In Full Bloom

Carnac The Magnificent: Now The Answers To 2011’s Unknown Questions

Updated 12/15/2011 — in the wake of SAP/SFSF and now SFDC/Rypple, I thought I’d just better go right through these and do a general update. All I need now is for someone to acquire Bloom & Wallace, but then who would have imagined what’s been happening in “Our Town” over the last couple weeks?

I wrote the original post on this at the beginning of this year. When we lost Johnny Carson, we lost a great entertainer. For thirty years, 1962 to 1992, he dominated late night television, and he did that without insulting our intelligence or our sensibilities. My beloved grandmother, Bubbi Bloom, with whom I lived through much of high school, would get ready for Johnny’s Tonight Show by putting on a lovely nightgown and robe and freshening her hair and makeup. And no matter how often we told her that he couldn’t see her, she was unconvinced. Prove it, she would say, to which there simply wasn’t an adequate answer.

One of Johnny’s best-loved characters was Carnac the Magnificent. I’ve often used Carnac in my work, pretending to be him, when confronted with the unknowable, the unanswerable, the irrational questions for which no reasonable responses are going to solve the problem. Unfortunately, as I age but my clients don’t, more and more of them haven’t a clue about Carnac and just think my little skits are just wierd. Such is life.

So why is Carnac showing up for a 2nd time, here, and now? Well, there will be many blog post predictions about what’s going to happen in 2012 in human resource management (HRM), in HRM technology, in HRM BPO and in the HRM delivery system. Some of them may even prove correct when we look back at the end of next year. But what all of us would really like to know aren’t the answers to the known questions (whose answers are already in process) but rather how we should prepare for the unknown questions, i.e. those questions which just haven’t presented themselves yet. And that was Carnac’s great gift. He was able to discern the answers to questions hidden in the proverbial “the envelope please” just by holding that envelope to his forehead, thus engaging his powerful brain.

So before the wave of 2012 predictions begins, perhaps even including one of my own, and with many thanks to Johnny Carson for his contributions to my education, here’s my attempt at answering the unknowable questions that confront our industry in 2011:

Answer: None.
And the question is: How many “fake” SaaS HRM software vendors will be on a trajectory to achieve $250 million in annual recurring revenue from their HRM software (because some may offer more than HRM) with 25% real margins by the end of 2011?
Reality: How stupid could I be? I should have been much more specific in my question, limiting the vendors of interest to those which are public and, therefore, whose profit margins can at least be hypothetically parsed from their published financial statements. But no, I had to be vague in a market where the wizardry of financial engineering, and the lack of understanding by a large segment of buyers of the difference in downstream benefits between true Saas and not so true SaaS HRM products, has produced a very considerable roll-up of not entirely true SaaS HRM software vendors during 2011. And there are several such roll-ups that may well outpace the $250 million mark but at who knows what margins.
Answer: No.
And the question is: Will Lawson retain its current leadership, ownership, product mix, and/or non-SaaS HCM product strategy by the end of 2011?
Reality: I was clearly prescient on this one.
Answer: Very few.
And the question is: How many full-scale, global implementations in organizations with more than 5,000 workers will there be by the end of 2011 of Oracle Fusion HCM where the losing vendor is anyone other than Oracle PeopleSoft or EBS HCM?
Reality: I think my answer is correct, but I’ll defer to my colleague Gretchen Alarcon on this one in hopes that she’ll name names in a comment if I’m wrong. Updated 12-15-2011 I should have said now. Here too I’m looking for any corrections from Oracle.
Answer: Yes.
And the question is: Will SAP have taken all customer size restrictions off the subscribing of Business ByDesign by the end of 2011, letting prospects choose that platform wherever it fits, albeit without much fanfare?
Reality: Nope, wrong again. They’re still targeting relatively small companies and, by extending support for their BS products through 2020, they’ve acknowledged that there won’t be a next gen for their larger customers any time soon. Answer: Two, possibly three.
And the question is: How many brand new, mega-deals (so greater than $50 million USD in total contract value) will be signed for comprehensive HRM BPO at the highest end of the market in 2011?
Reality: I don’t think there were even this many, but I’ll defer here to Lisa Rowan or Keith Strodtman who will surely name names in a comment if I’ve missed the boat on this one.
Answer: Dozens.
And the question is: How many roll-up acquisitions will be done in the US among “mom and pop” PEOs and/or payroll service bureaus and/or background checking and/or applicant tracking and/or performance management software vendors during 2011?
Reality: Yup, I’m confident on this one even though I haven’t been tracking all of them. Just too small, most of them, and all private, to be tracked easily, so here I need everyone’s help. If you’ve been acquired and are reading this, just so note in the comments.
Answer: All of the larger talent management suite vendors.
And the question is: How many of the larger talent management suite vendors will already offer or be building/buying towards offering at least the core HRM functionality of the system of record (SOR) for at least the small to middle market?
Reality: Well, Kenexa, Peoplefluent, Taleo, Saba and Cornerstone don’t appear to be going down this path while SumTotal, SuccessFactors, SilkRoad are clearly on this path. But to parse the validity of my answer, we must decide (1) what constitutes a talent management suite (Peoplefluent and Kenexa don’t include learning (yet?), and (2) what constitutes a larger suite vendor? I think I was pretty far off the mark here, but your thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Answer: Very few to none.
And the question is: How many of the larger talent management suite vendors will actually support the level of global HRM compliance in their version of an SOR that larger organizations take for granted when their SOR is a traditional ERP/HRMS.
Reality: Nailed this one. And they’re some distance from being able to do this.
Answer: <5%
And the question is: What percentage of HR leaders in large and global organizations will have achieved globally standardized semantics for their talent management foundation data, including job, position, KSAOCs, work unit, work location, total compensation plan, employee and contingent worker along with the related demographic/indicative attributes?
Reality: I haven’t a clue, but I think I’m on the money. Evidence one way or the other?
Answer: <5%
And the question is: What percentage of HR leaders will be able to demonstrate via provable analytics what impact their top three (in terms of financial investment) people-related expenditures produce in terms of improved business outcomes?
Reality: Another “I don’t have a clue,” but here too I think I’m on the money. Your call?
Answer: Neither!
And the question is: Who will retire first, Naomi Bloom or Dave Duffield.
Reality: Right again! And I don’t need any help on this one. If you had seen Dave dancing at Workday Rising, you’d know he’s still got the moves. As for me, I can do 20 knots on my electric scooter, not to mention wheelies.

