It’s that time of year again when all of us in the HR Technology business book our airline and hotel reservations and congregate in Chicago for the annual HR Technology Conference and Expo. Wait, did I say Chicago? Sorry, this year the conference was in sunny Las Vegas Baby! Anyway, this post is way late (and probably a dollar short) as the conference was over weeks and weeks ago. I have a good excuse or ten for being tardy on my post but I won’t bore you with the details. In my prior blogs posts about the 2009 and the 2010 conferences, I waxed on about the conference being about connecting with my social media network (especially my Twitter buddies – AKA my Tweeps). Making connections with the Tweeps was still an important aspect of this year’s conference. The Social Media factor at the conference continues to grow each year and I think we might have finally reached a tipping point. This year so many people were using the #HRTechConf hash tag on Twitter that the tweets were streaming into TweetDeck faster than I could read them. Information overload. So kudos to the conference organizers and all of my HR Tech Twitter buddies who helped promote the Social Media aspect of the conference. On the good news/bad news front the sponsored Wi-Fi was very spotty especially in some of the conference rooms that were more out of the way. In the larger sessions when everyone powered on their tweeting devices the Wi-Fi came to a standstill. What’s the good news in this? If the Wi-Fi had been 100% rock solid the tweet stream would have been OUT OF CONTROL.

What I Learned This Year

The expo floor as always abounded with a zillion vendors hawking their wares. I was having a conversation with one of the vendors who mentioned that in general the vendors were unhappy with Vegas/Mandalay Place in comparison to McCormick Place because the attendees were not a captive audience. At McCormick Place there was nothing around the conference center to do or see so most attendees with any free time would stroll through the expo floor. At Mandalay Bay, the attendees often used any free time to stroll over to the casino floor instead of the expo floor. Speaking of vendors, there were a ton of announcements at the conference and I do mean a ton. I’m too lazy to track them all down so here is a great summary of the announcements from Marketwatch.

Mobile was a huge topic at the conference this year but let’s first talk about the attendees mobile devices. The news reports indicate that the iPad has decimated the Netbook market and I can tell you first hand that this rang true at the conference. The iPad ruled and I could have counted on one hand the number of Netbooks being used. In a slight twist to last year, I witnessed a strong showing of people using physical keyboards with their iPads. In another nod to the strong growth of Apple, the MacBook Air also had a very strong showing among the attendees. Sorry Microsoft, the traditional laptop seemed pushed out this year. Hope you have big plans for Windows 8 to stem the market share loss.

Unlike mobile which has been brewing for a couple of years, gamification seemed to blast out of the woodwork from seemingly obscurity at the conference this year. For vendors and for companies the message this year is that if you want adoption of your application you need give workers a reason to use the app. Enter gamification which uses games design techniques applied to HR applications to encourage people to use (or adopt) the software. Gamification is no longer just badges but now includes awarding and redeeming points, achievement, challenges and recognition. There were many vendors showing applications with gamification built to the core or at least gamification techniques applied to bits and pieces. I’ll be curious to see in future surveys if gamification does indeed make a difference in adoption.

Just like mobile, analytics is HOT HOT HOT this year. The good news is there are now solutions that cover the spectrum of needs. Vendors are adding transactional analytics into their applications at a minimum and strategic analytic solutions are coming on strong. I encourage customers to take the long view when implementing disparate HR systems that each have their own transactional analytics to think about the impact of providing too many disconnected metric reports to their end users. While it might make sense to dip your toe into analytics by starting with built-in transactional metrics, only rollout the metrics that make the most sense and determine your long term analytics goals up front. Maybe an enterprise wide HR Analytics/BI system should be in you HR Technology Roadmap.

SaaS continues its steady march to replace on-premise HR applications. Nearly all vendors with on-premise solutions are re-architecting, re-coding or at least re-marketing their apps to say they are SaaS compliant. Don’t believe the marketing message however. Customers will need to dig deep and ask tons of pointed questions to determine exactly what flavor of SaaS the vendor is supporting. From the Talent Management panel the big take away was SaaS is really Saa (Software as a…). Service is still missing from many SaaS vendors. Customers are having to redo their contracts with SaaS vendors at renewal time and substantially beefing up the SLA and Service agreements.

The Awesome New Technologies for HR session was a hit again this year with the instant responses from the Twitter peanut gallery providing lots of colorful commentary. The Twitter users at the conference are pretty savvy HR Technology users so hopefully the vendors participating in the session captured the tweets (both good and bad) for future consideration. The iPad demo’s from Workday and Peoplefluent seems to garner the most interest and praise from the crowd and the tweets. Workday’s iPad app interface with the Swirl pretty much stole the show. By the way, for any session presenters reading this post don’t say “San Fran” when you mean “San Francisco”. You know who you are.

