Perceptive HR Technology

The second full day at CUE (this year it was Wednesday) is always about showcasing new products.  And this year, it was an opportunity to introduce Strategic Human Capital Management (SHCM) to our customer base.  Let me cut to the chase — for those of you that attended the mainstage demo Wednesday morning, it wasn’t without a glitch or two.

This is the second time I’ve done a live demo of SHCM in front of a large group.  The first time (at HR tech), it was a pretty low key affair.  Myself, my partner-in-crime (Anne Graham) and a single PC (ok, we had a second one with us in the event of a disaster) was the extent of our possy (with lots of moral support from our Lawson colleagues).  Then we hoped against hope that the event organizers would make sure the projection equipment worked.  It worked perfectly.

Cut to CUE, and it’s a production on the scale of a broadway musical.  A director (!), an AV and backstage staff of at least 10, and handlers everywhere.  So that should have ensured that there wouldn’t be any glitches.  Right?  Wrong.

It turns out that the network connection failed at some point during the presentation, before we went on stage for our portion of the demo.  The information we’d received was that it was only one of the ports, but it was the one that Anne was going to use for her portion of the demo.  So we were backstage frantically clipping slides into a powerpoint and then it dawned on me — buy the hotel wireless service (for the value price of $39.95 for four hours, by the way)! The other participant in the demo, Amy Ihlen was good — everyone said on her side of the stage, things were fine.  Wrong.

So the demo gets started and things are rolling along well until I look to Amy and that moment of hesitation crossed her face and I knew we had a problem.  But I said to myself, no big deal — Anne has powerpoints (and for split second congratulated myself for effective risk management)!  Little did I know that in some way, shape, or form (I still haven’t heard what feels like a full explanation) the failure also impacted the stage crew’s ability to display content from the computers on the big screen.  Go figure.

So in front of an audience of around 5000 I just say ‘please bring Anne’s PC to the monitor.’  (Remember: I had powerpoints!!) Nothing.  From there, it’s all a blur.  Add to this, by the way that just before going on stage I was told that we were 30 minutes behind schedule and that I had to hurry up.  Just what I wanted to hear as I am about to unveil the work of dozens of people two years in the making. 

It’s all good in the end — at least 50 people came up to me and said things like ‘customers loved it!’ and ‘it looked real’ (I loved that one) and ‘your message came through loud and clear.’  I must admit, though, the best comment came from Guenther Tolkmit (just minutes after the Barenaked Ladies finished a really great concert).  He said (and I’m paraphrasing) that the way people remember things isn’t always what you expect.  So the good news is that in the chaos, the most important messages will linger in their memory because of the imperfections in their presentation. 

The irony of the whole thing was that a few weeks ago, Anne and I made the decision to do the demo on the server because we wanted to demonstrate the full workflow processes running in real-time with complete Outlook integration.  We could have easily done that with only one PC, having Anne do all of the work herself on stage (ala HR tech).  So we gambled, and well, probably won anyway.

It was more about things not going the way we planned than it was good vs. bad.  I am told that when we showed the side-by-side talent profiles in Outlook the audience burst into spontaneous applause — but I have to admit I didn’t hear it.  And in a few days, maybe I’ll watch the footage for myself.  But for now, I’ll lick a wound or two and enjoy that fact that (with a few minor glitches) our customers now know what SHCM is all about and they seem to like what they’ve heard.

And by the way, I turned $15 into $70 at the Wheel of Fortune game just before I went to bed — that helped a bit too.