In Full Bloom

The Four Pillars Of ADP

It's Not Your Grandfather's ADP!

Everyone in my professional world, and most business people in general, know ADP — or at least they think they do. While ADP offers a very wide range of products/services to both employers and all types of vehicle dealers, they continue to be known most widely as “the payroll company.”

The company’s history is one of which any founder could be proud. And when the current CEO, Gary Butler (only the 5th since ADP’s founding in 1949), hands over the reins to his successor, it will go as smoothly as such turnovers have done in the past. No drama, no palace coups, no unprepared and/or disrespected successors at ADP.

For much of its history, ADP has been known as a sales (pillar #1) and services (pillar #2) machine, training a good many of those who have gone on to sales and operations leadership roles with other industry firms or even to founding their own very successful ADP competitors, like Scott Scherr, the founder/CEO of Ultimate Software. Yes, our industry has benefitted mightily from the training ground that ADP has been for most of its history.

Less well-known than its sales and services acumen is ADP’s mastery of financial management (pillar #3), especially the management of the float that accompanies some of their product categories. This is absolutely not my area of expertise, and it hasn’t been a huge contributor to the bottom line these last few years as interest rates have been lower than low. But just wait until those rates go back up (and they surely will before the global economy recovers) and see what drops directly to ADP’s bottom line.

What ADP hasn’t been as well-known for in recent years is mastery of HR technology. They’ve acquired quite a few applications, partnered for others, and taken some not always good natured jabs (I hope they’ve seen mine as at least well-intended) for their “classic” payroll. But 2011 may well be the year in which ADP gets noticed for doing more than building a Rube Goldberg out of more piece-parts than anyone outside the firm can track — and then spending a fortune to maintain those connections and keep everything compliant.

I believe that ADP has reached a turning point in 2011 when it comes to their launch of several new products which reflect some fundamental changes in how ADP invests in and manages technology (pillar #4). From an entirely mobile payroll for the lower end of the market (called RUN for Mobile) to specific mobile apps for their larger customers and on to the integrated and contemporary UX of ADP Vantage HCM, there’s a lot happening in technology at ADP — and not a moment too soon, because the competition is getting tougher by the minute.

What’s most interesting to me isn’t what you can see but rather what’s going on “behind the mirror” of ADP’s new products. They’re bringing order to the many, many years of accumulated applications, investing for the future while retiring some of the past, and moving as rapidly as practical toward a common reference object model to support their new development as well as their refactoring of existing software. These aren’t the sexy moves that seem to garner market buzz, but they are the essential moves of a technology-based services firm that intends to be as successful in their next sixty years as they’ve been in the past sixty.

Having mastered sales, services, and financial management, I believe that ADP is now focused heavily on demonstrating visibly that they’ve also got technology chops. With decades of accumulated software, it’s no mean feat to update/integrate/overhaul/streamline/etc. their platform inventory, but I for one would not bet against them.

In the interests of full disclosure, ADP has been a client, and I have provided specific guidance to their reference object model development. Ultimate Software, also mentioned in this post, is a current client.

My First Word On #HRTechConf 2011 — And Your Best Discount Offer

What Goes In Vegas Doesn't Stay There!

I’m writing this as Fort Myers is experiencing a relatively mild summer (compared to the rest of the country’s astonishing heat) while getting enough rain to float all boats. But no lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer here. A quick look at my calendar and todo list are enough to frighten anyone, but that’s what comes of trying to pack two years of living — professionally and personally — into every calendar year. And 2011 has been a doozy.

Having missed last year’s HR Technology Conference when my very close friend lost her only son the weekend before the conference, I set about preparing for the 2011 conference last October. But I never expected this October to come so quickly. Now here we are, and with just a couple more months to prepare, I’ve been booking vendor meetings, selecting sessions to attend, preparing for the Great Debate with Jason Averbook (you do know that he outweighs me mightily!), finalizing travel plans, organizing the Hussies event, and so much more, all while trying to keep up with my day job and a ton more travel before we land in Vegas.

Since I know that all of you are HR Technology Conference enthusiasts, there’s no need for me to do a laundry list of all the reasons why everyone who is anyone in our industry will be there with flags flying. But to make it a little easier for any of you who haven’t yet registered and made your travel plans, have I got a deal for you. Just go to the conference Web site noted above, click on register, enter the case sensitive SPK11 in the Promo Code field, and you’ll save $550.00 courtesy of InFullBloom. With the money you’ve just saved, you should have no problem paying for a rock bottom airfare with a little left over to squander on the delights of sin city — or not.

Can You Tell Who's Who?

There’s no time to lose on this because the 2011 conference is going to be a block buster. The Kutik is beside himself with glee over the early registration numbers, the show floor will be bursting at the seams in spite of vendor consolidation (did you know that new HR tech companies are hatching as quickly or more so than older ones are disappearing?), and I’m sure that hotel rooms (at least the discounted ones) will be filled to overflowing. In addition to the Great Debate with Jason, I’ll be hosting an “Expert Discussion Session” (always fun because it’s all about your questions — that’s the entire agenda), and The Wallace will be doing the swag patrol looking for more stuffed toys and stress reducers.

So please do join me and everyone else in Las Vegas. Tucked between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it’s an absolute MUST. Use the discount code yourself and share it with your colleagues, but use it quickly because it expires before my birthday.

And It’s Not Even Full-Blown Hurricane Season Yet!

Hurricane Charley 2004

I’m flippin’ tired of all the bad news. My twitterstream has been a surreal mixture this year of enterprise software (#EnSW) developments, HRM happenings and insights (#HRM) and all things related to HR technology (#HRTech) along with the end of civilization as we’ve known it brought to me by the global media. And it’s not even full-blown hurricane season yet in SW Florida!

