In Full Bloom

Big Conference Attendee Tips — #HRTechConf, #HRTechWorld, #WdayRising

It’s that time of year again, and this year I’m scheduled for three major HR technology conferences between now and Halloween. Each is very different, but for me each represents a valuable opportunity to learn, network, visit with old friends, share what I know, and did I mention learn?

I’ll have my husband, Ron Wallace, with me at both HR Tech Conference & Expo in Chicago and HR Tech World Congress in Paris (trying keeping him away from Paris!), and that’s a huge help because I’ll be speaking at each of these conferences as well as hosting all manner of industry meetings. For Workday Rising, which is also in Chicago this year, I’m going on my own safe in the knowledge that, as an analyst there, I won’t have quite so many miles to scoot nor as many industry meetings to attend. Hopefully, I’ll get to see all of you at one or more of these important events in our industry’s calendar.

But whether you’re going to all of these or just one of them (and I can’t imagine that any of you will be missing all of them), it’s time to finalize your preparations so that you get the most out of your time in Chicago and/or Paris. I’d add that what I propose below applies equally well to any other sizable vendor-produced or industry events of the HR technology persuasion. They may also apply to all manner of other technology-related events, but you’ll have to decide that for yourselves.

If you’re anything like me, from the time you arrive in a conference city, you’re off and running, non-stop, on:

vendor/industry meetings,
exhibition hall booth visiting (I make a valiant effort each year to stop at everything single booth, but now the two big HR tech shows have gotten so large that many of these visits are flybys at best with no disrespect intended),
session attending,
session delivery,
intense but wonderful hallway and restroom exchanges (do guys do as much substantive chatting and networking in their restrooms as we do?),
time with valued colleagues and long-standing industry friends,
an occasional meal and more than an occasional drink,
tweetups and meetups,
our annual Brazen Hussies gatherings, and more.

As I’m finalizing my own preparations for these conferences, I thought you might enjoy a few tips from my personal list. And like all good twitterstreams, please read from the bottom up:

Bonus tip: This is where I had planned to suggest that you read my entire blog, from 11/9/2009 forward, but that seemed really pushy. Instead, just read those posts that are relevant to your purpose in Paris and/or Chicago. I can’t help but encourage you to focus on the posts that discuss what’s happening in HRM software that’s just out of sight, what you should be looking for “derriere le mirroir.” What you don’t know can cost you dearly! And it will come as no secret that I’m urging buyers to be really pushy with vendors whose imprecision about what they have on offer fits right in with this wacked our presidential election.

#Tip #10: Get dates for #HRTechConf and #HRTechWorld 2017 on your calendar and in your budget right now. Each of these shows has its own special flavor and areas of emphasis, and only some of you may find that attending both is justified, but whatever your inclinations, do get that budget justification in process now.

#Tip #9: Talk, talk, talk and listen, listen, listen because sharing questions, ideas and experiences with colleagues is the point. Bring your list of the folks you follow most on Twitter and make it a point to meet them. Come up to me after my sessions and hit me with your questions. And do feel quite comfortable approaching almost anyone about anything reasonable; it takes a village, and that’s HCM and HR technology all over. And I would definitely get your foreign language skills in gear — a MUST if you’re hoping to support global organizations or becoming a global citizen yourself — whether you’re planning to attend the Paris conference or just go out for authentic Italian food in Chicago.

#Tip #8: Bring a swag carrier if you’re flying in and plan to carry your giant stuffed toy home in your lap. Ron can’t imagine coming home from one of these conferences without a new monster, but I’ve warned him not to expect one this year given Randstad’s announced intent to acquire Monster. And if you’re a vendor doing some swag planning, we love: umbrellas (the rainy season is on right now, and you can never have too many), interesting stress reduction toys, cuddly creatures (why doesn’t anyone ever give away big stuffed alligators), shoe bags (those soft ones in which you pack your shoes when traveling), towels (all sizes appreciated), t-shirts (medium for Ron, XL for me — embarrassing but true), international electrical plug sets, great bottles of wine, and books we’d really like to read, but please no more vendor-branded tablet or phone covers. The risk of meeting with Vendor A with your iPad wrapped in Vendor B is just too high.

#Tip #7: Leave room in your schedule for serendipity and for nature breaks — well at least nature breaks. I’ve met some amazing women during those nature breaks; I can’t speak for what goes on in the men’s room. Given the sometimes impossible lines at the lady’s rooms at US convention venues, I think the French idea of shared restrooms — common sink area and a collection of stalls into which you slip as they become available — has real merit. Why should women be waiting on line while stalls in a separate men’s room are free? And sharing the sinks would also provide opportunities for mixed gender ad hoc discussions of conference-related topics — or not.

#Tip #6: Attend as many sessions as possible. I do because, at least when there’s NO sales crap allowed, they’re generally excellent. Come prepared to be an active listener, to take notes, to provide a twitterstream for your colleagues who couldn’t attend in person, and to boo any speaker who dares to give you a sales pitch or to trash their competitors. And the best thing we can do to support the hard-working men who program these conferences — so Peter Russell for the Paris show and Steve Boese for Chicago — is to complete those evaluation forms, adding comments as appropriate.

#Tip #5: Don’t try to attend > 3 vendor parties after a long first day of sessions. I hate missing all those great parties, but my party all night and work all day years are behind me — and behind many to most of you as well although some of you aren’t ready to admit it. Save at least a few brain cells for the second day of sessions; you’ll thank me if you do. And for those of you attending the Paris show, surrounded by some of the greatest wines in the world, I’ve learned my lesson about indulging in too much of those wines at the mid-morning coffee breaks.

#Tip #4A: Download the conference’s app and learn how to use it. Increasingly, this is the only way to know what’s going on, and the best of these apps support your networking goals, plug you into the best parties, offer suggestions on what sessions may be of greatest interest, etc. Being the oldest person you know in the industry, I like to support my aging memory with an overall itinerary for myself that includes my travel plans, all meetings with agenda, attendee information and logistics, location of the exhibitors I most want to visit, location of the sessions I most want to attend, details on relevant parties, and more. And while I carry this electronically, I also carry — yes, I really do — a hard copy. No dead phone battery, small screen/tired eyes combo, or last minute change is going to catch me unprepared. But of course, you probably don’t need such backup.

#Tip #4: Plan your conference in advance. With what vendors do you want to schedule extended and/or private demos? Make those appointments now. What attendees with whom you share specific issues/vendors/industry concerns/etc. do you want to meet? And if you’re all on the same true SaaS product, you won’t have to waste a minute asking each other what release you’re on! Do that outreach and arrange those meetings now. Pick your sessions and, because there are too many good ones for just one person, find a buddy with whom you can divide and conquer. Better yet, bring a whole team to these conferences and cover the ground.