The Challenge For Next Year

The market for HR Technology applications has exploded the last couple of years. Core HR systems are hot again, suites continue to be rolled out, Analytics are front and center, Social Media is being embedded and everything is mobile, mobile, mobile. I found myself this year really feeling like I missed out on way too much. Trying to find time for all the great sessions, the expo floor, vendor briefings and hallway conversations with the attendees was impossible. The challenge for next year is to find a way to make more time available for all these things. Longer Expo hours, repeated sessions or maybe an additional day added to the conference might do the trick. Kudos to Bill Kutik and LRP for another great HR Technology Conference.

Most Important Takeaways

• Dwane Lay and Paul Smith make an awesome Penn and Teller combo.
• You know you have spent too much time in the elevators at Mandalay Bay when you can lip sync the Hubert Keller “Fleur” video.
• More men use moisturizing cream around their eyes than you probably realize.
• Ron Wallace is in amazing shape having to keep up with Naomi Bloom on her scooter.
• Bill Kutik needs a smart phone adviser the next time he gets a new cell phone.
• Naomi Bloom can operate an iPhone but not an iPad. Go figure.

No good conference is complete without some sort of video so I leave you with this awesome swag video by my good pals Dwane Lay and Paul Smith.

Are you a big fan of Google Maps and feel like the Maps application on your iPhone is falling behind in functionality?  Maybe you would like to access your starred locations and My Maps data stored in your Google Account. Whatever your reason, Google has enhanced Google Maps for mobile browsers on Android and iOS.  Just visit maps.google.com on your phone or tablet browser and stare in awe of what Google has accomplished in HTML instead of a dedicated app.

So my dear iPhone owners and frequent flyers…would you like a highly interactive app where “you can track your flight, recalculate your remaining flight time and flight position, and learn more about key landmarks and geographic areas you’re flying over”?  (I love it when a vendor provides tech tips copy for me).  If so, you might want to check out all the details on the iPhone WindowsSeat app and see if this one is for you. Looks like they have a paid app for $2.99 and free app that covers a limited number of cities.

Are you one of those people who have a need to print from your mobile device but don’t want to have to install software for printing?  I’m a little late notifying you about this but Google has a service called Google Cloud Print that will do just that.  Head over to the Google Mobile Blog to read all the details.

As our social network continues expanding, the ability to keep up with all the noise can become overwhelming.  Twitter already has the ability to create lists but surprisingly many people are not aware that Facebook has a similar list capability.  Lifehacker has a quick write up on creating and using Facebook lists.  It’s only a couple of paragraphs so go read it now. Scoot.

I have had terrible luck this last year with hard drives failing on me.  I wish I had come across this website on hard drive sounds earlier.  Most hard drives start to make specific sounds when they are failing and Data Cert has created a database of sounds for each brand of drive to help you understand what might be happening with your drive when you think you hear sounds that just don’t quite sound right to you.

And finally, I leave you with one of the most interesting toilets I have seen in a long time. It’s called the Kohler Numi and this illuminated, electrified, spritzing, heated and wireless remote control device will only set you back a cool $6300. I’ll take 2.

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.

I have noticed a high number of tweets, blog posts and news stories about people returning their iPhone’s and jumping ship to Verizon or Sprint.  People are unhappy with the AT&T cell phone network and with the new iPhone 4.

I have been on the AT&T cell phone network forever. My association with AT&T started with Pacific Bell Wireless which became Cingular which become AT&T Wireless.   AT&T uses a cellular technology called GSM.   Since I have been using GSM based cell phones for a very long time, it didn’t occur to me that non-GSM phones have limitations and was shocked to discover that the CDMA network technology (Verizon and Sprint use CDMA) can’t handle simultaneous voice and data.

The Verizon iPhone may be capable of supporting both voice and data like its AT&T cousin, a tip today says. Verizon is reportedly planning to add Voice over Revision A (VoRA) to its network that would use its EVDO Rev A 3G network to handle voice calls as well as data. Unlike usual CDMA networks, which cuts off 3G when a call comes in, VoRA would behave more like HSPA on phone networks and allow both to run at the same time.

Are you on AT&T and thinking of moving to Verizon or Sprint?  Hold on then, step back for a moment and think about how you are currently using your smart phone on AT&T.  If you currently browse the web, check email or use any apps that require the internet while you are on a voice call you might want to rethink this.  Food for thought.

It’s been a busy week in the technology tips world.  In fact I might have to hold a few back for next weeks blog post.  So let’s get on with it, shall we?

