects or customers choose someone else, these are VERY different companies. And that’s before we even get to their definitions of SaaS and cloud, let alone to the completeness and correctness of both their object models and applications architectures.

I so wanted to pin down every one of these panelists on these and many other points, but we would have needed a full day and a ton of diet coke to do that — not to mention that the audience would have glazed over or left. So, as in so many things in life, less was more.

Innovation, Adoption, More Innovation

How much real adoption has there been across our industry of the very best in HR technology? How many executives are using their tablets to run their succession planning meetings without paper or laptops or whiteboards? Or to execute those succession plans when all hell breaks loose?

How many employees are recording their time on their smartphones, requesting leave right there, and getting their payroll results on the same device while cheering their children’s sports teams on Sunday afternoon? And doing all of the above with a ton of embedded intelligence to guide them and live chat available if needed?

How many garden variety managers are using their tablets to propose some future-dated organizational changes, to see the future-dated impacts of these proposals on their budgets and the potential business results if those proposed organizational changes are made? Can they then launch those future-dated changes for needed approvals and execution?

It’s clearly not everyone having all of this capability delivered where/when/how they prefer to work, so perhaps some are awaiting Vulcan mind melding rather than messing around with today’s tablets and smartphones? Or not.

I could give you a zillion more examples of the differences between what’s possible and what’s been adopted, rolled out to everyone, and placed actively in service. With the show floor and adoption case studies from HR Tech 2012 to point out the high ground, and Lexy’s survey to tell us where we really are, the delta is very large. And it feels to me as though that difference is growing as those able to take advantage of the best we offer further outdistance their late adopter cousins with each generational change in HR technology.

Legacy Apps, Legacy People

I wrote a blog post series (see below for the links and short descriptions) a while back about how to enjoy a long and productive career. These were really just lessons from my own experience with same, and the experiences of many friends/family members who have worked long and well. I’ve also written some posts about the specific KSAOCs that have served me well, and which you may want to consider.

So one of the things I’m always on the look-out for are people who, through their own hard work and pushing the envelope, stay at the top of their game. And I can’t help but notice those who aren’t, some of whom once where but slacked off as well as those who never were and wonder why their careers have tanked. Just as enterprise software, especially HR technology, doesn’t stay young forever, neither do we or our KSAOCs. There’s a “half-life” to many KSAOCs which, unless refreshed continuously, degrade visibly.

If you’re one of the folks I scolded about all of this (is there any other way to describe having this aging Tweep in your face about professional development?), I hope you know that it was with genuine concern rather than any negative intent. I’m not only trying to make the world safe from bad HR technology but also to make our community safe from bad HRM and HR technology decisions and use because of legacy KSAOCs.

HRM Drives Business Outcomes

Another topic on which I tend to repeat myself (yes, it’s a common sign of aging, or perhaps it’s just because it bears repeating), is that all technology investments must begin with the business outcomes that are their purpose. Here too I’ve written a ton, with this particular post (and do follow the links at the end for a tour of the “Yellow Brick Road” to achieving those business outcomes) aimed squarely at our HR leaders. But it was very reassuring to see that something I’ve been advocating for 25+ years is now front and center on vendor and consultant as well as end-user agendas.

Touring the show floor, reading what vendor booths say they do, skimming all that marketing literature on and off-line, it’s clear that our industry has shifted gears from improving administrative efficiency to driving organizational outcomes. And just in the nick of time. There are simply no more heads to cut, and saving another few cents per employee per pay cycle is no where near as important as ensuring that we have the talent and talent management processes to support our growth targets, open up new geographies, bring new products to market faster and with better sales, etc. Yes, administrative efficiency and effectivness are important, but accomplishing that should be in our rear view mirrors. Now we simply must demonstrate the real power of HRM, of strategic HRM, in driving business outcomes. And at last the entire industry seems to be singing the same song on this.

Rethink And Replace

I was really amazed at the size of the audience in my Tuesday afternoon “Ask the Expert” session but didn’t learn until later that quite a few people couldn’t get in because we were over the limit for our room. I hope someone who was there took photos/video and/or make a recording and will send those to me because I was so busy answering your questions that I didn’t make note of them or of my responses. Hopefully, I gave reasonable answers, but your feedback on that would be very much appreciated. What did strike me were the number of people interested in talking about how, when and why they should plan for getting off of their licensed/on-premise/aging ERP/HRMS with add-on talent management applications

Serendipity During Nature Breaks

If you’re the woman who approached me as I was washing my hands to ask/talk about your struggles with your ERP vendor over the incessant pressure to buy more modules, open up seats, commit to their next generation, etc. etc., this post is for you. I did say this in my “Expert” session but know that you weren’t able to get in because the room was over its limit, so here goes again. Do not spend one more dime investing in your current, aging licensed/on-premise HRMS and related apps (apps which their vendor owner has designated as legacy even as they are building out their own next gen apps as fast as their feet will carry them) until you’ve completed a thorough strategic HRM and HRM delivery systems planning project.

