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.

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.

I have had a nagging feeling for awhile that HR people are actually afraid of technology. I thought back on my last year of twitter conversations with my HR tweeps and could not think of any significant evidence of HR people talking about technology. In fact, many times during the monthly #HR_Tech chats, the participants bemoaned the lack of actual HR people participating in the chat. I spent some more time reading through the various blog posts written after the HR Technology conference and the Oracle OpenWorld conference. Unfortunately I only found a few HR bloggers that actually wrote about the technology at the HR Technology conference and could not find any HR bloggers who wrote about Oracle OpenWorld. Finally, I perused through my HR Blogs category in Google Reader and again could not find any significant evidence of HR bloggers writing about technology. When I say HR people are afraid of technology, I am not talking about people in HR IT, HRIS, HR Industry Analysts and HR consultants. I’m talking about HR generalists, managers and executives who own the HR function at a company.

So I realize this post is VERY late but I had a couple of conversations this week about Oracle Fusion Applications where I ended up pointing people to the blog posts I could remember off the top of my head. Since it is cold morning, I though I would trudge over to the local coffee shop, order a large mocha and compile my list of Oracle Fusion blog posts. So without further ado, here are the blog posts (you can thank me later).

Jim Holincheck wonders how real are the Fusion Apps AND has a Q&A post that is a must read.

Bill Kutik indicates the brief look we got at Fusion indicates Oracle Fusion HCM seems to be only on par with our best current software.

Ray Wang says Oracle takes a two prong strategy and seeks domination in the market.

Paul Hamerman provides some insight post NDA.

Steve Boese muses on what to think about while waiting for Fusion.

Jason Corsello proclaims that Oracle Fusion Apps Have Finally Arrived…Kinda.

Josh Greenbaum thinks the compartmentalization of Fusion Apps will work to Oracle’s benefit.

For Vinnie Mirchandani, his Fusion question remain unanswered.

Michael Fauscette believes the Fusion Apps are very well designed, extremely usable, modern and offer significant value for customers throughout the different modules.

Official Oracle OpenWorld flickr photostream here.

If you wrote a post on Oracle Fusion and would like me to add it to my list, leave a comment and I will see what I can do.

Updates:

Frank Scavo spins the Fusion timetable in both a positive and negative light.

Merv Adrian skipped Larry’s keynote entirely.

Well, that got your attention!! My blogging brain appears to be on extended leave but I didn’t want you all to think I had abandoned you so I thought I would give a shout out to Meg Bear over at Talented Apps for her great post last week:

http://talentedapps.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/shock-and-awww/

For those of you waiting for the Oracle Fusion Apps, this is a must read since Meg finally acknowledges the elephant in the room:

“I totally understand too, why wouldn’t people get excited about a project that is entirely secret and vague.”

We anxiously await Fusion becoming a public reality and wish Meg continued success on the project.

Obviously I am taking the same chillax approach to updating my blog (sorry everyone) but I had a couple of minutes to spare this morning and while I eat my cereal and stare out the window at snow lightly falling wondering if my Mini Cooper with no snow tires will get into work without incident I thought I would share my thoughts.

As we have seen from prior acquisitions, Oracle does a lot of posturing at the beginning of a takeover (especially if it is a hostile takeover) then mostly settles down and behaves. Those of us who were PeopleSoft customers during the nasty and brutal battle Oracle waged to acquire PeopleSoft remember the public vows by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison to shut down PeopleSoft and discontinue its products.

Here we are a couple of years and many acquisitions later and Oracle has mostly kept the acquired products up and running. Has Oracle innovated with the PeopleSoft product line? Not so much especially with HCM but they continue to fix bugs, provide regulatory updates and deliver incremental functionality.

I say, let’s wait a bit and see exactly what Oracle has to say about the future of Sun. Chillax everyone.

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.

Having participated on many HCM and Talent Management upgrade projects in various roles such as Developer, Business Analyst, Architect and Project Manager I am dismayed at the amount of time, resources and money the traditional upgrades consume.

Prior to the Oracle acquisition, PeopleSoft correctly determined that ERP upgrades were consuming the budgets of their customers when those dollars could be used to purchase additional modules instead. They started working on a new methodology to make PeopleSoft upgrades go much faster (and thus cheaper) than the traditional upgrade . Unfortunately for both Oracle and the PeopleSoft customers that new methodology was never actually implemented.

I think it is time for the ERP vendors to go back to the drawing board and re-think the upgrade process. There is some amazing technology out there from vendors such as Oracle for virtualization. Oracle Enterprise Manager will let you create a new virtual server and deploy an application with just a few keystrokes (or at least that is what they show in a demo). How about taking that virtualization paradigm to figure out how to create an upgrade process that takes hours and not days, weeks and months to upgrade a system.

As companies start looking at the enormous costs associated with upgrades, I suspect many of them will take a left turn and evaluate the cost benefit of in-house ERP upgrades versus the costs associated with converting to SaaS. On the HR application side, many of the traditional ERP systems are starting to show their age. HR SaaS vendors have created much more user friendly systems and they tend to implement additional functionality on quarterly basis versus the year to two year cycle of a traditional ERP.

So, come on ERP vendors…streamline my upgrade please!