In Full Bloom

The Future Of HRM Software: Applicability/Eligibility

GOP View Of Obama's Health Care Reform Bill

This post is one in a series I’ve been writing about the preferred architectural behaviors for great HRM software, to include HRM SaaS InFullBloom (but many are equally important for single tenant HRM software regardless of how it’s licensed/subscribed and installed/hosted). I posted the introduction to this series in April, 2010, after I had already written some posts on the topic, and the whole list of previous posts on preferred behaviors can be found here.

HRM Has Zillions Of Business Rules

In HRM, there are zillions of business rules that must be applied properly to the relevant areas of HRM by process/business event, many to all of which have often complex variations by labor agreement/line of business/geography/etc. Then there are the process definitions that can and do vary by line of business/geography/local requirements/etc., business events whose data attributes/edit rules/processing vary by industry/geography/labor agreement/etc. and the list goes on. Every aspect of HRM policies, plans, practices, processes, data, etc. that are captured within HRM software may be applicable to an entire enterprise or just to meaningful subsets of that enterprise, where those subsets might be organizational/geographical/contractual/whimsical.

It’s important for great HRM software to be able to set up the relevant business rules/processes/data attribution/content/workflows/really everything just once — and maintained in one place — with an effective-dated expression of their applicability to the appropriate subsets of the organization and then be inherited by/applied to those subsets. In a multi-tenant SaaS environment, many of these business rules, especially the regulated and/or culturally common ones, may transcend tenants in their applicability and must therefore be inherited across as well as within tenants.

In modern HRM software, where most business rules/workflows/and similar are expressed as meta-data (which might be captured in and driven from a domain model) rather than as procedural logic, we’re “wrapping” chunks of meta-data (e.g. the description of a particular total compensation plan or the workflow of a performance process) with their applicability rules (e.g. this total compensation plan may be applied just to our business operations in Bulgaria and this is the workflow for the performance process used with all executive positions), also expressed as meta-data. And let’s not forget that all of this must be further “wrapped” with effective dates because not only do the business rules themselves change over time, but their applicability rules also change along with the inheritance of them. Are you ready to scream yet? Shall I go on?

Once that applicability is established, once you know that a particular business rule (which could be a complex as an entire total compensation plan or performance management process) etc. is applicable to one or more subsets of the organization (so to one or more work units, work locations, workers covered by a specific labor agreement, and so on), there must then be more specific rules (i.e. which are attributes of that total compensation plan and/or of the performance management process) for determining, within those subsets of the organization, which individual employees and/or non-employee workers (whom I call vendor employees in my HRM domain object model “starter kit” ) are eligible to participate/be covered by/etc.

For example, we may design a sales compensation type of total compensation plan that is only intended to be applicable to those work untis that are focused on the sale of our consumer products. But even within those work units, the eligibility criteria for participation in that total compensation plan might be defined by job, within job for just those positions that are based in the USA and, for the employees holding those positions, just for those whose tenure in the position is greater than or equal to 6 months. Even with their eligibility established for participation in the plan, they would still need to meet the accomplishment rules for an entitlement/payout under that total compensation plan, but that will be the subject of another post.

As another example, we might establish a performance appraisal process that’s to be used just for our IT-related jobs. And we all know that, where regulatory requirements dictate the business rules, reporting, processes, etc., that such requirements are applicable only within the geographic and “nature of work” juridiction of the relevant regulatory body. And just like applicability rules expressed as effective-dated chunks of meta-data (or via their object model expression), so too are elgibility rules expressed except when, as a result of their complexity, an eligibility calculation engine is used which is then driven by meta-data.

Determining an employee’s eligibility for participation in a specific, applicable total compensation plan (e.g., by their membership in a specific work unit and/or their working at a specific work location and/or by their performance of the duties and responsibilities of a specific job, etc.) is conceptually the same as determining and expressing the applicability of that total compensation plan (i.e. that it applies to everyone working in a specific work unit and/or at a specific work location and/or to people performing the duties and responsibilities of specific jobs). Therefore, the methods for establishing and executing eligibility and applicability rules should be as consistent as possible, easy to use, and be understandable to normal human beings, unlike the flowchart above.

Eagles, Cattle, And Gators — Welcome To HQ

Cracker Cow Customer Service

: Mr. Eagle On His Lakeside Perch

Many corporate, non-profit and public sector organization Web sites feature wonderful pictures of their offices/factories/mines/etc to suggest the substance and durable nature of their activities. Even in this era of virtual everything, there remains something comforting about knowing that our suppliers, customers, partners — really all of our trading partners — do indeed have the wherewithal to maintain, even require, physical premises.

Conveying corporate substance and immortality are surely behind the massive headquarter campuses of Oracle in Redwood City and SAP in Walldorf, that well-marked turn onto Workday Way, and Ultimate headquarters’ reflection in its very own Florida lake. So I thought it might lend substance and a sense of permanence to my own small business, Bloom & Wallace, to give you a perspective on our very own albeit modest headquarters right her in Paradise.

First, I’d like to introduce you to our legal counsel, Mr. Eagle, who maintains a dignified stance no matter the circumstances as long as he remains on his lakeside perch. Preferring dead trees, both to perch and build their nests, our resident eagle family have been here since well before our arrival in 1999. No amount of disruptive behavior by new home building, rambunctious teens or the middle-aged to senior motorcyclists and Corvette owners seems to disturb their aura of calm watchfulness.