My own “Follow The Yellow Brick Road” approach is a good starting point, but what matters here is drawing the line of sight from your organization’s needed business outcomes through the HRM policies/practices/plan designs/etc. that are needed to achieve those outcomes and right on to the enabling technologies. It’s that analysis which will tell you whether or not you should stay where you are or prepare to make a major leap to a next generation of core HRMS with integrated talent management capabilities or take an entirely different approach via best-of-breed interfacing, substantial BPO, etc. Whatever you do, don’t let any vendor sell you; rather, educate yourself to be a buyer on behalf of your organization’s best interests.

Final Thoughts

Ron and I had a great time at HR Tech, and we’re already thinking about next year. Every year the best part of this conference are the meetups with friends new and old, the casual conversations on the show floor, chance encounters in the rest rooms, and all the other unplanned intersections with members of our community. But between this year’s show and next year in Vegas, it’s clear that there remains a ton of work to do if our industry is going to own the damn table, as well we should.

Next week we’ll be in Amsterdam for HR Tech Europe, and I hope to meet many new colleagues. If we haven’t met before, please do introduce yourselves.

Reflections On A Long Career — Part IV — Summing Up

The Message Is Clear!

In the first three posts of this series, here, here and here, I reflected on various aspects of building and sustaining a long and successful career. Now it’s time to sum up the lessons of my own career, a long professional run for which I’m truly grateful.

There’s been a huge […]

May 29th, 2012 | Category: Aging, Life’s Challenges, Looking Back/Looking Forward, Ruminations | 2 comments | Edit this post

Reflections On A Long Career — Part III — The Network Effect

Tales Of The Mighty Rolodex

It always was and always will be about the power of the network. It really does “take a village,” the mutual support we derive from friends, family and colleagues, not only to raise our children but also to help us every step of the way through life. We owe so much to those […]

March 16th, 2012 | Category: Aging, Friendship, Life’s Challenges, Looking Back/Looking Forward, Ruminations | 2 comments | Edit this post

Reflections On A Long Career — Part II — My Heroes

Larry Seidel’s Other Interests

My first post in this series was about what we can do to prepare for and sustain a long, productive and satisfying career. In this post, I’d like to give credit — and there’s a lot to give — to the people who helped shaped the professional I became. We should all […]

February 5th, 2012 | Category: Aging, Life’s Challenges, Looking Back/Looking Forward, Ruminations | 2 comments | Edit this post

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 […]

January 21st, 2012 | Category: Aging, Change Management, KSAOCs, Life’s Challenges, Looking Back/Looking Forward | 15 comments | Edit this post

Reprise In Time For #HRTechConf: Do You Know How To Answer These Questions?

[I posted the original version of this on 9-12-2011, just in time for last year’s HR Technology Conference. Now here we are again, in frantic last minute preparations, but so wanting to be sure that our conference plans are focused on the important HRM delivery system issues that we’re facing. So I thought it was time for a thorough update.

And what a difference a mere year makes in our world. Oracle’s acquired Taleo, released Fusion, and gotten cloud religion. SAP’s acquired SuccessFactors, gotten true SaaS religion, and gone in-memory. Workday’s en route to an IPO, and they’ve had true SaaS, cloud and in-memory since their first release nearly seven years ago. And there are more new vendors, new releases, and new people in our space than any of us can track.

With so much going on, I thought I’d refresh this post in hopes of helping some of you do your final prep for the conference — and for the European HR Technology Conference in Amsterdam later this month — and to stimulate your questions for my “ask the expert” sessions in both Chicago and Amsterdam. As always, in the spirit of full disclosure, presume that I’m working with many of the major vendors in our space whether they are mentioned or not and that my thinking is certainly informed by the smart people with whom I work across the vendor community.]

Unlike my good friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Ray Wang, there are no Naomi clones. Just this solo consultant trying to save the world from bad HRM and HRM delivery systems. And while I’m a pretty productive and hard worker, there aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to support every HR exec who comes calling with their always interconnected HRM delivery systems issues. So I refer a lot of business to capable colleagues (among whom there are some big developments afoot), suggest useful reading/conferences/discussion groups/etc., and help as many as I can directly.

Having studied my methodology for strategic HRM and HRMDS planning, I thought you might now enjoy my list [updated as of 10-4-2012] of the HRMDS issues that give rise to so many of these requests for assistance. Some combination of these issues is almost always the impetus for that first call/email/DM/whatever from a global HR executive. Unfortunately, it usually takes a broader planning effort to make sure that sir/madam isn’t playing that loser’s game of whack-a-mole in resolving these types of issues. You know that game: no sooner do you put one issue to rest than two more rear their ugly heads.