Globally high unemployment with no real solutions in sight. Soaring 3rd world food prices causing even more starving and often displaced families. Horrible prognostications about shrinking water resources, overpopulation and the obvious impacts of global climate change to go along with Japan’s nuclear meltdown’s pouring radioactive water into our already fragile oceans. Civil wars, uprisings, rebellions, drug wars, unrest of all kinds, and that’s before the islamist militants take over a variety of failed states. Budget impasses, financial meltdowns, and striking everybody, while the already wealthy are doing quite nicely.

Why haven’t we got a cure for cancer yet or, better yet, a couple of vaccines? I know detection and treatment are much improved, but this awful disease has taken and continues to take a terrible toll on my family and closest friends, not to mention on the rest of mankind. And did I mention that aging is quite literally painful?

When was the last time that we faced something other than intransigent problems amid a polarized society? When was the last time we really pulled together in ways that made you proud not just to be an American but to be a member of the human race? Whatever happened to that wonderful feeling of putting a man on the moon, of the Berlin wall coming down, of the eradication of polio? On a more personal level, when was I last on top of everything expected of me and that I expect of myself? And when was the last time I felt truly accomplished, like the feeling I had after swimming a measured ocean mile for the first time, sailing successfully off the anchor (and shifting bottom sands) of Anegada’s treacherous anchorage, or declaring a major systems implementation go-live an unadulterated, on-time, on-budget success with a team doing high-fives?

If we’re all so damned smart, connected and armed with nearly endless technology, why the hell can’t we solve some of our global problems? For all the gamification, consumerization, mobile, global, analytics, etc. that we’re hot to incorporate into every bit of enterprise software, will that next generation of enterprise software make a dent in the politics of self-interest, the brutality of tribal warfare, the damn debt? Call it a crisis of confidence on my part, but it sure feels like we’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic rather than saving the world. And those of us who came of age in the 60’s really believed that we could save the world.

The good news is that I’ve found my theme song for this year’s HR Technology Conference: The More Things Change…

Larry Ellison And I Disagree, And Not Just About The America’s Cup

First things first. Although all responsibility for this post is mine, I want to offer my sincere appreciation to Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman on Twitter) for his suggestions on how I could write a better, more useful and balanced post and to Dennis Moore (@dbmoore on Twitter) for his insights (with which I agree entirely) about those situations for which true SaaS is not the right application architecture/deployment method/business model. I also want to note that this post applies strictly to HRM software being offered now (so with all due respect for legacy applications which may have been the bees knees in their time), which is my major focus, and may not be applicable universally to all other enterprise business domains.

Larry Ellison and I disagree, and not just about the America’s Cup being run where he’ll get great views from his San Francisco house. It seems that Mr. Ellison is not impressed with multi-tenancy as a core design principle of true SaaS. Nor is he impressed with his major competitors.

In my view, this is classic Ellison selling what he’s got no matter what’s best for his customers. Virtualization is quite useful if you’re hosting single tenant software as well as for data center resource management, but it doesn’t give you the most important benefits of true SaaS, of SaaS InFullBloom. What it does do is to impact TCO in ways that will help Oracle’s profit margins. Anyone want more hardware (sorry, now they’re called appliances)? How about some more RDBMS licenses?

But how easy is it to handle inheritance properly across tenants, e.g. for the type of embedded intelligence that makes data entry-style self service into self sufficiency, without true SaaS? How about aggregating data across tenants (obviously with all the relevant permissions) to create benchmarks or shared pools of candidates or job descriptions? What about the real cost (to include managing the risk of errors and rework) of applying upgrades across a virtualized versus a true SaaS architecture? And can you really keep everyone on the same release when some of them are implemented on-premise, some are being hosted by the vendor single tenant, and some are being hosted by the vendor multi-tenant (assuming that Oracle can ever get there with Fusion?)?

It’s entirely possible that Salesforce.com’s architecture needs refreshing (and is no doubt getting it) because of when they started building. It’s also possible to build badly designed but multi-tenant software, and there are certainly situations (e.g. you’re responsible for HRM of our covert operations teams) when true SaaS just isn’t the right answer, even for new applications. Realistically, we’re going to have a mix of true SaaS and everything but true SaaS for many, many years to come — just as we’ve still got flat files and COBOL at the heart of many applications (we’ll mention no names of where that old COBOL pops up in now Oracle products). But it’s Mr. Ellison’s opinion of true SaaS that’s the crock, not multi-tenancy. True SaaS is the best model for contemporary HRM software in all but a few extreme instances, and I believe that Mr. Ellison knows that even as he’s saying otherwise. Did I mention that SAP, Workday, most of the TM vendors, NetSuite, Salesforce, most of the consumer Web sites and many more agree with me?

Mr. Ellison is a brilliant businessman when it comes to making money for his investors and for himself. Furthermore, I think that Oracle has a large part of the IT community by their collective tender parts. And with his investment in NetSuite, he’s playing both sides against the middle, because NetSuite is true SaaS. But Mr. Ellison and his firm are never going to win the contest for most customer-focused, at least not among HR leaders. And just wait until you’ve digested their Fusion HCM price list!

What’s really sad is that the Fusion HCM team has done a very good job within the limits imposed upon them by Mr. Ellison’s business strategy. I believe they’ve pushed their fresh HRM thinking and product design efforts as far as they possibly could within the allowed technology stack and while preserving sufficient backward compatibility with their installed base to retain those maintenance streams well into the future. But without true SaaS, without the ability to keep everyone on the exact same code base, without the many other benefits that only accrue to their customers when a vendor delivers well-done true SaaS, I think Mr. Ellison’s America’s Cup entry has a better chance of beating its competitors than does Fusion HCM when it’s compared, all in on a “rip and replace” basis, to the emerging “fleet” of true SaaS HCM products.