The only time the eagles have left us, and who can blame them as we were all running for our lives, is when Hurricane Charlie came straight at us. They returned as soon as the rest of us did to assess the damage and rebuild. But until you’ve seen an eagle swoop at full speed into the lake and soar upwards, fish in claws, you haven’t seen the power and determination of our legal counsel. Best not to mess with him as those claws are huge, sharp and NOT removable once he’s got you in them.

Next, I’d like to introduce you to our customer service department, also known as our cracker cattle herd. Just like with our corporate counsel, our customer service “department” is outsourced, actually owned and maintained by our neighbors across the lake. But just imagine that, when you’re on the line waiting for the IT support people for one of your freemium smart-phone apps in Hindustan or your laptop disaster recovery person in Cucamunga, instead of the horrible elevator music you’re hearing the lowing of cattle on the gentle, tropical night air.

That’s what you get when you call Bloom & Wallace at sunset with the windows open almost no matter who answers the phone. Those cattle make themselves heard, well they are a herd, even as the backdrop to a couple of Webinars that I’ve done. Walk up close to their pasture and stand at the fence, and you never met a friendlier group of customer support folks, and certainly none that will lick your face if you’re foolish enough to get within range. But don’t even look like you’re annoying them or Johnny their wrangler will intervene promptly and memorably.

Finally, I’d like to introduce you to the sales team. They’re a tad on the aggressive side, but that’s to be expected under the circumstances. Actually, they’re not our sales team but rather that of one of the HRM software vendors which isn’t at all pleased with how I view their products. But not to worry, unless it’s mating season. Then our local gators can be quite unpredictable. And please don’t believe that old wives tale that you can outrun a gator on land by zigging and zagging because they can only run in a straight line. Tell that to the several people each year who aren’t around to tell their side of that story. But there’s nothing so serene as watching our sales team basking in the sun at the end of our garden, looking for all the world like they’re asleep until something catches their attention and then they’re off like a freight train. Here’s a great picture of one of the sales team leaders trying to work the doorknobs from the lanai into the pool bath during one of those always too long briefings on my HRM software architectural preferences.

Yup, we’re well-staffed here at HQ, and ready for your visit. It’s much more interesting to take vendor briefings and demos in person rather than online, so do consider Fort Myers as a stop on your tour. We’ll do our best to make you very welcome and see that you leave unscathed — your person, but not necessarily your software/solution.

Customer service team picture through the generosity of the Florida Cracker Cattle Association.

Thomas Wailgum Inspired Post #2 — A Further Airing Of Grievances

Personal Grievances Were Never Part Of My HRM Object Model So I'm Improvising

Last month I had a terrific time airing a list of the grievances, just some of the routine annoyances, of my professional life. Well, that felt so good that I began making a similar list for my personal life. I hadn’t meant to share that personal list, but then a few of these sort of hit me between the eyes over the last few weeks, and I decided that there’s no purpose in having a blog if you can’t vent on whatever topics you choose. So, here goes (in no particular order):

Personal grievance #1 — Snooty social-climbing ladies who lunch who presume that careers are for husbands. Yes, these women still exist in 2011 right here in Paradise. And I’m not talking about retired ladies, but about women who’ve never had a career thought in their heads, until their big bucks husbands turn them in for younger models.

Personal grievance #2 — Flight attendants in business or first class who presume male passengers need/deserve more attention than females. Don’t they realize that attitude went out with the men in their grey flannel suits? I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to be greeted in business class on an international flight as though I had every right to be there, and not just because Ron’s a gold mine. Hmmm…I think #2 is connected to #1.

Personal grievance #3 — Most commercial TV. When did the lowest common denominator get so low? Who the hell cares about Snookie! And who on earth are the Kardashians? Why would anyone waste time peering into the dysfunctional lifestyles of the stupid and ugly? I’m clearly not a good candidate for most consumer marketing, but I’m sure a reliable contributor to Masterpiece Theater.

Personal grievance #4 — Boom box cars playing absolute crap at 500 db stopped next to me in heavy traffic. I keep hoping their eardrums will explode all over their windshields, but then I worry that they’ll cause an accident. Don’t these people have parents? Don’t these parents have any brains?

Personal grievance #5 — Calories! By now the scientists should have figured out how to squeeze them out of my food. With all the money being spent on myriad ways to lose weight, from exercise equipment to all the recalled diet drugs, not to mention on every flavor of cosmetic improvement (you’d know that I’m living in the center of the plastic surgery universe if you could just see the results in any upmarket restaurant between Sarasota and Naples), but you never hear about serious efforts to suck the calories out of, say, M&Ms or bagels. You’d think that the VCs would be all over this. Hmmm… nope, not an entrepreneurial inspiration for this gal.

Personal grievance #6 (which is closely related to #5) — The entire fashion industry’s lack of interest in anyone under 5’10” and/or over 120 lbs, which is almost all of us. Men buy clothes sized to their actual measurements with perhaps a little shortening of a sleeve here or a pant leg there as needed — and always provided by the shop. Women buy clothes that will never fit because there are no clothes that do fit. If you’re short and weigh nothing, there’s petites. If you’re an Amazon and weigh a lot, there are plus sizes. But if you’re short and weigh a lot, there’s nothing, absolutamenta nada. And forget alterations unless you’re shopping at Neiman Marcus, which certainly doesn’t cater to whatever non-size I am.

Personal grievance #7 (just so you’ve got one for every day) — Family members you only hear from when they’re trying to make up the numbers at a wedding or funeral or wherever they need relatives to show off to their friends. I’m blessed with some terrific relatives, folks I call friends in spite of the blood ties and shared childhoods, but there are some who didn’t make the cut, and deservedly so. If you’re an A list relative and are reading this, please plan a visit to Paradise so we can laugh at the ladies in #1, commiserate over # 5 & 6, sing at the top of our lungs with the top down to drown out #4, and watch old Masterpiece Theater masterpieces on DVD.

