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.

My partner in HR Technology crime, Steve Boese, harassed nicely asked me recently to do an all BlackBerry Tech Tips. I took pity on him and his iPhone wanna-be BlackBerry Storm and so here we are.  I scoured high and low for some awesome BlackBerry Tech Tips. Okay okay I scoured the CrackBerry.com and TUAW.com sites but hey I found some great information to share with you.

Apparently some BlackBerry’s have touch screens (who knew) and if you have to touch you might as well use shortcuts. Read on about BlackBerry touch shortcuts otherwise known as Touchcuts.

So RIM has this iPad challenger in development called the BlackBerry Playbook. If web surfing speed is the most important feature of a tablet device for you then you might want to see this video of the Playbook versus the iPad.

Just in case you didn’t know, Twitter has their own official Twitter app for the BlackBerry so go right here, right now to get instructions on how to download, install, configure and start using the BlackBerry Twitter app.

I have seen more than a few tweets out there from loyal BlackBerry users about having to yank the battery out of the device and reinsert to get the dang phone to work again.  CrackBerry.com has a great post on when and how to do a battery pull, hard reset, soft reset and some wacky thing called a DOUBLE-SOFT reset. Oh BlackBerry you make me laugh.

Do you have BlackBerry OS 6?  You are in luck then because OS 6 comes with a brand spanking new WebKit-based Browser that competes pretty well with the iPhone Safari browser. As part of their BlackBerry 101 series, CrackBerry.com walks you through the features of this OS 6 browser.

And finally I leave you with the design of the next BlackBerry. Okay maybe not the next BlackBerry but a concept design of a pointy BlackBerry called the Empathy.  I’m not sure what is more interesting, the pointy phone or the thumb ring on the person holding the phone.

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.

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.

The Carnival of HR has landed right on the tail of Mardi Gras  so grab a Sazerac or Hurricane and some Jambalaya, pull up a chair and settle down for some fantastic blog posts.

As you know, Mardi Gras is a downright fun celebration but sometimes people imbibe a few too many hurricanes and need their friends to keep them from embarrassing themselves.  At work sometimes you also need a network of friends and mentors to help guide you.

Mary Jo Asmus at Aspire Collaborative Services kicks off the carnival with Leading People Can Be Messy about unpredictable people.

Continuing the theme of messy people who probably need a mentor, Melissa Prusher from The Devon Group suggests you rely on your mentors in Count on Change – and a Mentor to See You Through.

Speaking of friends and support systems, Paul Smith continues his story from his previous post about being gay at work and asks you to take stock of your support system in Support (if It’s Not love, Then It’s the Bomb).

If you don’t do mentoring then my guess is you don’t do Succession Planning. With a blog post titled Got Succession Planning Phobia? You’ve Got Problems, you can bet that the CEO of Aquire, Lois Melbourne has some specific thoughts on the subject.

Friends don’t let friends make HR mistakes so please read the HR Observations post by Michael Haberman on the Top 5 HR Mistakes That Small Businesses Make.

I’m sure the HR Bartender has a fabulous recipe for Hurricanes but more importantly, Sharlyn Lauby in Failure is Nothing Personal explains that it might be your methods that are failing.

Continuing the discussion on failures, Mark Bennett over at Talented Apps wants you to Focus on Failure! and learn from your failures when they happen.

Steve Boese thinks that Gartner may have forgotten that HR can and should play a role in Social Media initiatives and would like your thoughts on subject. Head over to What’s Missing from the 2010 Social Software Predictions to add your comments.

Now sometimes when you are enjoying the Mardi Gras celebration you need a little encouragement in form of Beads.

Speaking of needing some beads, over at Simply Lisa, Lisa Rosendahl gives us some thoughts on how to free up the mind to write in The Anti-Writing Demon.

Over at Humor That Works, Drew Tarvin talks about what you can learn from an improv class. I wonder if the 10 tips include tips for attracting bead throwers.

Beads are a powerful motivation but more importantly Three Star Leadership’s Wally Bock tells us about a different type of motivation in Putting Drive to Work: Intrinsic Motivation.

Continuing our discussion of motivation, Mr. Renegade HR himself, Chris Ferdinandi, wants your thoughts on How to Turn Average Performers into Rockstars.

Beads are also currency and The HR Store answers a write in question about negotiating a better salary for a job offer in Job offer negotiation.

Let’s not forget our international currency by reading Three Rules for Compensation Surveys in Smaller Developing Markets by Warren Heaps over at the International HR Forum.

More than just about beads, Bill Kutik writes What Does Salary.com Actually do and lets us in on the best kept secret in HR Technology and as a bonus gives us his thoughts on the SuccessFactors purchase of Inform.

Giving and collecting beads are a passion for some people and in the appropriately titled Passion – It’s Not a Dirty Word in HR, Steve Browne guest posts at the Cincy Recruiter blog to tell us how to be passionate about HR.

I don’t know how Naomi Bloom feels about beads but she has become passionate about blogging.  Read Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion and learn about who Naomi has beaten on over the years and why she is publishing her methodology for strategic HRM delivery systems planning.

Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Advisors wants to throw beads to everyone with his simple plea to be passionate about something in A Plea For Passion.

At some Mardi Gras celebrations people wear masks to conceal their identities.

Let Lance Haun over at Rehaul show you how to take off the mask of your current career and show the real you in his book review post Doing a Career Transition the Right Way of Alexandra Levit’s new book.

Office politics: It’s Personal is the final installment of the 5 part office politics series over at Jennifer Miller’s blog where you can explore your personal influence.

Speaking of being an influencer, Heather Stagl at Enclaria gives us Ten Essential Tools for Change Agents to help influence when you have no direct authority.

