From the category archives:

SaaS

To Change or Not to Change?

by Michael Krupa on February 1, 2010

One of our top notch HR Bloggers and HR Technology instructor at RIT, Steve Boese, asked the HR blogosphere if we would host some guest blogs for his students.  I raised my virtual hand as fast as I could and I sure am glad as one of Steve’s students sent me a fabulous guest post.

Today I am hosting a guest post from RJ Nicolais. RJ is just getting into the Twitter thing so if everyone could please follow him and give him encouragement to update his BIO and avatar and maybe add a couple more tweets, that would be great. I don’t want to embarrass RJ by mentioning all the wonderful things he said about my blog but lets just say he will go far in life if he keeps up the compliments.  RJ and I share some similar thoughts about HR and technology and all kidding aside, please give RJ your full attention for this great post about being afraid of change.

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To Change or Not to Change?

I’ve worked at several different organizations throughout my career in human resources and have noticed that they all have one thing in common: they are afraid of change.  Not just any change, but a special kind of change.  As HR professionals, we are supposed to be the “champions of change” and yet have difficulty changing ourselves.  We can take on wellness initiatives and change whole benefit structures (not to mention that we shoulder the responsibility for broader company culture shifts) but when it comes to technology we’re just plain frightened.  I would have used another colloquialism to tell you how I feel about it but that would be inappropriate.

The rate at which “technology” changes and evolves is totally insane – but that is the nature of the beast.  You can learn to accept it and embrace those changes or you can choose to resist and get left the in the proverbial dust.  I should probably tell you that I don’t think I’m really frightened, so I make that correction to the statement I made above.  There are those of us who truly embrace technology changes and get downright excited about them.  So we demo software and the newest (SaaS) solution for HR and we start to drool thinking about how much we can accomplish in so little time.  We may even start to sweat a little when we see the pretty interface we get to look at every day.

Then we talk to our bosses about it and our dreams are shattered.

“It’s too expensive.”  “There is too much at stake in a change.”  “It’s just not possible this year – maybe next year we can talk about it.” Or, my all-time favorite: “What we have now works just fine.” Those are all valid answers to valid fears.  I think that we need to get past those fears.  HR needs to spend the money to get the right solution at the right time.  Get the product that will be the most use to the company right now when growing the business is more important than ever.

Trying to work within the constructs of old software that doesn’t support the business any longer isn’t productive.  Excel isn’t a means to an end.  That is what scares me – outdated software and massive Excel spreadsheets.  It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

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My 2010 Predictions

by Michael Krupa on December 31, 2009

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.

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While you wait

by Michael Krupa on December 28, 2009

Apologies on the delay in moving my blog to Wordpress. I could bore you with all the reasons for the delay (work, work, work, bad cold, holiday gatherings, learning the Thesis Wordpress theme etc…) but I know you could care less. You just want some new content to chew on. Especially that darn @thehrmaven who has been snapping her fingers at me. So how about a compromise? Let’s turn back the clock and remind of you some of my earlier work while you wait.

In my very first post, I told you to SaaS your SaaS. Now that was one sassy post. How about this beaut from last February when asked if you Twitter in the bathroom? In April I showed you how to convert filing cabinets into a ping pong table. Finally for all my new readers, this gem of a video from August entitled What I do (Wednesday edition) will give you the low down on my work and my passion for rescued greyhounds.

Now run along and don’t come back until I tell you I am ready.

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Is HR afraid of Technology?

by Michael Krupa on October 27, 2009

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.

Now I know what you are muttering to yourself at this point in. You say HEY I write and talk about technology all the time, are you not paying attention? So let me backup a minute and clarify what I am talking about. HR loves to talk about technology but only if that technology is directly related to social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Google Wave is heartily discussed. But what about systems that support Core HR, Benefits and Payroll. Zilch, nada, nothing. Salary planning and succession planning? Ditto. Performance Management and Recruiting? Things are looking a little bit better here but still not too much action.

From my exhaustive limited research, it looks to me like HR likes to talk about non-technology HR topics.

  • Cover letters, resumes, personal development and inappropriate workplace behavior? Check.

  • Getting a seat at the table, transforming HR processes and employee engagement? Check.

  • Performance evaluations, interviewing techniques, leadership development and mentoring? Check.

We read story after story about how HR organizations purchase HR applications only to find out later that the application does not really meet their needs. Often times the application is purchased after watching a demo of the software but not after asking the vendor to run through real world scenarios or after digging into the technical architecture of the product. Maybe if HR organizations were not so afraid of technology they might be more inclined to ask more questions and dig deeper when evaluating HR applications. And then maybe, just maybe they might be happier in the long term with their HR applications.

I am hoping that I am just not reading the right blogs and am not following some HR tweeps on Twitter who post about HR Technology topics and are clearly NOT AFRAID OF TECHNOLOGY. So, leave a comment and tell me why I am totally full of “it”.

Really, seriously. I want to be proved wrong.

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Cloud computing is not in a cloud

September 9, 2009

I have been dismayed recently at all the articles and blog posts I read these days that seem to indicate that we won’t need data centers anymore with Cloud Computing. That somehow Cloud Computing runs, well, in the cloud! Now I know you all are smarter than that. Right? You know that somewhere, someplace [...]

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How HR SaaS Vendors can conquer the world

March 1, 2009

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 [...]

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Streamline My Upgrade Please

February 8, 2009

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 [...]

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SaaS Disillusionment is your own making

January 13, 2009

While on Twitter the other day, one of my favorite HR twitter users, Jason Averbook, posted a link to an article on the InformationWeek blog about the SAP CEO, Bill McDermott, predicting SaaS Disillusionment.
From the InformationWeek article:
Meantime, McDermott says SAP is positioned to gain share in the business applications market as IT departments scrutinize every [...]

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Sass your SaaS

November 30, 2008

In other words, do talk back to your SaaS applications. Let me explain. Bahan Sadegh at Sandhill.com wrote an excellent article called 10 Questions To Ask A Potential SaaS Vendor. Number 10 on the list includes monitoring. Personally I think this needs to be a little higher on the list. What’s the point [...]

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