#Tip #3: Carry a water bottle and refill it at every chance you get. Convention center climates are designed to dessicate, and they don’t always have enough refreshment stations. Lately I’ve been carrying a protein bar or two in my briefcase, something you may also want to consider. And I could also suggest that you bring a restorative flask, but we HR people would never make such a suggestion.

#Tip #2A: Assume that the convention center will be too cold/too hot/too drafty/too whatever, and dress accordingly. We’ll be overrun with executives from across the industry, buyers and sellers, so you may want to lose the flipflops, cutoffs, and anything that reveals parts of you that I’d rather not see. Here I’m showing my personal biases, but business casual does not translate in my book into anything lower down the sartorial scale than clean pressed jeans, a similarly clean ironed t-shirt with at least short sleeves, most of your tattoos tactfully covered, and shoes. Of course, these suggestions only apply to the granddaddy of HR technology shows, the big Kahuna, in Chicago, and to Workday Rising. Many of our Continental colleagues lean toward business formal, as in dark suit and tie. Hmm….

#Tip #2: Wear your most comfortable walking shoes. There will be few places to sit except in sessions and long convention center distances to cover. Yes, I know that my younger female colleagues will want to show off those Manolo D’orsay spikes — the latest in fashionista circles — and I don’t blame you, but be sure you’ve got a suitably designed male colleague at the ready to carry you after the first hour. Having done my fair share of spike heel time, I’m convinced that there’s a direct connection to my now arthritic joints. It doesn’t matter what shoes I’ll be wearing as I flash by on my magic carpet (electric scooter), but you’ll be limping by noon if you don’t select your shoes carefully. And speaking of that magic carpet, we finally found, in an English antique shop, a suitable horn so that I can give fair warning before running over fellow conference goers.

#Tip #1: For vendors of greatest interest, do your homework in advance, preparing the mental scenarios that you’d like to see, so that booth time is hands-on demo time. And be sure to spend time on the floor checking out some of the newer/smaller vendors. There’s a ton of innovation going on in our industry, and it isn’t always on offer at the flashiest booths. In spite of the heavy industry consolidation, VC moola has been flowing into all things HR technology, so there are going to be a bazillion vendors at both conferences of which you’ve never heard — and many of which will disappear just as quickly.

Most important: whichever conferences you attend, be sure to say thank you to the conference organizers. They work their butts of all year to give you the best possible learning/networking/problem solving experience, and they deserve our gratitude. See you soon….

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

For this 15th anniversary of jihadist Islam’s declaration of war on the United States, I wanted to express my anger at what this war has cost all of us in the loss of privacy and freedom as well as in human lives and treasure. It’s a war whose enemy combatants wear no recognizable uniforms, dwell in the shadows, and do not recognize the Geneva Conventions. And it’s a war that cannot be won solely on the battlefield.

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

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

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

“Dear friends and family,

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

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

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

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

Let’s give them hell. Naomi

Update: 9-10-2016 Ron’s and my commitment to living large, to living well, to showing those bastards that our vision of civilization won’t give in to theirs, is even stronger now than it was fifteen years ago. We know that they’re spending their 15th anniversary of 9/11 plotting murder, mayhem and the overthrow of all that we hold dear, but we refuse to spend our 15th anniversary in fear of what they may do next. And to those in our own country who would preach fear of “the other,” who would preach isolation from this dangerous world, who believe our best days are somewhere in the past, I say you couldn’t be more wrong. So let’s sing out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETrr-XHBjE

Workday’s 8/24/2016 Earnings Call — Non-Financial Thoughts

There’s been some great coverage of their latest earnings call, to include from Dennis Howlett at Diginomica and Larry Dignan at ZDNet (and please do point me to other high quality coverage). Now I’m neither a financial or IT analyst, but I do think there are a few items from that earnings call which deserve a little more attention. In addition to what was said explicitly, here’s what I “heard.”

The Power Of The Platform

Neither hyped by Workday on the call nor questioned deeply by the financial analysts, Workday Learning and Student will be generally available this month — although it’s still early days for these newer capabilities — and baked into their sales machine with good uptake. More importantly for this student of definitional, models-driven development, there’s a growing body of evidence that Workday is not only getting substantial reuse (translate: reduced development time/effort/cost/errors) from their object model (e.g. corporate learning courses/classes/content and academic courses/classes/content have tons in common in terms of their attribution and behaviors) but that their approach to development has reduced substantially the amount time/effort/cost/errors it takes to go from object model to delivered functionality.

When both Learning and Student first were mentioned, there were a number of comments to the effect that Workday might be biting off more than they realized to automate fully two such complex domains. Now you can look across what they’ve done and see how much leverage has been achieved by recognizing the “patterns in the problem” and abstracting those patterns to the greatest possible extent as effective-dated metadata. Of course this is how all modern software is being built, but you only get to do this systemically, thus getting maximum leverage from this approach for both vendor and customer, if you start from scratch, build your tools and methodologies to support this approach, and then impose strict and consistent discipline across the organization so that you’re not weighed down with exceptions.

The Power Of Interrogatory Configuration

I take a lot of teasing from my colleagues because of my emphasis on (some would say devotion to) some very specific design principles for enterprise software. One of these is interrogatory configuration. But what may have looked like foolish devotion to many is critical, in my view, to the vendor’s economics as well as to the customer’s sanity in the continuous implementation of true SaaS. Now that many vendors, particularly those with broad functional footprints, are working on some flavor of interrogatory configuration, the teasing has let up a little, but it should come as no surprise that I was delighted to hear Aneel speak about the “tooling” on which they’ve been working to reduce implementation cost/complexity/time.

While aimed (at least initially) at expediting the most common implementation paths for mid-market, non-manufacturing businesses, I’m reading between the lines to discern, given their past conservatism, that they wouldn’t have mentioned this until they’ve cracked the very difficult technical and domain expertise challenges of doing this. Aneel also mentioned that they’ll be talking more at Rising about what they’ve been doing, and I’ve got fingers crossed that we may see a demonstration. This is potentially huge, now with mid-market but over time with everyone.

The Power Of The IBM Relationship — Not Just IaaS

I don’t think there was a mention of financials and IBM in the same breath, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the possibilities here. IBM will be replacing their financials at some point, and I can’t imagine they would have gone to Workday for HCM (that’s confirmed) without thinking about the longer term pluses and minuses of bringing financials under the same architectural and object model umbrella. In my opinion, it’s only that level of true integration that provides the right foundation for predictive analytics at the speed of human decision-making.