So what are the issues? In no particular order:

Can we afford to/should we upgrade our licensed, on-premise ERP/HRMS?
Can we afford/manage the integration of separate talent management applications?
Are we better served by getting our talent management capabilities already integrated with our system of record’s (SOR’s) foundation from our SOR’s vendor that piecing together/layering on a variety of separate talent management applications, no matter how integrated they may be?
Are the so-called integrated talent management capabilities from our SOR’s vendor truly integrated or are they in some stage of being interfaced and given a more or less common user experience?
Does our system of record’s (SOR’s) coding structures/data granularity/data accuracy/data-entry style self service support talent management at the level we need?
Are the right capabilities available in our SOR and/or have they been implemented properly?
How can we bring our data entry-style self service into the mobile and social world?
If we’re running on an ERP/HRMS, should we upgrade in place, implement that vendor’s next gen (when it’s ready), mix and match?
Will our smaller/weaker core HRMS vendor(s) be able to make needed regulatory, architectural and functionality investments in their products?
Lots of our vendors are describing their latest products as SaaS. How would we know if that’s true? Why should we care?
If our current vendors aren’t true SaaS as Naomi has defined it, are they likely to be viable long-term? Are there other workable definitions that make sense for some vendors?
Is it time to make the leap to a newer, SaaS generation of HRMS, like Workday or Ultimate (with more coming every day, to include from Oracle and SAP), which are building out talent management functionality very quickly?
Should we stick to our older on-premise ERP/HRMS and add one or more talent management applications on top? With what approach to interfacing and/or integration?
What types of social technology capabilities should we consider for HRM? Across our organization?
Should we be looking for social tech within the foundations of our HRMS/TM unleashed where we want it or looking at specific social apps?
Is it better to provide social technology capabilities that are specific to an HRM process or to provide broad access to those capabilities across HRM?
What policies are needed to balance the value of social technology with protecting our intellectual property, personal data privacy, and organizational productivity?
Should we be looking for mobile capabilities within the foundations of our HRMS/TM unleashed where we want it or looking at specific mobile apps?
Is it better to provide mobile technology capabilities that are specific to an HRM process or to provide broad access to those capabilities across HRM?
What policies are needed to balance the value of mobile technology, including “Bring Your Own Device” (so BYOD) with protecting our intellectual property, personal data privacy, and organizational productivity?
Are there obvious HRMDS targets for outsourcing?
Are there areas within the HRMDS that just don’t make sense to do any way other than via outsourcing?
What impact would outsourcing specific HRMDS components have on our ability to present an integrated view of organizational HRM data?
What impact would outsourcing specific HRMDS components have on our ability to provide embedded, actionable analytics?
Are there areas within the HRMDS that just don’t make sense to do any way other than via tightly integrated components?
What impact would using best-of-breed solutions for specific HRMDS components have on our ability to present an integrated view of organizational HRM data?
What impact would using best-of-breed solutions for specific HRMDS components have on our ability to provide embedded, actionable analytics?
What are the characteristics of an HRM process that lend themselves to either tight or loose coupling with our core SOR?
Our ERP/HRMS is described as licensed/on-premise, and we’re paying 22% of retail in annual maintenance. Are we getting enough value to justify those annual payments?
Will our vendor’s next generation be free to us because of those annual maintenance payments?
Are there alternatives to making those payments? Are their other sources for basic maintenance, especially if we’re on an older release?
Will our talent management software vendor(s) survive and prosper? What’s at risk if we’ve bet on a vendor that gets acquired?
With all the consolidation going on in talent management, how can we determine if our vendors will be acquirers or be acquired? Does it matter?
Is it more important for us to get talent management right than to invest further in our administrative HRM foundations or will poor administrative foundations cripple our talent management efforts?
Do we really have to build/maintain the whole data warehouse apparatus just to get obvious analytics? To support actionable analytics at the “point of sale?” So embedded in employee and manager self service?
Why can’t our payroll provider (yes, we outsourced that years ago) support the variety of workers, work roles, work schedules, total compensation plans, and other practices that we’re now using or need to use? What are our options here?
What about our global payroll requirements? We’ve got large populations in a few countries and very small populations scattered everywhere else? Should we handle this ourselves?
Are there truly global payroll providers whose capabilities are integrated and priced well?
And what impact will the coming changes in health care, talent management, social learning, globalization, HR technology, workforce diversity, executive compensation caps, government austerity programs, [you name the issue] have on our aging, too many moving parts, never implemented well and/or too expensive to maintain HRM delivery system — and on our ability to deliver the HRM outcomes our organization expects?
We seem to have a disconnect between our administration and strategic HRM data — could that be the result of disconnected systems, data definitions, organizational responsibilities, HRM business rules, etc.?
What changes should we be making in our HRM policies and practices to support a more social, mobile and global workforce? Won’t our software vendors provide these?
I keep hearing about social/mobile/global/embedded analytics/the importance of integrated talent management/[you name the hot topic here], but these capabilities seem to be add-ons at added cost etc. from our primary vendors. Is that right?
How do I push more and more responsibility for HRM to managers and to the workforce without having a whole range of compliance/productivity/decision-making problems? How do I provide these users with enough embedded intelligence to enable effective decision-making? To enable correct and timely HRM transactions?
Every time I ask for a briefing on the current state of our HRMDS, my eyes glaze over from the complexity and detail. How do I know if we have more moving pieces than we need? If we have the right pieces? If we’re spending the right amount to achieve our needed outcomes?
How can we keep all the pieces well playing together? How much bailing wire and chewing gum does it take to keep everything running?
Our CEO asked me if we have the HRM capabilities we need to help the organization deliver business improved outcomes. Frankly, I haven’t got a clue.
How can I find enough resources to invest in strategic HRMDS components when everything’s being starved because of the black holes of administrative HRM, including compliance, which really don’t drive business outcomes no matter how well-done they are?
Cloud/smoud — my CIO is deadset against it but all the hot newer software is built for it. What do I do?
I know we need analytics, but which ones? My team has proposed 217, all of which sound interesting and potentially relevant, but what I really need are the half dozen that would tell me how we’re really doing?
Social sourcing sounds wonderful, and everyone’s doing it, but is it really applicable to our need for [place your scarce KSAOC list here]?

