Are you an HR Tech Fanboy?

I always have to have the latest and greatest. The newest version of the hottest gadget or mobile operating system. That great, innovative, mind-blowing feature that my favorite tech company tells me I can't live without. I stream the keynotes and product launches. I follow all the tech blogs religiously and track all the leaks. I count down for days, weeks, even months to release date.

Sound familiar?  It's OK to admit it. I know there's a few of you out there. There are names for people like us: "geek," "techie" and even the dreaded "Fanboy." We've been mocked (Samsung mocks Apple Fanboys), chastised and accused of being obsessed. Why do we do it? Maybe it's the sense of excitement of having something new, that feeling you get having something that no one else has yet, the accomplishment of waiting in line for hours or perhaps it's actually something so insanely great it will change the way you get work done, even simplify your life.

I recently purchased a Pebble smartwatch. I didn't fund the original kickstarter campaign but did follow it closely as wearables was a very knew consumer space. Although fitness trackers had started to gain momentum, the verdict was still out on the smartwatch. So, following a key software update that enabled support for notification center on iOS, I decided to give it a try. The device truly changed how I interact with my smartphone. It's a conversation for another post, but if you'd like to know more, just ask me in the comments.

Although I loved the core functionality around being able to glance discretely at my wrist for notifications there was still much to be desired. Fortunately, the team at Pebble was hard at work on the next update and they announced it would be available by the end of January. I waited patiently (who are we kidding), stalking their Twitter account, Facebook pages and blog, hoping for any news of the update, looking for any sign it would come before the weekend. I couldn't wait to show off all the new features to my friends and co-workers.

As it grew closer and closer to the end of the day, and the anticipation continued to build, it got me thinking,  do we get this way about enterprise software? Are there those of us that want the upgrade first. The first to login after a vendor update and try out that new feature you've heard so much about? Be the first to register for a vendors user conference? Dare I say Fanboy!

I know what you're saying, there's a big difference between consumer technology and enterprise software. Sometimes being first isn't always a good thing. There's to much risk involved. No one would ever be obsessed over enterprise software! But is there really that much of a difference anymore? Haven't enterprise software vendors been taking cues from the consumer space for quite some time now? Do vendors not track customer loyalty, retention, referencability and net promoter scores? In a sense, identifying Fanboys of their solutions?

Take Salesforce.com for example. Benioff revolutionized enterprise software. He wanted enterprise software to work like Amazon.com and be as easy for people to use as it was for them to use Facebook. But what was more astonishing was his ability to create the first, true enterprise software Fanboys.

Modeled after consumer and developer conferences of tech giants such as Apple, Dreamforce became the gold standard of user conferences in the enterprise software space. Benioff garners celebrity status. Thousands of people, customers and non-customers alike, from around the world come to see the latest and greatest Salesforce has to offer,  participate in hands-on development and thought leadership workshops and attend keynotes from the sharpest minds in business. And of course there's the customer appreciation party, usually with a big name musical act. All of which is intended to make you, the consumer, fall in love with the vendor and their solutions and to evangelize them to your peers.

Does anybody get this excited over other types of enterprise software, dare I say human capital management software? I do. I'm a techie. I'm an HR technology Fanboy. There, I said it. Anytime I hear of a great new feature slated for a vendor's upcoming release, I get all excited. I need to know all about it, how it's going to change the way HR, employees and managers get work done. I want to share it with my peers and customers to tell them how awesome it's going to be. How it will simplify how they do their job.

How about you? Do you get excited for your #hrtech vendor's annual conference, an upcoming release, a great new feature you've heard about? Are you dying for the new user interface enhancements the same way you did for those of your smartphone OS? The latest update to the mobile site. Do you dream about how that new predictive analytics feature is going to help you make better business decisions about your people? Or perhaps how the latest social integration in your favorite ATS is going to improve candidate sourcing.