That felt great. I may make this an annual post.

Bloom & Wallace Release 2011 — Constellation Research Group

In November, I posted the first installment of this series on planned changes in the mix and style of B&W consulting engagements/projects for 2011. In December, I posted about the work I’ll be doing in 2011 with Mercer’s Human Capital Operations And Technology Solutions practice with a particular focus on their Human Capital Connect solution powered by Peopleclick Authoria technology, advising on business and marketing strategy through software architecture and functional roadmaps. It’s now with great pleasure that I announce another 2011 relationship, the newly formed Constellation Research Group, whose advisory board I am joining.

Constellation Research is a newly formed IT analyst firm, led by Ray Wang and populated by some really big thinkers, which is focused on a range of disruptive enterprise technologies, including: mobile, social, cloud, analytics and game theory, unified communications and video, next gen government, and the internet of things. They will be providing, in addition to their research agenda, a range of both buy-side and sell-side advisory services. A major goal is to help end-user organizations not only plan for the use of these and more disruptive technologies where they provide leverage to organizational business models but also to help design revised business models and leverage savings from legacy systems optimization to invest in these technology-enabled innovations. This is indeed a tall order, but the gathering team of analysts and other advisors is very impressive.

My responsibilities as an advisory board member will be to help shape their research agenda, contribute my thinking to that research and the resulting analysis, and bring the human resource management perspective to both the research on disruptive technologies (i.e. which of them and how might they impact the intersection of HRM and IT) and on the challenges of technology adoption in the enterprise. My interest in taking this role is the opportunity to continue learning and contributing in areas that are beyond the range of any one person to monitor, specifically the mega-changes underway and soon to come in enterprise technologies. As you may know, I’ve collaborated for years, but very informally, with colleagues at the traditional IT analyst firms in order to learn from their research. As an advisory board member, I’ll now have a greater opportunity to help shape that research.

I will not be doing any direct advisory work with Constellation clients, whether sell-side or buy-side, through my advisory board membership, but there will be opportunities for me to share my thinking with this broader audience, e.g. by choosing to repost a specific blog post on the Constellation Research blog and/or by participating in a Webinar as a panelist or speaker. I will also not be doing any direct marketing or sales on behalf of Constellation Research although I may well provide the occasional introduction for them on either the buy-side or sell-side of their primary markets where I see benefits to both parties. My interest in becoming an advisory board member, beyond the opportunity to collaborate with some really smart people in areas of professional interest, is to ensure that I’m knowledgeable, in the most efficient way possible, about what’s coming next in technology and where it applies/adds value to human resource management.

This is a new firm, just in formation now, and there will be a natural evolution as they find their voice and market niche. Some of the lead analysts are known to me through their published work and/or through their participation in the private discussions threads of the Enterprise Irregulars http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/, and they are a VERY impressive group. I look forward to bringing my learning from this relationship with Constellation Research into my own work and into this blog.

As I take on additional strategic relationships, consulting and speaking engagements, I’ll be doing similar write-ups on the other clients/engagements that I’ve selected for 2011, highlighting what it is about a particular initiative or client that makes them a good fit for me. I’ll also be committing to new licenses in 2011 for my HRM domain object model/architectural “starter kit” and related training, and keeping my eyes open for 2012 clients/initiatives that will be a good fit for me. Did you think I was retiring just because you’re supporting me on Medicare?

With many thanks to Leo Collum, the great business cartoonist, from whom I bought the above customized cartoon in the early days of Bloom & Wallace. Leo passed away in late October, 2010 and is remembered here by The New Yorker.

HRM #EnSW Vendor Consolidation Fairy Tales

Update: in the interests of full disclosure, many of the vendors/providers mentioned below have been, are or will be Bloom & Wallace clients. Nothing learned under NDA has been used in the creation of this post, nor have any delightful fairies been harmed.

"Fairy Tales May Come True, It Could Happen To You"

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

which LMS vendor SuccessFactors and/or Peopleclick Authoria may acquire? and what about Kenexa is this regard?
whether/when/how Salesforce.com will expand into the HRM market more directly and on a grander scale than via their own lab efforts and a range of small fry building HRM-related applications on the Force.com platform?
what further acquisitions the private equity firms already in our space may make (and it’s too long a list to print here) as well as which PE firms may yet enter our markets?
where ADP might go next, e.g. to create less dependence on their GlobalView partnership with SAP via acquisition of a more complete/less expensive/functionally broader global HRM platform and/or to acquire more in-country players to serve emerging markets with owned capabilities rather than via partners? and this same question, about acquiring in-country players, should be asked about NorthgateArinso and others?
whether Lawson, perhaps with pressure from substantial investor Carl Icahn, will be on Infor’s or someone else’s shopping list or improve their stock price via a bold sell-off of lower performing assets coupled with an equally bold foray into true SaaS via a further acquisition in our space?
when (and if?) Cornerstone OnDemand will IPO given their much smaller size than some of their bulkier, publicly traded talent management competitors versus becoming an acquisition target for a private equity firm or established HCM player wanting Cornerstone’s multi-tenant SaaS architecture?
how much runway do some of the smaller workforce management vendors have given a new burst of energy from Kronos around its user experience, mobile capabilities, and global expansion — and when might Kronos itself beconsidering further acquisitions of its own and/or an IPO to provide a liquidity event for their private equity owners?
and speaking of private equity owners liking their liquidity events, what’s the most likely scenario for Ceridian’s owners to achieving their return of capital? and what about those folks at Vista Equity Partners who own SumTotal et al? or General Atlantic over at TriNet? or KKR and Northgate Arinso? (Boy, that list of HRM software/services companies that are PE-owned is impressive!)
what about those interesting smaller players like Rypple, Sonar6 and similar getting acquired for the energy and modern technology that they bring? there are some very interesting small, niche players in our space that have also been talent magnets, but one wonders how much scale they can build with their mostly quite narrow products in a market that favors bulking up?
which PEOs will be the mega-aggregators in this uniquely American business model, not to mention the global roll-up underway in indigenous payroll service bureaus where small fry around the world simply can’t keep up with the technology investments this business now demands? the same could be asked about 3rd party benefits administration players in the US, which is also ripe for further roll-ups by the big guns: and, my personal favorite,
who will be left standing among the formerly independent talent management single process automators, from consolidation across the background checking firms to those offering the classic ATS and right on through performance management and org charting/management?

