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.

I was organizing some of my PeopleSoft documents and came across some screen shots of PeopleSoft from years gone bye. Interesting to see the changes in the application from the Windows 3.1 days to the Web. Enjoy.

Here is the original PeopleSoft 3.0 application from 1994. Windows 3.1 baby!!!

PeopleSoft version 6:

PeopleSoft version 7:

PeopleSoft version 8:

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!