I know that the majority of the people who read this blog travel to conferences on a pretty regular basis and many of you also carry an iPhone in your purse/pocket/briefcase/holster (but not in your left hand). Read on for Five apps for the conference -goer.

Unfortunately I think we all have some email habits that probably should be avoided.  Our pals over at Lifehacker have rounded up The Worst Email Habits and Annoyances You Should Avoid (or At Least Be Aware Of). Go on. I dare you to read it. Maybe one of your habits is on their list.

Don’t have Adobe Flash on you mobile device or can’t get Flash?  Addicted to YouTube?  Thank goodness I found this information over at the Boy Genius site: YouTube launches HTML5-enabled mobile website, native YouTube apps soon to be obsolete.

For you Apple Time Capsule lovers, I have some good news and some bad news.  That bad news is that Apple manufactured a whole batch of flawed Time Capsules in 2008. The good news is that TUAW found out that Apple will repair or replace these Time Capsules should they die on you.

By coincidence I happened to find this beauty of an Apple Support document: Time Capsule: Using AirPort Utility 5.3.1 or later to make a copy of the Time Capsule disk.  Since it looks like Time Capsules might be a ticking time bomb, I highly suggest you follow these instructions to make sure you have a copy of your Time Capsule backups.

Not really a tech tip but for the ultimate gadget lover I just had to share this totally amazing bathroom faucet with touch panel controls.  I want one…bad.

Wow, iPhones, Email, YouTube, Time Capsules and High Tech Bathroom Faucets all on one blog post.  What will I think of next?

While talking to a few people recently and comparing our Google Reader subscriptions and trends, I discovered that I read a lot more technology sites than the average reader of my blog.  So I figured I should put all that reading time to good use and share some of my technology goodies with you all.

It’s iPhone 4 pre-order day and I am sure you all are running around the house/backyard/office/parking lot/mall like crazy person trying to figure out how best to pre-order an iPhone for your spouse/significant other/son/daughter/dog/cat.  Fear not. Engadget has you covered with their post on: How to: pre-order the iPhone 4 (update: third-party retailers best avoided)

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to stop by Starbucks for our daily quad shot Latte, the Boy Genius Report says: Starbucks offering free Wi-Fi access at all U.S. locations starting July 1st

A couple of my tweeps/peeps/yahoos have been bugging me to do Skype video calling. So for all you Skype people and video bloggers pay attention as Engadget has the goods on New Logitech HD Webcams

I don’t know about you but sometime my spelling engine goes on hiatus. It can be a problem when trying to search for something on Google.  Its Google to the rescue with: Spelling corrections in Google search suggest

I know many of you use Google Reader and have been saying why, why, WHY can’t I easily rename my folders.  Stop your crying and read all about:  Renaming folders and tags in Google Reader

Last but not least for all you hardcore Gmail, Buzz and Google Maps users (you know who you are). I give you the holy grail of Google Maps previews in Gmail and Google Buzz

Did you like these tech tips?  Found them useful?  Want me to continue serving up these tips on a regular schedule?  Hated it and wish I would not waste precious blog space doing this?  Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

As some of you know, I am a bit of a road warrior and a Mobile fanboy.  To keep on top of my blog reading, I often find myself reading my blog list on my iPhone.  In fact I even wrote a blog post about stealing time for Blog reading and Social Media.  Most of time I am using Google Reader to catch up on my blog reading, but sometimes as I find new blogs I read the blogs directly on the blog website and not using Google Reader.  While the mobile Safari Browser on the iPhone is great, it is even better when blogs have a specific mobile site.

For those of you using WordPress to maintain your blogs, there are 2 great plugins that will automatically create a version of your site for most mobile phones.  The plugins are WPtouch and MobilePress.

Here is an example of my Blog using WPtouch:

Here is an example of the HR Think Tank blog using MobilePress:

As you can see the mobile plugins reformat the site to fit within the mobile browser window so that you do not need to pinch and zoom to see the actual blog post content.

So, my mobile blog reading wish for 2010 is that everyone who maintains a blog will install a plugin to enable mobile reading.

The latest Carnival of HR is up over at the Simply Lisa blog by Lisa Rosendahl.  This time the carnival is hosted in Central Minnesota and you know what that means: Get out your hand warmers and go read some great posts.

Here are a couple of posts that peaked my interest:

Kelly Mitton on 8 ways Gen Y can Impact HR

Paul Smith presents Fixing A Hole – HR’s responsibility to their Gay employee population

Trish McFarlane gives you some great tip on How to Simplify Your Social Media Life

I suppose I should plug my contribution to the Carnival in this post where I tell you how I Steal Time for Social Media

Big thanks to Lisa for pulling together a great Carnival with a fun winter theme.