But that degree of integration is not possible with SAP as HCM and FI run on fundamentally different architectures there. Plus S/4HANA only runs on HANA, and that competes directly with IBM’s DBMS market, something SAP didn’t do before. As for Oracle, their cloud applications only run on Oracle, which obviously competes with IBM’s DBMS market. Add that SAP and Oracle aren’t using (at least TMK) IBM’s cloud IaaS, and I think there’s a significant probability that IBM will move to Workday Financials when they’re ready for a next generation, true SaaS financials.

The Power of Partnerships That Go Poof!

First there was a lot of back channel discussion when Ultimate and NetSuite did their partnership. General view was that this was a good move for both firms, a primarily defensive move in a world where mid-market companies show a marked propensity to want financials and HCM applications to be “integrated.” There wasn’t as much discussion as I thought there should be at the time of how long this partnership would last once Oracle bought NetSuite, which was always assumed. Well, now that the NetSuite SaaS experiment has been bought back into the Oracle fold, there’s a lot to consider for customers of both companies who saw NetSuite and Ultimate, in addition to their other pluses, as the NOT Oracle and NOT ADP.

I think Ultimate loses big time on this even as pressure is increasing from mid-market buyers to get fully integrated ERP, which includes HCM. And I think this is a substantial net plus for Workday. Those mid-market customers are still hoping for a truly integrated HCM/Financials suite, and that’s something that NetSuite can’t provide even though it can certainly be made to interface smoothly with Oracle’s cloud HCM. And the uncertainty surrounding the channel competition (e.g., when does Oracle now offer its own cloud suite versus referring prospects to NetSuite? how does Oracle attach its own HCM suite to NetSuite or support a continued relationship with Ultimate?) bring opportunities in the mid-market for NetSuite’s competitors, now including Workday.

The Power Of Active Listening

I’ve been sitting in on a lot of earnings calls this year, educating myself about specific vendors and learning more about how financial analysts look at our market. One thing that fascinates me is how blandly those financial analysts pose their questions. I’m also amazed at how little attention is paid to the actual software, to its architecture, object model, development methodology, fit for purpose, etc. In my mind, what goes on behind the curtain is just as important, maybe more important, than what you can see easily in a demo or read from an earnings call transcript. There are many aspects of an enterprise software company which can be revised pretty quickly, from strategy to sales techniques to target market analysis. But vendors are for the most part stuck with their software foundations, with the good and bad decisions they’ve made about those foundations. While there’s always a certain amount of refactoring to be done, and smart vendors are always paying down their technical debt, the fact is that you cannot get to where most vendors want to be without having started as you meant to go on. Now that would be a great topic for one of these earnings calls.

Prep Now For Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, And The “Days Of Awe” — 5777

[Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Sunday, 10/2, and continues through sundown on Tuesday, 10/4. And thus begins the Hebrew year 5777. Yom Kippur beings at sundown on Tuesday, 10/11 and continues through sundown on Wednesday, 10/12/17.]

Last year’s Jewish High Holy Days occurred right when I was celebrating my 70th birthday, so I was already in the introspective, life assessing frame of mind which is a major focus of these holidays. 70 was the age I always thought of as really old, but of course I’ve now redefined old age to start at 90. 70 brought another decade of my life to a close, thus increasing the incentives for quiet reflection, reassessment and rededication which are central to this period on the Jewish calendar.

But this last year, while filled with so many of the good things in life for Ron and me, has brought us more horribly violent global conflicts and the millions of innocent refugees whose circumstances break our hearts, more fear of both terrorism and domestic gun violence and Zika, and US election primaries which not only have illuminated long unresolved cultural divides in my country but also have empowered those who would otherwise still be living under their rocks of prejudice, bigotry, reality TV’s narcissism, geopolitical ignorance, cultural insensitivity and even demagoguery. It’s been a really awful year for so many people, and all of this makes it more important than ever that we find space in our overbooked and over-connected lives to prepare for and then experience Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

So I thought I’d give everyone a month’s notice before the start of these holidays in hopes that you’ll have enough lead time to clear your calendars and minds for the annual stock taking which is at the heart of Judaism. It’s a wise person — and that includes everyone of my followers/readers no matter your religion or lack thereof — who will use this time to take stock of their lives, cherishing their accomplishments and vowing to mitigate their shortcomings, deciding what they’d like to do, see, experience, learn, accomplish, improve, etc. in the coming years as well of how and with whom they want to spend increasingly precious time.

Each year, even if I’ve been thinking about these questions at other times, I take seriously the purpose of the Days of Awe, that period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we Jews are commanded to take stock, to address our own shortcomings, and to rededicate our lives to higher purpose. We are also commanded, during this period, to resolve outstanding earthly issues before we seek atonement for our spiritual ones during Yom Kippur. Hopefully, I haven’t offended or harmed too many of you this year, and I’ve certainly tried to right any such wrongs. But, if I have wronged anyone inadvertently, please accept my apologies.

So what is it that we should be asking ourselves during the Days of Awe? Have we done as much as possible during the last year to serve mankind? Have we used our capabilities to the max in benefit not only of ourselves but of humanity? Have we dealt honestly with our family, friends and colleagues in both our personal and business dealings? Are there acts of kindness which we should have committed but whose moment we let pass without action? The list is long of all the ways in which we may or may not have lived up to our potential, and so is the list of potential commitments to improvement that we should be making for the New Year. But for us, these lists have long since been written.

Jews live with the responsibility to carry out 613 mitzvot (commandments) which, taken together, represent a value system that really does put the humanity back into human and the civilized back into civilization. And while many of those mitzvot may well appear outdated or even foolish when read on our smart phones while sipping a latte, it’s quite a collection of golden rules by which to live a full and worthwhile life while respecting the desire of others to do the same. Even if you’re completely non-religious, or if you practice a completely different religion, you’ll find in the mitzvot of Judaism at least a few ideas for improving your behavior, your contributions to society, your relationships and so much more. For your convenience, you can find the entire list at “Judaism 101.”

To my Jewish friends, family and colleagues, “L’shanah tovah tikatev v’taihatem,” may you and yours be inscribed in the Book of Life for a sweet year. And to all the wonderful gentiles in my life, I wish you exactly the same, even if you’re working off a different calendar. We can but pray that 5777 will be the year when mankind grows up.

Women In Tech, ‘Firing Line’, And Naomi’s World

And We Still Need A “Village!”