In the interests of full disclosure, many of the vendors mentioned or referenced by their telltale characteristics in this post have been/are/are likely to be clients.

#WorkdayRising 2011 — Mostly Non-Software Observations

Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, Workday Founders/Co-CEOs

Full disclosure: Workday is a client, and I was a compensated speaker at Workday Rising 2011.

After several days in Vegas at Workday Rising, attending lots of sessions (including one I did with Leighanne Levensaler, VP for HCM product strategy, in which she did the play by play and I did the color, “what’s behind the mirror,” commentary on a series of strategic business scenarios) plus three social gatherings, quite a few meetings with Workday’s growing stable of partners, and many informal and “unchaperoned” conversations with Workday prospects and customers, here are some preliminary, non-software observations:

Openness — All vendors should encourage industry influencers who are invited to/attending their conferences to mingle freely with whoever else is there and without handlers, to attend as many sessions as they’d like, and to participate fully in the learning and not just the partying. That was my experience at Ultimate’s user conference earlier this year, at which I was also a compensated speaker, and it was repeated at Workday Rising. I think I’m deciding that I won’t speak at/attend any vendor conferences that aren’t this open and welcoming. I don’t do flybys as a speaker, and I’m very willing to invest my own time in learning from the sessions and from the other attendees.
Positive customer/prospect sentiment — It was very hard to find unhappy or even less than enthusiastic Workday customers or prospects (300 prospect people here from 100+ companies, many of which are very big names planning to rip and replace their ERPs, starting with HCM and whose names are off limits for tweeting etc. at their request) — and both Ray Wang and Dennis Howlett were here as speakers and doing their best to find the malcontents with similar results.
Rapidly growing partner ecosystem — The large and rapidly growing partners list is public at the Workday website, and most if not all of these were exhibitors/sponsors of Workday Rising. The expo space was large, well laid-out and very busy. The program design had lots of time for partner/attendee interactions, and I assume that the partners are paying serious money to be here. And these partners, especially the larger implementation partners, are ramping as fast as their feet can carry them, making big investments to get people trained and, for those with their own long histories in on-premise ERPs, to learn how to do business in the cloud. In private exchanges, several partners noted that the level of interest in Workday from their stable of SAP and Oracle/PeopleSoft customers is exceeding even their wildest year-ago projections — and rip and replace is top of mind.
Plenty of secret sauce — There’s a growing but still modest (in my opinion) awareness among the #EnSW influencer and competitor community about the size of the competitive moat that Workday’s architecture is creating. I’ve commented on the potential size of this moat since their launch, when I first learned that they were going all in with models-driven development, along with many other (but not yet all) items on my always growing list (covered here, here, here, here, and here of preferred behaviors for SaaS InFullBloom. A little more was revealed this week publicly about the techniques they’re using to scale high volume and calculation-intense processing for the largest organizations, to include a range of grid computing capabilities being used initially in payroll processing and financial closings. But the real story for Workday, in my opinion, continues to be the speed/quality/cost/breadth of functionality/flexibility of functionality/time-to-market lift they’re getting from application development that’s entirely models-driven. For vendors who’ve gone down a however leveraged procedural code applications development path, I think that it will be tough to achieve this same lift.
Customer/prospect confidence — Because of the pace/quality/predictability with which they’re able to roll out new features, Thompson Reuters announced that they were able to take the plunge with confidence in spite of important missing features. They could see those needed features on the roadmap and felt sure they would show up when promised. This is such a departure from the unmet promises of many other #EnSW vendors whose roadmaps are couched in more legalese than substance, whose delivery dates have become a source of comedy, and whose complete inability to predict what will happen when, never mind at exactly what price, hasn’t stopped them from doing business as a series of press releases that they wish they could rescind.
Conference acumen — From a purely logistical perspective — venue, catering, staff support, A/V, and similar — this is about the best organized/run conference of this size (I think about 1400 people total, to include partners plus Workday people, but I could be a little low) I’ve ever attended. If you read Dave Duffield’s latest blog post, you’ll know he’s a stickler for clean toilets, and the venue had plenty of same for women, a rare thing indeed. Everywhere you turned there were people, either Workday in green t-shirts or (I presume) locally hired staff in black t-shirts, guiding you to where you were going. There were only modest lines at the generous breakfasts/lunches/party buffets (mostly sponsored?), and the venue itself, the Aria, is outstanding. If I were looking for something to improve, it would be the horribly dry air (clean but too dry) at the Aria and the many temptations on offer at the attached Crystals highest of the high end shopping mall.
Coopetition — It was very much in evidence. For example, the broader partnership with Salesforce was discussed, and Salesforce platform EVP was on stage briefly during the keynote. Customers/partners will be able to build extensions to Workday on Force.com with WD 15 coming 12/3 through 12/17 (they feather their upgrades with customers choosing when during this window to take the new release). But I’m of the opinion that, when Workday is ready, they’ll allow the use of their own development environment/platform by customers and partners, which they don’t do now. So even as there are a number of HRM products emerging that are built on Force.com, could there be a long-term play that infuses SFDC’s architecture with some of Workday’s? And then there’s the partnership with both Saba and Cornerstone OnDemand for learning, both of which are broad talent management (TM) suite vendors who are getting broader all the time, even as Workday is claiming, with considerable justification, that with WD 15 they’ll be at parity in many areas (they don’t do full recruiting or learning) with the TM suite vendors and, furthermore, that TM must be integrated with core HRM for many reasons, to include delivering the types of embedded analytics that they are showcasing. But perhaps the most interesting to me examples of coopetition in the Workday ecosystem are those major SIs, who only yesterday were bringing us the zillion dollar and many year on-premise ERP implementations (and who continue to do as much SAP/Oracle/PeopleSoft work as they can find within their target markets), who are now “citizens of the cloud” (to use the tag line/theme from Workday Rising 2011). These are the folks who still do (some might say dominate) the business and IT strategy work — so IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, and Wipro, so name just a few — that leads to major corporate IT infrastructure and applications on-premise buys and the big ticket implementation/support contracts on which these firms continue to thrive.