Do you shout about it to the highest mountain tops and evangelize it within your organization and to your peers? Are you the first to ask your vendor to participate in beta and early adopter programs so you can get your hands on the latest and greatest functionality before other customers? if any of these describe how you feel about your #hrtech and enterprise software then you to are an #hrtech Fanboy.

New Year, New Post, New HRTech

It's that time of year again. In the coming days many of us will reassess personal and professional goals,  lament over prior year's resolutions not kept and swear to ourselves we're going to commit to those we've made for 2013. 

Maybe one of your 2012 resolutions was to make better use of your HRTech. Unfortunately, your day-to-day job probably put a wrinkle in any hopes you had of taking advantage of all the great technology you invested in. Or did you just wrap up a new hrtech purchase and are preparing to dive into the activation process? Maybe you just finished your implementation and have a 1/1 live date. 

Whether your hrtech is already well ingrained within your organization or your just starting out with a new system, here are a few hints to help you make the most of your technology investment in 2013.

Move beyond the core

For many of us, just making it through the first live check date is an important enough milestone. However, at some point during the selection process, you chose the solution because of the value added it provided outside of just managing employee information and processing payroll. Unfortunately, feature roll outs outside of the core functionality are typically reserved for later phases of the project and don't see the light of day for quite some time. Maybe it was the performance management module or succession planning functionality that really caught your eye during the vendor demos. Extending the capabilities of your hrtech by leveraging the talent management features included is a great way to help your organization gain efficiencies and get a leg up in the war for talent in the new year.

The more the merrier

Family and friends are finally packing up and leaving. You invited them into your home, whether just for the night or an extended stay,  to help celebrate the holidays and ring in the new year. However, just because the holidays are ending, doesn't mean we can't continue to extend that same hospitality into the new year. In this case, I'm referring to welcoming your existing or new hrtech into your corporate systems family. Your hrtech undoubtedly came with a slew of integration options and an ever expanding partner ecosystem that can further help solidify the value of your HR technology within the organization. Perhaps it's time to finally build that integration which will keep other corporate systems up to date with the most current employee data from the HRMS. Maybe your hrtech vendor has a new partnership with another provider whose solution you already use. Taking advantage of included functionality such as web services API's or a pre-packaged integration available via a partner relationship provides another opportunity to get the most from your hrtech in 2013.

Data is data, regardless of size

Data doesn't have to be big for it to be useful. All organizations, regardless of size or complexity, can leverage the data from their HRMS to gain valuable insight into their business. Of course your hrtech comes with hundreds of pre-delivered standard reports that you can not live without for day-to-day tasks. However, vendors have focused a lot of attention on delivering true analytic capabilities with features such as custom report authoring, dashboards and drill-down options. If you're not leveraging these tools you mine as well be running your business blind. Your people data holds the keys to important aspects of your organization such as employee retention, hiring practices and labor costs. If one of your hrtech resolutions for 2013 is to be more strategic and gain that all important "seat at the table," there's no better time than the present to start using the business intelligence tools delivered as part of your solution.

So, what will your #hrtech resolution be? What areas of your HRMS are you going to make better use of in 2013? Whether it's one of the recommendations above or something not mentioned, share your ideas below in the comments or via twitter by sharing this post. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful holidays and happy new year. Here's looking forward to another outstanding year for #hrtech in 2013.

Better Late Than Never

I've been busy, more like procrastinating with starting this month's post. Let's chalk it up to the quarter-end rush. Regardless, I was about 24 hours away from missing my own self-imposed monthly writing requirement. So, here we go with June's post. Better late than never.

Staying with this month's theme, I recently had the opportunity to present at a customer event as a late fill-in. I was excited about the opportunity and began making last minute travel plans and getting up to speed on the content scheduled to be presented.

The subject for the event was continuous performance management and how traditional methods of performance management, such as the annual performance review, are outdated and failing employees in the workplace. Discussing current workplace trends such as the changing generational workforce, collaboration and the social enterprise, and the consumerization occurring within HR and IT, my goal was to demonstrate how these trends called for a newer, more modern approach to performance management. One that considered these trends and their importance in managing the performance of today's workforce.