And yes, in the interests of full disclosure, Oracle is not a client (although I did do work for them during Joel Summer’s respected tenure as head of the EBS HCM product line), I’m not on Larry’s most favored analyst/influencer list, and I don’t expect to be invited to watch the America’s Cup as his guest. I would also note that this post was not written as a result of any Oracle briefing and, therefore, was not subject to Oracle’s review.

Matching Vendor/Product And Buyer Lifecycles

Vocabulary Shapes Our (Wishful) Thinking

This post was inspired by a Twitter exchange with a valued colleague after I tweeted that this might not be the best time to be a new buyer of Oracle PSFT/EBS HRMS given Oracle’s commitment to Fusion HCM as the next generation of these long-established product lines. My colleague very correctly pointed out that Oracle is committed to supporting and maintaining PSFT and EBS HRMS via Apps Unlimited, but we disagreed over just what Apps Unlimited means. In fact, Oracle has made very clear that there will be no EBS HRMS 13 and no PSFT HRMS 10 but that Fusion HCM will be their next major architectural generation. But the real issue here isn’t the life cycle stage of any particular vendor’s products. It’s matching that life cycle stage to the needs of the buyers, and doing so such that there is completely informed consent before the buyer signs anything.

For buyers whose HRM needs are substantially administrative, heavily payroll-focused, not requiring much social-enablement or mobile support, needs which haven’t moved to self service as the only service and the list goes on, there may be no business case at all for migrating from the best of the last generation to the still embryonic next generation. But for those customers whose HRM needs are aligned to driving business outcomes, whose workforce is expecting current and very mobile/social technology, whose administrative processes have long since been optimized such that the firm’s HR technology investments are focused on talent management and innovation of same, there may well be a solid business case for leaving that old friend software behind and moving on. However, the worst of all possible situations is to think you’re moving on in 2011 to the best of the current generation of HRM software when what you’re moving to was designed in the mid-80’s, however renovated and updated since then.

There are lots of resources to help you understand where a particular vendor’s products are in the life cycle from leap into the future to overtaken by one too many generations of HRM and technology changes. The tougher question is where does and should your own end-user organization position itself in the life cycle from early adopter of new HRM technology to the latest of late adopters clinging to “old Sam” until the only person who can fix “old Sam” retires. And just as every HRM product in your current portfolio is itself in a different position on the life cycle for products and vendors, so too are your different business needs positioned differently on the customer scale from early adoption to dying in place.

Is your Tesseract payroll still doing yeoman service without undue cost or fear of failure? Then put your scarce investment dollars elsewhere. Do you have just twenty executives for whom you’re managing succession very nicely thank you on a spreadsheet with attached Word documents? Perhaps this shouldn’t be your first priority for implementing that new talent management suite. Happy as a clam with your PSFT HRMS, to include ALL of the associated support costs as well as the Apps Unlimited level of enhanced capabilities? Then don’t be the first to “rip and replace” with either Fusion or the growing number of quite interesting alternatives.

There’s no right answer here, no one size fits all. But let’s not kid ourselves that buying last generation software in 2011 (as so designated by its own vendor and/or by the market), software that will take a year or two to implement, will take us to the future of HR technology. All it will do is take us to the most recent past. If that’s good enough, and the buyer really understands why it’s good enough, then who am I to say otherwise? But I sure hope that all such buyers have “Followed The Yellow Brick Road” en route to this decision and considered what really happens to software once it’s well past its prime.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve been around long enough to have been there when we moved from custom-built then payroll plus software to that first generation of HRMS packages, and I’ve seen just how long old habits in automated HRM data design linger long after HRM business practices have moved on. One of the biggest challenges with older HRM software — and even, unfortunately, some quite new HRM software — is the extent to which their designs date to a time when contingent workers weren’t considered an integral part of the workforce, workers weren’t entirely responsible for their own careers and financial futures not to mention entirely competent online, labor costs were an expense to be minimized through the management of interchangeable workers , and more. With so much change in the nature of work and workers, not to mention the global economy and technology, it’s just not reasonable to expect to use a twenty-year-old set of such assumptions as the foundation for today’s strategic HRM requirements. I should also mention that we would have done things differently in the 60’s through 80’s if we had been living with today’s HRM business needs and available technology, but we weren’t, and we didn’t. Thus, it’s little wonder that you may occasionally have to “rip and replace,” no matter how painful, in order to keep up with the times and, more importantly, the business needs of your organization.

HRM Software/Services Q1 Vendor Briefings — It’s A Wrap!

Future-Proofing Pelican At The Helm! In my first post in this series on learnings from my Q1 vendor briefings/demos, I wrote about the implications of HRM software and services vendor ambitions for buyers and, more generally, for the industry. In my second post in this series, I covered a wide range of changes in the context within which these vendors operate which they must address with their business strategies if they’re going to survive and prosper. Then I wrote about some of the most important capabilities vendors must address/provide in their products, followed by what impresses me in software. If you’ve been following me through this series, you may well be wondering where it will end, and the truth is it ends now — not because there isn’t a ton more to discuss. But I’m going to do a series of onsite vendor meetings in July, and I’m sure those will educate me and shape my thinking further.

Over the last many months, I’ve seen some very useful and innovative products, met with incredibly capable vendor leadership teams, and learned a ton about what’s coming out of their “kitchens” but isn’t yet visible as well as the capabilities they’re delivering now. I would have liked to write about the specifics of what I’ve seen, but there are lots of real analysts, writing about specific products and groups of products within a category, who have more time, organizational infrastructure, and intellectual patience for ferreting out the exact nature of features and functions. I’m anything but a research-based analyst, so my real interest is in the patterns of new capabilities, the overall direction of the best products and leadership teams, and what we must do collectively to advance the practice of HRM by leveraging great technology.