Recently, two of my favorite bloggers posted tips on how they handle social media overload.

Trish McFarlane wrote an excellent post on How To Simplify Your Social Media Life where she suggested you schedule time for social media and prioritize your access to social media sites.

Naomi Bloom also write an excellent post about her experiences with social media called Reflections Of A Digital Immigrant Gone Semi-Native: An Embarrassment Of Riches where she let us know she is going to set aside Facebook and limit the number twitter followers to keep from being overwhelmed.

I’d like to add on to these wonderful suggestions and offer up my own secret for keeping up with the firehose of social media information.   What’s my secret, you ask?  I steal…time. There, I said it.  I steal time. When I am sitting in a conference room waiting for a meeting to start, standing in line waiting to board an airplane, waiting for my mocha at the local coffee shop or walking across the office building, I steal that time and catch up on social media.  I’m sure by now you have figured out my secret weapon for stealing time and that weapon is my iPhone.  The iPhone has native applications for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and email and with mobile Safari and the Google Reader iPhone mobile website, I can breeze through my blog roll.  But wait there’s more.  The iPhone also has several native applications to manage your blog while on the go.  When I steal time for Twitter, my favorite application is TweetDeck.  With the iPhone TweetDeck application, I am able to automatically sync my TweetDeck groups between my desktop and iPhone.  When on the go and stealing time, being able to selectively view tweets via TweetDeck is a must for me. Did I mention that Google Reader mobile website for the iPhone is amazing?

Stuck on network other than AT&T? Hate the iPhone (for some inexplicable reason). Can’t be separated from your Blackberry or Android phone?  Never fear. So long as you use smart phone that has a fast 3G data connection with the ability to download native social media programs, you too can steal time.

Okay, let review.  YOU too can steal time for social media by:

1. Acquiring a smart phone such as an iPhone, Android device, Palm Pre or Blackberry
2. Downloading native Social Media applications for sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
3. Downloading native applications to manage your Blog
4. Configuring access to all your email accounts via the built in email application
5. Bookmarking the mobile Google Reader site

Oh, one last thing.  I’m not going to go into any details here but you might want to read this blog post of mine about a particular place to steal time.

I know there are probably a ton of other ideas out there so please leave a comment and tell me how you steal time for social media.

Since @williamtincup over at Starr Tincup did not ask for my predictions for 2010, I guess I will have to blog about them right here on my shiny new WordPress Blog.  Since it is New Years Eve and my brain is now official mush for 2009, I could only come up with 5 (really lame) predictions.

SaaS continues to pick up steam

As company’s budgets open up in 2010 and they start looking at upgrading or replacing their aging legacy in-house HCM applications, they will turn to SaaS replacements.  Additionally many companies already using SaaS applications for Talent Management, Recruiting and Learning will switch to another SaaS provider based on perceived but not necessary real shortcoming of their current system  (grass is always greener syndrome).

Consumer information such as Social Security numbers will continue to get stolen

Many companies still have not implemented procedure changes and technology solutions to keep employee information safe.  Too many system administers, database administrators and developers have inappropriate access to employee information in the HR systems.  Additionally, too many people in HR also have access to sensitive employee information.  Controls are still not in place to prevent or detect when files containing social security numbers have been emailed, copied to USB drives or otherwise been spirited out side the company firewall.

Social Media sites will start to be unblocked

More companies will finally get the hint that blocking social media sites is not actually causing employees to avoid spending work time doing social media.  The rise in popularity of smart phones such as the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices that can easily access Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites convinces companies that blocking is futile.  However as more people start using sites such as Twitter and Facebook and post before they think, we will see an increase in the number of employees getting the boot at work for posting negative information about their company, co-workers or management.

Oracle Fusion Applications will…

…nope, sorry, no way am I going to predict anything about Oracle Fusion Applications

Bryon Abramowitz and Sarah White will move to a self hosted WordPress Blog

Okay, I sort of get to cheat on this. I started writing this blog post a couple of days ago when Bryon was asking for Blogger Theme help and I predicted that he would eventually be persuaded by his fellow bloggers to move to WordPress.  However Bryon jumped on this faster than my speeding greyhound and moved to a self hosted WordPress blog yesterday.  Sarah will eventually get plugin envy after seeing all the really cool buttons on other people’s blogs and will move her WordPress.com blog to a self hosted site.

There you go. I hope everyone has nice New Years Eve and I am looking forward to continuing the conversations in 2010.