Perceptive HR Technology

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!

I wanted to update you on a post from a number of weeks ago where I was talking with a manager at Lawson about our merit review process.  I challenged this person to think differently about the situation, and we had our monthly mentoring meeting last week and got an update.

As a mentor, I try to influence and suggest, but not push (too much) and in this case, since I admitted I had been preaching a bit, I deliberately didn’t ask for an update.  But in fact, I did get one (I was hoping!) and was delighted with the outcome:

• This manager was fearful of what very senior people would think of a lower increase, and that turned out to be the easy part.  They understood the rationale and were appreciative of the recognition.
• The manager ended up with a range of increases from 2.5%-8%, and prior to our discussion that range was something like 3-4%.  Bonus points towards admission to HR heaven for really making great performance matter!
• One of the people that got 8% was delighted, surprised and very appreciative.  The second person, not so much.  They expected more (and imagine if that 8% had been 4%!) and that discussion proved to be the most challenging.

Shame on me:  I prepared the manager for the (possibly) difficult discussion with the senior people and what to expect from the delighted/surprised person.  But I left my mentee fully unprepared for the top performer who got a great increase relative to any measure and was still dissatisfied.  I guess 2 out of 3 isn’t bad.

Most importantly, I’d influenced the manager to evolve to a new level, and confirmed that the experience was a good one.  On to the next one!

The holidays are over, and it’s time to get fully reconnected with the world.  I can’t say that I took much time off (note to self for next year), but it’s always a great opportunity to slow down a bit, take stock of what’s happened and give some thought to where I want to focus my attention during 2008.

My blog is almost 3 months old, and for the most part I’ve met my commitment to myself to average close to 2 posts per week — 2.15 to be exact.  For any of you that are blogging regularly, it’s not easy to find the time to write that consistently.  And as I’ve been talking to other bloggers, I’m told that identifying some themes can help make that easier, so that’s the focus of today’s post — what to expect in 2008, highlighting some perspectives that you’ll (hopefully) continue to find perceptive (pithy, huh!).

Look for the following themes in my writing for 2008:

1. The launch of Strategic Human Capital Management at Lawson:  I’ve always been honest about my bias, so you’re going to have to hear about this one.  But I promise to give you a range of perspectives (except those that will get me into big trouble with the SEC) about what we’re doing, how it’s going, and what people are saying about it.
2. Evolution of Web 2.0 and HR Technology:  Ever since the HR technology conference in Chicago, I’ve been talking regularly to analysts and press about our work here.  I’ve also been making a concerted effort to probe the topic with prospective and current customers to really see if there’s something beyond the hype.  I’ll continue that discussion, and even try to get some customer perspective from the trenches.
3. I love leadership development, and in particular, those differentiating characteristics in leadership that separate good from great.  I’ve blogged a few times about leading with influence, so I’m going to focus on that topic from a few perspectives:  my work as a leader, the impact of those traits that I observe in others, and how a ’soft’ attribute can be measured and leveraged to competitive advantage (with some focus on technology).  We’ll see where this one goes, but if you picture me on a soapbox, you’ll be getting the point.

On with 2008 — Happy New Year!

I’ve been on the road the last few weeks promoting the next phase of the charter implementation program for our new product, Strategic Human Capital Management (SHCM).  This week it’s London and Oslo (Norway).  For the fifth time (in a row) I sat across the table from a customer who told me how important integration is to them in talent management.  The most important part:  HR and IT seem to agree, albeit for different reasons.  It goes something like this:

IT:  As HR considers implementing individual best-of-breed talent solutions (such as performance from one vendor and recruiting from another), the integration challenges escalate.  Trying to synchronize competency, org structure and supervisor data (among others) is a ton of work —  never mind having to manage all of those vendor relationships….

HR:  We need to recruit, evaluate and develop employees based on collaboration with managers and through the use of a consistent, measurable set of attributes (competencies or whichever artifact delights you), and reconciling that functionally across siloed technology platforms looks difficult. 

Same problem, different perspective — and in either case, solving the problem will make the difference.  Not necessarily between success and failure, but companies that bite the bullet and choose real integration will see returns that are orders of magnitude greater.

Nicholas Higgins characterized this from a functional perspecitve in an interesting way when he said: 

From an HRM process perspective there is very little new in terms of what talent management brings. However, talent management appears to be interpreted as more focused on the optimised integration of existing HRM processes relating to TM (even though technically this should be covered under strategic HRM). This has been skewed from a software supplier perspective. Our definition of integrated is much more than just data importing and exporting.

Nicholas:  I’m with you.

That’s it for me for this year — I wish you a happy holiday and the most prosperous of new years (emphasis on your definition of prosperity!).

