What Color Is Your Hair — Really?

Choose Your Color, Any Color

People of all ages choose to modify their hair color, and for many different reasons. Sometimes, it’s simply to give themselves a change, as when a young person colors their blond hair auburn or brunette hair blond. Sometimes, it’s just to call attention to oneself, or to demonstrate a complete disdain for convention, which probably explains blond-tipped brunette brush cuts or fuchsia locks in an otherwise blond head of long hair. Neither of these motives has anything to do with obfuscation, quite the contrary in many cases.

Of course, there are many other reasons for changing your hair color when the intention is obfuscation, even outright deceit. These include the full range of righteous to dastardly motives. Changing hair color can be part of a spy’s or a criminal’s disguise. It can change the appearance of a protected witness, be an important part of the tranformation of an actress into the real life person whose part they’re playing, or hide the effects of illness or injury. I’m told there are even folks who’ve changed their hair color because they believe that “blonds have more fun” or “brunettes are more intelligent.”

But, especially as we get older, very different patterns emerge. As our natural hair color changes with age, some patterns have emerged among my contemporaries;

None of them — at least none among my immediate circle of family/friends/colleagues — have just let their hair grey in whatever way it chooses. Even those few who have gone grey in a lovely way do a little something to ensure that their grey is silvery and shiny. They’re at peace but still want to put their best foot forward.
Some, like me, are entirely comfortable with aging and do nothing to disguise THE NUMBER (66 in my case) but don’t like the way aging hair colors (from dulling to greying) look on them. They change with the times, they reinvent their look, they adopt a more attractive color (normally lighter colors are recommended around the face as you age), at least until they’re ready (should they be so lucky as to develop gorgeous silver hair as has Ron) to go au naturel. There’s no hidden agenda here, not from themselves or the world around them, but there’s definitely a desire to put their best foot forward.
Then there are those who are very uncomfortable with their aging and will do anything to conceal it from others and, I often think, from themselves. Some of them cling to the hair color of their youth (or remembered image of their youth) without realizing, perhaps, how obviously colored it looks. Nothing looks more fake than an older woman with determinedly brunette all over color next to her aging skin tones. No amount of makeup can recreate the skin tones of youth (except on stage) that really matched that hair color. Others adopt the platinum blond look of Jewish women of my mother’s generation, clinging to the conviction that platinum never ages. But both of these looks are clearly false no matter what the wearer believes — and a little sad.

Now what on earth does any of this have to do with HRM, with HR technology, or with any other meaningful topic for this blog? Actually quite a bit. As HRM software shows its age, and at least so far all software does age, the owners of that software have very similar decisions to make about how they will present their software into the autumn of its years. They can:

Accept that they’ve got aging software, perhaps software which carries out fairly stable business processes, and software whose installed base may be slowly moving on but with those who remain quite content to use the software with modest enhancements and regulatory updates until they too are inclined to move on. They can acknowledge openly that their software isn’t intended for new sales, is only supported modestly, and that it will be turned off, sold off, or no longer supported when there isn’t enough maintenance revenue to justify the ongoing expenses of supporting it. There’s no shame in doing this, and also no reputational harm (in my opinion) to the rest of that vendor’s products and services. I’m a pretty grey, doing just a rinse to give it a little shine.
Accept that they’ve got aging software but one whose customers really need/want a higher level of support, some at the edge innovation, the ability to use new devices and more, this vendor can make clear investments to put that best foot forward — but without any pretense of having the latest and greatest software under the covers. Lots of worthwhile investments can be made in refactoring, adding extended capabilities, refreshing partnerships, improving the user experience, and much more, and these investments can definitely give a fresher look to “the old gal.” But just like my beautifully (and expensively) layered hair color, which really does look quite natural to folks who don’t know me (and who don’t look too closely at the rest of me), it’s still Naomi under the covers. Again, no shame in doing this, and also no reputational harm (in my opinion) to the rest of that vendor’s products and services, especially if they’re upfront about what it costs to do that terrific hair color and how much of the customer’s maintenance fees are really going to other business initiatives. Or — and this is where customers should beware —
Pretend their software isn’t aging, give it whatever they think represents the marketing color of youth (of course we have SaaS! of course we do mobile! of course we’re integrated! and yes, we can support the contingent workforce!), and hope that they’ll fool the world. Even when they combine this with lots of useful improvements, the big lie fools no one — and it does hurt their reputation in a way that affects their other products and services.

