I read the tweets coming from the Workday Technology Summit on August 23 and was surprised. A couple of the analysts seemed to suggest that Workday should stop talking about its SaaS Multi-Tenant technology approach and focus instead on the business value of the Workday application when they are talking to customers.  While that might be good advice for Workday, I hope the analysts are not advising customers who are looking to purchase SaaS solutions to focus only on the functionality of the application and not worry about the technology.  Potential customers should absolutely dig into all the nooks and crannies of a vendor’s technology.

Vendors are not to be trusted especially when it comes to HR data.  If you are a customer thinking of using a SaaS vendor for HCM/TM applications (especially core HR) you had better make sure that the Vendor is using technology that is proven and fully supportable.  Sometime after go-live when the SaaS application experiences an outage or data breach is not the time to discover the vendor’s servers are running Windows Server 2000 or the database is Oracle 8i or the “servers” are a rack of Psystar towers.  You might get compensated for the downtime but at that point you probably have lost confidence in the vendor.

Customers need to fully understand the technology used to power the SaaS application. Purchasing HR applications/software should always be a joint venture between HR and IT.  HR can focus on functionality and usability and IT can focus on technology and security.

Laurie Ruettimann thinks HR Technology Conference co-chair Bill Kutik is no Old Spice guy.  Or is he?

“Hello HR Professionals, look at your HR Technology, now back at me, now back at your HR Technology, now back at me. Sadly, your HR Technology isn’t state of the art like me, but if you stopped using legacy ERP software and switched to true SaaS HR software they could be state of the art like me.  Look down, back up, where are you?  You’re in Chicago with the state of the art technology your software could be like.  What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s a Promotion Code for 30% off the HR Technology conference registration.  Look again, the promotion code is INFOBOX10.  Anything is possible when you attend the HR Technology Conference.  I’m on a horse.”

If I have not sold you on attending the HR Technology Conference & Expo by my witty Old Spice satire then you should know that the HR Technology Conference & Expo is THE HR Technology conference to attend.  Each year the conference has a shootout session where multiple vendors demo their live software to a scripted scenario.  The shootout has been so successful that this year there will be four separate shootout sessions with only 2 vendors per session.  I’ll be hosting one of the shoot out sessions this year so how better to spend your money except to come see me live and in person as sheriff making sure the shootout vendors stick to the rules.

But wait, there’s more.  Last year we had a highly successful impromptu Tweetup during Friday morning’s breakfast (and garnered interesting looks from those conference attendees who were not in the know).  We are stepping it up this year and for my loyal twitter followers we will be having another Tweetup Friday Morning with more, more, more.  I can’t discuss all the details yet but I know you won’t be disappointed.

I know I am forgetting something…think, think, think.  Oh yeah, don’t forgot my promo code of INFOBOX10 gets you $500 off the onsite price of $1,695 – just $1,195.

Need more convincing? You will be surrounded by 2,000 HR practitioners, vendors, consultants, analysts and bloggers from 24 countries (over 18,000 attendees in the last 12 years).  The conference will also feature free Wi-Fi in the conference center and giant Tweetstreams outside the expo floor and the general session room.

Still not convinced?  Laurie Ruettimann will be teaching a class called Twitterversity.  There will be a debate between guru Naomi Lee Bloom and Gartner’s Jim Holincheck, Oracle revealing more of Fusion HCM,  the Blogger Insight Panel (members not yet chosen), and “Awesome New Technologies for HR” from bleeding edge start-ups (chosen at the last possible second).

If you still need more information, head on over the conference website, download the PDF of the full conference brochure or check out my recap of last year’s conference. Finally, don’t forget my promo code of INFOBOX10 to get $500 off the onsite price of $1,695.  Go register now, while I go buy some Old Spice Body Wash.

I have read a number of articles and blog posts recently that implore HR leaders to forgo traditional HR Metrics reporting and jump right into providing HR metrics data that tie directly into the metrics and dashboards of the business itself and not just HR.  This is a great recommendation for companies who have already mastered HR metrics reporting but what about HR departments just starting out with metrics reporting?  These companies need to get their reporting feet wet before jumping into the water.  For example, if you decided to implement a new HCM system you would not t implement Core HR, Benefits Admin, Payroll, Recruiting, Salary Planning, Bonus, Performance Management, Succession Planning and Learning Management all at the same time. Right?  So when it comes to implementing HR Metrics and HR Business Intelligence applications don’t go the kitchen sink route as well.

Where do I start…

I recommend starting with basic HR metrics reports.  Does your current Core HR system have any built-in metrics reports or dashboards? If so, start with that and gain experience and confidence in your Metrics reporting.