I’m sure that Workday will provide links on their Web site to a wide variety of posts resulting from Workday Rising, and I’ll have more to say about Workday’s software when I’ve had my WD 15 briefing and a chance to digest what’s new. Aneel provided some glimpses during his keynote, and there were further references during other sessions, but let’s not get ahead of their release schedule. In the meantime, you might want to check out some of the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iDu2wiO6MU Can you see me in the video? No?

#Consumerization, #Gamification and #Mechugasification

Mechugas -- Fun But Without Organizational Purpose

I love the fact that enterprise software is becoming more like consumer software every day — more usable, more accessible, more obvious and discoverable functionality, more mobile/social/global, and with much more of the look and feel of the consumer Web sites I’ve come to know and love. And for all of us who love contests with prizes or just getting a visible expression of what we’ve accomplished, gamification has added important new capabilities to the quest for ever more useful and business outcomes-driving enterprise software. So far, so good. But of late I’ve discovered an entirely new trend in the design of enterprise software that isn’t so good. I’ve called it mechugasification, from the Yiddish meshugas, of which there are many Anglicized spellings but which is universally understood to mean madness, insanity, or craze.

Mechugasification, like so many complex architectural concepts, is easier for most of us to understand experientially than via a learned dissertation. Basically, you know it when you see it. I saw some of it (no names yet) at our recently concluded #HRTechConf — and there’s a lot more waiting in the wings of the HRM enterprise software community. An example will put you in the picture. Video interviewing is a great idea whose time has clearly come. Combining the consumer experience of YouTube with the features needed to insert such interviewing techniques into rigorous staffing processes (so tracking, confirmation, secured routing, etc.) makes very good sense. Now combine this with robust employee referral processes, to include some which have been gamified to engage employees in the “hunt” for great new workers as well as teaching them about the ripple effects of a bad hire, and you’re really cooking. But push the envelope by including tools within the video production application that allow applicants to put their best foot forward — taller, thinner, lighter, darker, clearer skin, or juicier lips — and you’ve got mechugasification.

Would you like another example? Consider the burst of investment in HRM analytics. Consumerization makes even the most arcane algorithms, e.g. probability and severity of flight risk calculated on the basis of the relevant 20-30 factors, each of which requires different scales and a little linear regression in order to come up with something meaningful, and then make them accessible for “normal” people by displaying them with simplified graphics, e.g. radar diagrams which consolidate the relevant factors into 5-7 composite dimensions. Gamification might be used to help reduce the flight risk of those in key roles — assuming we can’t just pay them enough to achieve the needed level of engagement or that their personal motivation profiles value other important aspects of their work beyond cash on the barrel head (does anyone still use that expression) — by presenting a multi-level, prowess-demonstrating and badge-receiving collaboration environment for all of the researchers of a particular type. But to get to mechugasification, we’d need to make sure that the badges awarded via this collaboration tool were repeatedly tweeted so that the entire Twitterstream was clogged with this, thus bringing all of us the fail whale. Get my drift?

The moral of my story is a simple one. Just because something is possible, that doesn’t make it a good idea. And just because our HRM enterprise software and related tools are increasingly — and usefully — being consumerized and gamified doesn’t mean that we should tolerate them being mechugasified. Even as I’m “playing” with new learning and performance management tools, even as I’m experimenting with the latest in sourcing technology, and even while I’m finding my own footing in the “how should we spend our limited comp budget” game, my mechugas detector is on full alert. Please don’t set it off.

Impressions From HR Technology Conference 2011

Ooooogah! Oooooogah!

Updated 10/11/2011 — join the discussion about getting to great HRM software over at LinkedIn’s HR Technology Group http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1772602&type=member&item=74705112&qid=589809af-35c8-492b-b988-49f4c32dd041&trk=group_most_recent_rich-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmr_1772602

I’m exhausted but energized, if it’s actually possible to be in both states at once. I’ll leave it to others to do both the play by play and color commentary, neither of which is my forte. But I do want to summarize my key learnings in case they’re useful for others.

I also want to call attention — very positive attention — to the hard work that our impressario Bill Kutik and the entire LRP team put into this production. While you and I are still recovering from the 2011 show, these folks, along with the vendor community, are already hard at work on #HRTechConf (that’s the approved Twitter hashtag for the three of you who are not yet on Twitter) 2012.

