by Michael Krupa on July 11, 2010
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.
by Michael Krupa on June 21, 2010
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.
by Michael Krupa on April 20, 2010
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.