Beyond basic metrics reporting….

My guess is that you probably have separate systems for Core HR, Talent Management and Learning Management.  So once you master creating your core HR metrics reports, I suggest looking for an HR Business Intelligence tool that will allow you to integrate all your disparate HR systems.  As you start combining and reporting on data from all your different systems you move from HR Metrics reporting to Business Intelligence reporting.  Again don’t try to do it all at the same time.  Start by extracting and loading data into your Business Intelligence tool from your core HR system.  Build your reports and dashboards and roll them out to your senior leaders.  Then start loading data from another one of your HR systems depending on your biggest reporting needs. If you get a lot of requests for recruiting metrics and not training metrics then load recruiting data into your BI application next.

Stay tuned for future blog posts on HR Business Intelligence reports and dashboards.

Yes I know I am very late in blogging about my thoughts on HR Technology at HRevolution 2010.  I have been staring at this blog post for weeks trying to figure out what to say.  The problem is that I am trying to write about something that well…didn’t happen so I’m giving up and finally finishing this post.

In case you missed it, Ben Eubanks hosted the HRevolution Carnival of HR over at his fantastic upstartHR blog.  Ben’s Carnival seems to be the most thorough roundup of thoughts regarding HRevolution.  By my count there were 45 blog posts mentioned in this Carnival.  I read every single post and guess what? If you set aside social media and mobile technology, only 2 people mentioned technology in their blog post.  At the conference, Bill Kutik, Bryon Abramowitz and I were co-session leaders of the HR Technology session.  We did the usual introductions, made a couple of comments about HR technology and then opened it up to the crowd of about 25 people for questions.   The session mostly centered around Abra HRMS, some questions about Taleo and a request for information about recruiting technology vendors for small companies. Questions were asked and answers were given so I hopefully some people walked away with new technology information.  However, I sensed that many of the session attendees did not even know where to begin to ask HR technology questions.

Let me be clear that this blog post is in no way a criticism of the HRevolution conference, the conference organizers or the conference participants. The focus of the conference was not on technology and I had a great time, learned lots and was able to connect and re-connect with wonderful people.   But what my experience at the conference does tell me is that we still have a long way to go to get HR Practitioners to think about technology.  Unfortunately I do not have any earth shattering ideas right now on how to approach this.   I do think I will reach out to my session co-hosts Bill and Bryon to brainstorm ideas for getting more discussions going with HR Practitioners. Then I will reach out to some of the HRevolution attendees for their thoughts as well.

If you attended HRevolution, did you have the same experience as I did regarding HR Technology discussions or something different?  Do you have any ideas for me on how to engage HR Practitioners in technology discussions?  Come on, help a guy out here.

I’m currently sitting on a plane heading from Portland to Denver. The person in front of me has reclined their seat leaving me no room to use my laptop.  Being a good tech guy, I pulled out the iPad I won at HRevolution and am typing this out using the iPad WordPress App. Okay, Okay, I might have finished up this blog post back on the ground but rest assured that the majority of the blog post was indeed written on the plane using my iPad.  Now would probably be a good time to thank all the good people at Monster.com (especially my new best friend Eric Winegardner) for sponsoring the opening night party and for the iPad raffle that somehow I miraculously won.

A couple of weeks ago was the HRevolution 2010 conference in Chicago. I was not able to attend HRevolution last year as it was darn near impossible to get from Portland Oregon to Louisville Kentucky in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike many people who attended this year, I did not go to specifically pickup nuggets of HR knowledge. In some of my previous posts I lamented HR department’s lack of interest in technology so I didn’t go to HRevolution with the hope of a tech breakthrough. It’s a good thing since for the most part I witnessed the status quo. But more on that in a future blog post.  I did not go to HRevolution to pick up HR technology information; I went for the opportunity to spend time with my HR thought leaders outside of the sessions.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and with casual meetups over snacks, the parties, the sessions and impromptu hallway discussions  I managed to have great conversations. I also managed to squeeze in a couple of sessions. Of course one session I didn’t miss was the HR Technology Q&A session since I was co-facilitating with Bryon Abramowitz and Bill Kutik.  Again, stay tuned for a future blog post on my observations on HR Technology conversations at the conference.

I could write about what worked and did not work for HRevolution but as it turns out many of my fellow conference attendees have already blogged about it better than I could. One of the HRevolution planners, Ben Eubanks, has already rounded up the HRevolution blog posts into the wonderful Carnival of HR-HRevolution Style. Go ahead, click that link to open up the HRevolution Carnival in a new window and read all the wonderful blog posts.  I’ll wait right here until to you return.  As incentive for returning, there is still a matter of the blog title to resolve.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my partner in crime and an amazing blogger Paul Smith who kept me highly entertained from morning until late at night and to the HRevolution organizing committee.  Finally as I end this blog post, some of you are thinking, what’s the deal with the Dirty Martinis in the Blog Title?  Well…I ended the conference on Saturday night at the rooftop bar at theWit Hotel by sipping a Blue Cheese Olive Dirty Martini along with Shennee Rutt and many many others.  Good times were had by all.

