A Tidy package of HR and Technology information, insight, wit and wisdom.
From the monthly archives:
I received an email today from Dell informing me there were new updates available for my Dell laptop. I had to laugh when I read the description of the new version of the Dell Support Center application “1. Add new feature of passive marketing.”
I consider my Dell laptop as my own and as such do not want Dell sending me marketing messages through support software. So, perhaps I’ll pass on passive marketing.
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Warning, this blog post has nothing to do with HR Technology.
Last week a friend of mine was in the hospital for some major surgery. The operation was a success and the friend recuperated for a few days in cardiac intensive care. At the end of the week she was moved from cardiac intensive care to a regular room. As part of the move to the new room, an orderly put her in a wheelchair and rolled her to x-ray for a couple of quick pictures. On the way to x-ray, my friend felt like she was being wheeled a little too fast and was feeling a bit sick to her stomach but decided to remain calm and not complain. Once back in her new room she thanked the orderly for taking her to x-ray and back to her room.
The next day she was rather abruptly released from the hospital. Unfortunately several hours later some complications set in and after a quick consultation with the doctor an ambulance was summoned to bring her to the emergency room. Back at the hospital the same orderly showed up to take her to get more x-rays. He immediately recognized her and felt bad that she had to come back to the hospital so quickly. There was a long line of emergency patients waiting for x-rays so the orderly sidesteps the rules and took my friend to another part of the hospital (not related to the emergency department) where there was an x-ray department with no one waiting. As my went in to the x-ray room, she heard the orderly say to the x-ray staff: “You take good care of her, this lady was just in the hospital earlier today and she is a very nice lady”.
Although in pain, my friend smiled inside and realized that simply being nice and saying thank you to the orderly allowed her to get some extra special treatment at the hospital.
So, have you been nice to a stranger today?
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One of the biggest limitations preventing companies with an in-house HCM system (e.g. Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Lawson) from moving to a SaaS HCM system is customizations. Many companies have made significant customizations to their HR system and are not willing to let go of these customizations. I don’t want to get into a discussion of why so many companies customize their in-house systems. That will have to be another blog post.
SaaS applications built from the ground up to handle customizations as configurations would rock.
Application development technology has matured to the point of being able to create a rich User Interface experience that would allow the client to easily make modifications to the UI to suit their needs. HR and to a lesser extent Talent Management applications have been around for decades and we now have a pretty good idea of what companies are looking for in HCM systems. Business Rules need to be extracted where possible from the underlying code and elevated to a place in the application where the customer can modify the Business Rules as a configuration step and not as a customization request.
Similarly the User Interface needs to be a separate layer with a similar capability to easily add/remove or move a field on a page as a configuration step and not as a customization request.
An uber configurable HR SaaS Application has the potential for convincing a larger number of companies to give SaaS a second look.
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