And now for a few of my personal favorites, just for laughs.

We bought the software, signed up for maintenance, and have it loaded on our computer. But it seems to sit there waiting for us to tell it what to do. Is that right? Doesn’t it come loaded with “best practices?” We budgeted for a “vanilla” implementation on that expectation.
My global head of talent is telling me that we must get all of our applications from the same vendor in order to get the deep process and data integration that he tells me integrated TM requires. If we do that, buy everything from a single vendor, will it really truly scouts’ honor be fully integrated?
The last guy who’s able to maintain the extensive COBOL code we used to create our highly customized Cyborg/Genesys/Tesseract/Integral/MSA/[put your favorite truly over-the-hill essentially payroll but now doing everything imaginable application brand here, and with full knowledge on my part that all of these brands are getting some level of quite sincere regulatory support and other updates from their current owners] has gone out on emergency long term disability, and we never did get him to document that code. Help!
My predecessor insisted that we needed an enterprise-level ERP/HRMS. Four years and millions of $$ later, we’re not implemented, the SI (systems integration) leader (the new one, his precessor was promoted) tells me that we don’t have either our organizational structure nor our jobs defined right to meet the analytical requests I’ve made of the system, the release we’ve been implementing seems to have been overtaken by the vendor’s newest release (and that’s the one that has the improved user experience that we really need), and now my new golfing partner (he’s a partner at another SI) suggests that what we’ve selected is gross overkill for our 500 person, entirely US-based call center business for which our financials are moving “into the cloud,” whatever that means. When I told a trusted HR exec colleague about all of this, she said I might need some help and suggested I call you.

All laughs aside, these are really tough questions, all of them, when you put them into the context of any specific organization, and they are worthy of our best efforts to educate end-users as they “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” to developing their own answers. If you are facing any of these questions, I hope you’ll bring them to this year’s HR Tech Conference, to my “ask the expert” session there, so we can tackle at least some of them together. Without your questions to shape this session, we’ll just be staring at each other — or I might decide to lead the group in singing 60′s protest songs.

Zombie HR Tech Vendors

Zombie Jamboree

What got me thinking about this was reviewing the list of exhibitors for the upcoming HR Technology Conference in Chicago. There are vendors on that list who’ve been around at least as long as the conference (and some for much longer), never gaining much sales momentum, never gaining much financial scale, and never gaining much attention from the media/analysts/etc.

These vendors have been kept alive by determined and hard-working staff even as they’ve been overtaken by the evolution of technology (most are really client server or possibly Web-based but definitely not built for the cloud), the advances in globalization (most are US or Canada only in terms of their products but also US or Canada only in terms of their thinking and organization), the generation of workers demanding that their technology be mobile/social/gamified and more, and so many of the other forces at work in the sea change that is going on in our industry.

Many of these zombie vendors are entirely reputable in the same way that your FAX machine is entirely reputable (but long since overtaken, at a minimum by multiple function copy/scan/FAX machines, and those are now dusty). They often have a very long-standing leadership team and staff who didn’t see the sea change coming or, even seeing it, just weren’t able to react in time. They often have very loyal customers, at least until a change in management/ownership of that customer causes someone to hunt down and get rid of the zombie products and their vendors. And they often have a warm spot in the heart of various professional societies because they can be counted on to take a booth, however modest, at each year’s conference.

These vendors aren’t usually big enough to attract the attention of the ERP graveyards or other aggregators. They’re frequently too closely held to be under any external pressure to sell. And they’re often based too far away from Silicon Valley or other technology corridors to lose their devoted employees to the siren song of hot vendors and hot technology. But these vendors are truly the walking dead. Zombie Jamboree indeed.

[Written while singing one of my absolute favorite calypso songs http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_kingston_trio/zombie_jamboree.html]

Everybody’s Talking ’bout Workday’s IPO, But I Think There’s Still More To Say

Everybody's Talkin'

[Full disclosure: Workday is a client as are a number of their competitors. More importantly, I been looking under the covers of HRM enterprise software practically forever, and before that I was writing the code.]