Some of you may know that I started my professional career in 1967 as a programmer trainee at then John Hancock Life Insurance in Boston. I was part of a trainee class that was made up primarily of new grads from Ivy League universities with degrees in such diverse fields as linguistics, sociology, anthropology and, in my case, English literature with a minor in natural sciences (cobbled together from the courses I had taken when my planned major was physics). Our class was about half and half, young men and women.

It wasn’t long before I learned that the women were all being paid $139 per week while our male colleagues made $152 per week for doing precisely the same work and with precisely the same credentials. If you know me at all, then you know that this early evidence of gender bias and income disparity did NOT sit well.

When I asked then Personnel (long before it became HR or acquired even more fanciful names, like central casting or associate relations, and before the supporting software went from payroll to HRIS to HRMS and on to today’s HCM) about this disparity and bias, I was told by the nice Personnel lady that those male colleagues would soon be family breadwinners whereas I would be leaving to raise my family or, at best, sharing my attention between child-raising and work. That too didn’t sit well with my feminist soul, and I left John Hancock as soon as I’d gotten enough training and experience under my belt to make that a sensible move.

That truly was what women of my generation faced when we began to enter the professional workforce in large numbers in the 60’s, but I never imagined we would still be fighting those battles now, a half century later. Gender bias and income inequality in the workforce, particularly in my world of enterprise software, may not be as bad as it was then, but it’s bad enough that we’re still talking about it. I’m not a researcher or an academic, and you should turn to them for an accurate assessment, country by country and job type by job type, of where we stand now. But what I do know from my own work experience is that, across the enterprise software industry, there are very few women in CTO, CIO, chief architect, head of development, and other technology leadership roles.

In this latest “Firing Line with Bill Kutik” conversation, I share my thoughts on why so many of my programmer trainee classmates didn’t get to the top of their field, what I did to face down the barriers on my career path, and some things we could be doing — right now — to improve the situation. I hope you’ll watch the video when you have a moment, but I also hope that you’ll get out there and do whatever you can to fix this imbalance.

Since this is my blog, and a place where you can comment, I’d like to speak directly to my colleagues about two challenges for which there just wasn’t time in our Firing Line format. First, there’s no way to get to the top of any field, technology or otherwise, without making huge personal sacrifices. And that goes for those who aspire as well as those who become their life partners. For every woman (or man, for that matter) who is capable of and interested in becoming a chief architect or CIO or head of development, there’s a long tough road ahead, many obstacles to be overcome, and decades of long hours and tough choices.

No one can manage all of this and raise a family and have any quality of life unless they’ve got a “village” to help them, and not all of us are fortunate enough to have that village in place when we want to start a family. Whether that “village” is a group of friends, a spouse, and/or family members, the reality is that you’re going to need their help, their understanding, and their active support if you’re going to pursue the highest levels of tech leadership and raise a family.

In our case, the choice not to have children wasn’t difficult, and it was the right one for us. It made it much easier for each of us to take on heavy travel job opportunities and to pursue them aggressively. But there’s simply no way that I could have had the last 15+ years of the career I wanted, especially once I developed the mobility challenges of which some of you are aware, if my husband Ron Wallace, like a knight in shining armor, hadn’t come to my aid. Even without children, it takes a “village.”

For a growing number of women in today’s HR tech leadership roles, their life partners are taking on, like Ron has done, the at home responsibilities so that they can pursue their careers and, perhaps, raise a family while maintaining the required heavy schedules, including travel schedules, that our field requires. In other cases, parents are stepping in to help on the home front so that both partners can pursue their career ambitions. Some couples earn enough early on to afford full-time, live-in child care or other such arrangements, while others patch together an assortment of child and home care arrangements to enable both careers to progress. Toughest of all, and those for whom I have the greatest respect, are the single parents carrying the full load of breadwinning, child and home care. And while salaries in technology can be quite generous, they can be much less so on the bottom rungs, in the many adjunct roles that don’t require quite as much education, and when that single parent cannot manage full-time work.

Over the years, especially once my own career was well-established, I’ve been that friend who held the fort for a colleague (although not when it comes to small children because I’m totally incompetent until they’re completely sentient) at a client site or on a deliverable when I could do it and they couldn’t. And, for close friends and family, I’ve been their patient advocate even lifeline as they went through the hell of serious medical treatments. Yes, it does take a “village,” and you can’t start early enough to build and nurture that “village” against your future ambitions.

Second, there’s something else that we touch on in the video but didn’t have enough time to explore fully, namely the role played by personality in reaching the top of whatever heap you choose to climb. Call it grit, perseverance, resilience, strength of character, or sheer determination to describe that collection of KSAOCs which enables some people to just keep moving, to pick themselves up when they’ve been knocked down, to refuse to be limited by the assessment of others, and to push themselves beyond their comfort zones. I don’t know the right words to describe these behaviors, and I don’t know why some people develop them while others, even siblings, do not. But I do know that all the women in my experience, who have made it to the top of anything, have these qualities in spades.

Others may have suspected this about me, but I didn’t discover these qualities until my first career dreams went up in smoke. I went to UPenn to become a nuclear physicist but discovered, pretty early in my education there, that I lacked that special intellectual gifts which were required to move beyond learning the proofs of even advanced physics to positing and solving what had not yet been proven. I remember very well that awful day when I knew that my dream wasn’t achievable, and you won’t be surprised that I had a couple of good cries while grieving for what was lost. But then I picked myself up, got some input from teachers and advisers, did some research, and figured out where to go next, all while working nearly full-time to pay my living expenses. There were still some zigs and zags before I landed at John Hancock as a programmer trainee, and many more bumps and lumps from then until now, but somewhere inside of me is a voice which just won’t take no for an answer. Many of you have that voice too, and I urge you to shut out the din and listen to it.

Please do watch our video and let me know what you think. I’ll try to respond personally to all of your comments on this post, but you can also reach me directly at naomibloom@mindspring.com. And I know that Bill would be delighted to hear your feedback on his “Firing Line” series, where you can comment and share after watching our video.

Home Remodeling, Moving To SaaS, And Life Lessons

Familiar Vendor Is NO Excuse For Short-Cutting Due Diligence!

In the last year, I’ve relearned a valuable lesson in vendor research, short-listing, evaluation, selection and management, and it’s been a very painful, expensive, and embarrassing lesson for someone who should have known better. Yes, there’s no fool like an old fool, especially when we let our good intentions and personal relationships get in the way of VERY aggressive and methodical due diligence.

But this old fool will not be taken in again to this extent because the most important lesson relearned from this sorry experience is: at the very first sign that a vendor doesn’t cherish your business, so long before they’ve failed to deliver as promised, it’s time to end the deal. But let me take you back to the beginning of my sad little tale to demonstrate how the best laid plans of even an experienced project and vendor manager can lead her down the garden path of unmet expectations, failed delivery, vendor “divorce,” and starting over.

