Perceptive HR Technology

One more post about my experience at the HR forum two weeks ago………….

Some of you are probably aware that this event has a ‘pay for play’ element to it — suppliers pay to participate, and the delegates attend for free in exchange for a commitment to a certain number of meetings to hear about offerings from the various suppliers.  There’s an elaborate (and I would say effective) matching process to get folks with like interests talking to each other.  But with the goal to make sure that every supplier gets a certain number of ‘meetings,’ you always have a few with someone you quickly discover couldn’t care less about what you have to offer (or vice versa). 

Knowing there would be some of that (and in some cases I could even tell in advance), these delegates became my ‘focus group’ targets — I tested our strategies to see how these folks would react eventhough they probably wouldn’t be our target customer.  A particularly insightful meeting was with a large, national retailer with over 100,000 employees who’s identity I will opt not to disclose.  The delegate, a senior HR person, was telling me about their talent management technology strategy, and the conversation went something like this (paraphrased for brevity, and might slightly miss on a detail or two):

Supplier (me):  How are you addressing your talent management technology needs?
Delegate:  We have a enterprise-wide LMS installed that’s having a real impact on delivering training in the stores, we just started an implementation of a recruiting system, and performance management is next.
Supplier:  How many vendors are providing that technology?
Delegate:  Three.
Supplier:  Are you concerned with the issues of technical integration?  Do you hope to leverage infrastructure like organizational and supervisor structure across those products?
Delegate:  Definitely.
Supplier:  How are you going to do it?  Is IT engaged in the process?
Delegate:  <moment of silence>.. IT is looking at it

And so went the discussion..we also explored how they anticipated leveraging data for decision-making across the full organizational development value chain, and concluded that while those issues had been discussed, these integration elements (see my previous post) are not central to the creation of their technology strategy — at the moment.

I would anticipate that this organization has a real shot at efficient and effective management of their core transactional business processes in talent management.  For training, they’re already doing it.  But at the end of the day, after all those operational benefits are achieved and they want to really get those systems talking together they are either going to spend a fortune consolidating data into one of those systems (and hope that the one is good enough to manage the data from the others) or they will be building the mother-of-all-data-warehouses.  And let’s face it — HR is always number 11 on a priority list of 10, and after all of the money they’ve spent on getting the operational stuff right it will require real clout to get the funding for yet another major HR technology initiative.

Everyone knows about my bias here — that an integrated, ERP-class talent management solution aligned with the system-of-record data about people is the only realistic way for organizations to do breakthrough talent management.  It’s about great operational efficiency AND actionable data about people, and the organizations that get both right will be at a significant advantage.

After a long-awaited vacation with family (a Carnival Cruise to Mexico), I was delighted to return to see this post from systematicHR.  It speaks for itself — and I can appreciate the challenge on the use of the term ’strategic.’  We’ll let time (and some great success stories) speak for itself on this topic.

The evangelizing will continue on our strategy.  Calling all bloggers — keep these kind of posts coming!

On a different subject, I’m off to the HR Forum tomorrow morning.  I wrote about this previously (link here), and now it’s time to see if the event will prove useful.  If the internet connection on the cruise ship cooperates, I’ll try to provide you with a daily post both on what’s interesting at the event and how the program looks from a vendor’s perspective.  Stay tuned!

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.

It’s a mere six days until the Lawson Conference and User Exchange convenes at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.  It’s always a huge confab, with thousands of Lawson users coming together to hear about the latest in product, service and support offerings from the company.  I was trying to figure out how many of these I’ve attended – and I think it’s my tenth.  They’re always a ton of work, but immensely gratifying.

And of course, everything is bigger in Las Vegas — and this year’s conference is no exception.  That’s especially true for those of us that work with Lawson’s HCM products, as it’s the BIG coming out party for Strategic Human Capital Management.  Back in the fall, Ed Frauenheim did a piece on the Lawson HCM strategy and wrote about my return to the company.  I commented that I felt like I was getting a second chance to do something big…..and now it’s time to find out if that’s true.  Yes, we presented much of what we’ve been doing at the HR Technology conference last October, and got some great press for the effort.  It was terrific validation of our strategy.  Now it’s time to show it in all of its glory to our customers, front and center. 

CUE is special this year because it’s the first time our customers will get an in-depth look at the new product.  At CUE, it’s all about our users and frankly, we’ve been making some of them wait.  So we’re pulling out all of the stops.  Add to the mix the recent announcement of our acquisition of VasTech, and we have big news for our customers at CUE.