Yes, I’m totally biased, and now you know in exactly what direction. I love great HRM software and admire greatly the teams who bring it to life. But I guess I should also admit that holding the details of myriad products/services in my brain, or even in my notes, is a losing battle. If you want those details, and yes they’re important, it’s best to ferret them out yourselves using “killer” scenarios (there are a lot of posts on this site about this topic) or, where appropriate, use one of the research-based analysts that offer vendor feature/function matrices. Just asking a prospective vendor for a “sandbox” in which to run your scenarios may separate the truly SaaS with really modern architectures under the covers (they’re likely to say yes) from everyone else.

Change of the types discussed in my prior posts in this series bring both challenges and opportunities, and the sheer number and complexity of the changes I’ve described here has brought plenty of both. From the perspective of challenges, true SaaS forces every aspect of a software vendor’s or outsourcing provider’s business to be rethought and reinvented fundamentally. The success of this reinvention, for an established vendor, depends on how well and quickly they can ready/adapt their software for true SaaS (and for many of my preferred behaviors) and then bring their legacy customers across while engaging entirely new customers — unless of course your business model is to milk an installed base’s maintenance fees.

It’s a whole lot easier to just jettison your installed base and start over (or to start from scratch as a new vendor), but we also have some great examples of HRM software companies which have evolved from their licensed/on-premise origins to a true SaaS present, albeit with a number of legacy clients and maybe even legacy architectures still being supported. Bringing your customers along as you journey from a licensed/on-premise past to a true SaaS future may be highly valued by and valuable to those customers, but the financial markets appear to punish public HRM software vendors who are in that situation with much lower multiples than some of their start from scratch, true SaaS competitors.

Not only does true SaaS change the economics of the software business so dramatically — and everyone knows that reading financial statements is not my forte — but it’s easy to misread the requirements for change across one or more other elements of the business. There’s also a lot of code around, including fairly new code, that wasn’t that robust to begin with nor surrounded by the most robust and disciplined development processes, and now the vendor in true or even false SaaS bears the cost and operational challenges of supporting and running that code.

There also remain many in the IT community who view true SaaS as the devil incarnate, and they may lurk quietly until late in the sales cycle before pouncing, thus raising sales costs and timelines beyond what many a true SaaS vendor can afford. There are very real technical, operational, security, reliability, privacy, integration, provisioning, cost model, etc. challenges for true SaaS vendors, and that’s without dealing with the flying FUD they’re encountering from many directions. And trying to support mobile users, SaaSy or not, brings another whole set of issues, to include constantly lost/changed smart phones/tablets, should we or should we not put code on the client, how best to develop once/deploy many, the mindset of freemium apps, etc.

But with these challenges come tremendous opportunities for those vendors who can master them. Winners in a rapidly changing and consolidating market may gain market share, have more to invest in user experience stickiness and in increased customer satisfaction, and achieve the scale that is critical to financial success in a SaaSy world. True SaaS also brings new revenue opportunities, beyond subscription and services fees, which work when vendors/providers achieve substantial scale, including aggregations, inheritances, embedded intelligence from 3rd parties, etc. True SaaS vendors, via very cost-effective operational aggregations, know what configurations and features are being used and how they are being used so they can build most needed/used capabilities into their base products quickly and with confidence as well as tune existing features and the UX as needed because inexpensive, rapid crowd sourcing is a byproduct of true SaaS. Similarly, true SaaS vendors know what functionality is not being used so they can put their development $$ where it will have the maximum user impact. They are also able, with SaaS InFullBloom, to establish most common/needed configurations to be inherited at provisioning, e.g. by industry, geography, type of worker, etc. Also, in a consolidating/PE-involved market, there are a lot of integration and new owner distractions that can be used by those vendors which are able to stay above the fray.

Some large installed-base ERP/HRMS vendors are going to fight to the death to protect their maintenance revenues and to up sell for new license fees into their installed base. And some of them will be selling their next gen add-ons into that installed base while they get that next gen ready for prime time. Meanwhile, there are lots of SAP/Oracle/PSFT/Lawson HRMS customers on older releases who may not be able to afford and/or want to upgrade that can be targeted judiciously. Many of them are paying too much for too little, are learning that the next gen from their current vendor (where there is one coming) will cost a bunch/isn t ready/furthers expensive/risky vendor lock-in, etc. Well-known, fairly recent middle market brands, like Spectrum, are going/have gone the way of the previous generation of HRMSs, straight to the software graveyards, and their installed bases can be targeted aggressively.

If it s not true SaaS, if you don’t have something hot under the covers, and if you don’t have a huge installed base a la SAP/Oracle/PeopleSoft, then the influencers, including the traditional analyst firms but excepting the pay-for-play false analysts, aren’t going to be very interested or supportive. And what is said mano a mano or via such informal channels as the EIs discussion threads or the HR Technology Conference LinkedIn discussions is much more pointed than what is said in official analyst reports, and more strongly believed.

To avoid “buying” new HRM software that hasn’t got the runway you need, or if you’re a vendor trying to future-proof your business and product plans, here are some obvious considerations:

Successful vendors aim for where the market is going, not where it is or has been — and this is so much more than the software itself.
It takes time for vendors to bring new products to market and build momentum for those products, so what competitors can see easily (e.g. at HR Tech 2011) isn t what they will see over the next year or two (e.g. at HR Tech 2012/2013 — and yes, I m already planning to 2015). You’ll need to spend time online to pick up the informal sources of insight into what’s coming and to follow the talent to see which vendors are doing interesting things that aren’t being discussed yet.
It’s critical to plan for HRM software products — and for your use of them — on the basis of what the competitive landscape will look like when/after you’re launching/ramping and not just on the basis of what it looks like when you re planning/developing. When I commented that 2011 was a little late to be starting a PeopleSoft HRMS implementation as a new customer, I got jumped on pretty heavily. But the fact is that PeopleSoft HRMS, which came to market in the late 80’s with HRM data model features of its predecessor Integral mainframe product of the mid-70’s (and I could say the same here for other mature products of the client/server era), is at the end of its life and will not see a release 10.0.
There are legitimate business/product strategies other than aiming for momentum/high growth/high profits — but not for modest-sized public companies (or companies with the ambition of becoming public) which aim to survive among the giants. If your preferred vendor in a particular category doesn’t have the “big Mo,” then their chances of staying the course in a consolidating and unforgiving market aren’t very good unless they’re a well-funded lifestyle company. And finding yourself with a new landlord (hat tip here to Jason Averbook for introducing me to that term in this context) can be pretty unsettling, especially when they’re the exact vendor you rejected when you picked your current one.
I believe that effective future-proofing for vendors is about starting with the right three to five year business vision/core object model/enabling architecture/initial releases/go-to-market/etc. and then building out as quickly as competitive pressures/customer demands and time/resources permit. But all the future-proofing in the world can’t stand up against market economics when a vendor just isn’t strong enough financially to stay the course.
I also believe that there are some things that vendors must get right, right from the start, including (a) great UI foundation that can evolve without disrupting early adopters, (b) great business/product vision that gets built out rather than re-invented yearly, and (c) great and stable leadership team that grows and evolves but isn t unduly disrupted.
You can gain substantial future business model/next gen product intelligence by (a) talking with/reading a wide range of analysts/influencers, subject to their NDAs and expertise, and triangulating — lessons from sailing navigation, (b) following the talent trail for vendors/investors of interest — in addition to the team in place, including what roles are they trying to fill, what’s the KSAOC profile for those roles, with whom are they talking, and who’s coming/going, (c) following the published work (including blogs, tweets, all manner of articles/columns, Webinars, etc.) of vendor thought leaders, and (d) reading what’s discussed on earnings calls, at user conferences, when vendors speak at industry conferences, etc.
We are a very open society, as well as a closely-knit HRM technology industry, so it’s relatively easy for a real insider to be able to read the tea leaves without violating any NDAs, but outsiders can miss important clues, so it pays to be an insider if you’re betting your career on knowing what’s happening. And those of you who lead the HR technology function within an end-user organization are indeed betting your careers here.
You can make competitive intelligence gathering everyone’s responsibility and use crowd sourcing/social collaboration if you have the right tools in place, but you need global/local connections to do this well in each important geography — it’s important to consider those other geographies in everything, not only for marketing and sales-related purposes but also in all things product.
Assume that of these techniques work in both directions and that competitors are on your trail — and on the trail of your selected vendors. Thus, even the best strategies are only useful to companies that can execute well at the speed of today. That means, among many other things, using agile software development practices, having effective and rapid decision-making, and being willing and able to adapt their strategies as market conditions, technology and other factors argue persuasively for change.
Always challenge your thinking. What the risks are to your business/product plans? What are the next gen obstacles/unknowns/design or execution risks? What about the risks to your current gen product’s business growth/product extensions in the faces of changes at competitors or in the market more broadly? What would put your business plans and product roadmaps at risk? Really open those anxiety closets and face those monsters.

It’s not paranoia if in fact everyone is out to beat you and your vendors. And that’s today’s global economy. It no longer matters what proud history you bring to the table but what proud future you’re able to deliver. I for one have long since accepted the fact that I’ll have to prove my value to each new generation of HRM and HR technology leaders as well as make the expected level of contribution to each and every project. Such is the “new normal.”

Monaco To Paris With Twitterscope Up

: Provence, Toujours Provence

You’ll have noticed that my last post went up on May 3rd, shortly after we left for two weeks vacation. Before I return to our regularly scheduled programming, to blogs on more or less professional topics, I wanted to say a few words about this vacation and its impact on my state of mind.

From a purely vacation point of view, we had a wonderful time. My sister Marsha (the more outgoing of the two of us — many times more outgoing! — who runs a personal injury law practice), her attorney husband Irwin (whose birthday we were celebrating, and who never saw a workout program he didn’t want to try), Jan Fretwell (a close friend, charter member of the Brazen Hussies, and a star implementor of HRM software), and Sue French (also a close friend and charter member of the Brazen Hussies who’s running the apps process for a major financial services firm), Ron and I rendezvous’d in Monaco to begin our travels. From there we visited Nice, St. Paul de Vence, Eze and more before heading across Provence to Arles to join our river boat, the Avalon Scenery, for a slow cruise up the Rhone River and a final few days in Paris.

Monaco was memorable in so many ways, but especially because of the flash cars arriving for the Gran Prix and the flash people arriving for that and the nearby Cannes film festival. The gawking was at its best in the area around Monaco’s largest casino, so we lunched slowly and expensively at the Cafe de Paris (food okay, service poor, the passing parade fantastic ), each of us lost in our own particular dreams of grandeur. I for one had never seen some of the cars parked in front of the casino but have it on good authority from Irwin that’s because there some very limited edition super luxury cars that aren’t like to have dealers in Fort Myers.

Great wines, cheeses, and ice cream seemed to top the menues on and off our boat, and we visited some wonderful villages and cities along the Rhone, but the best part of the trip (at least for me) was having quality time with people I love. And that was in spite of doing a couple of hours online each morning and evening in order to stay on top of the never-ending stream of relevant industry news and ideas.