One of the most visible trends is the increasing level of social collaboration occurring in the enterprise. Whether it's collaborating on goals, following an activity feed, or publically issuing praise, the enterprise is going social. And, it's full steam ahead. However, enterprise social networks and collaboration tools have typically been seen as those of newer generations and not those of traditionalists and baby boomers.

During my presentation I shared examples of how providing instant praise, collaborating on goals and sharing feedback, and having real-time access to team activity streams were the new face of performance management. Instead of having to recall what an employee did a month ago or even last quarter, relevant performance data was available on-demand and included as part of the employee's talent profile. This was an easy concept to drive home with those in attendance and everyone clearly saw the value in leveraging these new tools to collect and mange performance data.

However, most in attendance were like myself, a gen-x'er, and familiar with many of the enterprise social networks and collaboration tools currently available. The challenges, as some in attendance shared, with implementing these new processes were around adoption and engagement. The question I got asked, on more than one occasion, was how do we engage and drive adoption for these new tools and methods with our traditionalists and baby-boomers? What if we're not the most progressive organization and have slow or late adopters?

This really got me thinking. So, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on how you might be able to drive adoption and increase engagement with those in your organization who may be arriving a little late to the social enterprise.

First, conquer the generational divide in the workplace. Contrary to what you might believe, baby boomers are not all that different from your gen-x'ers and Millennials when it comes to technology. Just as today's generations are latching on to new devices, software tools and new forms of media, previous generations had similar experiences with the introduction of the personal computer and early Internet technologies. 

In their book, The 2020 Workplace, co-authors Jeanne Meister and Karie Willyerd introduce us to a reverse mentoring program started at Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations and communications firm. Meister and Willyerd describe the program: 

Young and/or ethnically diverse mentors across the United States volunteered and were assigned to senior team members based on where they might have had the greatest opportunity to understand another perspective. 

Michele Chase, the managing director of world-wide human resources at Burson-Marsteller, notes that several of the young mentors have even helped their mentees setup Twitter or other social networking tools. Leveraging already existing working relationships, generations can learn from each other how they use social and collaborative tools in the workplace.

Second, demonstrate executive support and participation. Although the use of new tools and processes typically have their beginnings as grass-roots movements deep within the organization, inviting senior leadership "in" can help drive user adoption amongst management. For example, the CTO may be an early adopter of your enterprise collaboration tool, sharing updates about the Development team through this new channel instead of sending a lengthy email. The Chief Services Officer may be the first to leverage your organization's new performance management software with his or her own leadership team. This top-down approach to adoption can help solidify the use of these systems within the organization and encourage lagers to begin testing the waters, so to speak.

Finally, measure it. It's easy to communicate the soft or indirect benefits of collaboration such as less email or getting answers to questions faster. A goal of a new performance system may be to add more objectivity to the process. Although these are great desired outcomes, they're not exactly measurable. Begin sharing success stories; such as the percent decrease in number of days it took a department to complete the review process when compared with the previous system. How about an employee survey showing the overall satisfaction level with new methods of capturing and managing performance data. Demonstrating results quantitatively is a great way to show the traditional workforce the benefits of using these new tools.

So, how are you deploying new systems and technologies in your organization and driving adoption amongst all generations of your workforce? Share your thoughts in the comments or share them on social media. Remember,  not everyone is going to be an early adopter, but when those who needed a little extra convincing finally do jump on-board, you can welcome them with that old adage - Better Late Than Never.

HR Tech and Classic Rock: Open Arms

As the Summer concert tours began to take shape, I couldn't help but notice Journey would shortly kick off their 2012 tour this July. I certainly wasn't surprised to see them heading back out on the road as they've experienced a definite resurgence over the last decade along with the likes of other power rockers such as STYX and REO. 