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

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

Change is change, and it’s never without extra effort on everyone’s part even when it’s change for the good. When we went from S/V Mar-Lin Nights to M/V SmartyPants, a change for which we had long prepared and one anticipated with great enthusiasm, it was nevertheless daunting to take the controls of our new trawler for the first time. So when ownership/leadership changes happen suddenly, and without your advice and consent, to the vendor of one or more of the HRM delivery system platform components upon which you rely, it’s little wonder that you feel some whiplash. And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the “new”company’s leadership puts out soothing messages all around. But despite the best intentions of everyone concerned, prepare for the possibility of some disruption when you hear that your vendor has just been acquired. If you’re faced with a rocky ride, you’ll at least be prepared. And if you’re pleasantly surprised, shout that acquirer’s praises to the heavens or via a comment right here.

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

Free Agent Nation: Nail Tech Tales

: Nail Tech Tales

When Daniel Pink’s now classic “Free Agent Nation” was published in 2001, it brought to public attention the world in which I had been living for much of my professional life. Just in my little neighborhood, at the intersection of HRM and IT, I knew well several dozen solos, like me, who were earning a good living as itinerant, billable hours contingent workers. We were HRM software implementation team members and project managers, HRM delivery system strategists and business analysts, and every flavor of HRM subject matter specialists.

These were and continue to be very well-educated folks (many Enteprise Irregulars also fit this profile) who, even when the economy has been just awful, have savings from the fat years upon which to rely in the lean ones. These are folks who work hard, play hard, travel heavily, sacrifice family life to their careers, build and sustain friendships within their professional “neighborhood,” refer business to each other but with care to match the work to the worker as objectively as possible, and within which community I’ve built some lifelong, very close friendships. So when I sat down (on an airplane as I recall) to read Daniel’s book, this was my image of free agency — nothing to do with sports teams or entertainment folks and everything to do with Jan Fretwell (still a very active HRMS implementation project manager/coach) and Bill Kutik (who needs no introduction as the impresario of our neighborhood).

Over the last decade since our move to Fort Myers, and even more so during this dreadful recession, I’ve come to appreciate the true extent to which we’re surrounded by a much larger array of service providers who are also self employed (i.e. free agents) but who lack the earning power and, therefore, the protections, the safety net, of my professional contractor/consultant colleagues. Hair dressers are mostly self-employed, renting their work stations from shop owners with that rental covering their share of all the fixed and variable expenses of keeping the hair salon operating. Many car salesmen are self-employed, keeping a portion of the sales commission on the cars they sell with the rest going to the showroom/dealership owner to cover the fixed and variable expenses of keeping those showrooms open. Almost all Realtors are self-employed, with those operating out of realty firms owned by others paying a hefty part of their earned commissions for the privilege and facilities of operating under a Realtor’s umbrella. Our practically on retainer carpenter, our window washer and power siding washers, our tree trimmer (they grow like mad in this climate) and boat cleaner, and the list goes on of terrific, self-employed people whose work enables us to live where we choose while I continue to prefer day job to all of the above. And when the economy tanked, and everyone who uses these services, including us, did more themselves or did without (you should see what a skipped window washing creates in the land of the mega-insects, but it’s certainly not top priority for those whose mortgages are under water), many to most of these very hard-working folks had absolutely no safety net, little to no savings to draw down while waiting out the great recession, no unemployment to tide them over, no health care coverage, no nothing. While public employees fretted over paying more of their generous health insurance premiums and co-pays, while laid-off salaried corporate workers struggled with COBRA, these free agents of modest earnings in the best of times lost their homes, moved in with family members, went without any health care, applied for food stamps, and showed up, for the first time ever, at our food pantries and Goodwill.

What brought home to me the impossibly dark underside of the free agent nation, of the stark difference in circumstance between my educated consulting colleagues and their much lower paid but very hard working free agent cousins, was the nail tech tales. As it happens, my nail tech is a college graduate who had worked her way through college as a nail tech and then found that she couldn’t find work in her chosen field (Fort Myers has a VERY meager corporate base) at anything close to what she made as a nail tech, let alone could she have the schedule she needed to raise her grandchild (that’s another story). She’s smart, reliable, honest, a delightful companion for that hour I spend with her, and someone whose work is to a very high standard. Frankly, I could ask for no better description of my own work by my clients. And everything was going pretty well for her and her husband (he’s in the hospitality industry as are so many in our resort area) until the economy tanked. Hospitality/vacations was clearly the first place that everyone cut, and there went his otherwise decently paying but modest job. Next up were cutbacks by so many of her regulars — stretching the time between manicures, even more so between pedicures, foregoing the little extras and reducing their tips — and that’s for the ones that didn’t leave the area to find jobs elsewhere or to double up with family. Mortgage under water, sole support now of husband and grandchild, this amazing woman still smiled at each client and listened to their tales of woe, hour after hour, always the professional nail tech whose trade involves playing father confessor and shrink to her clients.