In mid-2013, we decided that our wonderful home, designed by us with an architect in 1997, built very well in 1998 and Q1 1999, now needed a thorough refresh and some enhancements. Aging infrastructure, our changing (lifestyle) requirements, new technologies and innovation of which we wanted to avail ourselves, and just the wear and tear of happy usage added up to our need for a fairly complete refresh. We had a pretty good idea what needed to be done, but we certainly needed both design and execution help to move with confidence and a workable level of impact on our “day jobs,” from the 1997/98 version of “Casa de Ranas” to a 2016 version of same. After all, an experienced consultant like me should value using outside experts when venturing into territory outside her areas of expertise.

After some research and reflection, we decided that we’d prefer to work with a design firm which would take full responsibility for the various projects, including the selection and management of all subcontractors, and a firm which had the in-house capability to source and select the kinds of fabrics, furniture, flooring etc. which fit our taste. It turns out that most of the higher end homes in our part of Florida are done in a faux Mediterranean style with myriad shades of beige as the prevailing interior design color, a design preference for gigantic furniture better suited to giants than to Ron and me, and a minimalist approach to the décor (except for really stupid things like having twenty decorative pillows on the master bed which have to be removed and rearranged daily). But our home is more cracker/Florida vernacular (which is well suited to the climate) with lots of bright colors, modestly-scaled eclectic furniture, tons of art work and object d’art (nothing minimalist about Bloom & Wallace), and nary a beige in sight. So we really needed a design firm that got it! So far, so good.

What should have happened next, as I’ve advised every corporate client I’ve ever had, was for us to educate ourselves pretty thoroughly about the interior design firms in our area that might have the capabilities of interest to us and then to narrow that list with a heavy dose of due diligence (designed of course for the type of vendor with whom we were planning to partner). But that’s the opposite of what we did, to our great regret. And before you fall off your chair laughing at our foibles, how many of you have (foolishly?) stuck with or plan to stick with your incumbent vendor when moving from on-premise HR technology to true SaaS without reviewing carefully your other options?

Instead, we homed in very quickly on a leadership team with whom we had a longstanding relationship, who claimed that they could meet our needs and be a good fit for our home, style, scope of work, and budget. Yes, they had had a few customer satisfaction and other business hiccups in the past, but their showroom and design studios (their user experience?) were gorgeous. Yes, we neglected to do full-scale reference checking, but these folks had been in business for years, were a major player, had tons of brand recognition and awards (don’t get me started on the zillion awards claimed by every HR tech vendor) and of course this wouldn’t be possible unless they delivered as promised most of the time. Do you see a pattern here?

Well, the rest (as they say) is history. The project began with good intentions all around and a lot of hard front-end discovery and design work, for which we paid on a time and materials basis. We liked the designer, and she was knowledgeable and capable. At first, we had her attention, but as the project progressed, 0ther projects with greater dollar value, prestige, brand-building potential increasingly captured her attention. Responsiveness slowed. But we were still in the design phase, when it’s often difficult to quantify how well things are going even though your “tummy tells you” that all is not well. But the bigger problems emerged — as they always do if you even get that far on a project headed for disaster — when it was time for this firm to execute.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but we saw it all — crummy quality, ridiculously long elapsed times, mismanaged subcontractors, and more. A custom piece estimated at six months max (think “custom” extension) was delivered after fifteen months and wasn’t what we expected. Re-upholstering was a comedy of errors, with fabrics ordered, delivered wrong, ordered again, delivered wrong, ordered again, etc. and then a good bit of poor quality results attributed to having their contractor speaking only Spanish when the design team didn’t. And did I mention that they lost Ron’s favorite reading chair, finally fessed up to that loss, then found it torn apart for re-upholstery long after we had put a hold on that task. Of course there were some excellent subcontractors, but a few questions quickly revealed that they were performing well in spite of the communications and scheduling failures of the prime. Ouch! And the worst part of all of this was my own sense of guilt, of feeling totally stupid, for getting us into this mess in the first place. Boy, can I understand why HR tech customers, having made too quick a decision to stay with their incumbent, are loath to admit that they’ve made a mistake.

By mid-2015, I’d gone from guilt over my own stupidity to anger at this vendor, and we stopped all work with them. But they still had work-in-process to which we were hostage, so I had to use every diplomatic KSAOC to work our way out of this without losing the value of that work-in-process. And even as I was nursing them along, we had to start over, researching other providers, creating a short list, conducting serious due diligence, selecting a new interior design firm, and bringing the new firm up-to-speed. That last point meant spending a lot of money to re-cover ground with the new firm that we had already covered with the familiar firm. And we also had to spend money to fix some of the shoddy work done by the “fired” vendor. Then there’s all the time we lost, first because the original vendor performed so SLOWLY, and then because it takes time to onboard a new vendor.

The new, much more carefully selected vendor is doing a great job, there’s visible progress at “Casa de Ranas,” and we should be pretty much finished with master bedroom and bath, entry, wine “cellar,” the living room part of our great room (our house’s center is one very large room, without walls, whose kitchen, living room, dining room areas are designated by the cabinetry and counters which wrap around the kitchen) by the end of the year (to include some architectural work with lighting and a new gallery-style hanging system for a growing collecting of artwork). Next up will be the kitchen part of the great room, for which the design work is nearing completion, key materials are being reviewed, and kitchen contractors are being vetted. Needless to say, the “fired” vendor is none too pleased, but they are behaving rationally.

Our remodeling project vendor management mistakes have cost us about a year and a half and a good bit of moola, but there are no significant downstream implications since Ron and I have managed to stay married despite the stress of having no living room and of my guilt and frustration. Not so lucky are those who make the same kind of mistakes when selecting HR technology vendors. Breaking up is much harder and more expensive, the downstream implications can include career death, and there are very real impacts on your organization whose ripple effects can be felt for years. So please do re-learn from my mistakes without having to make any more of your own.

Annual Reprise — Father’s Day Thoughts: Remembering Jack Samuel Bloom

[When I wrote the original version of this post for Father’s Day 2010, I never planned to update and then reprise this post annually. But as each Father’s Day approaches, my sense of loss increases. With no family members of my father’s generation still living, my own sense of mortality grows.

I so wish my Dad were still here to share with me and my sister the laughter and tears of everyday living. And, now that I can afford to do it, with my time and not just money, I would so love to spend more time with him, hearing the stories of his childhood as well as of mine.