In twitterspeak, the hashtags for my learning topics from this conference (about which I’ve been writing for some time) are: #social #mobile #consumerization #gamification #global #analytics #embedded intelligence #KSAOCs (did you think I’d really leave this out?) #objects #architecture #socialmarketing #infographics and #ripandreplace. While I could write a book as could many others on any one of these topics, for now I just want to open up the discussion. My hope is that, through your comments, we’ll sort out who’s doing what to whom on each of these topics (whose order below is completely random) in the vendor and end-user communities:

Social — there are many opportunities for unleashing collaboration (the grown-up business term for many aspects of social), but we appear to be approaching this in two very different ways. There is the “add social and they will use it” school of thought and the “unleash social by use case” folks. I’m of the opinion that social/collaboration tools must be deeply embedded in HRM software platforms but then revealed through specific use cases. We may well reach the point, and perhaps very quickly, where end-users organizations can handle this unleashing for themselves, but I think they still need help from the vendor/consulting community to select specific (for them) high pay-off use cases and then deploy the correct collaboration tools for them.
Mobile — this is closely related to social because so much collaboration of the right kind depends on reaching customers where they are rather than where it’s convenient, from a systems perspective, for them to be. Here too — but perhaps this is true of everything when it’s very new — vendors are approaching mobile capabilities in two quite different ways. Some vendors are mobilizing their existing capabilities, reconfiguring them for the specific capabilities of various mobile devices. Others are rethinking HRM for a mobile world and creating entirely new mobile capabilities, albeit with some plain vanilla HRM transations, primarily administrative transactions, included. Here I’m of the opinion that mobile opens up the possibility of reaching entirely new audiences directly, like CEOs, with entirely new HRM capabilities. For example, we can deliver advanced workforce analytics on an iPad designed for the CEO with all of the drill down/poke around capabilities that I believe they’ll use in the “privacy of their boudoir” once they’re comfortable with the reliability and usefulness of the data.
Consumerization — this isn’t just about the user experience but includes, when done well, attention to what works best on what devices, our desire to conduct HRM business when and where it’s convenient, the expectation that the “system” has enough information to guide our actions, and the realization that the real competition for mind share when it comes to technology is not other HR technology products/services but rather the products/services we choose to use daily from such firms as Amazon and Facebook. And if we ever were ready to accept the “no training” mandate for whatever we’ll now call self service, it’s now. The last generation of those willing to read user manuals or go to training classes has long since been converted to discovery as the new software training paradigm or disappeared.
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 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.
Global — can you even believe that there are still HRM software products that insist upon first name, middle name, last name? That insist that there’s no house name in street address? That don’t recognize the possibility that a worker is paid in two different currencies in the course of a single payroll cycle? That impose a US-centric mindset on the cultural aspects of HRM around the world, for example, by presuming that equal opportunity and valuing diversity are universal rather than country-specific? Even when organizations are primarily domestic, they are competing for specific KSAOCs on a global basis and must accommodate the very diverse US workforce, so their HRM software must be global at its core.
Analytics — the holy grail here is predictive analytics, which helps us determine the impact on the future of some HRM or business process or outcome if we take a specific action now. For example, what will be the flight risk of our high potential employees if we take a particular compensation action now? Or what will be the probability of achieving our revenue targets at various levels of time to productivity in the hiring of sales professionals? While the simple metrics of headcount reports and compensation/benefit cost forecasts are useful, and the more impressve analytics of workforce KSAOC gap analysis are even more so, understanding the impact of today’s decisions on tomorrow’s business outcomes is what every HR leader is trying to achieve — and there has been a burst of activity from the vendor community that addresses exactly this need with varying degrees of success. I might add here that the best analytics are only as good as the underlying data (accurate? complete? sufficiently granular? etc.), so great analytics depend heavily on having the right object model (see below) implemented properly.
Embedded intelligence — I’ve covered this in detail previously, but I want to emphasis here the importance of delivering actionable analytics along with guidance, context, business rules, compliance requirements, etc. “point of sale” — and the new mobile devices make this increasingly possible to the point of being expected.
KSAOCs — if we really don’t know what human capabilities are needed to perform well in a key role, or if we really don’t know which roles drive business results, then talent management technology just isn’t going to deliver more than superficial improvements in the mechanics of worthless performance reviews etc. And determining which roles drive business results, “painting” a KSAOC profile of those roles, assessing the KSAOC profile of both incumbents and candidates for those roles, requires intellectual heavy lifting by HR professionals. But following the theory that, in the land of the blind the one-eyed woman is queen, we can use crowd-sourcing techniques and other forms of collaboration to ferret out socially the roles of greatest interest, the KSAOCs of greatest importance, and the workers of greatest potential, etc. This may be our last chance to raise talent management to more science than art.
Objects — doing my own demonstration of shiny new vendor releases, I was struck immediately by how visible is their object model and how much of their delivered functionality rests on the manipulation of that model. If your talent management vendor never considered the multiple concurrent relationships to position — including incumbent, named successor, ready successor, on leave of absense with right to return, contractor backfilling for known and voluntary resignation, etc. — then you can’t possibly do an accurate headcount report without manual intervention, let alone more sophisticated workforce planning. And the state-of-the-art in software development, known as models-driven development, depends on having a correct, complete, sufficiently granular and rigorously-expressed object model as its foundation.
Architecture — object models and architecture go hand in hand, and they must both be current and correct to achieve software that is very good to use now and sufficiently future-proofed to ensure that you have a non-disrupted and highly productive future with that software. What amazes me about both object models and architecture is the extent to which some vendors are delivering shiny new software that doesn’t have the best of these under the covers — and these are VERY hard to correct if you don’t get them right in the first place.
Social Marketing — I am absolutely not a marketing expert, really the furthest thing from it, but I know that it’s useless to send me tons of physical conference mail just before HR Tech. It’s also useless to have a company twitter account if all you tweet is your own horn. If you want to have influence with me, to attract attention to your brand/products/services, then have your real thought leaders out there blogging useful content, tweeting their story, and generally acting like non-marketeers. In an increasingly social world, marketing is much more about individual influence than it is about company palaver.
Infographics — I so wish that I had an ounce of graphic vision or drawing ability, because these are just the best way to convey a ton of information in an understandable and memorable format. Going many steps beyond mere graphical visualization of data, infographics combine text, graphics, and visualization, with every flavor of symbology to create immediate impact and comprehension. If this is a new topic for you, here’s a good place to start.
Rip and replace — not quite a groundswell, but that’s coming as end-users decide that their current applications just aren’t the right foundation for the future. Painful? Yes? But lower costs, greater agility, better user experiences, modern object models and architectures that enable whole new ways of doing our business and much more are creating the winds of change for many licensed/on-premise core ERP/HRMSs. As more of these sunk cost ERP/HRMSs come up for expensive upgrades, more of their owners will look around and decide to make the big move. Of course their incumbent vendors, assuming they’re delivering an excellent next generation product, may have an edge here, but I think there’s a huge opportunity for newer players to catch these prospects when they begin to look at their options.

