Perceptive HR Technology

I made it to Las Vegas without incident, although thanks to spring break all over the USA, more than a few people missed their flights due to long security lines – thank goodness for elite frequent flier programs!  It’s great to have the conference in a single facility, where everyone (especially Lawson employees) can all stay in the same hotel.  But the Venetian is a gigantic place – you have to wonder how they make the logistics work so well.

Yesterday was for internal meetings – I had one with the product management team.  The details would probably bore you to death – but there was an evolving theme for the afternoon – the numbers 8 and 12.  After the two numbers came up a second time in less than an hour, I knew that I had to act – so I hit the roulette table, put $15 on 8 and 12 and hit the jackpot for $350!  I looked like a complete idiot, having never played roulette — I didn’t realize I’d won until the dealer started pushing chips my way.  But when I cashed them in (which I did immediately), those three $100 bills felt mighty good.  I gave about $100 back to the slot machine gods, but it’s all good.  Next stop should be a designer boutique – I’ll burn the cash one way or another.

Next up is the employee rehearsal this evening and more importantly, dry runs of the big SHCM demonstration for Wednesday with the team.  The conference really kicks into high gear tomorrow!

It’s 2:30 on Friday afternoon, and the Lawson offices are rapidly becoming a ghost town!  Even the cafeteria will be closed next week as a majority of employees in the St. Paul headquarters will be in Las Vegas.

We’re ready and excited about the week to come.  The big news of the week is all of the cocktail parties that our partners will be hosting — my e-mail has been loaded with invites, and I’ll be taking advantage of it!  I should start a nasty rumor that Paris Hilton is going to be at Tao (at the Venetian) on Tuesday night and Brittney is thinking about joining her!

Seriously, though — for those of you interested in the SHCM launch, check out the following:

• The SHCM lounge on the 4th floor of the Venetian (Delfino Rooms) will be loaded with opportunities to learn more about the product
• At 1pm on Wednesday, our customers will host a panel discussion on their experiences with the product and provide an opportunity for interested prospective customers to hear from the experts
• We’ll present a major live demo at the general session on Wednesday, hosted by Dean Hager (with yours truly taking a shot in the spotlight as well)

I’m off to Las Vegas in the morning — hope to see you there!

On Friday, we announced the acquisition of VasTech – an Annapolis, MD-based provider of workforce management solutions.  I’ve been eager to expand the Lawson product footprint in this area, and this deal is the perfect strategic move.  Making the decision to buy a company is always a challenging one – you take a quick look at a company, decide if it looks interesting and then dig into the evaluation phases referred to as due diligence.  For me, that is about managing risk.  Is the product what they say it is?  Will our customers respond favorably?  Can we sell more effectively to new customers?

But at the end of the day, it ends up coming down to the people associated with the organization.  Do you think you can work with them?  Are they trustworthy?  What are they hoping to do after the acquisition gets completed?  Will the addition of the folks to the Lawson team add incremental value?

The best part about this deal is the people.  Josh Vance, Amy Every and Ted Morahan have built a great set of workforce management applications that our healthcare clients will love and that our customers across-the-board will be able to leverage over time.  More importantly, they’ve assembled a team of dedicated folks that are committed to taking their company to the next level in partnership with the rest of the Lawson organization.  I’ve never started a company, so I have no idea what it’s like to sell it to someone else.  But when great folks like Josh, Amy and Ted decide to trust us with their ‘baby,’ I feel a sense of accomplishment in what it will mean for Lawson.  More importantly, I also inherit a sense of obligation to make sure that I do my part to make sure that their vision for the product and the company exceeds what everyone thought possible.

To the entire VasTech team – Welcome to Lawson!  We’re honored that you chose us.

I spent last Tuesday at a very interesting conference with investors that have interest in the HCM technology space.  For a bunch of folks that don’t work at all in our industry directly, they certainly knew a lot about our market, what interests our customers and the trends in the space.  I suppose that’s reasonable because their job is to figure out which of these companies to invest in.  Many of them influence large investment portfolios, and make a habit of knowing the companies well before making decisions to buy the stock.

So I expected lots of insightful questions about market opportunities, growth projections and how Lawson intended to differentiate its products.  And they didn’t disappoint.  But then, without exception (luckily my buddy from Investor Relations, Barbara Doyle, prepared me for this) they asked me if I thought the economy was in a recession.  My immediate response – how would I know?  I felt as if I had to all of a sudden have some enlightened insight into economic theory, the laws of supply and demand and what the Euro would be trading at by the end of the day.

OK, not really – but I was surprised by the level of interest that they had in what a guy like me had to say on the topic.  In fairness, it was mostly about whether we have seen changes in buying behavior (no) or if we were anticipating a substantial shift in customers’ decision making on purchases from us (not yet).

Then I was reading Business Week in the car yesterday, and saw more of the same – everyone on the planet talking about the potential for a recession, each with a different opinion or two about the topic.  It got me to wondering:  how do we tell the difference between a media/hype-induced recession (I suppose I could have been a contributor to just such an effect during my meetings on Tuesday) and a real one? 

I’m sleeping at night because VPs of HR have to be looking at managing talent for the long-term, which will force them to make the kinds of investments that will make their organizations that much more competitive whenever any (possible) economic slowdown comes to an end.  It’s discretionary, but strategic – which means it will last longer on the priority list than many other investments of its type.