The economy is recovering, very slowly, and many businesses will add to their employed workforces eventually. For those lucky enough to be employees, there will be some kind of employer-sponsored health care coverage, some other benefits, COBRA if laid off or even leaving voluntarily, workman’s comp if hurt on the job, fair labor standards laws governing overtime, unemployment if laid off in the future and all the other benefits of being a traditional employee. But in a nation of free agents — and you’ll know we’re there if you just look around — it’s well past time that we adjusted our labor laws, our tradition of employer-sponsored benefits, and all of our thinking about free agency being the the acme of capitalist independence (which it certainly has been for me) to consider the vast army of lower paid service workers upon whom we depend but for whom we as a country have provided absolutely nothing comparable to their employee cousins.

Please note that this is being published with the full permission of my wonderful nail tech who is profiled here, permission for which I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Daniel Pink, who doesn’t know me from Adam, for helping shape my understanding of the broader policy issues associated with the growing ranks of the self-employed. If we expect to have a vibrant, durably successful economy, we need to revise labor policies and, more importantly, attitudes shaped by and relevant to our agrarian ancestors and the industrial age that followed. In today’s Free Agent Nation, those antiquated policies and the assumptions upon which they are based are not merely outdated; they are stultifying and dangerous.

A Bloom’s Christmas: Inventory Management And Retail Retold

Bloom's Camera Catalogue Circa 1950

On Christmas Eve, my Dad’s retail camera shop closed early, and we knew we’d have him with us all that next day. Really just with us, even if he was too tired for much conversation after working the very long hours of the retail Christmas season. New Year’s Day was for taking inventory, and it was all hands, even my very small hands, to the wheel. But Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were really special. Time alone with my father Jack, who ran a modest camera shop with his brothers Paul and Herman (who published his “romantic” novels under the name Harmon Bellamy), was rare and precious.

When I was really young, my Dad left for work before dawn and rarely got home before I was put to bed. Friday nights were usually spent having Shabbat dinner, with all my Bloom aunts/uncles/cousins and even great aunts/uncles (those without their own children), at my grandmother’s house. After dinner, Dad went off to Schul with his brothers. On Saturday mornings, we were all off to Schul, but we were orthodox so my only male first cousin Elliot got to sit with his Dad. The store was open on Saturdays, so my Dad, in spite of the Orthodox prohibition against working on Shabbat, went from schul to work on many Saturdays, especially if they were short-handed by employee illness or vacations. Summer Sundays were for golf in the mornings and family time in the afternoons, often spent visiting family who lived far away. In those pre-turnpike (yes, before there were highways, there were turnpikes) days, the trip to Hartford, less than thirty miles away, took well over an hour. But on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we didn’t go visiting; we stayed home so that Dad could rest, and that meant me sitting beside him as we watched TV (once we had one) or read from the World Book Encyclopedia. My Dad was a great reader, something my sister and I have “inherited” from him.

In the run-up to Christmas, everyone worked long hours, and it was rare to see my Dad during December. My cousin Ronni and I, from about age seven, ran the strange machine in the open mezzanine above the shop floor that took addresses on metal plates and transferred them to labels for the Christmas mailing of catalogues (like the one pictured here) and calendars. Long before it was fashionable for small businesses, Bloom’s Photo Supply was into direct marketing, and we carefully collected the names and addresses of every customer and caller, all of which were entered in the perpetual address files that my Uncle Herman kept.

Sitting in the mezzanine, Ronni and I bickered over whose turn it was to load the metal plate (not fun), load the next item to be addressed (not bad), or turn the wheel (most fun) and discussed what we saw going on all around us. Excess inventory, the bain of every retailer then and now, was a major topic, along with fanciful ways of getting rid of it profitably. While I can never be sure, I think those conversations with Ronni must have been the origin of my now famous story about the invention of Christmas as an inventory management scheme. In that story, the wise men were retail merchants who saw in the humble birth of Mary and Joseph’s son a solution to the already age-old problem faced by retailers everywhere of how to ensure that the year ended without extraneous, highly unprofitable inventory. This is one interpretation of the Christmas story that my Christian Wallace family had never heard until they met me.

By the time we were ten, Christmas season found Ronni and me, the two youngest Bloom cousins, helping behind the counter after school and on weekends, ringing up sales, selling film and other simple products, watching for shop-lifters (you thought that was something new?), recording those sales in the perpetual inventory files kept by my Uncle Herman (there never was nor ever will be again a filer like my Uncle Herman!), and generally learning the business. Everyone worked, including our mothers who were otherwise traditional homemakers, during the month before Christmas, and by Christmas Eve, we were all exhausted. But the lifeblood of retail is the Christmas shopping season — always was so and still is — so our family budget for the next year was written by the ringing of those Christmas cash registers. And I can still hear, ever so faintly, that special ka-ching when I’ve made a big sale.

My Dad was buried on my 50th birthday. My cousin Ronni, just four months younger than me, died in her mid-thirties. Cousin Elliot took over the business from our fathers, built it into something completely non-retail but VERY successful, and sold it many years ago. But if you’re ever in Springfield MA, you can still see the four story mural of long gone camera and photographic supply brands on the exposed wall of Bloom’s Photo Supply’s last retail address, on Worthington Street just up from Main Street.