Apart from these specific topics, there were a number of big cross-cutting ideas that stood out for me. They’re not necessarily new ideas, but they are finally getting our collective full attention:

It’s workforce technology, not HR technology, and the whole point is organizational success not just HR success.
Your workforce, all of it, is using multiple devices, so your workforce technology must reach them where they live and support the right devices (as they see them) for the right tasks/processes/etc.
Licensed/on-premise/legacy ERP/HRMS will be with us for a VERY long time, but the momentum is clearly toward next generation, true SaaS core HRMS as well as true SaaS for talent management add-ons to those legacy ERP/HRMSs. This includes some version of SaaS (true in the case of SAP, more on demand from Oracle) talent management add-ons aimed at holding their installed base as well as a lot of new, so-called SaaS products with VERY dated underpinnings. Caveat emptor.
We’re all inherently social, and the best business-oriented use cases for social technology leverage/enable our individual and group productivity — increasingly with an element of fun.
Great innovation learns from the past so as not to repeat old mistakes even as it blazes new trails. This is a polite reminder to both our vendor and end-user colleagues that they would be well-advised to do their homework before declaring their screwed up implementation of something important as being the latest and greatest innovation.
If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Without a strategic plan for HRM and the HRM delivery system which is aligned with and drives business results, you’re playing whack-a-mole with every HR technology-related decision. BAD mole!

Finally, getting an oogah horn for my “magic carpet” (aka scooter) was the best idea ever. I will forever associate gamification with coming up behind a crowd in the casino, giving them an “oooogah oooogah,” and watching them jump out of their skins.

Yom Kippur, Steve Jobs, And Knowing/Doing What Matters

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

I never knew Steve Jobs, and I haven’t been an Apple fangirl until very recently. But his death, his oh so too early death, coming so close to Yom Kippur, has intensified my sense of this holiest of Jewish holidays. There’s absolutely no connection between Steve Jobs’ death and Yom Kippur, but in my mind they are now linked forever because both events urge us to reflection.

Both events reinforce the idea that each day is precious, each of our behaviors/words/deeds matters, and each of us is called to a higher purpose. As Mr. Jobs battled ill health and faced his own mortality, his own words tell us that he became very conscious of how he spent his time and with whom.

For those of us who are Jewish, while we are alive, Yom Kippur is our own chance to rewrite the script. In fact, Yom Kippur requires of us that we stop, reflect on how we are living in relationship to others as well as in relationship to the ideals we’ve been taught. It is the time when we commit ourselves to doing better, being more of what we should be, and making good on our responsibility of Tikkun Olam (“to fix the world”).

Do I really want to spend 5772 as I’ve spent 5771? What changes are needed in me? What changes are needed in what I do and don’t do? What must I do more of or better to honor my relationships with family and friends as well as to honor my human potential? We are each given a set of inherent capabilities and commanded to make the best use possible of them. Have I really done that? Have I fulfilled my promise?

There are so many questions that we are asked to consider on Yom Kippur as we rededicate ourselves to something larger than ourselves. For me personally, the timing of this Yom Kippur will forever be linked to the collective introspection of the worldwide technology community as we contemplate a world without one of our heroes, without Steve Jobs. No one who accepts the challenge of deep reflection presented by Yom Kippur, or by the life and death of Steve Jobs, can emerge unchanged — nor will I.

May you have an easy fast.

M&A Observations: Oracle, Infor And… SumTotal?

When SumTotal announced in July a not unexpected acquisition of Accero (really more of an aggregation because both firms were already owned by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm with a now substantial stake in HRM #EnSW) along with the acquisition of CyberShift, I was not surprised. One could speculate at length, and others have done so, about the financial terms of this deal, the relative health of the acquired companies, the overall strategy of Vista/of private equity in all of this, and many of the other business details of this further consolidation in our industry. My immediate interest is what this does or doesn’t do for the customers of all these firms, for the competitive landscape, and for the advancement of innovation, end-user service levels, and overall thought leadership in HRM software/services.

SumTotal’s leadership is very professional, albeit with limited experience in our industry, and I believe that Vista will make money via the tight management of this portfolio using their very well-developed business integration and operations playbook. I was personally impressed with how well thought out were their procedures for integrating aggregated companies. And there are obvious cross-sell opportunities, e.g. much better workforce management from CyberShift for Accero’s (formerly known as Cyborg’s) remaining installed base and much more of CyberShift’s capabilities for the entire SumTotal customer base.

When you list all the piece parts now under the SumTotal brand, they do indeed cover much of the HRM domain in terms of administrative HRM automation and strategic HRM support in key talent, vendor, workforce and expense management areas. But piece parts do not an integrated or state-of-the-art platform make, nor do they necessarily appeal to customers of the other piece parts. For effective cross-selling as well as achieving end-user business outcomes, you need a platform that’s truly integrated — not unified, harmonized, or any other flavor but one which shares a common object model, meta-data, architecture, user experience and code base. Yes, you need a platform that shares one workflow engine, one business rules engine, one of every critical utility across that platform. And that’s before we consider the requirements for true a SaaS InFullBloom platform.