Ready to switch to a mask that is unfamiliar to you?  At the Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy has some advice for people ready to make a lateral move into a role that is unfamiliar to them in Career Advice Part 3: Lateral Moves.

Masks can also be used to hide things we are uncomfortable talking about but Kathleen Nicolini over at the Omaha.net blog tackles obesity with A Big Problem: Obesity and Employee Rights .

Put on your mask of shame and head over to Susan Heathfield’s post Your Worst Job – Ever? where Readers share their worst job – ever.

Sometimes the goal at Mardi Gras is just to party on and have safe and sane good time.

I’m guessing the partying is kept to a minimum at these top 11 HR Masters Programs described by Jared Lucas over at The HR Patriot.

Mardi Gras can suck you in and so did the SHRM website for April Dowling. Head over to PseudoHR to read From APA to SHRM for the juicy details.

Mardi Gras is also about meeting new people and in Networking – Online of Off, Joan Ginsberg thinks the “traditional forms of networking are pointless time-wasters”.

If you don’t have any free time you probably won’t be able to go to Mardi Gras so be sure to stop by Blogging4jobs and let Jessica Miller-Merrell teach you 6 Time Saving Business Social Media Tools.

Of course you can’t have a good time at a party if you have not honed your conversational awareness so head on over to Jason Seiden’s wrap up of how-to posts on developing organizational savvy for Tips & Tricks: Develop Your Conversational Awareness (5 of 5).

The amazing HR Maven, Deirdre Honner, tells us why she continues to party on work, write, blog & talk with her blog post Why I do it.

I don’t know about you but I always get a return on my investment when attending Mardi Gras (beads anyone?) so read on about HR ROI.

What is the #1 HR Metric to Report to Your CEO? I am not going to give it way so you will just have to read this post from Cathy Missildine-Martin at the Profitability Through Human Capital blog.

I usually get a return on investment from my beads but do you know how to evaluate the ROI for your Learning Programs?  If not, you had better go read Reviving Training’s DOA ROI by Kevin Oakes.

Payroll is a topic not always covered in our sexy HR blogs but Tusha Bhatia over at the Talent Junction blog has a great post covering ROI on automating the Payroll Function.

Thank you everyone for your fantastic contributions to this Carnival of HR and to the readers for taking time to find some new blog posts to read.  Stay tuned for a very special Undercover Boss edition of the Carnival of HR hosted by Bryon Abramowitz at The HR Technologist Blog on February 24th.

That’s right kiddos; I’m hosting the next Carnival of HR right here in the rainy Pacific Northwest.  Please, pretty please send me your submission by February 15th to michael at infoboxinc dot com.  Yes, yes I know I am making you manually type in my email address but I do what I can to keep the spammers at bay.

Just a reminder that we have rules (but only a couple of easy rules) and I have lifted them directly from the @hr_minion listed them below:

1. Please submit a recent (within 2 weeks) post of yours for consideration to the current host.
2. Once the Carnival goes live please help promote it via twitter, your blog, or what have you.
3. Check out our fan page on Facebook and go to Twitter right now and follow CarnivalofHR!

That’s it!  Check back on February 17th for all the delightfully wet goodness of the Carnival of HR.

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.

Following on to my 2010 predictions blog post, I thought I might make some personal predictions for some of my HR Twitter peeps:

@SteveBoese will write one too many late night blog posts and will find himself inside the Squarespace server farm.

After battling a Windows Vista corrupt files issue all during the 2009 holiday break @thehrmaven will declare “if you can’t beat them, join them” and will become a Tech Support supervisor at Microsoft for Windows Vista.

@adowling will suffer a total hashtag breakdown and end up in a hashtag anonymous group where she will find that @TLColson is the group president. Unfortunately both will fall off the wagon and be kicked out when they are discovered whispering to each other during group meetings only in hashtags.

Looking to bring some order and discipline to his employee ranks, Dr. Evil hires @HR_Minion to be his Chief Operating Minion where she quickly convinces him to turn his back on his evil ways.

@beneubanks will evolve to pure energy, simultaneously posting to 40 blogs every day and publishing 12 books.

@billkutik will have to fly down to Fort Myers Florida for a personal intervention when @InFullBloomUS‘s latest blog post hits 100 pages and our brains explode.

The Federal Government will suddenly discover how influential @lisarosendahl really is and appoint her as Blogging Czar. Her first directive will be “Mr. Obama, tear down this firewall!”

@MisterScrubby finally asserts control over @lruettimann, changes her blog name to fakepunkrockhr.com and appoints @bncarvin chief comments moderator.

While dreaming after watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs with her twins, @TrishMcFarlane discovers the secret of cloning and will show up at every 2010 HR event and conference.

Do you have some HR Twitter Peep Predictions you want to share?  Come on now, you know you do.  Please add your predictions in the comments.

Wait, I wonder if this should have been a Google Wave instead.  Oh, never mind.

Well, well, well. That was quite an HR Happy Hour last night.  For the 2 people that read my blog that were NOT listening in live last night, here is the recording of last nights show.

It was wild and crazy and we all got a good belly laugh at the antics.  And yes we did find out that Laurie Ruettimann’s husband, Ken,  really does exist and despite Steve’s probing he didn’t crack at the pressure to reveal embarrassing things about Laurie.  As usual Steve and Shauna did a fantastic job as co-hosts and Shauna even got to push the buttons on the blogtalk radio control panel. Go Shauna.

Don’t forget to read all the back channel tweets for #HRHappyHour.  They are hilarious all by themselves.  Happy New Year and welcome to 2010.