What got me thinking though was this wasn't the same Journey, nor had it been for quite some time. In fact, most of these legendary groups have undergone key personnel changes over the years primarily as a result of band members no longer able to coexist as a group. Just as remaining members of the band undertake the search for a replacement lead vocalist or bass player, organizations are going through similar selection processes- looking for their new lead singer (system of engagement) or new rhythm section (system of record) as a result of their current group (applications) not working as well together as expected. These new systems must ultimately welcome each others' data with open arms.

Yeah, I know. That was a stretch, but we can all agree it's more critical than ever for enterprise systems, regardless of function, to be open and able to share and consume data from other applications. Closed systems have no place in our world today. Solutions providers must demonstrate openness and the ability to integrate across the organization.

The HR Tech landscape has been in constant flux as a result of recent acquisitions. Niche players and best-of-breeds are finding their way into the organization. Unified solution providers are working diligently to expand partner networks and grow their ecosystems. Software delivery models have expanded the options the business now has in making technology decisions and changes in the way people engage with each other mean new types of data that can't be ignored.

Each of these trends is even more the reason why the systems you choose to run your business with must provide for multiple options to interface and share data with each other.

First, let's consider what this means for those organizations whose solution of choice recently fell victim to some level of acquisition within the market place. What do recent moves such as Salesforce's purchase of Rypple and Oracle's purchase of Taleo tell us about the need for a system's ability to be open. There weren't a whole lot of folks, outside of Benioff maybe, that were forward thinking enough to see that Rypple's social performance platform could have anything to do with CRM. And what would Oracle decide to do with it's new cloud purchase? The task at hand for these vendors is to determine how to provide integration points for their new band mates- both for their existing fans as well as new ones. As a consumer of these offerings, I'm looking for useful integrations that drive strategic value and not just done for the sake of saying we integrated the two solutions.

Secondly, the adoption of the social enterprise is changing the way we work and interact with others. An increasing number of organizations are now leveraging some form of enterprise collaboration tool to improve the connectedness of their employees. Whether it's a social goal in Rypple or employees giving praise to one another in Yammer, we're seeing new types of people performance data emerge within the workplace. This data, and it's ability to be consumed by your performance management system, is becoming increasingly critical if you're going to achieve a holistic view of your people. Many HR Tech providers have acknowledged the importance of this data and are now partnering with enterprise collaboration providers to deliver integrations between HCM and these new social tools. 

Finally, the ease of which organizations can adopt and leverage new technology has forced providers' hands in ensuring openness of their solutions. Lines of business are now more empowered than ever to make their own decisions when it comes to the software they use to run their departments. Upgrades, rip and replace strategies and moves to the cloud could eventually mean organizations are left with a group of disparate systems still very much in need of sharing data with one another. 

So what should you be looking for from your HR Tech vendors to ensure they're welcoming data from other systems with open arms:

1) Check out the partner pages on the web sites of solutions providers you're currently evaluating as well as those already in use within your organization. Vendors should be able to demonstrate a developing ecosystem around their solutions incorporating technology partners from various disciplines.

2) Ask about pre-packaged integrations and connectors to other commonly used solutions. This prevents you from having to build and maintain custom interfaces on your own. 

3) Ensure the vendor offers an API library for which to programatically share data between applications. Web services are an efficient way for different applications to interact with each other and can automate the movement of data between multiple systems. Web services should be made available at no additional cost and be packaged with application programming interface guides and sample code to help get you started.

It's time for your HR Tech to integrate it's new band mates with the same open arms Journey welcomed lead singer Arnel Pineda . Those that fail to forge these new relationships early on might find themselves playing to empty arenas.

Predictive Analytics: March Madness Style

This post was originally posted on 411talent.blogspot.com in April 2012. Re-posting here for archival purposes.

March Madness has the unfortunate reputation as being one of the most productivity draining events of the entire year for many organizations. Instead of focusing on this phenomenon, which many others have already so eloquently done, (here’s a great one http://bit.ly/GAUuce) this post is about the underlying data and capabilities of it to predict a team’s success in the tournament and how analytics is as important for those of us filling out our brackets as it is for the success of our organizations.