I also can’t help but note that SumTotal has its work cut out for it to create anything close to a modern, global, SaaS or otherwise payroll engine with its business rules abstracted to meta-data, for that’s definitely not what Cyborg’s payroll application has been. And even using the HRMS minus payroll and benefits capabilities in their previously acquired Softscape, there’s work ahead to create a truly modern, global core HRMS, integrated with that modern, global payroll engine, with a goodly chunk of country by country compliance functionality. In fairness, our industry has produced VERY few modern global payroll platforms with built-out compliance for dozens of countries, and we’re not awash in modern, global HRMSs either, so there’s plenty of opportunity for SumTotal to make their mark.

Is this a good business move for Vista with lots of cross-sell opportunities for SumTotal? It certainly looks that way. Does this ensure that Cyborg customers will get regulatory updates for the time being? A modest yes here for just the basics, and with fingers crossed that nothing goes bump in the night. And this also assumes that SumTotal is able to retain the small team that knows that Cyborg code base well enough to support it (but who else is hiring Cyborg maintenance experts?) and, just as important, that knows how to handle the regs for each of the countries (they did say global) for which Cyborg must be supported. But those Cyborg customers, those latest of late adopters, have no one to blame but themselves if they’re not happy with anything about this acquisition because they’ve chosen to run software that’s well beyond, a decade or two beyond, it’s “use by” date. Is this a good move for CyberShift’s customers? Very likely yes as their support will now come from a larger and well-managed vendor which has little overlapping functionality and many incentives to provide very good support to these customers and this code base. As for the rest of SumTotal’s customers, they can judge for themselves whether their products and support have improved substantially in the wake of SumTotal’s acquisitions of Softscape and GeoLearning.

What I’m concerned about is the possibility that Vista Equity Partners will turn SumTotal into another Infor (or into its bigger brother in the HRM-related code base aggregation business, Oracle), however well-managed each of these firms may be. Now this may not happen, and SumTotal does speak about a longer-term, integrated platform strategy, which is clearly needed. But I think it’s a very open question as to whether Vista will be willing to invest at the level needed to pull off the design, development and migration to a truly new, totally rethought for today’s technology, and completely integrated platform, even if that platform finds a substantial starting point in the acquired Softscape code base (as SumTotal has said). I look forward to having a large and vibrant, next gen-focused, investing heavily in product SumTotal. A SumTotal that is growing their overall customer base organically, cross-selling their acquired products, and supporting very well all of their current customers on these acquired code bases. Doing all of this is a huge challenge, one which Oracle has been working on for some time in somewhat similar circumstances but of course with much greater scale and resources. We know this approach can be a money-maker for the owners, but will it advance the achievement of customer business outcomes? Of best practices across our industry? For SumTotal, Oracle and Infor (with respect to Lawson HCM quite specifically), this remains to be seen.

If what matters is sheer size, SumTotal has advanced its cause substantially with these two acquisitions as have Infor with Lawson and Oracle, much earlier, with PeopleSoft. If what matters is having more functional boxes checked in their offering, then this is also a big move for SumTotal. But my hope is that SumTotal will (1) design and deliver a next gen true SaaS platform as quickly as possible, (2) deliver a very broad suite of HRM applications on that next gen platform, (3) brief their newly acquired customers in great detail on that design and those roll-out plans so that these customers can plan for their migration, and (4) be a force with which to be reckoned in the HRM software/services industry for many years to come. They’ve built a solid leadership team to take on these challenges, but it’s not yet clear to me if this type of agenda, with such a substantial needed R&D investment, will be funded readily by Vista. Fingers crossed!

Oracle, Infor and now SumTotal. All three firms are depending on a pile of middleware and the adoption of a SOA/Web services architectural paradigm to connect the dots of very dissimilar acquired software. Oracle’s the furthest along this path, at least in the HRM software space, making pieces of Fusion HCM connectable to PeopleSoft and EBS HCM via their Fusion middleware. Infor has made recent announcements about their plans in this area, and SumTotal has been very forthright about their plans. But does any of this weaving together of disparate data designs and process thinking, some of which is VERY dated while other bits may be quite new, produce the deeply integrated business process-driven, embedded analytics-laden applications that our end-users have been led to expect from their consumer automation experiences? Does any of this weaving together produce the fundamentally rethought and internally consistent object models and process flows that 21st century HRM requires? Only time will tell.

And yes, in the interests of full disclosure, SumTotal is not a client although I was briefed on these acquisition announcements. Cyborg was a client when, in the late 1990’s, they undertook a bold project to re-architect and redevelop their HRMS under the able leadership of Cheryl Paterson. Cyborg licensed from me the then current version of my HRM domain model “starter kit” and associated architectural materials as input to this project, and I worked with the project team on a consulting basis. In my opinion, the realistic budgets/timelines/etc. produced by that team, along with Cyborg’s inability to sell new US customers in a much changed competitive landscape, were significant factors in the owner’s decision to complete the 2003 sale of Cyborg to Hewitt. Then, in 2010, Accero, with plans (not realized to my knowledge) to upgrade substantially the Cyborg code base, renewed that license and received the 2010 edition of my licensed materials but without any related startup training

HR Leaders: Do You Know How To Answer These Questions?

Dr. Naomi Is In!