I still haven’t digested every word in Workday’s recently released S-1, nor am I likely to do so before I publish this post. But I have been reading a ton of coverage of this event, some really excellent and some much less so. A major shout-out to @SAP_Jarret (and many others) for posting some of the best links on his discussion thread about Workday’s S-1 over at LinkedIn (free registration required). Hopefully others will contribute there so that we will have a fairly complete set of the relevant links in one place.

After some soak time (literally, I worked this out while swimming laps), I think there are a few points that haven’t gotten enough attention which prospects, customers and investors (as well as competitors and anyone thinking about working there) might want to consider. And many of these points may also apply to other true SaaS vendors, especially those which are fairly InFullBloom. So here I go, jumping into the fray, last but I hope not least.

Lock-In

There’s been a good big of discussion about the customer lock-in aspect of Workday having 3-5 year non-cancellable contracts per their S-1. But there’s been little mention of the fact that many true SaaS customers (and not just Workday’s) prefer longer contracts in order to lock in, for their own purposes, desireable pricing for as long as possible because they know that pricing may well change when that contract renews.

But real customer lock-in for enterprise software that’s being used and embraced by the entire workforce (not to mention by their dependents/beneficiaries and applicants and by the ex-wife of a former employee who is eligible for benefits under COBRA) has little to do with the contract. Rather, it’s all about the difficulty of getting 10’s of thousands of people who have adopted that UX to give it up, always assuming it’s a good one, which Workday’s is. And just imagine the outcry when these users think they’re going to lose a UX they use daily once it includes the type of intelligence, historical data, embedded analytics and so much more that comes with widespread and long use (think Amazon’s ability to recommend books based on what it knows you have purchased and not designated as a gift)?

The lock-in for true SaaS vendors is in delivering so compelling a user experience that customer leadership would be hung out to dry if they tried to take it away — and to keep on delivering it. That’s quite different from the various flavors of lock-in we’ve seen with the last generation of licensed/on-premise enterprise software.

Professional Services

There’s also been a good bit of discussion about the amount of revenue Workday derives from professional services. While not broken down completely, I think we can assume this includes helping customers through not only initial implementations but also with ongoing or periodic support as those customers turn on features in new Workday releases or change their configurations as their own business needs change.

Some of the comments have suggested that this is too large a % of Workday’s revenues or that this begins to look like true SaaS isn’t a silver bullet for eliminating ALL implementation work (which it certainly is not). But no one has even hinted at the importance of Workday (and the value to their customers) keeping at least a light Workday hand on many to most customer implementations, even when partners are taking the lead.

I think it is critical for any next generation enterprise software vendor to keep their hand on the tiller (also the till :-)) to ensure that systems integration partner-led projects aren’t using implementation thinking, methodologies, tools or business practices carried over from the mega-implementations of the last generation of licensed/on-premise (or hosted single tenant and 3rd party managed) solutions. No matter how good the intentions of SIs in developing their partnerships with true SaaS vendors, many of them retain a business model that thrives on mega-implementations.

Architecture As Competitive Moat

The best coverage of Workday’s S-1 release, and of Workday in general (as is true for the best coverage of other enterprise software vendors) does discuss the growing functional scope of Workday’s offering (there’s been a lot of good coverage of WD 17’s new Time Tracking application as well as big improvements in their growing financial applications), the usability of its UX, the range and capability of mobile Workday, its being SaaS and more. However, there’s been VERY little coverage of Workday’s underlying architecture and development methodology which I consider to be a very substantial competitive advantage.

Those vendors with which I’ve worked or am working (and others with whom I have not been similarly engaged) which have adopted correct domain object models (and getting to correct is no mean feat) as the foundation of their applications, a metadata-driven definitional development approach to writing a whole lot less code (so code only for the tools and NOT for the applications), and much more easily adapted applications, are able to achieve much better cost, time and capability to market with fewer errors and release to release perturbations of historical data. Those vendors which have achieved a set of preferred architectural behaviors, which I dubbed SaaS InFullBloom, deliver products that are inherently easier to configure and understand while reducing greatly not only their own efforts to add capabilities but also the effort needed by their customers to unleash and then use those capabilities.

Doing it right takes a ton more money and time up-front, and that’s time and money that very few entrepreneurs in our space have had available to them, but it pays huge dividends to vendor and customers over time. Doing it over is painful, but there are some major vendors in our space who are doing just that, and I applaud them. Doing it right also changes the mix of KSAOCs needed by the vendor (e.g. very specialized tools developers and subject matter experts who can express the domain in patterns) and by the customer (e.g. ability to rethink the domain from the perspective of business outcomes rather than replicating age-old processes and data). But what this also means is that, as the tools mature and the models are built out, R&D investments slow per chunk of capability delivered because so much of that new capability involves the reuse of known objects in new ways.