For me, sitting in my usual place at the keyboard, Christmas Eve will always be special. Years after my Dad retired and I had a business of my own, we talked daily, with me updating him on my business in response to his questions. You can’t fail to hear the ghosts of a retailer’s Christmas past even as my very non-retail business thrived. “How’s business?” “Business is great.” “Are your clients paying on time? “They sure are, Dad.” “And are their checks clearing the bank?” “Absolutely.” This Christmas Eve, I’d give every one of those checks for another Christmas with my Dad.

Thomas Wailgum Inspired Post #1 — My Airing Of Grievances

Modeling My Grievances!

I was much inspired by Thomas Wailgum’s post today about how various “tech vendors, CIOs, analysts and other assorted IT types” had let him down in 2010. It’s a great catalogue of bad behavior by people and companies who should know better, and I enjoyed it so much that I read it twice before starting my own list. Then I tried out a few of my grievances on Twitter and got some encouraging words from @SAP_Jarret. So, before I call it a night, I thought I’d clear my mind by airing my own grievances about the folks, including the customers, whom I meet all too often at the intersection of HRM and IT. This is just a “starter kit” of same; otherwise I’ll be up all night.

HR executives who think the software should tell them by what metrics they should be running their business. If you really don’t know what about the people side of the business drives your business outcomes, then you sure as hell don’t know what about the people business you should be working at measuring and improving or rethinking completely. As a small holiday gift to anyone who fits this description, I offer you my blog post series on strategic planning for your HRM delivery system entitled “Follow The Yellow Brick Road” (the linked page points to all four parts of this series).
HR executives who don’t understand that you can’t do talent management if you wouldn’t know talent if you tripped over it. There’s really no way to improve any of your talent management processes, from sourcing and acquisition through ever flavor of development and deployment right on to performance management and compensation and then looping back through succession and workforce planning (and there’s a lot more to it than just these few highlights), unless you have intimate knowledge of your business, its work-producing roles, the critical drivers of success in those roles (dare I mention KSAOCs?), and so forth. So start by understanding these points and designing the relevant HRM processes, and you’ll soon discover that you have crap for data in your underlying systems which is going to need a major cleanup in order to support effective talent management. There’s a lot of work to be done en route to effective talent management so start with the talent and roles that matter most.
HRM #EnSW vendors (I’m starting to blog in Twitter #hashtags, which is really scary unless you’re too young to remember what hash was used for before Twitter) who claim their subscribed/single tenant hosted software is SaaS. This makes me crazy, even when their software is quite good. If you believe that single tenant is the right model, whether licensed/on-premise or hosted, then just say so — as Harry Debes, Lawson’s CEO does, discussed here and here. But please don’t try to glom onto all things trendy by confusing the hell out of buyers. Calling myself tall blond and thin does not make it so.
HRM #EnSW vendors whose software really doesn’t do what the vendor’s representative says it will do during sales demos to naive customers. This is closely related to #3 above and #5 below. Not everyone knows — but they surely ought to by now — that a good demo person can make their software do almost anything and whiz past/gloss over any inconvenient little limitations or glaring errors. But I’m still seeing, literally seeing those wide-eyed prospects, on the show flow at #HRTechConf, oohing and aahing while the vendor’s demo dolly shows them just how easily their employee-only talent acquisition product is going to handle their contracted for non-employee workers. Do these people not remember what Phyllis Diller looked like before all that plastic surgery?
Customer evaluation teams without a clue (and without “killer” scenarios — the linked page points to all my posts on this topic) who later claim that their vendor overstated capabilities. Frankly, customers have no one to blame but themselves if they haven’t done a thorough enough set of “killer” scenario-based demos to assure themselves of what the products they’re evaluating actually do. Of course all US payroll software is going to be able to calculate withholding taxes, but will the product in question handle absolutely all the jurisdictions of interest to you? Surprise! Not all do every jurisdiction, every reciprocity agreement, etc. And of course every performance management product is going to be able to route whatever passes for the appraisal “document” for approvals, but that doesn’t mean that the routing will be driven by the underlying database’s nuanced role-based structures rather than your having to set up each such routing individually.
CMOs at #EnSW vendors who know neither HRM nor enterprise software nor our industry but are sure they can learn OJT in a month or two. This is personally annoying because these folks are often the gatekeepers for analysts trying to find out more about their company and its products, and it’s even worse when they see themselves as the spokesmodels for their companies long before they’ve got a clue about our industry. Mentioning no names (although I’m really dying to do so), the most egregious version of this was the CMO of a US HRM #EnSW company who thought that having a Continental accent and trendy eyeglasses trumped a complete absence of product or industry knowledge.
Anyone whom I don’t know who calls me to ask for something — for me to take a briefing with their client or company, to spend an hour discussing their HR/IT issues, to speak at a conference or to contribute to their work in some other way — who hasn’t done me the courtesy of first finding out who I am and what I do. The worst of these lately are the recruiters for those so-called “expert” councils/roundtables/networks, the ones that want you to do hour-long brain dumps with their mostly hedge-fund or similar financial analysts. Be assured that, if I’m calling you to ask for something, I will have checked out your background via LinkedIn, your online presence via a blog/Twitter/articles/etc., and how and through whom we might be connected via LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s the least I can do out of respect for your time, and I really appreciate this courtesy in return.