Unlike my good friend 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, 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 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/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 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?
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 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 you’ve defined it, are they likely to be viable long-term?
Is it time to make the leap to a newer, SaaS generation of HRMS, like Workday or Ultimate (and there will be more), which is 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?
What types of social technology capabilities should we consider for HRM? Across our organization?
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?
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?
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?
Will our talent management software vendor(s) survive and prosper? What’s at risk if we’ve bet wrong?
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?
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 not 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 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.

Remembering 9/11/2001: Let’s Give ’em Hell!

For this 10th anniversary of jihadist Islam’s declaration of war on the United States, I wanted to express my anger at what this war has cost all of us in the loss of privacy and freedom as well as in human lives and treasure. It’s a war whose enemy combatants wear no recognizable uniforms, dwell in the shadows, and do not recognize the Geneva Conventions. And it’s a war that cannot be won solely on the battlefield.

But there is one weapon that has emerged over the last ten years which does have the power to help defeat our enemies in this global struggle between the forces of modernity, of diversity, of individual and group freedoms and those who would turn back the clock to the dark ages, enslave women, drives Jews into the sea and generally reduce civilization to pre-enlightenment brutality. That weapon is social technology and the ubiquitous access to same via our smartphones.

Thanks to this technology, we have all listened to the twitterstream and seen the smartphone pictures and videos of freedom movements across the Arab world — and those leading and participating in these uprisings have used social and related information technologies to plan and coordinate their brave actions in the face of almost overwhelming and violent crackdowns by the worst possible governments. When the brave citizens of Iran tried to rise up against their truly scary leaders, we changed our location on Twitter to Tehran in an effort to confuse Iran’s computer security forces who were trying to track down the rebels. And many in the technology community have worked hard to keep vital social technology operational even as these repressive governments were trying to shut it down.

But none of that social technology was available to us on 9/11/2001, and our cellular networks weren’t able to keep up with the traffic as we all tried to get to safety and to make sense out of what was happening. What follows is an email I wrote to friends and family on 9/13/2001 after arriving home safely in what can only be described as the great HR Tech Conference (it was held in Baltimore that year) evacuation of 2001. It was a very scary time, and what I wrote captures both my fears and my anger. If I’d had a blog then, I would have written this as a post. And if I’d had a smartphone with camera, I would have recorded our flight from Baltimore with pictures. But reading this now, the pictures are VERY clear in my mind.

“Dear friends and family,

I arrived home in Fort Myers last evening after driving for two days in a commandeered Dulles Washington Flyer taxi from Baltimore, where I had been speaking at the HR Tech Conference. We avoided all metro areas just to be on the safe side. Emily Eason, a dear friend whom some of you know, and I decided that staying in Baltimore wasn’t where we wanted to be (she’s from Seattle), so we called upon Ozzie, the driver we used when we both lived in the Washington area. While our usual driver was in Turkey to see his sick Mom, the colleague answering his calls had heard of us and, after confirming with Ozzie that “our check was good,” he agreed to drive us to Fort Myers — and to take our check. We’ve been checking on friends and family too, and so far, so good.

I know you all remember the start of the Yom Kippur war. I remember it vividly. Sitting in Kodimoh (my family’s orthodox schul in Springfield, MA), in the women’s section (can you imagine me being told to go sit in the women’s section?), deep in prayer, when the sabbath goy (the schul’s handyman) ran in and right up to the rabbi waving a note. We all continued the traditional chanting, thinking that the interruption was some housekeeping matter. And then the rabbi stopped the service to tell all of us that Israel’s enemies had chosen that day of all days to attack the Jewish state. First there was absolute shock and silence, then the murmurs began, and then I remember (but perhaps I only imagine it in my memory) that the sound of singing broke out, spontaneously, as we raised our voices in the Israeli national anthem. When the congregation took their seats again, our then Rabbi Weisfogel challenged us to do whatever we could to demonstrate our solidarity with Israel and to show our commitment to the failure of our enemies by succeeding. Success not just in war but in living. Again, it may be more in my memory than it was in reality, but I came away from that day really believing that in our individual and collective success lies the failure of our enemies. Where did you think they got the expression “living well is the best revenge”?

All of that came back to me Tuesday morning when, at the HR Tech conference in Baltimore, I was sitting on an industry analyst panel moderated as always by Bill Kutik, when a man walked in and up to Bill with a note. Bill stepped out for a moment while we continued the panel discussion, thinking it was some housekeeping matter. We finished the panel and then he announced, with utter disbelief, that the enemies of the US — the enemies of every civilized human being — had attacked the World Trade Center. We all know now just how extensive was that attack, and how well-planned. And I wish now that I had stood up and broken into our national anthem, but I was too shaken.

After two days of silent driving, it’s time to speak. If a small country like Israel has survived, surrounded by so many enemies, and Israelis have learned to live fully and richly in spite of the best efforts of terrorists to steal their freedom and their joy, can we do less? I for one intend to show these bastards that they’ve messed with the wrong woman. I’m back at work this morning, and I’m going on with a long-planned vacation to Italy at the end of September. With every successful business venture, with every successful volunteer effort, with every step forward, personally and professionally, that we take individually and collectively, we demonstrate our solidarity with our countrymen and our commitment to the failure of our enemies. ”

Let’s give them hell. Naomi

Ron and I are in France on this 10th anniversary of 9/11. Our commitment to living large, to living well, to showing those bastards that our vision of civilization won’t give in to theirs, is even stronger now than it was ten years ago. We know that they’re spending their 10th anniversary of 9/11 plotting murder, mayhem and the overthrow of all that we hold dear, but we refuse to spend our 10th anniversary in fear of what they may do next. So sing out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETrr-XHBjE

Naomi’s Annual “Appearance” On Mr. Bill’s Radio Show

Oh No Mr. Bill!