Which brings me to the reflections part of this travelogue. Once upon a time, when I went on vacation, I was unreachable, truly unreachable, and totally out of touch with world events, let alone anything going on in my professional world. I remember sailing vacations in the Caribbean, climbing Maya ruins in Mexico, wandering the English countryside, and traversing Humboldt’s Trail along the high coldera in Ecuador without the slightest concern for who would acquire whom or even what country would dissolve into a new civil war. Sue French and I had to wake up the owner of the only bar in San Christobal de la Casa in Chiapas, Mexico (now that’s a story worthy of its own post) with a satellite dish in order to watch Bill Clinton’s inauguration — and only days before subcomandante Carlos led his uprising there. And there was also that time, at Saltwhistle Bay on Mayreau in the Caribbean, when we tried valiantly, using the only pay phone on the island, to do a conference call with a client whose executives expected him to debrief them on our project while we were sailing.

But those days of blessed disconnection are long gone. News breaks faster and more often, commentary on that news is immediate and widespread. The activity streams never stop, and there’s no way to recover if you’ve missed a few days of them. And that’s before considering the hundreds of emails, direct and via LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter/etc., that just keep coming. If you don’t spend a few hours per day while on vacation to at least skim through and delete this traffic, there’s simply no way to ever catch up when you return, let alone to hit the ground running after re-entry. The technology makes it possible for us to be hyper-connected from anywhere at all times, and even my disciplined approach to minimizing the need for clients to track me down on vacation can’t reduce that larger, more universal need to be in the know and “in the known” at all times. Bottom line — I had a wonderful vacation, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that I appeared to be working (or at least to be plugged into work) in the eyes of my less continuously engaged husband, sister, etc.

I can now say with absolute certainty that there are no work/life boundaries for those of us who have chosen to have careers rather than do jobs. Jobs have working hours, after which you’re done — truly done. No matter how demanding, how technically complex, how important to society the job, even the very highly paid pilot of the biggest airplanes works to the company rules, and doesn’t need to focus on how to fill their next flight with passengers or cargo. They may worry about whether or not their industry and company are doing well enough to ensure their job security, but their role doesn’t include doing much about that. This lack of round-the-clock engagement, this ability to walk away mentally when the job is done for the day/week/month, may be one of the reasons that many such jobs don’t pay nearly as well in general as the careers which have no OFF button, but it may also be the reason that many such jobs also have so little security, satisfaction, or future prospects for enhanced financial or other rewards.

But always on/always engaged/always learning careers demand so much more of us. We’re expected to know what’s going on in our field, our firm, our industry, our geo-political context, etc. — and what it all means for our actual work. We’re expected to care about it, to have and share our opinions on it, and to build a career that not only transcends these developments but which ultimately drives these developments. When I became active in the world of social tech, I wrote about the good and bad of these terrific collaboration, learning, communication, and influencing tools, from my own point of view. What I didn’t know then but do know now is that social technology has made those of us who are career-minded work even harder and more continously than ever before to find and use our voice to help shape the context of our careers and not just those careers themselves. And while we’ve gained a great deal in terms of reach and influence, in terms of the pace of innovation and the adoption of new ideas/technology/practices, we’ve also lost our ability to disengage completely for more than a day or two before the effort to catch up becomes overwhelming.

We’ve got many more vacations planned, from local trips on M/V SmartyPants to an exploration of the Amazon, and I’m looking forward to each and every one of them. I’m at peace with staying connected, with giving a few hours each day to my professional life even as I’m restoring my mind and spirit in a way that only travel can do — at least for me. But I am beginning, just beginning, to envision a time when my career is behind me and the sound of the water lapping at SmartyPant’s hull won’t be disturbed by my search for cellular reception, when I won’t give a damn if that Amazon freighter has wifi.

HRM Software/Services Q1 Vendor Briefings — What Impresses Me?

How The Hell Should I Know What Software Is Best?

Here’s another post that I had meant to write much sooner, but now it will post while we’re in Monaco before the start of our cruise up the Rhone River. I’m going to try to do some tweeting/posting from the “road,” always hopeful that I’ll spot some note-worthy HRM practices along the way, but this post may have to last you until I’ve had a chance to catch up when we return.

With a lot of briefings/demos done and discussed during Q1, one question I’ve been getting quite a bit via DMs on Twitter, via LinkedIn messages, remember email?, etc., is what impresses me about HRM vendors/products? What makes me think highly or not about the people with whom I’m meeting, their companies and their products/services? And why do some companies seem to get more of my attention and/or favorable opinion than do others?

Well the first thing to say is that, as a solo consultant and definitely not a professional analyst, I simply cannot follow all the potentially wonderful HRM software and services companies out there. So the fact that I’ve never taken a briefing with your firm or with your favorite vendor should not be construed as meaning anything other than I just don’t have enough time to go around and still do my day job. That said, I tend to pay attention not only to the obvious suspects, to the larger and more extensively used HRM vendors/products/services, but also to the interesting, the clever, the latest undertaking of long-standing and valued colleagues, to other people and vendors who capture my attention by what they do and how they do it. And suggestions for this latter list come at me from every direction. But I can tell you right now, for the record, if a company of which I have no knowledge led by people of whom I’ve never heard reaches out to me via their agency/PR firm with a form letter asking for my time, the chance are not very good that I’m going to make time for them. On the other hand, a friendly note from their CEO/chief architect/product or service visionary/etc. connecting what they do to something of interest to me (and those topics have been written to death on this blog, in my twitterstream and in the LinkedIn discussion group for HR Tech Conference), there’s a very high probability that I’d be delighted to meet you — even if I can’t do it right away.

I love great software. Well thought-out architectures/object models that scale with volumes, new functionality, geographic requirements, etc. Well thought-out UXs which incorporate a high degree of embedded intelligence and are appropriate to and variable with the work a user is doing. Real integration — not just interfaces/unification/gazintas and gazoutas — of HRM domain model, architecture, processes, analytics, etc. Solid foundations with clever extensions and clear thinking about difference between economic buyer and real customer. New solutions to old problems, new solutions before others even grasp the problems. And for anything HRM, systemic effective-dating, to include the entire application, should go without saying. What, no mention of true SaaS or SaaS InFullBloom? Absolutely not, unless of course you say you’re SaaS, in which case I’m more impressed if you’re InFullBloom than if you’re rebranded your old single tenant, customizable code base.