Here’s an SHCM insider’s guide to CUE that you might find useful:

• We’ll be firing on all cylinders at CUE across every aspect of our new Strategic Human Capital Management suite:  Talent Management (aka Ordway), Human Resource Management (aka S3) and Workforce Management (aka VasTech);
• Customers that want to see all of the products will have an opportunity to do so in a variety of sessions, private demonstrations and mainstage events (we’re front-and-center at the big all-conference session on Wednesday);
• There is a dedicated space for SHCM in a separate area of the conference center at the Venetian hotel (on the 4^th floor) where you can come and meet with the entire Lawson team and some of the customers implementing the new products;
• A track of over 10 sessions has been dedicated just to the new solutions in talent and workforce management – so anyone that really wants to dig deep will get the opportunity to do so;

And perhaps to make just a tad more interesting, I am planning a daily blog post starting on Saturday when I arrive in Las Vegas….so if seeing it through my eyes holds any appeal, stay tuned.

Finally, and most importantly – I love getting the chance to meet customers at CUE, so stop me and say hi (and I will be especially delighted if you tell me you’re reading my blog!).

I recently read a research report authored by Nate Swanson at ThinkEquity research about the Talent Management space. He did a very nice job of articulating what he thought the ultimate winners in HCM will need in order to be successful in our market. He made four key points (and I’m virtually quoting him here):

• A vision of creating the system-of-record for all employee data
• Deployed in a pure on-demand software model
• With applications that were built organically (for the most part)
• That are scalable and can meet the needs of both large and small businesses
• Both globally and locally
• Created for mass consumption, as most HCM applications will be used by employees across the entire organization

I was delighted to read about his perspective on the market given how nicely aligned it is with what we’re doing at Lawson.  Specifically:

1. The system-of-record issues are central to delivering broad talent management solutions at low cost, and no best-of-breed vendors can come close to claiming the ability to address them.
2. Thanks to the Lawson Landmark platform 100% of our application has been built organically.  Oh ok: we are getting some help with parsing resumes from our friends at Talent Technology.
3. Our product will prove to be scalable and it was global from the first day we started it (and we’ve proven it by having one of our very first customers in France).
4. With our introduction of the notion of spaces, we are showing just how effectively we can tackle mass consumption — things like using Outlook for core manager self-service and Facebook to let companies virally market their job openings (never mind spaces within the Lawson UI for HR generalists, recruiters, etc).

Best of all, I can’t wait until next week when we can demonstrate it all, front-and-center at our user conference in Las Vegas.   For those of you attending, be sure to let me know if you think we’re delivering on Nate’s viewpoint!

We’ve been working on how to leverage various marketing strategies to launch our new product, Strategic Human Capital Management.  The most obvious of these is easy — at our user conference in Las Vegas in mid-March.  But the options are endless — the big conferences that occur in the spring and fall, hosting seminar and webinar events and the like. 

But I couldn’t help laughing to myself about the range of possibilities.  I would offer for your consideration, two distinctly different events:  

1. The VIEW conference presented by hr.com.  They did their first virtual event in mid-December, and from the sounds of things it was pretty well attended.  We didn’t participate, but it’s certainly something we’ll consider in the future.  Bill Kutik provided a nice overview and perspective on the event if you didn’t participate.  Take a look.
2. Richmond Events offers another interesting perspective using of all things, a cruise ship.  Participants get to go for free, provided that they agree to spend some time talking with guys like me about their buying plans.  Add to that some marquee named keynotes and lots of networking time (you are out on the ocean, after all!), and it seems to add up to an interesting way to spend three days.  I’m attending this year for the first time, so we’ll have to see if it pays for itself in the form of new revenue opportunities.

So, why the title?  One could argue that a purely virtual event could qualify as ridiculous (will we give up on all human contact for such activities?).  But no one will argue with me that the cruise ship has the potential to be sublime.  You know they won’t be closing the spa during those important networking sessions (although from the sounds of my schedule I won’t be hitting the sauna!).

It’s overgeneralizing at either extreme, I recognize.  My objective:  figure out which direction our customers are taking to learn about our products, when they are getting ready to buy them.  At the end of the day, it’s all about leads.  We don’t attend these events for ‘brand recognition’ — show me the lead or I’ll show you the door. 

More importantly, to the folks doing the buying out there — how do you see these events shaping your decisions?