All of us age, and there’s really not a damn thing we can do about it. Of course we should take the best possible care of ourselves and put our best foot forward. But just as people make fools of themselves when they try to fool the rest of us into thinking that they’re still ingenues when they should be playing grand dames, so too do software vendors make fools of themselves when they try to pass off whatever they’ve got as what they think we want. Just sayin’

Even Successful Products Deserve A Sunset Plan

The End Of An Era Is Near

[Disclosure: This is part memoir and part advertorial, where the advertiser is Bloom & Wallace.]

If you’ve been wondering about the long delay since my last blog post, read on to learn about one project on which I’ve been working. That project has been to finalize the sunset plan for my very successful, and only real, product — my HRM domain object model/architectural “starter kit.” For that sunset plan, and even very successful products deserve one, you can skip to the bottom line below, but I found that writing the back story was a wonderful stroll down memory lane which you too may enjoy. And let me say at the outset that this is one product whose sunset plan has been invoked long before it became a “legacy” or a Snowdon of Yesteryear. We might wish that all vendors would do the same.

THE BACK STORY

Bloom & Wallace is my solo consulting practice founded in1987. I began by working, on a time and materials basis, with large, mostly global and diversified corporate clients on their HRM and HRM delivery system’s strategies. Over the years, my client list expanded to include the HRM software vendors and outsourcing services providers as well as firms (venture capital, private equity, and investment banks) which have an investment interest in this industry. But for twenty-five years, my mission has not changed: to use information technology as a critical enabler of HRM so as to drive breakthroughs in organizational business outcomes. From 1987 until now, my emphasis has been on the HRM metrics and strategic HRM capabilities that drive business outcomes (just click to enlarge the diagram, which explores strategic HRM), and I’m honored to have worked with and to continue to work with a who’s who of our industry’s greats — both people and organizations.

To bring leverage to my consulting work, thus making it possible for me to remain a solo, I developed, beginning in 1987, a variety of methodological and training materials, along with “starter kits,” for each task in a strategic HRM and HRM delivery systems planning project. Some of these materials were published in a tutorial in 1993 by Naomi Lee Bloom’s Learning Products, in partnership with my good friend and valued colleague, Jan Fretwell. This tutorial was recognized as a product of the year by Human Resource Executive magazine in 1993, and it garnered considerable critical acclaim, but it was NOT a best-seller. Without revealing who was “sleeping with” whom and the dark secrets of the day’s leading software packages (much of which were revealed in the infamous PeopleSoft/Integral law suit on which I did some software archeology for the defense), my tutorial was a critical success but a commercial failure. But oh what I learned while scribbling/editting/proofing those many hundreds of pages!

Year after year, I updated these “starter kits” to reflect my HRM delivery system consulting experiences (and those of valued colleagues), the changes in our industry and in technology, the changes in human resource management issues and practices and in the business context within which our organizations operate. Most importantly, they were updated to reflect my own evolving views on good practices in HRM and in IT. But I can tell you that the annual update cycles drove first my assistant of many years and, more recently, my husband to distraction as they did the heavy keyboarding.

In 1990 and 1991, I worked closely with then Integral (Dave Duffield’s 3^rd enterprise software venture which was challenged to survive, as were all the mainframe HRMS vendors, once PeopleSoft came to market in the late 1980’s and Integral lost its lawsuit) to create the domain models and preferred behaviors upon which their next generation InPower product was based, using my HRM Business Model “Starter Kit” to guide my participation in that design. The Integral talent on that project was amazing; click here to find some of the folks who reference InPower in their LinkedIn profiles. The InPower design/development were led by Joel Summers, who went on to become the head of Oracle’s EBS HCM products and then, after Oracle’s hostile acquisition of PeopleSoft, to be head of the PeopleSoft HCM products as well. I contributed to that product’s foundation many strategic HRM concepts, including total workforce management (to include both employees and non-employee workers), competency-based HRM, total compensation planning and administration, role-based security, team-based organizational design, culturally flexible data structures, processing logic for true global support, and breadth of functionality in work environment management. InPower was a critical success when it launched, but the then CEO and Board of Integral, the same folks who couldn’t see the promise of client server until it was too late, presided over its demise. Since then, but not nearly as quickly as I had hoped, ERP/HRMS/talent management software vendors as well as HRM outsourcing providers (many of which have been my clients, been led by former clients and/or been licensees of my “starter kit”) embraced these same ideas for their product direction and designs. The best of today’s HRM software reflect these ideas in their foundations; it’s not SaaS InFullBloom if it doesn’t.

During 1995 and 1996, at the request of the vendor community, I packaged my intellectual property as a product, called it the HRM Business Model “Starter Kit” (no, I couldn’t have given it a worse name), and released it to an excellent response toward the end of 1996. Dozens of HRM software vendors and outsourcing providers have since licensed this product (each getting the then current year’s release) as a critical input to the design of their HRM application software packages, their next generation and/or new product designs, and their HRM outsourcing platforms.