As you look at true SaaS (or even not so SaaSy) vendors who are practicing these newer development approaches and architectural designs in a domain as large and complex as enterprise class HRM, take a hard look at what they’re able to accomplish behind the scenes. It’s my opinion that Workday’s R&D investments (and that of other vendors following the same/similar path) are delivering more bang for their bucks, an opinion that will be tested very publicly once the bulk of their foundational build-out is behind them and all the leverage points of their approach are at scale.

Interrogatory Configuration

There’s been a lot of discussion among the EIs privately and in the blogosphere/twitterverse/business and financial press publicly about whether or not true SaaS at the enterprise level can be profitable. One of the concerns that’s always raised, and a very legitimate one, is how can the true SaaS business model at the enterprise level support the marketing and sales costs of yesteryear. Well of course it can’t.

But what doesn’t get as much attention, or at least I’m not seeing it, is what various true SaaS enterprise vendors are doing to attack the costs, complexity and timeline of every aspect of their “gleam in eye” to “closed deal” to “in production” customer lifecycle. And attack it they are.

My small contribution to this attack has been interrogatory configuration, an approach on which I’ve been working almost since the beginning of my solo practice in ’87. Initially, this was envisioned as a means of reducing the implementation and upgrade costs/time/errors for the HRMSs of that era. Great idea in principle, but the architectures of the day couldn’t support dynamic configuration of the underlying applications. One of those early efforts led to a number of workbenches at Oracle, more current versions of which are still in use with EBS.

Architectures of the type described above not only create a competitive moat, but they lend themselves to the collection of techniques — and to the fully automated configuration — that is the fullest expression of interrogatory configuration (think TurboTax). A number of my clients (and I’m sure others) have embraced this approach in spite of the really heavy lifting it requires in understanding a domain, and I hope to be around long enough to see some of this work bear fruit. While there are many other ways to streamline/improve the marketing and sales of enterprise class true SaaS, I believe that interrogatory configuration (if only it gets a much better name) will have a significant impact for those able to accomplish it.

Final Thoughts

Everyone knows that I’m biased toward great HRM enterprise software. But great software is never enough to ensure a successful software or other technology-enabled business. Quality leadership, talent at every level, effective organizational culture, adequate investment resources, and many more business elements plus a ton of mazel are also needed to build durably successful businesses. No one was harder on PeopleSoft than I was because I felt it was a technical reincarnation of out-of-date HRM thinking and data design. What pleases me not only about Workday but about some other bright software spots in HR technology is that we’re now reinventing on every level — business model, deployment approach, development methodology, operational technology, user experience, configuration frameworks, applications architecture, object models, and so much more. One of the reasons I love working/talking/visiting/etc. with HRM software vendors is the change to learn more about the topics covered here.

Loss Leaders: Great For Kodak Film But Perhaps Not For HR Technology

We Sell Kodak Film

[Like all early childhood memories, please consider this story as a possibly flawed recollection. What remains is the learning, for which I’m very grateful.]

I learned about loss leaders on my 5th birthday in 1950. My family-only birthday party (my Mom was very ill and died a year later) was convened at my grandmother’s home. Dad and his brothers owned a small camera shop, Bloom’s Photo Supply, which also sold luggage and umbrellas (but that’s another story).

As the grownups sat around the dining room table, discussing the upcoming Christmas season, Uncle Paul suggested that they reduce dramatically the price of good fresh Kodak film (was there any other? remember the yellow boxes?) in order to draw people into the store. He felt that purchases from the increased traffic would more than make up for any losses on the cost of the film by gathering in the developing business (which was then very high margin) and presenting opportunities to sell those film buyers with (all higher margin) upgraded cameras, camera bags, tripods, and more.

I really don’t remember which brother explained when I asked how they could make money if they “lost” a little on every roll of film. But I think it was my Dad (who ran the selling floor and later added the shipping department) who said that they would make it up on the profit from the other products and services they would sell to those same customers. And they did.

But it’s important to note that there was no attempt to mislead here; they really were selling good fresh film at or below cost. Instead, they were depending on increased traffic (so a greater flow of prospects), salesmanship and buyer psychology to do the rest.

In those simpler, less sophisticated times, when we bought a sealed film package with a clear expiration date on it, we assumed with confidence that the film inside was exactly as advertised and expected. Film was a pretty simple product, the process of buying it was quick and easy, and the very worse that could happen was that our pictures of a major life event would be ruined by outdated or otherwise damaged film. But that was a risk we understood and one that was very very small.

This concept of the loss leader is alive and well today in all things retail, from low-priced airline tickets where the real profit is in all the add-on fees to deeply discounted resort hotel rooms where the real profit is in the expectation of guests’ higher margin eating and drinking on-premise to the sale items you see in every newspaper (yes, there are still actual newspapers) and every manner of electronic discount coupons that increase the volume of customers and prospects who can then be tempted to buy non-sale/non-discount/higher margin items.