Stay tuned for my next blog post when I beat you all silly for not having a proper backup strategy for your personal computers.

Guess what?  The rumor on the street is that HR leads the industry in using the Software As A Service (SaaS) delivery model.  Surveys say that customers still prefer best-of-breed solutions over integrated solutions so that means more HR applications instead of less.  Guess what also is true about many of these SaaS applications?  They still use flat files as the main vehicle to shuttle information into and out of the application. In this model the customer is still required to develop an interface to the SaaS vendor.  Wait, what?  As a customer you still have to do custom development even though you are using a SaaS application.

There are several other more state of the art options such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or SOAP messaging.  I don’t know about you but when an employee gets hired into my core HR system, I would love to have the employee information zip over to my SaaS based Learning Management System within a couple seconds instead of sometime that evening when the flat file interface gets run.  When I push the button to fill a requisition in my recruiting application, wouldn’t it be great to have the new hire in my core HR system right away. Sorry SaaS Recruiting vendor, sending me XML files via FTP multiple times a day doesn’t count.

All is not lost fortunately.  The HR SaaS application vendors are starting to incorporate messaging or ESBs into their offering.  The most prominent example of this is Workday purchasing ESB vendor Cape Clear back in February of 2008.  Since then Workday has embedded Cape Clear into their application to allow end users to create their own real-time inbound and outbound interfaces.

For those other SaaS vendors who are still stuck in the flat file interface, you better get it together soon.  We are wising up and will be requiring state of the art real-time interfaces in our vendor selection criteria.

In a previous post I gave out some software demo tips for vendors. Since then I have participated in another round of software demos and this time I have some tips for all you customers out there.  Yes, you read that correctly. Customers also needs some tips to get the most out of software demos.

• Create “killer” scenarios ahead of time and send them to the vendor (ahead of time, like way ahead of time so the poor vendor can be prepared). Don’t know what a killer scenario is? Head over to Naomi Bloom’s blog here, here and here to educate yourself.
• Assign an owner for each scenario. When questions arise during the demo about the scenario, the owner should be prepared to answer that question.
• Bring all participants for the demo to the same city, same building and same conference room.
• If you ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY can’t have everyone in the same room (are you sure you really can’t get everyone in the same room?) then make sure you get a conference room with a conference phone with enough microphones so the remote participants can hear the presenter and any questions from the audience.
• Speaking of conference rooms, make sure you get a large enough conference room that everyone has a seat near a microphone.
• If the demo starts at 9am, make sure the vendor shows up at least 15 minutes early and that you, the customer, have the room ready for the demo.  By ready I mean, network connectivity for the vendor’s computers are ready, projector is powered on and warmed up. Otherwise the demo is likely start very late.
• If you have remote participants, DON’T PUT THE CONFERENCE PHONE NEXT TO THE FAN ON THE PROJECTOR. I’m sure you can figure out the issue with this one without me having to spell it out for you.
• Make sure you only have 1 version (1 truth) of your scenarios and fit/gap documents. Use version control and backup copies of your documents to ensure you know who updated the documents. Do not let the vendor take ownership of your documents and massage them to meet their needs for the demo or suddenly you will find yourself not on the same page (literally) with the Vendor during the demo.
• Match the content of the demo with the participants.  If the demo is to show you the GL interface for Payroll you don’t need the head of HR but you do need your Payroll accounting folks.
• Put away the Blackberry and pay attention to the demo. I know this one is really hard for some of you but you will surprised how much more you get out of the demo when you give it your FULL attention.

Okay, that’s my list off the top of my head.  What did I forget?

On episode 45 of the Bill Kutik Radio show, Bill Kutik interviewed Jason Averbook and Jason Corsello regarding the HR year past and coming up.  During the show the topic turned technical and Bill Kutik brought up the topic of whether SaaS will become the dominant delivery method for HR applications.  In answering the question, Jason Averbook discussed the myth that you do not need IT help when implementing SaaS application. Spot on commentary by Jason until he says:

Software as a Service requires just as much IT support as any of these other solutions. It’s a different kind of IT support, a different skill set.