Beginning in 2009, largely because of the extensive consolidation in our industry, I began renewing the licenses of some of our earliest licensees, providing them (in many cases, their new landlords) with current versions of the “Starter Kit” along with materials that had not been included in the earliest versions. With the 2010 and 2011 updates, these materials have become a fully expressed HRM object model “starter kit” along with a detailed set of architectural guidelines (about many of which I’ve written blog posts here) for bringing that object model to life in enterprise application software.

In total, the “Starter Kit” and related training materials are 3,000+ pages of intellectually integrated, structured worksheets and talking points presented in a work book format. For organizations using a true object-oriented life cycle, ideally agile, the relevant stories and use cases, object classes and class hierarchies, plus myriad attributes and methods are covered along with a great deal of discussion of the whats/whys/wherefores and hows of HRM. The modeling constructs are obvious, and trained modelers, particularly object modelers, can readily extract what they need and input them into the tools of their choice, assuming that their tools support objects fully, including their incarnation as Web services. And for those vendors working with models-driven development, which I strongly advocate and directly support, the “starter kit” takes them very far toward application delivery.

Licensees, in addition to training materials that cover the background, context, structure and use of the “Starter Kit,” are also given a very detailed set of application architecture guidelines. Not just so-called “best practices” in software engineering, these offer very HRM domain-specific guidance in crafting software that is much more highly automated than most. The goal here isn’t automation for its own sake but rather a careful focus on reducing the total cost of delivering business outcomes for the users of that software. All too often we’ve focused on the total cost of ownership of software, an important but heavily IT-oriented metric, or even the total cost of service delivery, the emerging standard for running shared services or BPO businesses. But what really matters to the business is what it takes to deliver provable business outcomes. That’s the focus of the “Starter Kit’s” training materials, and especially the architectural guidelines.

To my knowledge (but I hope this post will surface anything I’ve missed), there is no analogous product available from any other source, nor have even the major global HRM or HRMS consulting firms created so rich an internal resource. In 1997, this work was highlighted as an HRM delivery system improvement tactic in a major publication, “The New Frontier,” from the Corporate Leadership Council of The Advisory Board. With the formation in 1999 of the HR-XML Consortium, www.hr-xml.org, and my role as a consultant to the startup of this industry-wide data exchange standards effort, I contributed (through our consulting work) a number of the basic structures of the “Starter Kit” as a starting point for the cross-process objects upon which so many of their early standards depended. But in spite of many best efforts, the Consortium was never able to turn its attention to the larger issue of developing/promulgating an industry standard, even in the form of a skeletal domain model.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The End Of An Era Is Near

After twenty five years of massive annual update cycles, licensee training and support, I’ve decided that all good things must come to an end. I’ll continue to maintain and support my HRM domain object model and architectural “starter kit” through 2012, to include delivering support on new licenses and any of those in process that close in 2012. After that, I will maintain the records needed to support the copyrights under which the licenses were granted but will not be updating the materials further. I had hoped that the HR-XML Consortium would be able to step in, with my offer to donate these materials as a starting point, to create an industry standard HRM object model, however skeletal. But the Consortium has very reasonably decided not to take the donation and proceed in this fashion because they simply don’t have the necessary resources.

So, the sunset of this product is near. But, rather than being depressed, I’m incredibly satisfied. Today there is little disagreement about what were considered heretical ideas when I began promulating them in the late 80’s. It’s really true that PeopleSoft was not based on a fresh modeling of the HRM domain but rather on many then common but deeply flawed notions about HRM data design. No disrespect intended to the enormous success that PeopleSoft became, nor to its founding/early leaders whom I continue to admire. But I so wished that they had done more than make the considerable technology leap that was the center of their product sucess. However, had they modeled the domain as I would have wished, they might well have suffered the same fate that my 1993 tutorial did — achieving great critical acclaim but commercial failure. Perhaps the HR and IT communities just weren’t ready for that much change.

But they are now! And the best products of today embrace so much of the modeling and architectural preferences contained in my licensed “starter kit” that I feel entirely comfortable putting those 3,000+ pages into the static archives. I should add that no one’s happier about this decision to sunset the “starter kit” than is The Wallace.

[You can find more information on the “starter kit” (including some of the licensees) here and here. And if you’re a vendor that doesn’t yet have a license, you know where to find me.]

Reprise — HRM #EnSW Vendor Consolidation Fairy Tales

Fairy Tales Can Come True, It Can Happen To You...

