October 3, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
With many of my waking moments being occupied by the near-manic pursuit of a college short list for not one but two daughters in their senior year, my blogging has fallen off the cliff. Add to the mix the insanity of preparing to do the HR tech shootout, and overstimulation reigns.
But I’ve got the shootout behind me, and the entire Lawson team was beaming with pride and enthusiasm over our performance….in spite of 2nd place. For me, it’s primarily about showing off the work of our amazing employees and giving them a dose of adrenaline for the continued work of building, fixing, supporting, selling and implementing these great products. Plus lots of customers get to see a perspective on our stuff they probably wouldn’t see otherwise. It’s all good.
The HR capitalist did a good job of summarizing the highlights, so I won’t bother. Look here for a recap.
This one takes a village, and as the post notes, the entire population was sitting behind Dave while he ran the computer. But I couldn’t have done it without all of them — my sincere thanks to the entire Lawson team. It was a great experience, and I also appreciate all of the audience support for our products and the way we presented them. And seriously — reading from a script? I couldn’t imagine doing it. Ever.
Tags: hr technology conference
Posted in Lawson, SHCM launch | 3 Comments »
July 22, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
I have been working closely with two K-12 school district customers that are in contention for a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The category? Improving teacher performance. In a nutshell, it’s about working with some progressive, large school districts to implement new programs for recruiting, retaining and rewarding teachers. The grant money will be used to fund the creation and operation of the programs for a few years. The objectives are to materially improve teacher performance and make (hopefully) breakthrough discoveries that can be replicated nationally.
The genesis of some of these ideas are traced back to a speech Bill Gates made last November. You can see a transcript of it here. Bottom line: these organizations will have an exceptional opportunity to rethink the way a critical talent pool (teachers) is deployed in the organization. There are a myriad of challenges here, one of which hits at the heart of what I care about — the infrastructure to manage, administer and analyze the programs. The grant proposal is very clear — districts receiving this funding must demonstrate how they will protect the sustainability of these programs after the grant funding runs out. That’s where integrated talent management technology comes in. If you are going to rethink the way you pay teachers for measurable performance outcomes (like student test scores), drive behavioral change in alignment with what exceptional teachers demonstrate and more flexibly deploy great teachers to the schools that most need them, spreadsheets just won’t cut it.
As always, these initiatives are about people, process and technology. And if I have my way, a few of us will get a special opportunity to show how enabling technology in talent management can really have an impact on something that truly matters: the education of our children. As a software guy, those days are few and far between — so I look forward to embracing this one with gusto. Stay tuned.
Posted in K-12, Lawson, talent management, teacher performance | Leave a Comment »
June 5, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
Ok, so I don’t have much credibility in the world of linguistics, but my product strategist, Cecile Alper-Leroux used the word ‘integrally’ to describe our talent management system. What does it mean? Building integrally means to create an integrated solution with integrity. I kinda like it — provided that I can figure out how to use it in a way that is gramatically correct — an obsession of mine. We’ll see.
But I wanted to write about it because of what Josh Bersin said in his recent blog post about his assessment of the state of the economy as it relates to talent management technology. He made an astute observation: that “integration” is more important than “functionality.” It got me thinking about what Cecile said, and I liked the connection.
The integrity part is about delivering the technology that can enable the rapidly evolving talent management business process — and the integration part speaks for itself.
I’m not sure I love it so much that I’m willing to try to coin a new term (the narcissist in me likes the idea), but I thought I’d put it out there — what do you think?
Posted in Lawson, SHCM launch, talent management | 6 Comments »
June 4, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
Please join me tomorrow at 1pm CST when I will be the guest on the next HRchitect WebMingle event. If you need details, you can find it here.
Tags: hrchitect webmingle, Lawson, talent management
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
May 2, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
I’ve already vented here on the broader issues of the many social networking sites out there. And I had to laugh out loud when someone tweeted this week about how to solve the problem. In seriousness, the individual suggested you have two facebook pages (one personal, one professional), two twitter accounts, and who knows how many other plaxo or linked in sites.
I’ve also noticed that folks who’s blog I’ve followed of late are tweeting more frequently and blogging less. And I have to admit I’ve become one of them.
Blog posts take a lot of time and often are about formulating the background associated with one idea or concept. And when you HAVE to articulate it in 140 characters, you get good at summarizing and obviously you don’t worry much about eloquence (or do you do it even more?).
Bottom line — I’m finding myself tweeting all the best ideas/thoughts/discoveries in this pea brain of mine and lose all of my interest in writing a blog post.
I’m not finished, but I am going to let myself off the hook for the weekly posts I’ve committed to over the past couple of years (and anyone paying attention knows I’ve done a lousy job in the past few months anyway).
So join me on twitter (@larrydunivan) for regular stuff, and when something worthy of an in-depth discussion comes along, I’ll write about it here.
