BlogERP: Jim Holincheck's HCM Software Blog

BlogERP Links 05/03/2012

2012-05-03T02:30:08-05:00

Equifax Is a Big Data Company. | HR Examiner with John Sumser

More on Big Data in HR.

tags: HCM
Moneyball and the Blind Leading the Blind

Thoughts on Big Data in HR

tags: HCM

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

BlogERP Links 04/05/2012

2012-04-05T02:30:08-05:00

Steve's HR Technology - Journal - Value, Pricing, and Early Retirement

Another good article on learning from professional sports teams and their talent management practices.

tags: talentmanagement
The People-First Approach: Rewarding the Process Rather Than the Results

Some important thinking around pay for performance. It is another way of thinking about "how" vs. "what" for performance appraisals with good examples cited.

tags: EPM

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The End of One Era and the Beginning of Another

2011-12-06T08:44:42-06:00

As I reflect on SAP’s agreement to acquire SuccessFactors, it takes me back to 2004. At the end of that year, after a long, bitter takeover battle, Oracle finally acquired PeopleSoft. Everything felt different. It was the end of an era. No longer did we have the JBLOPS (J.D, Edwards, Baan, Lawson, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP) of the late 90s. Baan had already been subsumed into Infor (with many more to follow, the latest being Lawson). PeopleSoft had already acquired J.D. Edwards. Oracle and SAP, for all intents and purposes, had won.

Another thing was starting to happen around the same time. As Oracle and SAP consolidated its hold in the broader Business Applications space, innovation, primarily delivered via software-as-a-service, was starting to become mainstream in HCM. Demand for talent management applications (I say applications because at that point few vendors had suites) delivered via SaaS was starting to grow rapidly on the edges of core HRMS implementations now dominated by Oracle and SAP (at least for the large enterprise market). Though Oracle and SAP saw customer interest rise in talent management solutions, they struggled to keep up. They delivered new functionality, but it was difficult for their installed base to absorb because they needed to upgrade to take advantage of it. Most customers were conditioned to upgrade infrequently because, in many cases, the projects were large and expensive. This created a window of opportunity for SaaS vendors like SuccessFactors to grow and prosper. So, in one sense, this acquisition has the feel of if you cannot beat them, join them. On the other hand, it is much more.

It is a cliche to say that the pace of change is accelerating. However, I think it is fair to say that the forces driving change in technology are at the strongest I have seen in my career. If you think about Cloud Computing, Social, Mobile, and Analytics (including “Big Data”),they are all conspiring to drive a generational shift in computing. Viewed from this perspective, this acquisition takes on a different light. SAP is arming itself not only to defend its hard-earned turf, but also to stake its claim to what comes next. Acquiring SuccessFactors does not solves all of SAP’s cloud challenges nor does it provide it all the arms it will need to win. However, it is a first step.

So, everything feels different this time too. We are at the beginning of another era. The battle is just being joined. Some of the players, like Oracle and SAP, are the same. New combatants like Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and Workday have emerged to take up the challenge for enterprise application suite supremacy. However, others will continue to innovate around the edges, especially in HCM. Some of those will have high growth and the cycle of consolidation will repeat. Again. It is the nature of enterprise application software markets.

BlogERP Links 11/08/2011

2011-11-08T01:30:19-06:00

Where Was HR? The Penn State Edition

Well said.

tags: HCM

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Next Practices: Bottom Up Calibration

2011-07-25T11:19:11-05:00

This is the second in a series of posts (first one is here) on what I call “Next Practices”. These are practices that look beyond today’s conventional HR approaches to achieve improved business outcomes.

Business Situation: In a slow growth economy, there are limited funds for merit increases and bonuses. To the extent there are funds are available, organizations want to use those funds to encourage engagement and retention of high performers (and those with high potential).