2-12-2012 I just couldn’t help myself on this one. After another week of non-stop M&A fall-out from Oracle/Taleo, I was reminded of the post below, written just over a year ago, and thought it was not only worth a reread but also an update. Some of it reads like I really did have a crystal ball, but most of what’s been happening was VERY easy to predict. Now I’ve gone back, using blue for visibility, and brought this old post up-to-date, at least as of this moment. G-d only knows what tomorrow will bring. And as before, in the interests of full disclosure, so many of the vendors/providers mentioned below have been, are or will be Bloom & Wallace clients that it’s best to assume that I’m ecumenically biased. Also nothing learned under NDA — and I need a tracking system to track all that I’ve signed — has been used in this creation or update of this post, nor have any delightful fairies been harmed.

There was a ton of consolidation in the HRM software and services market during 2010, and 2011 is off to a roaring start with SumTotal’s acquisition of GeoLearning. There’s a lot more to come (and it came in spades in 2011 and the start of 2012), and speculation is already rampant about:

which LMS vendor SuccessFactors and/or Peopleclick Authoria may acquire? and what about Kenexa is this regard? [Well, SFSF acquired Plateau 4/2011, PeopleclickAuthoria changed its name to Peoplefluent and acquired Strategia late 1/2012, and Kenexa acquired Outstart early 2/2012. There’s not much of size and breadth left to acquire in the LMS market, and perhaps all the so-called talent management suite vendors (at least those based in North America or the EU) who wanted one now have what they need, but there remain a ton of smaller/niche learning-related vendors, and I see no reason why they might not bulk up among themselves and/or be swallowed up by smaller talent management vendors who still need to round out their offerings.]
whether/when/how Salesforce.com will expand into the HRM market more directly and on a grander scale than via their own lab efforts and a range of small fry building HRM-related applications on the Force.com platform? [And expand they did, with the acquisition of Rypple 12/2011 and putting John Wookey in charge of the initiative into HCM applications. If I were a betting woman (and those who know me well would say that I am only when the odds are in my favor), I’d bet that SFDC has already concluded that, to make much more of a play in HCM, even in edge/social/collaborative HCM applications, they’re going to need a whole lot more of the underlying object model, domain knowledge and enabling architecture (think systemic effective-dating and cross-tenant inheritance of regulatory requirements) than they may have acquired with Rypple and that they may well do another acquisition to speed them on their way. Who might be on that list? Easiest would be Java-based HCM vendors (and with many thanks to Bennett Reddin here) such as Saba (which has a solid collaboration foundation).]
what further acquisitions the private equity firms already in our space may make (and it’s too long a list to print here) as well as which PE firms may yet enter our markets? [Just some highlights here — iCIMS, which had been entirely self-funded, took its first PE funding 1/2012 from Susquehanna Growth Equity; Workforce Software took additional money from K1 Capital in 11/2011; Accel-KKR took a majority interest in Infinisource 9/2011; the very big private equity-funded (so Golden Gate Capital) acquisition of Lawson by Infor 7/2011 that I wrote about here; SumTotal, owned by Vista Equity Partners, beefs up with acquisitions of Accero (already owned by Vista) and CyberShift; Frontier Capital’s taking a large stake in Celergo 4/2011; PeopleclickAuthoria’s (now Peoplefluent’s) acquisition of Aquire, entirely funded by their joint owner Bedford Funding 4/2011; and so many more.]