On Wednesday (8-31-2011) at noon EDT, I’ll be doing my fourth annual guest “appearance” on Bill Kutik’s Radio Show, which is very generously sponsored by Knowledge Infusion. I always look forward to doing these shows because Bill’s a great interviewer, the long tail of replays is enormous, and getting ready to be pithy and ready for Bill’s questions forces me to a clarity of thinking that ups my game.

No one is ever sure what we’ll discuss, including Bill and me, but I’m sure we’ll hit on some of the most important topics facing our industry. And anything we don’t have time to discuss is bound to come up at The Great Debate in Las Vegas. We love naming names, but you’ll never know who they are if you don’t listen.

I’m sure that we’ll take a few moments to kvell over the upcoming HR Technology Conference, which substitutes in Bill’s life for the physical children he never had (or at least doesn’t acknowledge). If you can’t wait for the conference, join the conversation at the Conference’s LinkedIn group. Or better yet, read everything on this blog and then quote my own mistakes to me at the Conference’s “Ask the Expert” session I’ll be hosting — but please don’t bring throwable fruit.

But whatever else you’re up to over the next few days, please do join Bill and me for what feels to us like one of the many thousand such telephone chats we’ve done since we met. The only difference will be that you are there.

14th Annual HR Technology Conference 2011 Attendee Tips

After I finish preparations for my master class at HR Florida 2011, I’ll be putting the final touches on my schedule for the 14th annual HR Technology Conference and making preparations for the two sessions I’ll be doing there. From the time we arrive in Las Vegas late Saturday afternoon (yes, The Wallace will be with me), until we leave on Thursday in order to spend Yom Kippur in Fort Myers, it will be non-stop vendor meetings, exhibition hall booth visiting (I make a valiant effort each year to stop at everything single booth, but the show has gotten so large that this just isn’t possible so please don’t be offended if I don’t make it to your booth — no disrespect intended), session attending, session delivery (I’m doing the Great Debate with Jason Avebook on Tuesday morning and then an “ask the expert” session that afternoon), intense but wonderful hallway exchanges, time with valued colleagues and long-standing industry friends, an occasional meal and more than an occasional drink, tweetups and meetups and Googly hangouts, our annual Brazen Hussies gathering, and more. I’ll have just celebrated my 66th birthday (it’s 9/24 in case you want to send flowers) and will still be basking in the afterglow of another year well-lived.

As I’m making my own preparations, I thought you might enjoy a few tips from my personal list. Like all good twitterstreams, this one should be read from the bottom up:

#HRTechConf tip #10: Get #HRTechConf 2012 on your calendar/in your budget now. 10/8 to 10/10/2012 returning to Chicago. Yes, I assume they know that 10/8/2012 is Columbus Day but for once we won’t be cramming ten days of activity into five days in order to work in the conference between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Yeah!

#HRTechConf tip #9: Talk, talk, talk and listen, listen, listen because sharing questions, ideas and experiences with colleagues is the point. Bring your list of the folks you follow most on Twitter and make it a point to meet them.

#HRTechConf tip #8: Bring a swag carrier if you’re flying in or plan to carry your #Monster home in your lap. Ron can’t imagine coming home from #HRTechConf without a new monster, and who’s going to tell him that we’re overrun with them here at HQ?

#HRTechConf tip #7: Leave room in your schedule for serendipity and for nature breaks — well at least nature breaks. I’ve met some amazing women during those breaks; can’t speak for what goes on with the guys.

#HRTechConf tip #6: Attend as many sessions as possible. I do because they’re excellent, and there’s NO sales crap allowed. Woe be it unto any vendor who tries to slip a sales pitch into their session because the Kutik has both a loud gong and one of those long sticks with the curved ends they used in vaudeville to pull bad acts off the stage.

#HRTechConf tip #5: Don’t try to attend > 3 vendor parties on Monday night. Save yourself for the Great Debate on Tuesdsay morning. I hate missing all those great parties and must just hope for the year that my sessions will be on the first day so that I can do a party crawl.

#HRTechConf tip #4: Go online now http://www.hrtechnologyconference.com/agenda.html and plan your conference. With what vendors do you want to plan for extended demos? Make those appointments now. With what attendees with whom you share specific issues/vendors/industry concerns/etc. do you want to meet? Do that outreach and arrange that meeting now. Pick your sessions and, because there are too many good ones for just one person, find a buddy with whom you can divide and conquer.

#HRTechConf tip #3: Carry a water bottle and refill it every chance you get. Convention center climates are designed to dessicate, and they never have enough refreshment stations. I could suggest that you bring a flask, but there’s no shortage of booze outlets in Vegas.

#HRTechConf tip #2: Wear your most comfortable walking shoes. There will be few places to sit except in sessions and long convention center distances. Yes, I know that my younger female colleagues will want to show off those Manolo platform spikes — the latest in fashionista circles — and I don’t blame you, but be sure you’ve got a suitable designed male colleague at the ready to carry you after the first hour.

#HRTechConf tip #1: For vendors of greatest interest, do your homework in advance so that booth time is hands-on demo time. And be sure to spend time on the floor checking out some of the newer/smaller vendors. There’s a ton of innovation going on in our industry, and it isn’t always on offer at the flashiest booths.

#HRTechConf bonus tip: This is where I had planned to suggest that you read my entire blog, from 11/9/2009 forward, but that seemed really pushy. Instead, just read those posts that are relevant to your purpose in Las Vegas. As a hint, there are no posts on how to avoid the working boys and girls, but there’s a lot on how to look under the covers of HRM software that may be of interest.

And now for an announcement. You’ll notice there’s a new badge on my blog’s right side to indicate that we’re being syndicated by www.hrtechcentral.com along with content from some other great blogs. You can also follow this aggregator on Twitter @hrtechcentral to learn when there’s new material at that Web site.

I’ll look forward to seeing you in Vegas.

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