But unlike in my memories of Bloom’s Photo Supply, all too often loss leaders aren’t what they seem. All too often, the mirchandise is out-of-date/undesirable/about to expire, the add-on fees are hidden and become gotchas, and the advertised sale goods/services were never intended to be available, which moves us quickly from loss leader to bait and switch.

In much of life, “the house never loses,” something we should all have learned by being lured onto the gaming floor at the casino hotels with the great prices in Vegas where we stayed for the 2011 HR Technology Conference. And this is a lesson we should all remember as we prepare for the 2013 show returning to Vegas.

The use of loss leaders is also alive and well in the business of HR technology. But just as there was nothing dishonest about the use of loss leaders in my Dad’s day, there’s nothing wrong with doing it in our world. But caveat emptor must be our mantra if we’re going to avoid getting flim flammed.

Are you being asked to sign up for HR technology at a price that’s almost too good to be true? With promises of ease of implementation, conservation of the investments you’ve already made, all the benefits of innovation without disruption? What happens when a vendor with a portfolio of so-so products and one really great one uses the really great one to lock you into the portfolio with promises of quantity discounts, ease of integration, shareable support and usage competencies? What happens when what you saw in the demo (shame on you here for not requiring carefully scripted scenario demos) isn’t really delivered in the product and was created for that demo with a good bit of configuration and maybe even a little demo magic?

HR technology is often complex, and the process of buying it must involve considerable research and analysis. Implementations can range from reasonably fast and painless to horrific forced death marches with no end in sight. And what’s at risk is so substantial that we do pilots, go-live drills, parallel testing, and so much more just to be sure that we’re not going to bring our organizations to their knees and/or create a public relations nightmare. There are very large and not always fully understood risks associated with implementing and using HR technology which dwarf any savings we might have gotten on that loss leader.

So when you agree to sign up before the end of the quarter, to pay a lot less for each piece but a lot more for the bundle (when the piece you wanted was terrific but the bundle wasn’t), or to get some new software “for free” in exchange for being a beta customer as long as you keep on paying top dollar for everything else you had purchased from that vendor, ask yourself: “is this a loss leader?” And then ask one more question: “what would Naomi say?”

Guest Post — Paul Sparta — Apple Patent Victory Over Samsung Is A Disaster For Software

Apple vs Samsung

[This is my first guest post ever on my blog, and it’s very timely. For those of you who may not know my valued colleague Paul Sparta, who wrote this post, Paul is the former Chairman and CEO of Plateau Systems, Ltd. (until Plateau was acquired by Successfactors before Successfactors was then acquired by SAP) and is currently Executive Chairman of VBrick Systems, Inc. and Managing Director of Acme Nova Partners, LLC. Sparta has worked in the software industry for over twenty years and has published numerous articles regarding enterprise software. He can be found at @PaulSparta on Twitter.

I’m absolutely not a patent expert, and to be quite truthful, I haven’t been following this Apple vs Samsung very closely nor do I have an informed opinion in this matter. But Paul, who’s one of the most capable HR technology executives whom I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, has some very strong opinions in this matter, and I’m delighted to be able to give him a platform for voicing those opinions. Take it away Paul!]

The Apple patent victory over Samsung will have deep and negative consequences for every user and producer of software if the verdict is not overturned or if the damages are not significantly neutered. And, the implications will spill over into HR technology and every corner of enterprise software as well.

For those of you not familiar with software patents and patent litigation, let me boil it down. In software, as Apple and endless others have done, one can patent a method for how something is done.

Here is a legitimately patentable example, “Software method to correlate a person’s cocktail preferences with a person’s automobile purchasing behavior.” This has conceivable business value in that I could pay bars and restaurants to distribute cocktail napkins with the appropriate car dealership advertisements, e.g. order a Margarita and you get a Toyota napkin, order a Negroni, and you get a Fiat napkin (of course). I might want to do this if I owned a few car dealerships.

Now, a software geek will rightly tell you that this is a really easy application to build. A database with a handful of tables, a few queries plus a web interface and voila! I just made an application. This is what thousands of custom software development shops do every day.

But here’s the kicker, I can actually patent this application in the USA, not because it is truly innovative, but simply because I only need to demonstrate to the USPTO that it hasn’t been done before this particular way! Now, I can use this new patent to sue anyone who I think might be doing anything similar to this, with the assumption of validity, because I have a Patent Number from the USPTO saying that it uniquely mine. And it’s even worse. I do not actually have to build and market my cocktail/auto correlation software; I merely need to demonstrate that I had the idea first. I now have a license to blackmail via the legal system, for having produced neither actual innovation nor product. Do you see the absurdity?

If you don’t, here’s a perfect analogy. The patent example above is equivalent to a home builder laying out the configuration of a kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, and ceilings in a particular way that hasn’t been exactly done before. This happens all the time with custom homes and additions. No one would think that allowing a builder to patent that particular configuration makes any sense at all. After all, assembling these kinds of rooms has been going on for decades with standard methods and procedures. Yet in software, this happens all the time!