Thank you Thomas Wailgum. We haven’t met, but I hope I’ll have that pleasure. In the meantime, with your inspiration, I’ve gotten a few grievances off my chest and am feeling better already. Time to get some sleep!

The Wallace And Me: A Love Story

Ron and I met when he was a Captain in the US Air Force, stationed at Hanscome Field outside of Boston, and I was the payroll operations and systems manager at Polaroid by day and getting my MBA by night at Boston University. Was it love at first sight? Who remembers? But what I do remember is that he was the first man I’d known — and there’d been a few — who wasn’t thinking “you’re perfect, I love you, now change.”

We became friends as I dated two of his fellow officers, one of whom was my last valiant attempt at dating a Jewish guy and the other of whom was going to be a doctor, which almost qualified him as Jewish (and who later married a Jewish woman as I recall). My most active anti-war years were behind me, along with the demonstrations, sit-ins and one arrest, but it was still pretty wierd walking into the Officers’ Club on the base.

Ron was (and is) funny, smart, reliable, able to fix almost anything electro/mechanical/even plumbing, and did I mention funny? He shares my love of travel, meeting new (some might say strange) people, casual (some might say crummy) clothes (but now worn with nearly perfect large diamond stud earrings because any fashionista knows that accessories make the outfit), a wide range of intellectual pursuits (here our interests are VERY different but equally non-obsessive), and the list goes on. His acting out of various communication satellites, complete with their “voices,” leaves me ROFL, even now. And it’s really hard to have a lingering fight with someone who’s wiggling their ears.

We took to each other as friends and then, through circumstances that should not be a part of my indelible electronic story, became so much more practically overnight. But Ron was headed to the West Coast when his tour was up (he’d grown up in the Pacific Northwest but had been stationed on Mt. Tamalpais for a while and had fallen in love with California) , and I was a Northeasterner born and bred. More importantly, neither of us had marriage as an exit strategy. So we just enjoyed our time together, although that was very limited by my much more than full-time job and graduate studies and Ron’s several stints of TDY.

As my MBA graduation was in sight, we had the wild idea of my taking time off from work after my graduation and our doing a cross-country camping trip (yes, camping — money was very tight, and it sounded like quite an adventure to a girl whose furthest journey west had been to Pittsburgh). Ron would hang out in San Fran while looking for his first real job (BSEE, MSEE, Air Force), and I would fly ‘home” to pick up where I left off. But Ron’s tour was going to end in December of my last year of graduate school, so he decided to hang out in Boston, working on bio-feedback devices for a semi-crazed inventor, until I graduated.

Well, somewhere along the line, our plans changed, and the cross-country camping trip became our honeymoon. At the end of June, 1972, I graduated from BU with my MBA, said goodbye to my great job at Polaroid, and said I do. It never occurred to either of us that I should change my name, which is just one more thing I loved then and love now about The Wallace. He came with no preconceived notions of who should do what in a marriage or about marriage itself. So off we went, with my shattered parents sobbing because I’d married not only a gentile but an out of work engineer at a time of high unemployment in that field (as evidenced by newspapers clippings on the subject that my mother sent to me quite regularly).

I won’t bore you with the details of the next thirty-eight years, but if spending many weeks in a 6 x 6 foot tent with the occasional night in a crummy motel (just to use a real toilet and shower) and crossing Texas in the blazing summer heat (this before A/C in cars, or at least in the budget car that Ron owned) didn’t end our marriage in its first few months, then this marriage stood a reasonable chance of success. And so it did, but not without a ton of ups and downs and sideways, rescoping, rescheduling, rebudgeting, re-everythinging, just like every wholesale organizational transformation project that you’ve ever seen. Why Ron didn’t run screaming into the night on many an occasion is beyond me, but this is one tough hombre.

And that brings us to today and the impetus for this post. Ron had shoulder surgery this morning, and I so wish I had a third shoulder so that he wouldn’t have to go through what I’ve already been through twice. There’s little in ordinary life more painful that shoulder surgery rehab, and I know he’s facing many weeks to months of that. He doesn’t complain, he just gets on with it. We’ve even had a few laughs today as I try to help him with the things he can’t do with just one hand. You know that part of the traditional marriage ceremony that goes “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health?” Well, if you’re married long enough, all of that and more happens. How very lucky I am to have found The Wallace.

Snowdons Of Yesteryear: History Is Repeating Itself

: A Night In The Dinosaur Graveyard *

About this time last year, I did a post entitled “Where Are The Snowdens Of Yesteryear: A Cautionary Tale” in which I told the tale of long-forgotten mainframe HRMS software brands whose death-knell was struck in the sea change from mainframe to client server computing that began, at least in the HRM software world, with the launch of PeopleSoft in 1987. It’s worth a reread because the history of computing generational sea changes is repeating itself — and with the same results in terms of creating a new crop of dinosaur brands and products. And yes, I plan to name names.

For the original “Snowdens of Yesteryear,” their brand names are well-known to those of us who witnessed their demise, first losing their status as momentum players and then, more slowly, being relegated to the extreme backrooms of the latest of late adopter end-users. But many of the readers of this blog weren’t yet living professionally at the intersection of HRM and IT from the launch of PeopleSoft in1987 until the “if it’s not really client server we’re not going to buy it” aha moment in the early 90’s, so do reread my earlier column as background for this one.