Practice: “Bottom Up” Calibration - Today many organizations use “top down” calibration to make sure that performance ratings fit a specific distribution. The idea is to promote fairness and to limit “grade inflation”. Because performance is frequently linked to pay (especially variable pay), the intent also is to make sure that there is a differential in rewards for high performers versus low performers. However, frequently the people making the final calibration decisions may be somewhat removed from actually observing each individual’s performance. In addition, the exercise can be de-motivating to strong contributors who, because of the desired distribution, just miss out from the next higher ratings category. All of these issues (and more) bring questions about the fairness of the exercise to employees.

“Bottom up” calibration approaches the issue differently. The main premise is that co-workers (or people working on the same team) know who the best performers are, so why not ask them for their opinion? Let them vote on the top performers and use voting distribution as the ratings distribution. There are opportunities for abuse if groups of employees try to game the system, however, managers can do a “sanity check” (and make sure there are consequences for collusion). By gaining the input of the employees in the ratings process, it helps overcome many of the fairness concerns. In addition, the feedback can be more meaningful to employees because it is recognition by peers.

Example

There are good examples in sports of bottom up calibration. For example, voting for the Pro Bowl in the National Football League (NFL). Players around the league at the end of the season vote for which players they think were the best at their position during the season. The players with the highest votes from each conference are named the starters for the Pro Bowl game. Though not everyone who is voted as a starter plays for various reasons, it is an honor for the players selected. In addition, it impacts the compensation for players (many contracts have clauses that pays them a bonus for being selected to the Pro Bowl).

Do you use calibration in your organization? Have you looked at doing “bottom up” calibration? If you have, what results have you achieved?

Next Practices: Crowdsourcing Talent

2011-07-21T11:45:36-05:00

This is the first in a series of posts of what I call “Next Practices”. These are practices that look beyond today’s conventional HR approaches to achieve improved business outcomes.

Business Situation: In a slow growth economy, it is difficult to get approval to hire new employees. However, there is a strong desire by CEOs to grow the business and innovate. How can HR help the organization with conflicting goals of controlling costs, yet innovate and return to growth?

Practice: Crowdsourcing – This is not a new idea. It is explored in great detail in books like “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business” “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”, and “The Wisdom of Crowds”. However, it is not a practice that is in the typical talent management toolkit of most HR/Recruiting organizations. Crowdsourcing allows you to leverage talent that is not part of your organization to achieve your objectives.

Examples

TopCoder – Here is a description from their site:

Our business brings clients into the TopCoder community to get their work done in a new way. These projects range across the full spectrum of software and digital work. They engage our community in a range of disciplines: creative design, software engineering, and analytics. These projects are focused on innovating and implementing new products, releases, and features. At the core of this work is competition – each task is completed by members competing with each other to be the best at that task.

We believe that customers should be able to focus on what they want to build and create, not on measuring how many hours someone spent on a task. We believe engineers and designers should be free to chose when and if they work on a project or task, and be rewarded based on the quality of the results they produce. Empowering individuals to make their own decisions generates the most value for all parties.

When customers and members are brought together in a community and a market based approach is used to getting work done, there is no limit to what they can accomplish.

TopCoder has more than 300,000 people in the community. That talent pool is significantly broader than one employer could build on its own. LendingTree uses it as a virtual software factory on an ongoing bases to supplement its own website development efforts, for example.

InnoCentive – InnoCentive also provides a platform for what it calls “challenge driven innovation”. In that sense, it is similar to TopCoder, but is used for a broader problem set. Here is an example from its website:

Roche’s challenge was to find a means of better measuring the quality and amount of a clinical specimen as it is passed through one of its automated chemistry analyzers. Both Roche and its partners had been wrestling with the challenge for fifteen years. So the company devised a test. It posted the challenge on InnoCentive.com, and through the power of crowdsourcing, exposed the challenge to a diverse, global, and open network of problem solvers. Within two months of posting the challenge, nearly 1,000 unique solvers from around the globe had signed on to the project, and a total of 113 proposals were submitted to Roche.

The result? Roche solved a challenge that had been plaguing it for fifteen years in sixty days. And interestingly, the submitted proposals replicated the entire history of Roche’s research and development program into this particular challenge. In other words, all of the solutions Roche had tried over a fifteen-year period had come in.