Sorry Jason but I am going to have to disagree with you on this point. SaaS applications do not require as much IT support as on-premise solutions.  Let take a look at the typical IT tasks for supporting on premise vendor application and note the tasks that are also needed for SaaS applications:

My experience with SaaS applications show that you no longer need IT Datacenter support, Database Administration support, Application Infrastructure support and Application Development support (with the exception of interfaces).  Poof.  Gone. No longer needed.  Depending on the number of resources either partially or fully engaged to support your on-premise application, this could be a sizable reduction in the resources needed as you shift to SaaS.

Agree? Disagree?  Leave a comment and let me know.

The Carnival of HR has landed right on the tail of Mardi Gras  so grab a Sazerac or Hurricane and some Jambalaya, pull up a chair and settle down for some fantastic blog posts.

As you know, Mardi Gras is a downright fun celebration but sometimes people imbibe a few too many hurricanes and need their friends to keep them from embarrassing themselves.  At work sometimes you also need a network of friends and mentors to help guide you.

Mary Jo Asmus at Aspire Collaborative Services kicks off the carnival with Leading People Can Be Messy about unpredictable people.

Continuing the theme of messy people who probably need a mentor, Melissa Prusher from The Devon Group suggests you rely on your mentors in Count on Change – and a Mentor to See You Through.

Speaking of friends and support systems, Paul Smith continues his story from his previous post about being gay at work and asks you to take stock of your support system in Support (if It’s Not love, Then It’s the Bomb).

If you don’t do mentoring then my guess is you don’t do Succession Planning. With a blog post titled Got Succession Planning Phobia? You’ve Got Problems, you can bet that the CEO of Aquire, Lois Melbourne has some specific thoughts on the subject.

Friends don’t let friends make HR mistakes so please read the HR Observations post by Michael Haberman on the Top 5 HR Mistakes That Small Businesses Make.

I’m sure the HR Bartender has a fabulous recipe for Hurricanes but more importantly, Sharlyn Lauby in Failure is Nothing Personal explains that it might be your methods that are failing.

Continuing the discussion on failures, Mark Bennett over at Talented Apps wants you to Focus on Failure! and learn from your failures when they happen.

Steve Boese thinks that Gartner may have forgotten that HR can and should play a role in Social Media initiatives and would like your thoughts on subject. Head over to What’s Missing from the 2010 Social Software Predictions to add your comments.

Now sometimes when you are enjoying the Mardi Gras celebration you need a little encouragement in form of Beads.

Speaking of needing some beads, over at Simply Lisa, Lisa Rosendahl gives us some thoughts on how to free up the mind to write in The Anti-Writing Demon.

Over at Humor That Works, Drew Tarvin talks about what you can learn from an improv class. I wonder if the 10 tips include tips for attracting bead throwers.

Beads are a powerful motivation but more importantly Three Star Leadership’s Wally Bock tells us about a different type of motivation in Putting Drive to Work: Intrinsic Motivation.

Continuing our discussion of motivation, Mr. Renegade HR himself, Chris Ferdinandi, wants your thoughts on How to Turn Average Performers into Rockstars.

Beads are also currency and The HR Store answers a write in question about negotiating a better salary for a job offer in Job offer negotiation.

Let’s not forget our international currency by reading Three Rules for Compensation Surveys in Smaller Developing Markets by Warren Heaps over at the International HR Forum.

More than just about beads, Bill Kutik writes What Does Salary.com Actually do and lets us in on the best kept secret in HR Technology and as a bonus gives us his thoughts on the SuccessFactors purchase of Inform.

Giving and collecting beads are a passion for some people and in the appropriately titled Passion – It’s Not a Dirty Word in HR, Steve Browne guest posts at the Cincy Recruiter blog to tell us how to be passionate about HR.

I don’t know how Naomi Bloom feels about beads but she has become passionate about blogging.  Read Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion and learn about who Naomi has beaten on over the years and why she is publishing her methodology for strategic HRM delivery systems planning.

Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Advisors wants to throw beads to everyone with his simple plea to be passionate about something in A Plea For Passion.

At some Mardi Gras celebrations people wear masks to conceal their identities.

Let Lance Haun over at Rehaul show you how to take off the mask of your current career and show the real you in his book review post Doing a Career Transition the Right Way of Alexandra Levit’s new book.

Office politics: It’s Personal is the final installment of the 5 part office politics series over at Jennifer Miller’s blog where you can explore your personal influence.

Speaking of being an influencer, Heather Stagl at Enclaria gives us Ten Essential Tools for Change Agents to help influence when you have no direct authority.

Ready to switch to a mask that is unfamiliar to you?  At the Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy has some advice for people ready to make a lateral move into a role that is unfamiliar to them in Career Advice Part 3: Lateral Moves.