where ADP might go next, e.g. to create less dependence on their GlobalView partnership with SAP via acquisition of a more complete/less expensive/functionally broader global HRM platform and/or to acquire more in-country players to serve emerging markets with owned capabilities rather than via partners? and this same question, about acquiring in-country players, should be asked about NorthgateArinso and others? [ADP has focused substantially on their own new Vantage product and hasn’t done any blockbuster acquisitions since my original post; Ceridian will now own DayForce (2/2012) and has positioned its software platform as their future; and ADP has been mentioned more than once as a possible acquirer of Cornerstone OnDemand, their long-standing partner for the talent management needs of their larger/more complex/more global clients even as they build out the talent management capabilities of Vantage. My own view is that ADP will not be willing to pay what Cornerstone OnDemand expects in the wake of the multiples paid by SAP for SuccessFactors, Oracle for Taleo or Salesforce.com for Rypple.]
whether Lawson, perhaps with pressure from substantial investor Carl Icahn, will be on Infor’s or someone else’s shopping list or improve their stock price via a bold sell-off of lower performing assets coupled with an equally bold foray into true SaaS via a further acquisition in our space? [Swallowed up by Infor as predicted 7/2011.]
when (and if?) Cornerstone OnDemand will IPO given their much smaller size than some of their bulkier, publicly traded talent management competitors versus becoming an acquisition target for a private equity firm or established HCM player wanting Cornerstone’s multi-tenant SaaS architecture? [They did IPO 3/2011, but that hasn’t stopped them from being a potential acquisition target. Even as they are doing well, the multiples achieved by SuccessFactors and Taleo must look VERY attractive to their investors — and those multiples won’t be available for long.]
how much runway do some of the smaller workforce management vendors have given a new burst of energy from Kronos around its user experience, mobile capabilities, and global expansion — and when might Kronos itself be considering further acquisitions of its own and/or an IPO to provide a liquidity event for their private equity owners? [I continue to see Kronos as a potential acquirer, perhaps to update/expand its limited HRMS footprint or to add some additional talent management capabilities beyond staffing, even as they must be considering how best to realize the needed return for their private equity owners when they expect a liquidity event.]
and speaking of private equity owners liking their liquidity events, what’s the most likely scenario for Ceridian’s owners to achieving their return of capital? and what about those folks at Vista Equity Partners who own SumTotal et al? or General Atlantic over at TriNet? or KKR and Northgate Arinso? (Boy, that list of HRM software/services companies that are PE-owned is impressive!) [And that list got bigger in 2011/early 2012, used up some of the runway to liquidity for a number of private equity-owned vendors in our space, and raised expectations in the face of the big multiples being paid for SFSF and Taleo.]
what about those interesting smaller players like Rypple, Sonar6 and similar getting acquired for the energy and modern technology that they bring? there are some very interesting small, niche players in our space that have also been talent magnets, but one wonders how much scale they can build with their mostly quite narrow products in a market that favors bulking up? [Well, we know the ending of Rypple’s story, but there are no lack of exciting, nichey/edgy applications vendors, particularly in all things sourcing/staffing, to fill out the show floor at HR Tech 2012. That said, it’s equally clear that most of these will never achieve the valuations for which their founders/owners are hoping, simply because timing is everything. What I do see are a growing number of me-too innovators chasing too few buyer dollars as so many buyers are trying to sort out what they should do about the basics of HRMS, talent management, workforce management, global/social/mobile/analytics and more.]
which PEOs will be the mega-aggregators in this uniquely American business model, not to mention the global roll-up underway in indigenous payroll service bureaus where small fry around the world simply can’t keep up with the technology investments this business now demands? the same could be asked about 3rd party benefits administration players in the US, which is also ripe for further roll-ups by the big guns: and, my personal favorite?
who will be left standing among the formerly independent talent management single process automators, from consolidation across the background checking firms to those offering the classic ATS and right on through performance management and org charting/management?