Ron and I have large paintings of our two fathers above an archway in our home built for this purpose, and they are very much with us in spirit. They lived at opposite ends of the country, could not have come from more different backgrounds, and they only met a couple of times. But I know that they are very happy playing pinochel together wherever they may be now. ]

My father, Jack Samuel Bloom, was in many respects quite an ordinary man. Being a father wasn’t his thing, but he became a terrific friend once I was old enough to hold up my side of that friendship. Of far greater value than any assets (f he had had them) that he might have left me, from Dad I inherited:

his ability to tell a good story, to make a point while making you laugh;
his commitment to active friendship, the kind of friendship that does what you need done even when you don’t know you need it;
his intellectual curiosity, the kind that had him reading the entire World Book Encyclopedia from A to Z;
his belief that any day on which you wake up is already a good day, that the gift of life is too precious to waste; and
his habits of meticulous book-keeping, calendar-keeping, and commitment-keeping.

From my Dad I also inherited his love of reading and the sheer joy of opening a new book. Later I discovered that for me, being rich meant being able to buy any book I wanted to read and never having to browse in second-hand bookshops unless I was looking for treasure. Jewish families like ours, in the early 50′s, bought their children a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, one volume at a time on a payment plan that they could scarcely afford, so that their children would be better educated than they were. I remember my Dad reading that encyclopedia from Aardvark to Zebra, even the boring bits (and there were many such), and perhaps that’s where I also learned that reading some books was about more than having the pleasure of meeting their words.

My Dad taught me to swim almost before I could walk by carrying me on his back as he swam from the gentle shores of White Sands Beach, in Old Lyme, Connecticut to the floating raft in the waters of Long Island Sound. I’ve loved swimming and being in and around the water ever since. I have no fear of the ocean’s waves and can still feel his support whenever I’m over my head. But I can also remember his advice when it came to swimming in open, choppy water: “keep your mouth closed.” Words to live by in many of life’s “choppy water” situations.

We buried my Dad on my 50th birthday. He spent just a few days in hospital, having not been ill before his unexpected collapse just as I was about to deliver a presentation at the 1995 SAPPHIRE conference in Phoenix. To my Dad’s funeral came many hundreds of people we didn’t know whom he had helped, quietly, without ever being asked. In his retirement, he had “adopted” older members of our synagogue who needed rides to doctors’ appointments, help paying their bills, or just an hour’s companionship. Without the financial means of major philanthopy, he found the means for active philanthropy, through the gift of his own time and caring. By the example of his life, I learned the true meaning of tikkun olam (literally “fix the world,” but interpreted in my family to mean that we must leave the world a better place than we have found it) and tzedakah (literally philanthropy/charity but interpreted in my family to mean that we must share our time and resources with others). Taken together, and they really are two sides of the same coin, tikkun olam and tzedakah were the foundations of my Dad’s quiet and quite ordinary but principled life, and I’ve done my best to live those same values.

By the time I launched my own business in 1987, the cost of long distance calls, so daunting when I first left home in ’63, were much more affordable, and I called him most days in the late afternoon even when I was onsite with clients (which was most of the time in those early days). Those calls always started with:

Dad: How’s business?
Naomi: Business is great.
Dad: Are your clients paying their bills on time?
Naomi: Yes, they sure are.
Dad: Are their checks clearing the bank?
Naomi: Absolutely.

When you know that those early clients were firms like Bank of America, Hewlett Packard and International Paper, something my Dad certainly knew, this ritual opening to our calls goes from being merely odd to very odd, unless you also know that being a small retailer all his life shaped forever my Dad’s view of Accounts Receivable. In the family business, Bloom’s Photo Supply, there were no angel/seed/VC/PE investors, no generous lines of credit, and no one to fall back upon if cash flow was mismanaged, so careful attention was paid to the creditworthiness of every customer. And in those days before credit cards became ubiquitous, when retail payments were either cash or personal check and commercial payments were almost always by company check, knowing if the customer’s check had cleared the bank was the critical step in cash management.

From there we’d go on to the events of his day and mine, and to what was happening across the Bloom family, in the larger Jewish community in which I grew up, and around the world. I don’t remember my Dad ever calling me — long distance calls were for emergencies only among his generation — but I know he loved my calls because he reported on them to the group of men with whom he ate breakfast early every morning at a local deli. And I loved those calls too because, for a few minutes, the stresses of my being a grownup were relinquished to my Dad’s always calm voice.

I’ve always said yahrzeit for my Dad at the appropriate times in our Jewish calendar, and I think of him every day, but I miss him especially on Father’s Day. If you’re lucky enough to still have your Dad, don’t wait for Father’s Day to call him. And if you are a Dad, the gift of your time, of your self, of living your principles so that they become a part of your children’s inheritance is so much more important than anything you could ever buy them now or any money you could leave them. Now back to that meticulous book-keeping, calendar-keeping and commitment-keeping that are a major part of my inheritance.

Grand Passion Is Essential To Both Great Wine And Enterprise Software

Hunter Valley, Australia

Ron and I spent mid-Feb to mid-March 2016 traveling in New Zealand and Australia, spending most of our time visiting with much-loved friends in both countries who we see far less often than we’d like. Although we have tons of modern ways to keep in touch, there’s just no substitute for being there, being together, hugging and laughing and strengthening bonds which distance and time zones do challenge.

But we also included in this trip some intense wine tasting in the Hunter Valley (not far outside Sydney) with a terrific specialist guide, Grahame Richards, during which I had quite a aha moment (but then you’d expect something to happen if you’d tasted 30+ wines between 10:00 AM and when you sat down for a late lunch). I found myself seeing real similarities between the wineries and wines I enjoyed/respected/loved and the software vendors and products I enjoy/respect/love. But I needed to let those thoughts settle a bit — and let me revisit them when entirely sober — to see if there’s really an aha here, and there is.

What stands out from the many wineries we visited and the wines we drank, what produced the aha moment, is that they fell into two very distinct groups, one of which reflected a grand passion and the other of which was very ho hum. Not surprising to those of you who know my work, I tend to see software vendors and their products in two equally distinct groups, but first let’s talk wine.

The ho hum group of wineries and wines were professionally and, in most cases, competently managed by folks for whom this was a business (so not a grand passion). Their wine production was focused on varietals and blends which their market research and agricultural studies suggested would be the most profitable from their particular terroir. Often they were owned by professional investors whose own market research led them to launch one of these ho hum operations as a money-making proposition. And although their young tasting room staff were pretty enough, they were also pretty much clueless. In general, these ho hum wineries produced wines which were vin ordinaire, often overpriced but usually with terrific branding, a snazzy Web site, and a lavish tasting room.

