Is the HR Technology Conference co-chair Bill Kutik the Most Interesting Man in the World?  Here are some quotes that describe the Dos Equis man:

• He once had an awkward moment, just to see how it feels.
• He co-chairs the HR Technology Conference just because he can.
• You can see his charisma from space.
• His charisma compels people to write blog posts about the HR Technology Conference.
• His business card just says, “I’ll call you.”
• His tacos refuse to fall from the shell.
• His personality is so magnetic, he is unable to carry credit cards.
• Even his enemies list him as their emergency contact number.
• He is so generous that by using Promotion Code INFOBOX11 you get $500 off the conference rack rate.
• He once engaged in a staring contest with a fish and won:

This sure sounds like Bill Kutik to me but let’s talk about more pressing matters.

This year is the 14th annual conference and Bill tells me it’s going to be the largest and most exciting yet with an incredible, educational and entertaining speaker line-up. Speaking of speaker line-up, I will be participating again on the Second Annual Social Media Panel where my cohorts will be tackling all your sticky social media deployment questions (in an incredible, educational and entertaining way of course). So for goodness sakes don’t miss our session. But wait, there’s more. Don’t miss the Great Technology Debate between Naomi Bloom and Jason Averbook, the Expert Discussions, the public debut of the 14th annual CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey by Lexy Martin and the always popular Awesome New Technologies for HR. Oh and don’t forget to bring comfortable shoes to walk the expo floor where you can get hands-on demonstrations and one-on-one Q&A from tons and tons of vendors. All this can be yours for $500 off the conference rack rate by using promo code INFOBOX11 (all caps).

Got an HR Technology question or a problem? Everyone you need to know to answer your question or solve your problem will be there. Did I mention that all your favorite HR Technology Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, BeKnown,  BranchOut and Google+ peeps will be at the conference? Frankly you can’t afford not to be there.  As I said in my post-conference blog post from last year:

“I met CEOs, HR Bloggers, Industry Titans, Consultants, HR Professionals and Techies. I can’t think of any other conference where you have such easy access to such a diverse group of people.”

If you still need more information, you can download the PDF of the full conference brochure, read the post-conference blog posts from last year’s conference or forget all that and just take my word. I’m trustworthy. Right? Don’t forget my promo code of INFOBOX11 (all caps) to get $500 off the rack rate of $1,795. But don’t wait as this promo code expires on September 19th. If I still have not convinced you that you must register this very instant, here are 10 more reasons to attend the conference presented by Bill Kutik:

Go register now while I open a nice cold bottle of Dos Equis and ponder The Most Interesting Man In The World …  Bill Kutik … the HR Technology Conference.

Many companies have formal mentoring programs. These programs help employees find a mentor that can advise them on their career and provide some guidelines for both the employee and the mentor. Some people however do not think they have the skills or the time to be a mentor. The thought of participating in a formal mentoring program is too overwhelming.  So let’s put aside the formal mentoring program and talk about a way you can do informal mentoring.

Many of us work in a cubicle existence and actually cubicles are way more conducive to informal mentoring than being in an office. Come on now, don’t deny that you “accidentally” overhear  many of the conversations that goes on around you. It’s okay. For informal mentoring use the power of overheard conversations to your advantage. We all can’t be an expert in everything and my guess is you have knowledge about something your cube neighbors don’t have. Since you are listening in to their phone calls and cubicle conversations anyway, when you hear something that you know you can provide helpful information on, step up to the plate and offer your knowledge.  That’s what I call cubicle mentoring.

I hope you all had some fun reading my HRevolution spoof-ish blog post hosted over at Paul Smith’s blog Welcome To The Occupation yesterday.  I thought I would actually get serious (who knew that was possible) and write my actual thoughts about HRevolution 2011.

Last year’s HRevolution in Chicago was great except that as a tech person it was missing something near and dear to me. It was missing a lot of HR Technology talk.  I wrote a blog post about it called HRevolution 2010 – What happened to the Tech Talk. This year I saw some progress. Not mind blowing let’s talk about the pros and cons of Best of Breed versus Suite or SaaS versus On-Premise type of progress but nonetheless progress.

Let’s first take a look at the Sponsors: Monster, Pinstripe, Ceridian, Aquire, SHRM and PeopleMatter.  There are some serious tech chops to a couple of these vendors. There were no hard sells from the Vendors but their presence helped establish some tech credentials to the conference. Oh and thanks to all the sponsors who helped keep the conference costs at a minimum level for the attendees. You rock.

Moving on to the keynote, we had the CHRO of Kimberly Clark, Liz Gottung, mention during her keynote that a pillar of her global HR plan was the global implementation of Workday. I looked around the room as Liz talked about Workday and watched people’s faces.  To my surprise it was clear that many people knew about Workday.  Last year, it seemed like people only knew about Abra and Taleo.

As for the sessions, there were several technology specific sessions.  Josh LeTourneau led an uber techie session on Social Network Analysis. I can’t do it justice to explain it so you will just have to head over to his website to learn more about it.  Craig Fisher showed us a bucketful of tools in his Recruiting: Cool Tools and More session such as Crowdbooster, thesocialCV.com and BizzBizz. Craig also showed us how to stalk potential candidates using FourSquare and Twitter.  You had to be there to watch some of the people in the room become a bit uncomfortable with the idea.

Finally, I had several conversations with various people about HR Technology throughout the day.  Great conversations actually.

Just like last year there was interest in Social Media technology and Mobile technology.  One didn’t need to actually talk about mobile you just needed to look around the conference to see a significant showing of iPad’s.  Speaking of iPad’s, after winning the iPad drawing from Monster last year I was somewhat relieved to not win this year’s Monster drawing for the iPad 2 as I figured I might get in trouble with the attendees if I won 2 years in a row.  Social Media and Mobile aside there were definitely more conversation and interest in technology this year.  It’s a bit of a slow burn but since the next HRevolution will be in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay (using the same meeting rooms) as the HR Technology Conference & Expo, I am hoping for an even better showing in HR Tech Talk.

Thanks again to Crystal, Ben, Steve and Trish for a fantastic conference and for making me the unofficial Wi-Fi guy.

Heeeees Baaaaaaaack.  Bet you thought I had abandoned my blog.  Let’s not use such a strong word as abandon.  How about hiatus or leave of absence or long vacation.  It’s been a whirlwind crazy couple of months but don’t worry, I didn’t forget you all.  To ease you back into my blog posts I thought I would write about the HRevolution conference I attended on April 30th.  I didn’t want you all to freak out having to read so many words on my blog after my hiatus so I hacked into Paul Smith’s blog since he doesn’t know WordPress from WordStar and left my true thoughts about Paul and the conference on his Welcome To The Occupation blog.  So go click that link just to the left of prior period thingy.

I’ll be back soon with some delicious blog posts of my own.

I was following the tweets from the Social Recruiting Summit when I came across this profound tweet from @ewmonster:

Such amazing insight in less that 140 characters that I felt compelled to share it with you all. Oh and if you want to follow all the tweets from the Social Recruiting Summit you can follow the hashtag #SocialRecruiting.

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.

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.