I also love great people, regardless of their role in our industry. Smart, hard-working, disciplined thinkers who are paying or have paid their dues and really know what they’re talking about. Folks who are as passionate as I am about the importance of human resource management in achieving business outcomes, ideally led by an excellent HR function but with or without them as necessary. HRM subject matter experts who don’t live in silos but understand and work hard at the interconnections, always with a focus on business outcomes. One of the reasons I’ve stayed so long in this industry is the number of terrific people with whom I’ve had the opportunity to work, and there are more coming every day, bright younger colleagues who help me overcome my discomfort with some aspects of social everything and always on.

That’s pretty much it. But if you have visited Casa de Ranas, also known as Bloom & Wallace HQ, then you also know that I love bold colors, and room for the unexpected, the unplannable. That’s what impresses me. And that’s what I hope I can continue to deliver. Otherwise, why bother?

Is It Really SaaS If?

If It Looks Like A Duck...

I’ve long since put to rest the whole multi-tenancy debate around SaaS. If it isn’t multi-tenant, then it isn’t SaaS. You can host/subscribe single tenant software, and with piles of virtualization and other techniques for optimizing data center/operations costs, you may be able to approximate the operations costs of true SaaS in specific circumstances, but it’s still not true SaaS. So we’re agreed that SaaS means hosted, subscribed, and multi-tenant.

But what happens when a 3rd party, say ADP in the case of GlobalView or NorthgateArinso in the case of euHReka or CaliberPoint in the case of Republic (and the list goes on), use either an already multi-tenant ERP HCM platform like Oracle EBS HCM 12.1 or an ERP HCM platform like SAP that they render multi-tenant through some very clever wrapping/extension, and then claim to have a SaaS BPO platform or even to offer their platform as SaaS without a BPO service wrapper? If that 3rd party is still at the mercy of the ERP HCM vendor’s cycle of making enhancements to their core platform, if they don’t own or control the underlying software, if they can’t reengineer/rearchitect the underlying software to correct (some would say improve) object model limitations or implementation challenges, is what they’re doing truly SaaS? Or have they just been clever enough to adapt multi-tenant or nearly multi-tenant software that was designed for licensed/on-premise use to become a more robust HCM BPO foundation?

If this were just a question of who owns or does what behind the curtain when you’re relying on the SLA from a very reputable BPO , it wouldn’t be a very interesting or important question. After all, even OneSource VHR, which has the sole (thus far) rights to run Workday as their BPO platform (although run by Workday, not by them) and is arguably therefore running on the truest of truly SaaS platforms, is at the “mercy” of Workday’s product roadmap to which their business needs are only one of many such inputs. Putting vocabulary and marketing pitches aside, when a BPO provider depends on commercially available software as their platform, true SaaS or otherwise, they may well be providing that software with a valuable set of surrounding services, including services not available from the software’s owner, but should we call what they’re doing SaaS?

Let’s give it the duck test. From a customer’s perspective, can their provider achieve the vendor and customer benefits of true SaaS? Yes and no. Yes when it comes to the economics of multi-tenant operations, yes to rolling out new releases to everyone so that all are on the same release, yes to crowd-sourcing for service wrapper improvements and benchmarking as well as for providing input to the software’s owner when it comes to the whole range of product roadmap issues. No to direct software control and no to having access to the entire user population of that software because they can only access via crowd-sourcing the users of their BPO customer community. And the plot thickens when the underlying software was never built to be SaaS in the first place and the owner of that software isn’t in the SaaS business.

I’m still noodling on this one, but I think I’m going to come out here:

If the underlying software and its owner are indeed SaaS, a la Workday with OneSource VHR, then customers of the BPO provider, in this case customers of OneSource VHR, get most of the benefits of first hand true SaaS but with a probably reduced impact on the vendor’s product roadmap but one which could be offset by the provider bringing a large enough customer population to their influence with the vendor.
If the underlying software and its owner are definitely not SaaS (so even in the case of Oracle’s EBS HCM 12.1 which was architecturally improved to enable a high degree of multi-tenancy) but the software itself is multi-tenant, then customers of BPO providers using this software as their platform may well get some of the operational cost improvements of SaaS (but only once the provider has reached a critical mass of customers, something which none of them have done as yet) along with the opportunity to create (but here they’ll have to do all of their own development) some of the crowd-sourcing and/or data aggregating benefits of SaaS, but they may represent such a small slice of the underlying vendor’s total customer base that they’re unlikely to have much impact on that vendor’s product roadmap.
Where the underlying software and its owner are definitely not SaaS plus the software isn’t truly multi-tenant before the BPO provider does some serious magic to it (as would be the case in GlobalView and euHReka), you the customer are even further removed from having anything like true SaaS working in your favor. An excellent platform perhaps, with lots of cost efficiencies and opportunities for the provider to improve tremendously on the functionality and user experience of the underlying software, but there’s so much magic involved here that the last thing the provider needs is for the vendor of that underlying software to sunset it in favor of something more SaaS-like.

A fair question at this point would be “why does any of this matter?” Just because with true SaaS, the owner and operator of the software is the same company, and they decide not only on their product roadmap but also on the timing of new releases, the addition of data aggregation products, the entry into new geographies, just everything. When you’re working with a BPO provider who is dependent on someone else’s software, that BPO provider has no such control. And no BPO provider knows this better than ADP, which uses its own bespoke SaaS platforms for a whole range of high volume offerings.