And then there were the wineries and wines we loved, which I’ll call the grand passions. At these usually quite modest tasting rooms, we found ourselves speaking with family members or winery partners who had devoted their lives — and not just their working lives — to building great wineries and wines. Very knowledgeable folks in the tasting room, often the vintner him or herself, really wanted to talk about their wines and about our enjoyment of them, about their terroir and it’s implications for the wine, and about our preferences as we tasted. They often had made special wines in a particular year or as part of an experiment which defied the market research and agricultural studies, turning out really wonderful wines which fit no established marketing category. When I checked their Web sites, they weren’t fancy but did offer the important information, and they rarely had professional investors (although some did have wine loving angel investors). But what these wineries and their wines has in common was the quality and customer-centricity that only comes when owners with a grand passion for wine are in control of their operations. And these owners most often had deep roots in the Hunter Valley, had spent their whole lifetimes around grapes and harvests and winemaking, and while profits certainly mattered, they were much more about making great wines.

But what does any of this have to do with enterprise software? Just about everything. At least in my neighborhood, at the intersection of HRM and IT, there are two distinctly different groups of vendors which, along with their products, also can be described as ho hum or grand passions. The ho hums may be founder-led, but they’re VC-funded if starting up or PE-bought if they’re a little longer in the tooth and not self-sustaining as a public company, and that founder may have gotten involved in HR tech not because of a lifelong passion for it but rather because their market research suggested that we’re “ripe for disruption.” When you visit their booths at a major HR tech show, it’s not uncommon to find that the booth attendants have no idea about our industry’s history, about the architectural underpinnings of their own products, or even about the products’ functionality beyond the script they’ve been given. Yes, many of these firms have been named by branding firms, have well-produced Web sites, and are clever at marketing (particularly at generating buzz via social media). But when you dig more deeply into their products, it’s not uncommon to see that they’re repeating mistakes of past designs and business decisions, but with the requisite commitment to mobile first and “cloud.” Nothing is harder to sit through than a briefing with one of these firms, be they startup or well-established. CEOs who know nothing except how to manage professionally, products which have learned nothing from the past 40+ years of HR tech and are not outstanding in any way, and business decisions grounded only market research, spreadsheets, and focus groups (necessary but not sufficient) with no leavening of experience or passion.

And then there are the vendors whose leaders have a grand passion for improving the business of human resource management via breakthroughs in technology enablement, vendors whose products lift my spirits because they’ve taken our collective learning and made a leap from the past to a well-positioned future. Great object models and architectures, functionality which appreciates the inherent complexity of work and workers but doesn’t foist it on users, business decisions which are customer-centric, employees who know what they’re doing and why they’re there, and business results which have staying power. Yes, some of these grand passion businesses fail, just like any other type of business, but when they succeed, they really do change our world. Interestingly, many of the most successful grand passion HR tech vendors and products were born in conjunction with a generational change in technology, but that’s by no means a requirement. And these companies need not be founder run if the culture and succession planning are strong enough to ensure continuity and competency of passionate leadership. Walk the floor at a major HR tech show, and you’ll meet some of these CEOs and senior leaders, and their conversation isn’t all sound bites and carefully rehearsed marketing messages.

All very interesting, perhaps, but where does this take us? Since I’m neither a buyer nor seller of HR tech, and I answer to no one but Ron, I’m quite free to follow my grand passions in HR tech. But if I’m going to urge others to do the same, I’ll need to update my blog posts on how I evaluate vendors and products to reflect these insights. I’ll also be testing these insights at vendor analyst days, at the major HR tech shows in Chicago and Paris later this year, and during as many briefings/demos as I have time to take. And I’ll be sure to keep up my consumption of grand passion wines. In vino, veritas.

From Human Resource Management To Worker Management Or ???

If you’ve read even a few of my posts, then you know I focus pretty consistently on an issue that lurks, quietly but dangerously, waiting to sabotage our best efforts to achieve improved organizational outcomes through improved workforce performance. The villain of this piece is the sloppy, inconsistent, ill-defined and rampant misuse of terminology. The English major/natural science minor within me screams every time I hear or read someone misuse the subjunctive. But my psyche screams even louder when colleagues who should know better use talent management or engagement or SaaS or analytics to describe whatever ill-conceived or outdated idea or product they’ve got on offer this week.

But where to start to save humankind from sloppy terminology? The colloquial vocabulary for many to most of the important concepts at the intersection of the domain (formerly known as?) human resource management (HRM) and the domain (still widely known as!) information technology (IT) is so imprecise that I could make myself and you totally crazy trying to unravel that muddle. No entirely sane person is going to read the 3,000+ pages it has taken me to do so in my magnum opus, although a really surprising number of you — and you know who you are — have already done so or are doing so as I write, and I thank every single one of you.

When I began blogging, WAY back in November, 2009, I thought that the best place to start, to rid my world once and for all of sloppy, or worse, agenda-riddled terminology, was, as always, to begin with the results we’re trying to achieve, working backwards from business outcomes to figure what must get done, how, when and by whom, in order to achieve those results. In my professional life, the results we’re trying to achieve are specific organizational outcomes through what we used to call effective human resource management (HRM). But now, with the introduction of autonomous, even general purpose (or at least broad purpose) robots into the workforce, we simply must find a new term to describe the management of a workforce that not only includes employees and contingent workers of all flavors but also those darn robots.

I’ve used HRM (HCM being a much more recent and talent management-oriented term) since about 1980 to describe the subject matter domain, HR to describe the function, HRMS to describe the collection of software (ideally, truly integrated) which automates the bulk of administrative HRM while creating the essential foundation for TM, talent management (a much newer term). Given the always critical importance of integration across HRMS and TM, I have also used HRMS/TM to describe that integrated core suite which is central to effective HRM at every organization.

For me (and it’s central to every annual release of my HRM Business Model “Starter Kit” since 1995), the workforce has always included both employee and non-employee workers of every type, schedule and duration, and the HRMS/TM should always have addressed the entire workforce. But now, with humanoid robots entering the workforce, HRM etc. aren’t big enough terms to cover what’s really work and workforce management.

I’d like to change our collective vocabulary from HRM to WFM (workforce management), but that abbreviation has been in long use to describe the functions and software that manage scheduling, time and attendance, and related processes. Could I repurpose WFM to a much broader use? Probably not given the marketing $$ committed to its traditional meaning. So what’s a language precisionist supposed to do?