But this post isn’t about all the possible M&A/IPO/etc. events that may occur in 2011 and beyond. It’s about the fairy tales that surround such liquidity events from the perspective of their impact on customers and what not to believe. With examples I’m making up and which don’t represent any specific HRM software companies, living or dead, here’s my view of the fairy tales that are launched with the press releases surrounding these deals along with their true meanings:

We (the acquirer) will continue to support all product lines fully— Almost no acquirer ever says, in their first press release, that all investments in major architectural overhauls [not to mention the agility, innovation, etc.] will now stop for one or more of the combined product lines, but that’s exactly what does happen. No vendor can afford to advance equally a series of wildly different product architectures. What they can do, and what the most sincere and capable actually do, is continue to add features/functions within the framework of each product’s existing architecture and object model, while they figure out how to sunset and/or converge them, choosing one of the product lines as having the winning future state architecture and object model (the desired outcome when the deal was done), realizing that they must create a new architecture and object model onto which to build the full range of covered functionality in order to create their future state product line, or simply to mine the acquired customer base via upsell, price increases, and taking out costs. Where historical data isn’t important, where configurations (gasp! or customizations) are limited, and where other elements of implementation complexity are modest, migrating to a new and/or converged platform need not be life-threatening, but it’s certainly not a non-event. But in most cases where the software in question provided broad HRM functionality, there’s a fair amount of time and effort (translate: cost) to the customer for that migration even if the vendor doesn’t add to that cost. I could name names here, but there’s no need as most of my readers know of whom I speak. [What’s really important to understand when your favored vendor gets a new landlord, is that it matters tremendously why your favored vendor was bought. Does the new owner really want/need the software they’ve acquired as part of their own development plans or were they buying a revenue stream/customer base for upsell/gap filler/competitor killer/defensive play/etc.?]
We (the acquirer) are delighted with our new colleagues and expect to retain all of them – Almost no acquirer is ever able to retain all the best talent that comes with the acquired vendor. Some of the leadership wanted to cash out or just wanted out, either of which could have been the impetus for the deal. Or that leadership has been sufficiently unsuccessful that the acquiring company’s leadership isn’t likely to want to perpetuate the source of those business/personal failings. Great software people quickly notice if their products aren’t going to be the next generation platform for the consolidated company, and they pick up their marbles and leave. And there are many more good reasons, for staff of both the acquiring or acquired company, to decide it’s time for a change, to include being immediately courted by other firms which assume that may be the case. IPOs can produce the same effect, with some folks taking their money, after years of forced death march schedules, and just kicking back for a while. But whatever the myriad reasons for staff changes, to include the natural effects of consolidation in eliminating duplicate roles, count on these events to cause a fair amount of churn in the new organization’s design and staffing. Does that matter to customers? Have you ever been forced to change hairdressers or barbers and dreaded that first haircut? Even when the new haircut is noticeably better than you’d ever had before, we creatures of habit and inertia rarely switch hairdressers unless the old one about cut off an ear. How else would you explain the many companies still running my Snowdons of Yesteryear (and clinging to the next generation of Snowdons) under cover of darkness?
Our customers can expect to see only improvements in their support, product roadmaps, and overall happiness as a result of this event– this may well be true if you were the customer of a dying vendor which has been picked up by a thriving one once you and they are over the hump of needed changes, which can include your migration to a different software platform, agreement on a different contract/SLA/etc., working with a new support team, and more. And it could also be true if your vendor has been acquired for an amazing set of assets that they just hadn’t exploited well but which will now be given the love and support they need to blossom by a new owner who is more passionate about HRM and whatever your acquired vendor’s product does than they are about getting the costs out quickly. But HRM #EnSw vendors rarely become acquisition targets unless they’ve got a problem — aging architecture, lack of market momentum, exhausted or inadequate leadership, lack of profitability, inability to scale product/sales/support/etc., lack of capital to challenge market leaders, etc. – unless the acquirer is trying to take out a major threat competitor. But even then, that threat competitor might well have been able to fight off the acquirer if they were gunning on all cylinders. So even under the best of circumstances, all customers of the combined companies need to keep a careful eye on what’s happening there and invest more than they had been investing in their vendor relationship governance as well as competitive landscape assessment while the combined companies sort out their organizational design and staffing changes, separate and/or converged product roadmaps, product architecture convergence or refresh, rationalization of contracts across all customers, etc. There’s no rest for the weary here as change, even change for the better, always brings extra work.

So what should I have offered in my earlier post as advice and a bottom line for buyers? What do I wish I had said then but am determined to say now? STOP! Don’t make another investment (except what’s needed just to keep the lights on) into products that have new landlords — or are likely to have such at any minute — until you’ve got a great and freshly updated HRM/HRM delivery system strategy in place. And don’t make another investment into products whose owners have them on life support, have declared them legacy, or are otherwise focused heavily on a different future for their products than the ones you’re using now — until you’ve got a great and freshly updated HR/HRM delivery system strategy in place. You should always keep your HRM/HRM delivery system strategy in good shape so that you can use it against which to test new business needs, make further investments, continue roll-outs, emphasize what’s important to your customers, and help ensure that HRM drives business outcomes. But if you’ve been a little lax, if you’ve never had a clear enough strategy to guide you through M&A-land, now’s the time to get your act together. And here’s where you start https://infullbloom.us/?p=2857.

Change is change, and it’s never without extra effort on everyone’s part even when it’s change for the good. When we went from S/V Mar-Lin Nights to M/V SmartyPants, a change for which we had long prepared and one anticipated with great enthusiasm, it was nevertheless daunting to take the controls of our new trawler for the first time. So when ownership/leadership changes happen suddenly, and without your advice and consent, to the vendor of one or more of the HRM delivery system platform components upon which you rely, it’s little wonder that you feel some whiplash. [And these last few months have brought more whiplash than ever because of the sheer size and reach of Taleo and SuccessFactors.] Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the “new”company’s leadership puts out soothing messages all around. But despite the best intentions of everyone concerned, prepare for the possibility of some disruption when you hear that your vendor has just been acquired. If you’re faced with a rocky ride, you’ll at least be prepared. And if you’re pleasantly surprised, shout that acquirer’s praises to the heavens or via a comment right here. [For more coverage of M&A on my blog, here’s a selection of posts that may be of interest https://infullbloom.us/?cat=32]

With many thanks to the publishers of Golden Books for their book cover used here and to lyricists Carolyn Leigh and Johnny Richards for the song ”Young at Heart” popularized by Frank Sinatra.