Think about that for a minute from a talent perspective. Roche was able to find nearly 1,000 people for two months to work on its business challenge. The prize for the winning solution was $20,000. That was a pretty cost-effective source of talent.

Of course, crowdsourcing is not appropriate for every talent need. However, HR needs to get outside of the box that says that talent is limited to just employees or contractors.

How many sourcing professionals in your HR/recruiting organization are leading the charge in working with these kinds of solutions (especially if you are not hiring anyone right now)?

Back to Front Ideas

2011-03-21T10:51:03-05:00

It has been quite a while since I have written a blog post. I will not bore you with "Life, the Universe, and Everything" that has been going on except to say that that quote is a foreshadow for the rest of this post. Most people know Douglas Adams as the author of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy (which was really five books, but that gives you a sense of the quirkiness of the man if you are not a fan). What fewer people know (perhaps outside of the UK since it was recently a BBC 4 special) is that he also wrote another series of books about erstwhile private detective, Dirk Gently. The first book, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" is my favorite book, period. If I was stuck on desert island with only one book to read, this is the one I would pick. It is genius and I highly recommend it. It also has an IT angle to it. One of the characters, Richard MacDuff works at a software company, WayForward Technologies II, founded by Gordon Way. MacDuff describes the breakthrough product for the company as an old idea "back to front". Basically, instead of feeding the software all of the relevant facts and helping the user order it in a way to make a decision, Gordon's breakthrough was to specify the decision to be made first and then order the facts in a way to support that decision. Now, I won't go through the consequences of this (in the story, the Pentagon bought up all of the copies of the program to structure its arguments for funding), however, I do think it is useful to look at old ideas "back to front".

We do not do this enough when thinking about business applications, and HR applications in particular. We focus on things like the Performance Appraisal process and how we can improve it. That is good thing, but a better thing would be to focus on the outcomes we would like to achieve with performance appraisals and work our way to processes and applications that support achieving those outcomes. We might find it does not include doing performance appraisals at all because it does not support the desired outcomes.

Have you looked at your HCM practices, processes, and applications from a "back to front" perspective? If so, what have your found?

BlogERP Links 03/11/2011

2011-03-11T01:30:09-06:00

HRM Software/Services Q1 Vendor Briefings — Strategy Matters « In Full Bloom

Very savvy point of view on key things driving development of the HCM software market.

tags: HCM
Profitability Through Human Capital: Why HR Metrics Don’t Work

The Gartner model for Workforce Analytics has a similar point of view as the "Hitting the Wall" chart. Breaking through the wall requires the right people, process, and technology.

tags: workforceanalytics
Three Steps to Help Managers Give a Damn about HR Metrics - i4cp

Some good data and strong point of view on the important of workforce planning and analysis.

tags: workforceanalytics
Insights On SaaS From The $32 million HubSpot Mega-VC Round

Interesting point of view on what it takes to be a successful SaaS vendor.

tags: SaaS
Jason Lauritsen: Performance Appraisals Must Die

Some provocative thinking on performance reviews.

tags: EPM performance

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

BlogERP Links 02/16/2011

2011-02-16T01:30:09-06:00

SandHill.com | Opinion : Value Pricing and Avoiding the Commodity Metric Trap

Good article about for both SaaS vendors and customers looking to buy from SaaS vendors.

tags: SaaS
UPS Says It’s Now Delivering Hires, Not Just Fans and Followers - ERE.net

Good case study on social recruiting metrics.

tags: E-Recruitment socialnetworking

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

BlogERP Links 12/15/2010

2010-12-15T01:30:08-06:00

Startups - Marc Benioff: salesman extraordinaire

Interesting read from 11 years ago about Salesforce.com vs. Siebel.

tags: SaaS
SaaS Economics - Part 1: The SaaS Cash Flow Trough | For Entrepreneurs

Great article on the economics driving a SaaS business model.

tags: SaaS

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.