Work and workforce still apply as long as we consider workers to be both human (so employee and non-employee or contingent workers) and non-human (so humanoid robots, which could be acquired, maintained and accounted for as plant and equipment but to which many of the work and workforce-related processes (e.g. scheduling, development and onboarding as well as off-boarding) and object model (e.g. robots must have one to many KSAOCs and have their work defined in terms of duties and responsibilities) can be applied). No, I haven’t gone off the rails. We clearly need real care with our vocabulary as we expand greatly the notion of worker, and I’d really like to use WFM for this purpose.

The HR community was VERY slow to address properly, to include within the HRMS/TM, contingent workers in all their flavors, and we can’t miss the boat on robotic workers. Since vocabulary shapes thinking, as anyone who’s studied multiple languages knows, we’ve no time to lose in straightening out our vocabulary for the extended definition of workforce and for the related management processes. But, in the absence of a better term, I’m going to use worker management (WM). Therefore:

WM is a business domain, a collection of processes and business rules whose purpose is to help ensure long-term business and organizational success. WM is about planning for, organizing, acquiring, deploying, assessing, rewarding, leading, coaching, supporting, informing, equipping, retaining, and developing a high performance, cost-effective workforce. It is also about nurturing the growth, usage and value of the organization’s intellectual capital and personal networks.

What a mouth full, and there’s more. WM isn’t just the work of a central/local/3rd party WM department. While a WM department and WM professionals may still control the strategy and design of WM, WM execution is increasingly in the hands of managers and leaders (who may themselves be non-employee workers and/or robots) at every level and the increasingly technology-enabled, self-sufficient workforce.

The bottom line? The purpose — the expected organizational results — of WM are to maximize the performance of the organization’s workforce and the leverage from its intellectual capital and personal networks toward achieving the organization’s stated business outcomes. If we could get all of the organization’s work done and results achieved without any workforce, we wouldn’t need WM. But we can’t, at least not yet, so we do.

Workday’s 2015 Tech Summit: What Hasn’t Been Reported Widely Enough

There’s been a ton of great coverage out of Workday’s 2015 Tech Summit, a preliminary list of which I’ve included below and to which I’ll add as others bring their coverage to my attention. But having attended this well-run event and after reading the coverage below and more, I was struck by how little attention was paid to what I considered to be two of the bigger takeaways from this event. Of course, every well-run vendor influencer day leaves me gasping from information overload, and my true analyst/media/influencer colleagues do a better job than I ever could of capturing all the relevant details, which is why I don’t do many such event reports. But now that the dust has settled on this particular influencer event, I thought I might add a little color commentary.

For me the first big underreported takeaway is the fact that not one single line remains of the original code in Workday’s platform. Let me repeat, not one single original line of code remains in Workday’s platform. That’s because the original design provided for changing out whole services, whole blocks of code, for new or rewritten services, adding entirely new services and/or removing no longer needed ones, replacing custom code with commercially available code, to include both open source and acquired code, and so much more while the software is in flight. That’s right, while in full production, with new customers being added all the time, the folks “in the basement,” which is how Workday’s chief architect referred to his own work location, have been updating, refreshing, replacing, rewriting, re-everythinging their applications platform (not to mention the applications themselves, but that’s an entirely different story as discussed below) without any disruption.

So, to the question I always get from financial analysts: “won’t Workday have to replatform soon, just because of all the technological and other changes that have occurred in the past ten years, and won’t that replatforming be a costly, error-prone, disruptive, black hole?” the unequivocal answer is NO. To my very technical colleagues who attended the Tech Summit and may have yawned about this because they know it’s no biggie, let me just say that I nearly fell off my chair and needed a 2nd confirmation (that’s confirmation, not resuscitation). I don’t presume to know how this is done, but I’m blown away that it has been done without anyone being inconvenienced. So much for the FUD around replatforming. And although Workday again said that they have no immediate plans for unleashing their platform in the way that Salesforce does — per Workday, and I agree (not that my opinion on this matters), this is an entirely different business for which the time is not yet right — it’s nice to know that, if and when they decide to go in that direction, they’ll be doing so with an always fresh, always evolving platform.

For me the second big but underreported takeaway is the high degree of object model and framework reuse which, along with the underlying architecture’s definitional development environment, are creating a real competitive advantage in better time, cost and quality to market. Do you remember the punditry from the learning community when Workday announced they would be building their own learning application? Of course that’s a major undertaking, but when you look at the amount of reuse across the objects they already had, those they were building for their student applications, and those needed for learning, the amount of reuse suggested that this major undertaking would be cut down to size. We saw the same thing happen when Workday announced they would be building a recruiting/staffing application, and with the same results of rapid time-to-market, no cast of a thousand developers, plenty of global and compliance coverage, and so on. And every time they look at an application type which lends itself to a framework, so to a generalized but systemic architectural solution, from work books to grid computing to the latest spreadsheet motif, it becomes clear that they’re building additional platform capabilities that can be unleashed across the entire applications suite. I’ve always cringed when hearing enterprise software vendors pounding their chests over their huge development organizations because I know from my own programming days just how hard it is to create anything elegant and lean in such organizations. Thus, I’m naturally biased toward finding ways to reduce the amount of code needed to birth and maintain applications.

Now some will say, and perhaps correctly, that what I’ve described here is the norm among enterprise software vendors, but it’s not been the norm in my experience. Do I need to get out more?

Partial coverage of Workday’s Tech Summit*

“Workday – 2015 Tech Summit Update” from Saugatuck’s Bill McNee.

“Has Workday ceded the cloud platform to Salesforce and Microsoft?” from Phil Wainewright of Diginomica was actually written before the Tech Summit at which the whole issue of platforms was discussed quite thoroughly.

“Progress Report – Workday Tech Summit – Good Progress, More Insights, Less Concerns” from Holger Mueller, which includes link to his Storify of the Tech Summit twitterstream.

“Workday, North by Northeast” from Vinnie Mirchandani.

“Workday HCM Growth Forges Expanded Partnerships with HRO Providers” from Nelson-Hall’s Gary Bragar.

“Workday Tech Summit 2015 – fighting talk as CEO thanks Oracle” from Dennis Howlett of Diginomica

“Workday Works Wonders on Platform for HCM” from Mark Smith of Ventana

“Workday Tech Summit 2015” from John Sumser of HR Examiner

* If I’ve left out your terrific coverage, please drop me a note at naomibloom at mindspring.com dot com.

Disclosure: Workday has been a client but my attendance at their Tech Summit was on my own time with Workday covering the bulk of my travel expenses. I was compensated by Workday for being a panelist on their annual Predict & Prepare video broadcast earlier in the week of the Tech Summit, a participation which is totally free of Workday content review or control.

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