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!

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.

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?

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!

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’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!).