by Michael Krupa on May 10, 2011
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.
by Michael Krupa on May 8, 2011
Heeeees Baaaaaaaack. Bet you thought I had abandoned my blog. Let’s not use such a strong word as abandon. How about hiatus or leave of absence or long vacation. It’s been a whirlwind crazy couple of months but don’t worry, I didn’t forget you all. To ease you back into my blog posts I thought I would write about the HRevolution conference I attended on April 30th. I didn’t want you all to freak out having to read so many words on my blog after my hiatus so I hacked into Paul Smith’s blog since he doesn’t know WordPress from WordStar and left my true thoughts about Paul and the conference on his Welcome To The Occupation blog. So go click that link just to the left of prior period thingy.
I’ll be back soon with some delicious blog posts of my own.
by Michael Krupa on June 21, 2010
Yes I know I am very late in blogging about my thoughts on HR Technology at HRevolution 2010. I have been staring at this blog post for weeks trying to figure out what to say. The problem is that I am trying to write about something that well…didn’t happen so I’m giving up and finally finishing this post.
In case you missed it, Ben Eubanks hosted the HRevolution Carnival of HR over at his fantastic upstartHR blog. Ben’s Carnival seems to be the most thorough roundup of thoughts regarding HRevolution. By my count there were 45 blog posts mentioned in this Carnival. I read every single post and guess what? If you set aside social media and mobile technology, only 2 people mentioned technology in their blog post. At the conference, Bill Kutik, Bryon Abramowitz and I were co-session leaders of the HR Technology session. We did the usual introductions, made a couple of comments about HR technology and then opened it up to the crowd of about 25 people for questions. The session mostly centered around Abra HRMS, some questions about Taleo and a request for information about recruiting technology vendors for small companies. Questions were asked and answers were given so I hopefully some people walked away with new technology information. However, I sensed that many of the session attendees did not even know where to begin to ask HR technology questions.
Let me be clear that this blog post is in no way a criticism of the HRevolution conference, the conference organizers or the conference participants. The focus of the conference was not on technology and I had a great time, learned lots and was able to connect and re-connect with wonderful people. But what my experience at the conference does tell me is that we still have a long way to go to get HR Practitioners to think about technology. Unfortunately I do not have any earth shattering ideas right now on how to approach this. I do think I will reach out to my session co-hosts Bill and Bryon to brainstorm ideas for getting more discussions going with HR Practitioners. Then I will reach out to some of the HRevolution attendees for their thoughts as well.
If you attended HRevolution, did you have the same experience as I did regarding HR Technology discussions or something different? Do you have any ideas for me on how to engage HR Practitioners in technology discussions? Come on, help a guy out here.
by Michael Krupa on June 2, 2010
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. 
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.