If the major reason for going to BPO is to gain access to the best of HR technology, are you really doing that when your BPO provider is running on last generation’s software built for licensed/on-premise use no matter how it’s dressed up with multi-tenancy and an improved user experience? But if your real reason for going to BPO is get a much improved user experience over what the platform vendor can provide directly and/or a much improved total cost of ownership over what the platform vendor can provide directly, then running BPO on a very cleverly enhanced legacy ERP may be an excellent idea. But we definitely need a name other than true SaaS for those underlying and/or enhanced greatly BPO-provided offerings when what’s under the covers is anything but.

Disclosures: Of the firms mentioned in this post, Workday and ADP have been recent clients. CaliberPoint sponsored a Brazen Hussies event a few years ago. I also have done work for Oracle and SAP, but such work is shrouded in the mists of history. All of the referenced vendors are worthy of your attention or I wouldn’t have mentioned them, and ADP and NorthgateArinso have considerable HRM software and service offerings beyond their large market, global customer offerings discussed here.

Is HR Really A Pink-Collared Ghetto?

HR Is A Dominated By Women But Led By Men

I had planned to write this last September, so let’s just pretend that I did rather than wondering why I didn’t. It’s a critically important topic, and I hope that you’ll listen to the whole linked replay of the underlying discussion. We’re at a critical time in the HR profession, and your future depends on what we do now.

September 16 2010’s HR Happy Hour was a terrific program with guests Leighanne Levensaler, Vice President of HCM Strategy at Workday, and Jennifer Fitzpatrick, Director HR & Talent Management at Chiquita Brands International (now with their very cool, animated home page). Hosted as always by Steve Boese and Shauna Moerke and sponsored by Aquire, this particular program focused on the future of the HR profession and of that organizational function. I wish I could participate live in every Happy Hour (rather than just catching up via replays), and I certainly hope that you’ll try to do so, but I made a special effort that week because of the topic and the guest speakers.

Chiquita is a Workday customer to be sure, and Jennifer showed herself to be an HR leader worthy of our respect, but this show was much less about Chiquita or HR technology of any sort and much more about where the HR profession has been and where it’s going. You can catch the replay, and I urge you to do so, but of immediate interest for this post were the comments that just poured out of my mouth when we got on this subject: the pink-collared ghetto. Listening again to the replay, I’m a little embarrassed by how vehemently and extensively I inserted my point of view and commentary. But my passion on this topic comes from a sincere concern for the future of the HR profession and of my many, younger colleagues working in HR whose own futures are on the line.

When I first began working professionally, at John Hancock Life Insurance in 1967, all HR executives were male, predominantly labor lawyers by training with a smattering of failed line executives. All the personnel ladies were just that, ladies, most of whom had no college degree but had risen through the ranks from secretarial and administrative positions into increasing positions of responsibility for the various personnel functions. One big exception to the personnel ladies were a fair number of industrial psychologists, at least at the largest companies, who were degreed, often PhD’d, and most often male. Another exception was the growing number, again at just the largest firms, of actuaries and other degreed professionals working on those increasingly complex and pesky total compensation plans.

A lot has changed since then, but not enough. HR is still dominated as to numbers by women, admittedly with many to most having degrees and even advanced degrees. Compensation is better, and there are a lot of important areas of specialization. But something that was true then is still true now, to the detriment of the profession and, if you believe that HRM matters, to the success of our organizations. All too many HR pros still haven’t a clue what drives success in their businesses.

One result of that lack of business acumen is the frequency with which organizations pull someone from another part of the business, from another discipline, to be the chief HR executive. Would any public company appoint as their CFO someone with no financial street cred? As their head of supply chain someone who really never cut their teeth on the subject matter of supply chain. Hell no! But when it comes to HR, there’s a belief abroad in the land that it’s fair game to bring in someone from another area to lead this function. The other side of the coin is that it’s extremely rare for a true HR professional, someone who has spent the bulk of their career in HR, to be appointed to run a major line of business or to rise to CEO. Any why is that? Perhaps because it’s believed — and may in fact be true — that HR pros really aren’t business people.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat with a group of HR leaders and, when I asked the question “what are the three most important drivers of your firm’s financial outcomes?” I got deer in headlight looks when the answers should have just poured out. Ask that question of CFOs, and the answers are right there. Ask it of line folks, of sales leaders, of almost anyone else in a C-position at a profit-making organization, and they do know the answers even if they almost always add their own spin that elevates whatever they do to the first position.

I’ve written a lot about this topic from different perspectives (here and here for starters), but it wasn’t until this particular HR Happy Hour that I thought about this issue in terms of gender, in terms of the fact that women so dominate the HR profession. Attend a local or regional SHRM meeting, and that domination in numbers is absolutely clear. It’s even obvious at the annual HR Technology Conference. But review the annual list of the top HR executives from HRE, and it’s equally clear that males dominate the top positions.

So where do we go from here in terms of the HR profession? I do know that much to most of the administrative/compliance work can and will be automated and/or outsourced — if not with HR’s leadership and HR rank and file cooperation, then it will be done from over our heads. Much to most of the hard-core specialist work, from total compensation plan design to labor law, has long since been outsourced to various consulting speciality firms, and the rest will follow, except at the very largest firms. So what’s left? Strategic HRM, aka talent management. And here there’s a growing belief that with very smart software, with a ton of embedded intelligence, with help from specialist consultancies and outsourcers, there’s not much left that can’t be owned and executed by managers at every level.

I’m first and foremost a systems person, an enterprise software person, who stumbled first into payroll, then personnel, then human resource management, as my appreciation for both the importance and complexity of this domain grew, along with my passion for excellence in HR technology. Things will hold together just fine for me, and many of my vendor clients are hotbeds of talent management vision and technology, but I doubt very much that today’s average HR professional will have the future they want and deserve unless they become business people who lead and practice HRM. Maybe then the profession, although likely to be much smaller in numbers, will attract more men and become more gender-balanced in term of its leadership roles. Enough said.

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