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.
Equifax Is a Big Data Company. | HR Examiner with John Sumser
More on Big Data in HR.
Moneyball and the Blind Leading the Blind
Thoughts on Big Data in HR
Steve's HR Technology - Journal - Value, Pricing, and Early Retirement
Another good article on learning from professional sports teams and their talent management practices.
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.
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.
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?
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)?