When our HRM software industry went from mainframe/green screen to client server computing, there were a lot of important technical changes happening, but there was not a major rethinking of the underlying HRM data design or processes. First mainframe and then client server computing were designed to improve the lives of HR/payroll/benefits folks and to reduce the administrative burden of data entry. None of the HRM client server products, including PeopleSoft, really stepped back to consider such important developments as the growing role of non-employee workers (aka vendor employees, contingent or contract workers), the central role of KSAOCs in any attempt to automate or improve strategic HRM processes, that a total compensation perspective was essential because a dollar spent on compensation or benefits was still a dollar spent, and the list goes on. And none of these early client server products were designed for employees or managers, let alone position seekers and every flavor of beneficiary, to use directly, let alone to use collaboratively or mobilely (is that even a word?).

In fact, so similar in data design and process were these new client server applications that, when the old Integral Systems, Dave Duffield’s company before he left to found PeopleSoft, sued PeopleSoft alleging misuse of trade secrets (or some such nonsense), PeopleSoft’s legal team (with help from a couple of industry pros, including me and Bill Kutik) was able to demonstrate that the similarities in data design and elsewhere between the shiny new PeopleSoft and the somewhat long in the tooth Integral could well be explained as simply representing then common industry practice. That’s right, the shiny new PeopleSoft had the same unmodeled, throw in everthing but the kitchen sink, and surround it with miles of procedural logic employee status code as did Integral’s mainframe HRMS (as well as Genesys, Cyborg, InSci, MSA, Tesseract, and all the others of that era). We won’t even talk about PeopleSoft’s complete lack of systemic effective-dating and having only the thinnest use of meta-data to reduce the extent to which business rules were buried through the miles of PeopleCode. PeopleSoft was visionary in its own way, and its marketing was masterful, but it was quite grounded in many of the same concepts about HRM and HRM data as were the earlier mainframe HRMSs.

As we move from that first client server era right into the cloud, there’s a lot more going on than may be obvious. The entire basis of software development has changed, from writing those miles of procedural code, whatever the language, however elegant the code and whatever the success of agile development processes, to developing proper object models of the domain and letting those models drive the development, ideally directly. And those proper object models (dare I mention that many of them are using my own IP as an input?), really do represent a rethinking of HRM for the 21st century. Add in embedded intelligence, collaborative HRM processes, entirely mobile applications, and more, and it becomes very obvious very quickly that this isn’t just about having vendors host their own software and subscribe it on a usage basis.

Unfortunately, many current HRM software vendors don’t have the resources, vision and/or talent to rethink and rearchitect their products. Some are trying to take older concepts of HRM and older HRM software (e.g. single tenant, without adequate configuration capabilities, and written procedurally rather than making extensive use of meta-data or even definitional development to extricate business rules from the code) that was never built for the cloud, and reposition it as SaaS just as those mainframe vendors of yesteryear tried to mimic client server with screen-scraping and various other clumsy immitations. Some of the largest, most successful vendors have undertaken a variety of parallel but don’t cannabalize the installed base approaches, and some of these may well succeed IF their vendors are willing to take the necessary financial hit when their licensed/on-premise cash cow clients opt into better fit HRM SaaS InFullBloom platforms from them or others. While we can all understand the challenge of backward compatibility faced by successful vendors when they realize the need to make a discontinuous leap in order to remain momentum players in a new generation of computing, weighing too heavily the importance of backward compatibility can hobble that vendor’s future.

We can already identify the well-respected, widely installed (so unlikely to disappear any time soon) HRM client server Snowdens of Yesteryear — SAP’s BS HCM 7.x, Oracle’s EBS HCM 12.x, PeopleSoft HCM 9.x, Lawson HCM and many more lesser brands. These products are still sold, supported and being enhanced by their vendors, customers are still upgrading and being upsold additional modules, and real efforts are being made by these vendors to bring these products into a more social, mobile, and cloudy world. But in the very DNA of these products are the seeds of their eventual demise. The future for Oracle HCM is announced, and it’s Fusion HCM. The future for SAP HCM is not so obviously announced, but I believe it will be an evolution of the architecture of Business ByDesign. Lawson has a more recently architected/developed HCM, but it was architected for a licensed/on-premise or single tenant hosted world, and Mr. Debes, Lawson’s CEO, is opposed on the record to true SaaS. Among the smaller, HCM-only software vendors, one doubts that the Spectrums and PDSs will cross the chasm to true SaaS, and their installed bases may be entirely happy to sit this one out. But then such firms were never momentum players. What will be really interesting is whether or not some of today’s big name talent management suite vendors, especially the ones with known architectural challenges when it comes to SaaS InFullBloom, will be able to bring new product to market fast enough to survive the consolidation of that segment of the market when pricing pressures and architecturally-delivered capabilities from those with true SaaS drown those without.

I may not be professionally active when the next generational sea change occurs in our industry. When, in ten or fifteen years, we begin the next great leap from HRM SaaS InFullBloom to whatever comes next, I may well be past my career expiry date. But I didn’t want to let the current generational turn go by without using the experience from that last such change to inform my thinking about what’s happening right now. If you’re an end-user, it’s just as important as it always was to know where you fit on the adoption curve, not only for new technology but also for new/current thinking about HRM, and to choose vendors who are a good fit for you along that curve. If you’re trying to make a career for yourself within the HCM vendor community, it’s usually best to go with one of the momentum players if you’ve got the right KSAOCs to get in and the right lifestyle to stay in. Never a dull moment at the corner of HRM and IT.

The wonderful illustration above is the cover of a children’s book, complete with holograms, entitled: ” A Night In The Dinosaur Graveyard: A Prehistoric Ghost Story With Ten Spooky Holograms” which is available here from www.Amazon.com . The illustrator is Wayne Anderson .

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