Each year, as NCAA tournament time rolls around, millions of college hoops fans, inclusive of myself, try to predict which lower seeds will upset a higher seed, which school will make a Cinderella run and who will ultimately make the final four.

I bleed Orange and Blue. This means my beloved Florida Gators are a lock for the final four every year and traditionally, I’ve always put them through to the championship game in my bracket.

However, as the landscape was dominated this year by the likes of Kentucky (who we as Gator fans endured three painful loses to), Syracuse and Missouri, which received an untimely exit compliment of Cinderella Norfolk State, I decided to take a more objective approach to filling out my brackets. I did a side-by-side comparison of how teams would perform in the tournament based on two key data items used by the NCAA men’s basketball selection committee. 

The first was RPI which is a computer ranking of a team based on the opponents it has played during the season. The RPI is made up of a complex formula assigning weightings to things such as winning percentage, strength-of-schedule, wins at home vs. road wins, and opponents winning percentage. Fortunately for college basketball fans, the RPI rankings play much less significance (or do they?) in determining the overall national champion than that other infamous computer ranking system we all love to hate. Yes, I’m talking about you BCS!

The second was the team’s won/loss record over their last 10 games.  Those we consider experts believe how a team performed over their last 10 contests, conference tournaments included, is as good a predictor as any as to whether a team is deserving of being selected for the tournament field. The thought process here is a team who won 7 of their last 10 has a much better chance of going deeper in the tournament than one who may have lost 5 of 6 down the stretch.

And so I began to fill out my brackets, putting my love for my Alma Mater aside-giving way to the numbers and higher rationale. As we always say, the numbers don’t lie. In my RPI bracket, the team with the higher RPI went through to the next round.  In other words, the higher seeded team advanced.  The “last 10” proved  a bit more of a challenge with many teams recording the same won/loss records over their last ten games.  If this was the case, my tiebreaker was overall number of wins.

Now before we get to which was a better predictor of who would eventually be crowned champion, let’s discuss how using your company’s own data can help identify those employees in your organization who may become champions and those who may make an early exit.

If I told you that out of your most recent group of new hires, I could predict with high levels of accuracy which of those employees would no longer be with your organization after 1 year, what you would say? How about if I could predict which of your high performers might consider leaving their current position with your company, what would you do? I expect you would say “Heath, show me how I can use my organization’s data to predict employee behavior. “ I’d be happy to. By creating models that leverage key data points in our HCM systems, such as salary, length of service, location, job, performance data, we can successfully predict an individual’s behavior with greater than 80% accuracy. This is exactly what the selection committee is trying to do when building the tournament field, creating a model and using readily available data to determine a team’s success. Although in this case we’re dealing with individuals and your organization instead of a team and a tournament.

Imagine the value this type of tool would provide to your organization. Think about reducing employee churn and the cost savings associated with replacing an employee (estimated in the thousands of dollars).  And how about the ability to recognize flight risk of a high performer and the potential opportunities gained if you were ultimately able to retain that individual. The possibilities are endless. As an HR practitioner,  demonstrating these capabilities to your C-level execs will definitely earn you a seat at the table.

So how’d my brackets do? (ignoring the inherent flaws in my model) RPI turned out to be a better predictor of success then won/loss record. A team’s RPI successfully predicted the game winner 62% of the time, including the overall national champion, the Kentucky Wildcats. Using “last 10” as a predictor was only accurate in selecting the winner 30% of the time. And my Florida Gators, who were a dismal 4-6 in their last 10, well they defied the odds making it through to the Elite 8.

Fortune tellers have their crystal ball, the selection committee has their RPI. As professionals, we have access to powerful  business intelligence tools and data to help us predict the future. Harness that power to ensure the ongoing success of your organization. Like we always say, the numbers don’t lie.