And of course, that’s all predicated on actually having something interesting to say — and in the world of social networking that is not trivial!
Posted in collaboration, social networking, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »
April 20, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
Sunday is always an interesting day at CUE — it’s a great opportunity to talk to our customers about new products under non-disclosure. They learn about what we have in development, and we get a valuable opportunity to collaborate with groups of customers in a venue that’s hard to match.
Check out this video clip of Lori Simpson from Geisinger Health, talking about their talent management implementation. This is a success story in-the-making for complex, integrated talent management. These guys get it, and are willing to jump in with both feet for a big bang implementation across 4 of our 7 talent management modules.
And for me, it’s off to walk along the beautiful Pacific Ocean to start CUE Monday!
Posted in Lawson, collaboration, compensation, talent management | Leave a Comment »
April 18, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
I’ve decided to focus my blogging this year through twitter. If there’s an ‘it bag’ in the blogging community this year Twitter would have to be it. Plus I have a great app on my blackberry (tinytwitter) that will make it possible for me to update you on virtually everything that goes on — at least from my vantage point.
But don’t worry — I’ll spare you the weather reports and the dinner menus, I promise! (Although the weather in San Diego today is nothing short of spectacular…).
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
March 24, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
Help me get to the elite level of Linked-in-ness! I don’t stop until I get to 500 connections!
Connect with me here.
Posted in web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »
March 9, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
I’ve allowed my personal commitment to weekly blogging to get interrupted in support of a hiatus to get serious about other socicial networking technologies. So if the blog just isn’t enough for you, I am now on Twitter (@larrydunivan), Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo (as Larry Dunivan). Please join me at any or all of these sites. The more the merrier!
It’s been an adventure, to say the least. A few observations:
- I almost threw my cell phone against the wall one day last week. A few of the folks I’m following on Twitter are so prolific that the phone vibrates 10-15 times per day. I persevered until this weekend when I finally turned off the notifications. But with Twitter, you’re capturing a tidbit during a moment in time. So if I don’t read it as it happens, I can’t see myself going back to read through dozens of them some other time. I’ll turn it back on after my leg recovers from the irritation of the vibrating battery — we’ll see how it goes.
- At least 90% of what I see, read or observe has no value. As your network expands, the degree of intimacy you have with the vast majority of the people you encounter decreases exponentially. I have to be honest — I simply don’t care where the guy from my alma mater ate dinner Saturday night. But there it is in all its Facebook glory. And no, I couldn’t have picked this guy out from a lineup (before Facebook) if my life had depended on it.
- LinkedIn? My mission is to get to 500+ connections (bragging rights, nothing more…). Please help me by sending me a request! Pretty useless in the short-term, but I suppose valuable if I find myself in the job market anytime soon. Truthfully, the biggest value I see is in helping folks looking for work leverage my network. We all know it’s the only way you’re going to find a job in this economy.
- There is an occasional tidbit of interest — and I did find one nugget of gold. And in my opinion, the person who said it never should have — and there’s the last, most critical issue. I am an executive for a publically traded software company which limits many things I can talk about. But more importantly, if I were to more candidly talk about my perspectives, it could easily compromise our business strategy. Great for my competition and maybe would offer me a bit of an ego rush, but stupid in the long-term.
So it’s all very interesting, sometimes annoying, sometimes curiously fun. I do have a few great ideas of how we can capture the best of it in our software products (yet another topic I can’t twitter about) and that’s worth it’s weight in gold.
The jury is still out, but I’m sticking around and I hope you’ll join me. But unless it maintains some personal entertainment value (it does for me), the other benefits may not engage you enough to stick with it.
Posted in collaboration, social networking, web 2.0 | 8 Comments »
February 15, 2009 by Larry Dunivan
I’m intrigued by the amount of discussion regarding how the economy is going to impact HCM technology spend in the coming months. SystematicHR weighed in with a post this week. Here are a few snipets from my perspective:
- When a software vendor is spending to grow at any cost, this kind of economy is certain to put a damper on things. Much of that startup investment is ultimately wasted (trust me, I was around in during the dotcom boom!). So when we hear about cuts that sound draconian, it can be misleading about the broader market.
- Organizations that are reasonably healthy will still be making technology investments. It’s going to be about the HR leader’s ability to sell their mission — not about a total lack of funding.
- Not one of us has a clue about how bad it’s going to get, and the media (in all of its Web 2.0 forms) adds considerable ‘noise’ to the discussion. Let’s face it — none of us have encountered this kind of economic climate and I’m hoping it’s the last time for me.
- And I’ve said this before — organizations that find a way to make investments in this economy will have a significant advantage in the recovery.
I am sticking to my belief that great products will still be bought in this economy, and this cycle will be hard on the weak. It’s all a matter of degree.
Posted in Lawson, talent management, the economy, web 2.0 | 3 Comments »
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