Masks can also be used to hide things we are uncomfortable talking about but Kathleen Nicolini over at the Omaha.net blog tackles obesity with A Big Problem: Obesity and Employee Rights .

Put on your mask of shame and head over to Susan Heathfield’s post Your Worst Job – Ever? where Readers share their worst job – ever.

Sometimes the goal at Mardi Gras is just to party on and have safe and sane good time.

I’m guessing the partying is kept to a minimum at these top 11 HR Masters Programs described by Jared Lucas over at The HR Patriot.

Mardi Gras can suck you in and so did the SHRM website for April Dowling. Head over to PseudoHR to read From APA to SHRM for the juicy details.

Mardi Gras is also about meeting new people and in Networking – Online of Off, Joan Ginsberg thinks the “traditional forms of networking are pointless time-wasters”.

If you don’t have any free time you probably won’t be able to go to Mardi Gras so be sure to stop by Blogging4jobs and let Jessica Miller-Merrell teach you 6 Time Saving Business Social Media Tools.

Of course you can’t have a good time at a party if you have not honed your conversational awareness so head on over to Jason Seiden’s wrap up of how-to posts on developing organizational savvy for Tips & Tricks: Develop Your Conversational Awareness (5 of 5).

The amazing HR Maven, Deirdre Honner, tells us why she continues to party on work, write, blog & talk with her blog post Why I do it.

I don’t know about you but I always get a return on my investment when attending Mardi Gras (beads anyone?) so read on about HR ROI.

What is the #1 HR Metric to Report to Your CEO? I am not going to give it way so you will just have to read this post from Cathy Missildine-Martin at the Profitability Through Human Capital blog.

I usually get a return on investment from my beads but do you know how to evaluate the ROI for your Learning Programs?  If not, you had better go read Reviving Training’s DOA ROI by Kevin Oakes.

Payroll is a topic not always covered in our sexy HR blogs but Tusha Bhatia over at the Talent Junction blog has a great post covering ROI on automating the Payroll Function.

Thank you everyone for your fantastic contributions to this Carnival of HR and to the readers for taking time to find some new blog posts to read.  Stay tuned for a very special Undercover Boss edition of the Carnival of HR hosted by Bryon Abramowitz at The HR Technologist Blog on February 24th.

One of our top notch HR Bloggers and HR Technology instructor at RIT, Steve Boese, asked the HR blogosphere if we would host some guest blogs for his students.  I raised my virtual hand as fast as I could and I sure am glad as one of Steve’s students sent me a fabulous guest post.

Today I am hosting a guest post from RJ Nicolais. RJ is just getting into the Twitter thing so if everyone could please follow him and give him encouragement to update his BIO and avatar and maybe add a couple more tweets, that would be great. I don’t want to embarrass RJ by mentioning all the wonderful things he said about my blog but lets just say he will go far in life if he keeps up the compliments.  RJ and I share some similar thoughts about HR and technology and all kidding aside, please give RJ your full attention for this great post about being afraid of change.

______________________________________________________

To Change or Not to Change?

I’ve worked at several different organizations throughout my career in human resources and have noticed that they all have one thing in common: they are afraid of change.  Not just any change, but a special kind of change.  As HR professionals, we are supposed to be the “champions of change” and yet have difficulty changing ourselves.  We can take on wellness initiatives and change whole benefit structures (not to mention that we shoulder the responsibility for broader company culture shifts) but when it comes to technology we’re just plain frightened.  I would have used another colloquialism to tell you how I feel about it but that would be inappropriate.

The rate at which “technology” changes and evolves is totally insane – but that is the nature of the beast.  You can learn to accept it and embrace those changes or you can choose to resist and get left the in the proverbial dust.  I should probably tell you that I don’t think I’m really frightened, so I make that correction to the statement I made above.  There are those of us who truly embrace technology changes and get downright excited about them.  So we demo software and the newest (SaaS) solution for HR and we start to drool thinking about how much we can accomplish in so little time.  We may even start to sweat a little when we see the pretty interface we get to look at every day.

Then we talk to our bosses about it and our dreams are shattered.

“It’s too expensive.”  “There is too much at stake in a change.”  “It’s just not possible this year – maybe next year we can talk about it.” Or, my all-time favorite: “What we have now works just fine.” Those are all valid answers to valid fears.  I think that we need to get past those fears.  HR needs to spend the money to get the right solution at the right time.  Get the product that will be the most use to the company right now when growing the business is more important than ever.

Trying to work within the constructs of old software that doesn’t support the business any longer isn’t productive.  Excel isn’t a means to an end.  That is what scares me – outdated software and massive Excel spreadsheets.  It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.