What it means for the HR tech and enterprise software world, and you, is that corporations big and small with sufficient legal resources can abuse the patent system to either blackmail legitimate companies (patent trolling) or to create unjustified monopolies on technology, which is exactly what Apple is doing here. This has been going on for years, but never to this scale with so many potentially affected people and companies.

In practice, the matter of granting patents, patent litigation, and patent law is highly complex in its implementation, despite the manifest truths of the simple examples above. This is merely the tip of a giant non-productive, and indeed destructive, iceberg.

It is time for the insanity to stop. Tell your elected representative to work for patent reform, or we’ll all be paying through the nose for patently absurd behavior.

Some resources on the topic:

http://www.patentlysilly.com/ (to fully appreciate the absurdity)

http://endsoftpatents.org/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2011/07/28/the-supreme-court-should-invalidate-software-patents/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent

http://www.patentlyo.com

I’m Keynoting European HR Tech Conf In Amsterdam

Last year I keynoted my first conference outside of the US, a major HR technology conference held in Athens. I had hesitated to accept such speaking engagements in the past out of a concern that my style of speaking, my humor (or what I think is humorous), and my Yiddishisms wouldn’t translate well for an international audience. International client work including speaking engagements, conference breakout and “ask the expert” sessions, and other international non-keynote roles always went fine, but Athens was my first “make or break” the conference international keynote — and it was a success. I translated the Yiddish as best I could, acted out some of the more complex ideas (literally), and found the audience as welcoming and capable as any for whom I’d ever spoken. So, sticking with the A’s, I’m going from Athens in 2011 to keynoting the European HR Technology Conference in Amsterdam in 2012.

If you’re not familiar with this young but rapidly growing conference, I should start by telling you that it has no connection to the granddady of such, the US-based HR Technology Conference. LRP, the sponsor/producer of the US show, chose not to take their franchise beyond the US even though HR technology is global from a vendor perspective and in terms of the business needs of most buyers. So some very entrepreneurial and experienced HRM conference producers/new media executives launched this European conference, and I’m honored to be a keynote speaker at this year’s edition in Amsterdam on October 25th. And the same tips apply to getting the most out of your attendance at either or both of these conferences.

The title of my session is “What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You.” From the conference brochure, here’s how I described this session: “There are great companies and great products/services in our industry – and then there are the others. Whether it’s the unstated or deliberately misstated ambitions of vendor leadership, their cleverly obfuscated definitions of SaaS and cloud, the well-done demos that paper over well-known software flaws and gaps, or a customer’s own lack of preparedness and well-informed due diligence, the mismatch between customer expectations and vendor/product/service realities really does hurt the reputation of HR and their mission of driving business outcomes. Whether you’re evaluating and enhancing your current HR technology, finally engaging in that long-avoided cleanup of your data, making modest changes in your HRM delivery system and its software/outsourcing portfolio, or contemplating a major overhaul in the face of both head and tail winds, what you don’t know will hurt you. In her keynote, Naomi will take you on a journey, floodlight in hand, through the less-visited, but important highlights of vendor and software/services due diligence. She’ll enlighten you, using her well-known “killer” scenarios, on how to spot the strengths and weaknesses of vendors, and their products / services, with an eye on what will best meet your needs as well as on ensuring the least number of unpleasant surprises, or buyers’ remorse. An educated customer may be some salespeople’s worst nightmare, but it’s the objective of Naomi’s keynote.”

So that more of you can afford to attend this important conference, if you use my code NBVIP15 when you register, the organizers will give you a modest discount on one registration and a larger discount if you register a group of four or more. The Wallace will be traveling with me, and we’re extending our trip to enjoy all of the conference but also to do some sightseeing as this will be our first trip to Amsterdam. If you’ve got touring suggestions for us, favorite restaurants or canal tours, please leave me a comment below. I’ll look forward to seeing many new faces at this newish conference and renewing acquaintances with my European colleagues.

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About

“I’ve Looked At Clouds From Both Sides Now”

Reprise — Harry’s And Naomi’s Rules

Impressions From HR Technology Conference 2012

Big, Big, Big!

Master Panel — What Wasn’t Said!

Innovation, Adoption, More Innovation

Legacy Apps, Legacy People

HRM Drives Business Outcomes

Rethink And Replace

Serendipity During Nature Breaks

Final Thoughts

Reflections On A Long Career — Part IV — Summing Up

Reflections On A Long Career — Part III — The Network Effect

Reflections On A Long Career — Part II — My Heroes

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

Reprise In Time For #HRTechConf: Do You Know How To Answer These Questions?

Zombie HR Tech Vendors

Everybody’s Talking ’bout Workday’s IPO, But I Think There’s Still More To Say

Lock-In

Professional Services

Architecture As Competitive Moat

Interrogatory Configuration

Final Thoughts

Loss Leaders: Great For Kodak Film But Perhaps Not For HR Technology

Guest Post — Paul Sparta — Apple Patent Victory Over Samsung Is A Disaster For Software

I’m Keynoting European HR Tech Conf In Amsterdam

In Full Wallace!

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