For me, you have to treat this stuff as nothing more than noise – I can’t control it, and can only react to those events that are tangible.  So it’s back to work for me!

Last week was a flurry of customer meetings — and measurement in succession management seemed to be on the minds of more than one HR executive.  There’s are real desire to more effectively measure individuals with high potential (HI-POs, as the organizational development folks call them), but a plethora of challenges in doing it.

I’ve written about the issues related to capturing and maintaining data (here), but it’s more than that.  While organizations seem to be able to ‘manually’ identify hi-pos, the ongoing activities that need to be done to keep track of them consistently falls through the cracks.

The Institute for Corporate Productivity did a survey  tracking high-potential employees and the results didn’t disappoint:

• 69% of the responding organizations had a tracking process in place;
• 70% said that development planning was part of the process;
• but only 47% said that they are tracking the effectiveness of their assessment activities

Organizations have multiple challenges with measuring hi-pos — they don’t have clear success profiles for their jobs (and thus a way to measure great performance), measures of potential are often subjective and oriented in point-in-time assessments (rather than on a recurring basis), and almost no one can easily (meaning quickly and at low cost) correlate behavioral characteristics of hi-pos to business outcomes.

The result:  some high level data about hi-pos, in a spreadsheet that gets updated occasionally is as good as it gets for most companies.  It’s going to take a long-term commitment to integrated talent management combining good measurement with reliable data collection (and some decent technology to keep track of it all) to gain a differentiated advantage in managing top talent.

I have two snipets about Web 2.0 that I found interesting this week.  One had some work relevance, the other didn’t (but I ended up finding some anyway).  Here it goes:

First 
Great article in the current edition of HR Executive (not yet available online — why do they do this?) about Web 2.0 and how organizations are going to have to inevitably deal with the changes that are coming.  Lots of discussion about how HR leaders are going to have to consider the privacy, compliance and cultural dimensions of change management(I’ve blogged on this topic previously).  

It’s fascinating to me how rapidly this topic is penetrating the thoughts and minds of HR folks.  I was at a customer today, and we were talking about how to use Facebook to get employees to promote the company’s job openings on their individual Facebook pages.  Six months ago, that would be met with a blank stare.  At the HR technology conference in October, it got lots of interest as something new and innovative.  Today, when I showed it to my customer it was ‘we were just talking about that yesterday!’  Times, they are a-changin’ — and fast!

Second
I was in Nice (France) last week at a sales meeting, showing our EMEA sales team the new Strategic Human Capital Management product, and while I was setting things up to demonstrate our Facebook widget, I saw a friend invitation from someone I hadn’t been in contact with for nearly 20 years.  In this case it was a good thing — I enjoyed reconnecting with this person, and we had a lively e-mail exchange catching up on each other’s lives.  But at the same time, I had to identify with the HR executives I’ve been talking to, because true privacy is becoming a thing of the past.  If you’re going to be ‘out there’ in cyberspace, you’re going to sacrifice your anonymity.  I don’t have (too) many skeletons in my closet, so I’m not sweating it.  But I have an enhanced appreciation for how corporate executives feel.  But I must say that it didn’t stop me — I’m jumping off the cliff on this 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 read with some interest Gerry Crispin’s post this week about succession planning.  Some have suggested that succession planning is a futile exercise — the collection and analysis of data is complex and time consuming.  But more importantly, it’s obsolete a month later, because it’s all based on a point-in-time.  Plus, information is stored in a remote silo called an Excel spreadsheet (ok, the execs only saw the PowerPoint presentation).

The real challenge is in building an organizational process that exists on its own, supported by a data repository that lives and breathes.  That means a consistent effort towards collecting the data (at a minimum an annual assessment that speaks to potential and readiness) and a focus on identifying target jobs for individuals followed tracking each individual’s progress towards that next assignment.

Finally, it fails without the kind of technology that captures the data and effectively allows employees and managers to collaborate with flexibility and ease.  Just wait — a couple of companies are going to figure that out, and we’ll be hearing about it on the cover of Business Week.  If we’re doing our job right, that company will be a Lawson customer!

The term ’social graph’ is evolving rapidly into a buzzword du jour.  The Plasticmind blog had a good overview of the notion of social graphs in the broader context of social networking if you want some background.  Since returning from the HR technology conference last month, I’ve been trying to get my head around how social networking (and things like the social graph) are going to impact HR in the near term.

In an effort to think about it beyond the next cool software demonstration, I am intrigued by how we can leverage the technology we in HR ‘own’ for populating social graphs.  In most organizations, HR is generally the system of record for demographic data (sometimes even including e-mail address), organizational structure information and supervisor data.  If we wanted to feed a social graph for the organization into a set of social networking technologies, these sources of data are powerful and valuable.  Couple that with the attention being paid to creating technology APIs to connect with social networks (Google is the latest), there’s lots of innovation to contemplate.  It’s also getting closer to home — Chuck Allen made some interesting observations on the topic in his HR-XML blog as well.

Today’s post is to merely raise the question and ask — has anyone else contemplated the problem?  How do you think HR executives are going to embrace (or oppose) the idea of enabling their organization’s social graph and exposing it to the wide functions social networks can provide?  I have more questions than answers at this point, but I’ll be blogging more about the topic as I figure it out.

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?