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 be so lucky as to have career heroes, to have specific people who, at critical junctures in our lives, have helped us choose our direction and/or master the KSAOCs needed to pursue successfully the direction we chose. There have been many such people in my life, some I actually knew and others I didn’t. Some were even fictional characters from the books of my childhood. But each of these inspired me, showed me the way, supported me when the going got rough, and/or cheered me across the many finish lines I’ve encountered along the way. I can’t begin to describe all of them here — yes, it really does take a village — but I thought I’d highlight five to represent the many:

Nancy Drew — was the fictional heroine in a long series of children’s books, written by a committee of writers from 1930 on. A never-aging Ms. Drew, with her signature frocks and coupe (all this before what I felt was a disastrous modernization of the series that began in 1959), solved all manner of mysteries, overcame a wide range of villains, demonstrated more KSAOCs than you can imagine, and lived larger most women of the time. The best part of these books, and the reason they so influenced me, was that they provided my first exposure to a young woman who wasn’t bound by the conventions of the era. Having learned to read very young (taught by my older sister who thought this would keep me from bothering her — and she was so right), the Nancy Drew mysteries were and continue to be favorites. Nancy could do anything, and so I decided could I.
Annie McPhee — was my first manager at my first professional job, just out of UPenn, as a programmer trainee at the then John Hancock Life Insurance Company. I was going nights for my MBA, working a part-time job to help pay my tuition, working long hour at my day job, and really burning the candle at three ends. I was just barely getting by at both work and grad school, and Annie called me on it. A high school grad plucked from the tabulator ranks when the first business computers arrived, Annie was the last of a her breed in terms of being loyal to the company first and to herself a distant second. I realized through working for Annie that my first professional loyalty was to myself, followed very quickly by wanting to meet real customer needs even as any loyalty to my employer depended on its putting those customers pretty close to first place. It also became clear in this first job that I was more interested in learning and rethinking the business given the possibilities that computers brought rather than slavishly copying the existing procedures into computer programs. I was in trouble a good bit with Annie, and I quickly learned that a corporate career was probably not in my future.
Larry Seidel — was my long-suffering boss for most of my nine years at American Management Systems. A brilliant and intensely analytical man, from Larry I learned the essence of management consulting, putting the clients’ interests first, general systems thinking, turning good ideas into rigorous methodologies, turning sound analysis into “take a leap” recommendations, and turning good into great business writing. I also learned how to live on the road without the road becoming home, to manage complex interconnected projects, to start and run a consulting practice, and so much more. Larry and I remained great friends until his far too early death at the end of 2007, and I still ask myself “what would Larry do” on nearly every client project.
Grace Hopper — was the early computer scientist who is credited with much of the theoretically work that led to the COBOL language, but she was so much more. She had a brilliant academic career in physics and mathematics, to include a PhD in mathematics, before there were many such women; she was a Naval officer of high rank who retired as a Rear Admiral; she married then divorced her husband at a time when divorce was supposed to be the kiss of death for any woman; and Grace spent her long professional life proving that there really wasn’t anything a woman couldn’t do. Grace Hopper was everything I wanted to be, except divorced. Her famously quoted “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission” rings constantly in my mind when there are tough choices to be made. I never met Grace, but I followed her career closely, and I so wish I had known her personally.
Bubbi Bloom — Anne Bloom was my maternal grandmother. Am immigrant from the shtetls of Lithuania (then under the Czar), she taught me everything I know about perseverance, diplomacy, the power of the personal network, how to go forward when there’s no going back, respect for and learning from the past as a foundation for inventing the future, courage, and that there’s no such word as can’t. I lived with my grandmother a good bit growing up, and I loved the stories she told of the old country and the new. But mostly I remember her telling me that I could be and do anything to which I set my mind and my efforts. And I remember her telling not just me but everyone she knew that voting in her new country wasn’t just a privilege but an obligation, an obligation on the same level as tzedaka, the obligatory philanthropy of Judaism that is an absolute commandment.

There are many more people, much closer to my current career and whose names are familiar to many of you, who continue to inspire me every day. I benefit from younger colleagues from whom I’ve learned so much, clients who challenge me and give me the opportunity to do my best work, industry leaders who keep pushing back the boundaries of what’s possible, and friends who no longer ask me “when will you retire?” Social technology has so extended the reach of my own voice even as it’s brought many new voices to my attention, and my heroes now include many more people that I “know” but have never met. I don’t know this for sure, but I think that building and sustaining a successful career over a very long period of time takes more than any one person can muster. It really does take a village.

