BlogERP: Jim Holincheck's HCM Software Blog

Putting More Intelligence in Business Intelligence

2013-02-13T12:27:56-06:00

In my previous post, I talked about how I thought the reason there has not been widespread adoption of BI/Analytic solutions is that they have not had much intelligence in them. Dennis Howlett did a post partially talking about how alerts and dashboards supported what I had talked about in terms of interrogating drill-down paths and finding "interesting results". This post will provide more color about finding "interesting results" as alerts are only a starting point.

The easiest way to understand what I mean by an "interesting result" is to use an example. Let's say that my business intelligence system had an alert set up for when Voluntary Turnover was greater than 20%. As the system interrogated the drill down paths, it found that in the Southeast Region in the U.S. the Voluntary Turnover rate was greater than 25% over the past 12 months. That is about as far as most BI/Analytics solutions go. If I manage the U.S operations, I would know that there could be a problem in the Southeast, but I still do not have a sense of what the problem might be. Again, I could drill down and around further to find the root cause, but I maintain most business leaders will not take the time to do this. It is more likely they will assign a business analyst, assuming they have one with the right skills, to do this work. They may or may not find the answer (or find the wrong answer because they did not look at enough of the possibilities).

Why cannot the business intelligence solution do some of the work for me? It could if it knew other related drill-down paths. For example, it could look at source of hire to see if there is any relationship between the source of hire and the people who have left (maybe I should look at hiring from different places). It could look to see if there are any other worker profile data similarities that might account for people leaving. It could look at the performance level to see if there was a difference between high performers and low performers in terms of retention (maybe high performers were frustated with non-differentiated treatment relative to low performers). It could look at internal mobility to see if people might be leaving because they did not have promotion opportunities (or if the manager of that region may be blocking their progress). It could look to see how much and how effective the training opportunities are for people in that region compared to other regions.

This is only a short list of possible drill-down paths that a more intelligent solution could explore. All of these examples are related to talent management, but there are paths to explore beyond HCM as well. Is there any relationship between this high voluntary turnover and sales or customer satisfaction in the region, for example (or vice versa, maybe we have some really bad customers that are causing our employees grief).

To understand the relationships between various metrics and their root causes requires significant domain expertise. This is something traditional BI providers have lacked, in my opinion. It also requires more sophisticated analytic techniques be applied where appropriate, some of which today are beyond the skills of typical business analysts. For example, training effectiveness comparisons require more than just simple data visualization. A good analysis technique in this case would be control group testing (like they do for pharma testing) to understand the effectiveness.

So, in my view, there is plenty of opportunity to put more intelligence in business intelligence solution to make them relevant to different business audiences.

Disclaimer: These are my personal views and not the views of my employer

TurboTax and Business Intelligence/Analytics

2013-02-11T17:35:00-06:00

Dennis Howlett suggested that I do a post on a conversation we were involved with on Twitter recently. Basically, the conversation had started out as a discussion about how companies will need data scientists to be successful at analytics. The argument was basically that analytics were too complex and you need specialists to get real value. I chimed in that I thought that was a cop out. My belief is that business intelligence/analytic applications have not been easy enough or valuable enough to the layperson to gain wide adoption.

I used the analogy of TurboTax and tax filing. Unless you had very simple taxes, until TurboTax came along, you needed an accountant to help you prepare your taxes. TurboTax cannot help for every use case of tax preparation needs. However, it significantly increased the number of use cases where you did not need a professional to help you prepare taxes. I do not think we have seen the equivalent of TurboTax for business intelligence/analytic applications - yet. There will still be a role for data scientist to deal with the really hard and challenging use cases for analytics, just like accountants are still needed for complex tax filing scenarios. However, with the right tools, mere business people should be able to do meaningful analysis that drives better decision-making.

I think the biggest issue is the lack of intelligence in the tools themselves. One of my greatest pet peeves as an analyst at Gartner was watching demos of reporting tools that showed how you could drill-down to find the data or exception you needed to know or act on. The demo person would effortlessly drill-down four or five levels and get to the result. Most business leaders are not going to take the time to do that kind of exploration (because they may not know where to look to find this nugget like the demo person does). However, those business leaders would be quite interested in the results of that exploration.

Now, they could give the assignment to a business analyst or equivalent to do the exploration, but that is not really solving the problem (but it is what most frequently happens in organizations today). What if instead you had intelligence in the system that would interrogate all of the drill-down paths and report back interesting findings based on your role. That to me would be real business intelligence. Some of the findings may not be useful (and hopefully a system such as this would learn from what was found to be useful or not). Some of the findings may be worth more exploration (but there would be something definitive to look for). Some findings may call for immediate action or decisions to be made.

This is just one class of use cases for analytics. It is one that has been around for quite awhile. With the rush to focus on all the opportunities that Big Data affords (and that do require the know-how of data scientists to exploit), it has taken the attention away from the more basic needs of planning and analysis that were not well-addressed previously for the lay business person. That is a shame.

Disclaimer: These are my personal views and not the views of my employer

Farewell to Gartner -- Hello Workday

2012-07-11T16:56:20-05:00

It has been a great 10 years at Gartner. I cannot say enough nice things about the company, the people, and the job. An analyst gets a unique view of the industry. I have had the good fortune to work with many great end user companies, vendors, and consultants over the years. I know that Gartner's HCM coverage is in good hands with Thomas Otter and Jeff Freyermuth. They know stuff. If you are a Gartner client, take advantage of their knowledge and expertise.

I will miss working with them and the rest of our team that covers Financials, HCM, and Procurement. Along with Thomas and Jeff, Nigel Rayner, John Van Decker, Debbie Wilson, and our newest member, Chris Iervolino, have been a fantastic group. There are many, many others that I will miss working with as well. They are far too numerous to mention and I am sure I would forget some that I should not so I am not going to try to list them all. I hope that I will continue to work with many of Gartner's analysts in my new role.

So, what will I be doing at Workday? My job title is Vice President, Services Strategy and Marketing. For some, this may seem a bit odd on the surface. After all, I have been covering HCM software at Gartner and so the expectation might be that I would be working in product strategy. Why services strategy? One of the things that I had noticed in covering fast-growing, SaaS HCM vendors is that many had stellar reputations and references when they had a few hundred customers, but the customer experience started to become less consistent as they grew to a few thousand customers.

The challenge I am taking on is to help Workday scale the customer experience so it is consistently outstanding while it rapidly grows. Workday's partners will obviously be key and I expect to work with Jeff Pulver and his Business Development team. I also plan to work closely with Leighanne Levensaler and her product strategy team because I believe one of the ways that you deliver a consistent, high quality customer (and partner) experience is thinking about service as you design product. I will be on Jim Bozzini's team and working closely with our folks in the trenches implementing solutions for our customers led by Mike Maszka and George Sui.

Though it was not an easy decision to leave Gartner, I am extremely excited about the future with Workday. Workday is a technology and product innovator and I hope to do my small part to bring the same kind of innovative thinking to services. Stay tuned. I hope to share more as we take this journey.

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?