Jack Welch, the long-time (former) CEO of General Electric has always been an evangelist for the importance of HR in leading businesses.  He writes a column in Business Week where he answers reader questions, and this week’s post was a great one.  The reader asked what to do when a top performer gets a great offer from a competitor.  I loved his answer.  Paraphrased, he said two things:

1. If you’re taking care of your best people at all times from all the right dimensions, it doesn’t matter.  When they decide to go, let them — there probably isn’t anything else you can do to keep them.
2. Anticipate the possibility that just such an event will happen and have a strong succession plan in place so that you could replace a departing star with someone ready to do the work in eight hours.  Yes, eight hours!

This is a provocative idea, and for most organizations you could only manage it on behalf of a handful of people.  But from the HR executives I talk to, more progressive organizations see a need to manage at this level (ok, maybe not the 8 hour SLA!) for dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people.  It isn’t going to happen without technology.

To effectively do this, organizations will need tools that support robust measurement of what people did (performance management) as well as measures of their readiness and potential for target jobs (a key element of succession management).  This requires an integrated database of employee data, performance results and data about future plans.  Plus the analytics to distinguish between people and make fast (for Jack, very fast) decisions when critical positions become vacant.

Hmmmm…maybe a software company should solve that problem for HR leaders around the world!  Oh wait, that’s us!~

I just returned from a trip to Europe where I met with customers in France and Finland.  I was particularly interested in evaluating whether European talent management technology needs were different from that of North America.  When I was working at PDI (which is very much a global company), I got the impression that differences functionally weren’t that great.  But at the time, I didn’t really explore how that translated to technology needs for these companies.

My unscientific survey suggests the following with respect to technology:

• The functional needs are very similar.  Both of the customers I met with were passionate about developing better insights into talent and ultimately, tying those insights to tangible business outcomes;
• They don’t have the technology they need to do it, and recognize that achieving breakthrough advances in talent management won’t come without systems to automate the processes;
• Just like in North America, they are having to start with the basics — a global employee system-of-record (in some cases that doesn’t even exist) and the establishment of attribute models (such as competencies) for measuring performance, potential and readiness;
• Time is of the essence — pressure from leadership to make real progress in these areas is intensifying, and VPs of HR have to move quickly;
• While some processes are unique by country (training administration in France, for example), the foundational components of strategic talent management look very similar.

The lesson for me:  there’s a great opportunity for talent management solutions all over the world, and unlike some of the more transactional HRMS functions (payroll being the most notable example), there’s a real opportunity to build one application that can meet an organization’s global needs.

Next month it’s off to the UK and Sweden, then Asia and Australia/New Zealand in January – I’ll keep you posted on whether the trend continues!

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on filling an opening for my product management team.  I’ve been fortunate to have a number of great candidates, all of whom were really enthusiastic about joining the team.  As I contemplated the success profile for the position, I kept coming back to the same questions:  Could any of these people get things done without direct authority?  Could they convince folks to do things on the strength of their business acumen and what was right for the company?  Could he/she sell their ideas to all of the consitituents that need to get aligned on the idea(s)?

Could they lead with influence?

I was reading an article today about appreciative leadership that is all about focusing on getting people to focus on aspects of processes that work — instead of focus on everything that’s wrong with the way work is done.  It got me thinking about people that are great at leading with influence seem to naturally focus on the positive side of process improvement, not the negative.  They tend to be appreciative leaders.

I’m confident that I’ll pick a candidate that’s good at leading with influence — but an organization’s ability to identify this (or other) differentiating traits is a key element of talent management, and then we have to show organizations how they can capture that information in a talent management system to leverage it organization-wide.

The industry has a way to go here — but I think we’re on the right path.  Does your organization have a way to measure these kinds of performance attributes?

I’ve been casually observing the China marketplace for the past year or so, in an effort to ascertain when and how that market will be important for talent management.  It’s clearly emerging, and no one knows for sure how it’s going to evolve.  But it’s pretty clear that engaging the younger generation there will be critical, and the Recruiting in China blog this week offers a credible perspective on how that will play out and more importantly, how employers will have to create effective social networks in order to make their brands resonate with target employees.

And I love the idea of our cool stuff turning up in a blog from China!

The SystematicHR post today (http://systematichr.com/?p=804) regarding talent management was dead-on.  The way I talk about this is that traditional HRMS functions were more science than art.  Benefits eligibility determinations, tax calculations and the like were either right or wrong for the most part.  Measuring performance, evaluating potential definitely looks more like art than science.  There are broadly diverging views on the measurement models, and unlimited numbers of ways one can interpret the results.

And it definitely means that organizations will require a different kind of expertise to do it well.  For service providers, it’s also game-changing as the way we need to consult with customers looks very different.

Companies who look to us today to make sure that benefit calculations are right will now be also asking how to figure out how to select the right measurement model for various talent dimensions — the skills are not exactly the same!  I’d love to hear how those of you doing this in the trenches feel about the expertise you think you’ll need as you try to be more strategic with talent management…anyone?