Reprise — When Bank Branch Managers Are Called President

1/31/2012 — Shortly after I launched my blog, I published the post below. I’ve thought about it often since then, but never more so than today. So what set me off enough today to make me republish a two-year-old blog post? A very new HR technology blogger published a reasonable blog post that highlighted some vendors that interested him but with a title that included the word “leading.” Nothing in the post suggested that some type of exhaustive research had been conducted nor that there was anything methodical about how the mentioned vendors had been selected. In fact, selected is so much more formal than anything about the blog post that started this chain of events. Then one of the mentioned vendor’s team tweeted about having been named a leading vendor by this analyst, and that was retweeted from the vendor’s primary twitter account. You can imagine my response on Twitter (here in order of tweets and stripped of identifying information):

“This is absolutely misleading. Blog post highlights items of interest to author. There’s no research-based ranking here.”

“And you don’t serve your employer well by attempting to mislead followers.”

There’s nothing that screams more for a republishing of this blog post than when someone from a vendor tweets about the great award/commendation/analyst positioning/vague compliment/etc. that their product/service has garnered when there’s nothing more to report than that they were one of a group which was invited to participate in something or, even worse, when they were mentioned casually in a list of products/services of interest by a new blogger just getting familiar with the space.

So, without further ado, an oldie but goodie blog post that definitely bears repeating.

When Bank Branch Managers Are Called President

Dilbert CPO 74152_strip Frame I Today’s wonderful Dilbert strip got me thinking about how easy it is to use words that mislead, manipulate, and generally obscure the truth. In Lake Woebegon, where all the men are handsome and the children are above average, we dance around performance issues, letting the person in question think that things are going pretty well when, in fact, we’re already planning how to get rid of them via those convenient transfers, promotions and “special projects.” With work plans and estimates based on unachievable assumptions, we cross our fingers and make a wish over how long and at what real cost that ERP upgrade will be done, perhaps protected by the thought that such projects are invariably rescoped/repositioned/restaffed before they’re completed — or at least after we’ve left them for the next project. Confronted with the unpleasant task of balancing unbalanceable budgets, building sales plans to support unsupportable growth targets, creating pie-in-the-sky marketing plans, swallowing hard to swallow organizational changes, and the list goes on, we avoid the hard work of telling it like it is and cloak our discomfort in the weazle words of paradigm shifting, innovative differentiation, the “cloud” will handle those details, and Chief Whatever Officer. As in so many things, Dilbert has our number.

Renaming the job of branch manager to President of the Fort Myers area (where there’s only one such branch in the Fort Myers area) does not increase by one jot the decision-making authority or autonomy of the new, so-called President. Calling time and attendance software, which does the heavy lifting for hourly workforce scheduling, wage calculations, and timesheet-based labor distribution, talent management software does not make it so. Claiming that the 22% maintenance fees paid by licensed/on-premise software customers are being used entirely for the benefit of those customers, is only believable by those folks still buying swamp land in Fort Myers (where we have no swamps for sale, not even in this depressed market). Having a corporate values statement that says that our workforce is our greatest asset defies credulity when the organization just did a 10% across-the-board layoff because they didn’t know enough about their work or workers to know what part of the workforce asset was most important to retain. And calling single tenant software that the vendor hosts and for which the customer subscribes your SaaS offering is intentionally misleading. So why are these practices, and many more like them, so commonplace?

The easy answer may be that human nature abhores plain truths, shies away from unpleasantness, avoids being the messenger who may get shot after delivering the bad news, and is riddled with similar character flaws. Or it may be that we love the plain truth but only when it’s spoken “off the record,” “without attribution,” or “for deep background only.” I’ve built something of a reputation for being blunt-spoken, for not shying away from conveying the hard truths (at least to the best of my knowledge and, hopefully, with enough humility to know the limits of same), for pushing myself, colleagues and clients to do more and do better, and for calling out those who don’t, at least in my little corner of the world. That reputation and behavior have certainly closed doors, and I’m mindful that I’ve had the luxury, as a solo, of not needing the clients and projects on the other side of those doors to feed a large team (or a family) as I did before I went solo.

The bottom line. I’m convinced that the next big leap at the crossroads of HRM and HR/IT will come not from any breakthroughs in either but rather from the positive impact that social networks and networking are having on our continued ability to mislead, manipulate, and generally obscure the truth in both areas. Just as customer service fails, product quality issues, and new movies are discussed openly and in real time on Twitter, so too are the full range of HRM and HR/IT issues, products, services, vendors, providers, individual leaders, etc. No place to hide anymore. Doing a layoff? Everyone knows very quickly. Crap software? The word is out. Fluffed-up LinkedIn profile? Someone will notice. Not in Lake Woebegone, Fort Myers or wherever you dwell are all the men handsome or the children above average, and today everyone knows it.

November 21st, 2009 | Category: Debunking/Calling Out, HRM/IT Intersection, Ruminations

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.

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