Hello Wisconsin! - Presentation at the MRA Conference

Greetings from cold, rainy and 'hard-to-find-some-working-wifi' Milwaukee, Wisconsin!

I am here today to attend and present at the MRA's Annual Human Resources Conference titled : 'Take Your Game to the Next Level'. The MRA is a large professional employer's organization that serves members in the Midwest with development, learning, and other resources to help make them more effective.

An HR Conference being held at a baseball stadium with a 'sports' theme running all the way through the event? I am in!

My session is called 'Hitting the Curveball: Leadership in the Social Age', and is centered around some of the challenges that leaders and organizations face in the new world of openness and transparency, and offers some (I hope), useful suggestions for getting more comfortable and effective in this new environment.

I just uploaded the slides I will use today to Slideshare - you can take a look at them here, and they are also embedded below (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through to see the presentation).

Leadership in the Social Age - MRA

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Let me know what you think of the slides, it was not easy finding all the 'right' images to try and illustrate this topic.

Thanks very much to the great folks at MRA for inviting me to come to the event today, I just wish a Brewers game was on!

Apps for Everything - Notes from Lumesse Conference

This morning at the Lumesse Journey 2011 User Conference in Austin, Texas both Lumesse CEO Matt Parker, and CTO Martyn Arbon shared their observations around talent management, business software, and more directly their sense of the future of talent management technology.

In both presentations, Parker's that described the journey that has led to the current incarnation of Lumesse, (the company formerly known as Stepstone Solutions); and Arbon's, which provided more insight into current state and near-term Lumesse product roadmaps; both gentlemen described the increasing 'consumerization' of business technology, and the need for technologists, particularly in the HCM space, to effectively create and deploy flexible, easy to use solutions that will more and more resemble the look and feel of consumer-based applications. 

We have heard about this trend for some time now, certainly creators and developers of business applications have taken inspiration from popular and eminently usable consumer sites like Amazon.com and Ebay for years. But this approach has up to know been directed mainly about user interface improvements, attempts to streamline translational processes, and with the goal of improving HR organizational efficiency by driving more processes out to the employees and managers in the form of Employee Self-Service, (ESS) and Manager Self-Service, (MSS).

But the problem with ESS and MSS for many organizations is that many employees and managers really hated it. It forced employees and managers to use systems that they did not find all that friendly, following processes that were proscribed centrally and were not that flexible, and using systems that may have been in theory personalizable to some extent, but in practicality were often too difficult for the average employee and manager to use in anything other than their delivered, default configuration. ESS and MSS were kind of the like the old VCR machines in your parent's house, the time of day always blinking on 12:00.

So where this next generation of HCM solutions for core HR, for Recruiting, or for Talent Management process support has an opportunity to really become more transformational and leveraged more fully and effectively throughout organizations will likely be driven by how well suppliers of these technologies can adopt and adapt the latest 'consumerization' trends to the enterprise - apps, mobile support across platforms, and easily personalized.

As Martyn Arbon correctly noted in his talk this morning, no two people have the same exact set of applications loaded on their iPhones, even if said people perform the exact same role in the organization. Traditionally enterprises have deployed or made available to staff a general set of access controls and capabilities for systems and tools based on high-level, and fairly generic set of definitions. 

If you were a staff recruiter, or a purchasing agent, or an office manager, then you received the same set of tools and systems as the other staff recruiters, purchasing agents, or office managers. It did not really matter if you worked in a different style, a different location (perhaps remotely), had more or less appetite and expertise in technology, etc.  This 'role-based' access dominated, (and still dominates), most technology deployments. But what consumerization or 'appification' is doing is fundamentally changing employee's demands and expectations of what enterprise technology should and needs to support - the ability to tailor capability and functionality at a true personal level, i.e., just like their iPhones work.

The first wave of consumerization of business technology was mostly about user interface improvements and porting tools to the web, this next phase, at least for the companies that will be successful at it, is about delivering a much more personal, flexible, and truly individual experience.

The team at Lumesse spent a lot of time this morning showing that they have these ideas in the forefront of their strategy and thinking - which is certainly an encouraging sign for their customers.

What to do when the power is out?

I am in the cool, weird, and eclectic city of Austin, Texas for the next couple of days attending the company formerly known as StepStone (now called Lumesse), customer conference called 'Journey 2011'. Lumesse, in case you are not familiar, is a HR Technology solutions provider in the talent management space, (think talent acquisition, performance management, succession planning, etc.), with a significant global presence, and perhaps less well-known here in the US.www.lumesse.com

The re-branding from StepStone to Lumesse (with it's corresponding website, logo, corporate color scheme re-design, etc.), could be at least in part motivated by the organization's desire to raise awareness and gain some mindshare here, I will endeavor to learn more about those goals while I am here in Austin. But the success of the re-brand will be pretty easy to measure I reckon, by the length of time it takes for Lumesse staff, customers, prospects, and even bloggers to stop adding 'the company formerly known as StepStone' when talking about the organization.

So while I am looking foward to meeting many of the Lumesse employees, customers, and others who have made their way to sunny (apologies Northeast), Austin, I woke up this morning only to realize the 'official' events do not actually get underway until later this evening, essentially giving me an entire 'free' day here in Austin, when I had previously thought I'd be in sessions, attending demonstrations, eyeing the lunch buffet, etc. So while it is a fun town to find yourself in with some time to kill, at the same time all of a sudden being 'unscheduled' makes you really kind of pause for a moment to think about what to do.

It is a classic question, one that organizational effectiveness folks sometimes ask - what, if you and your team showed up at the office one morning (assuming, for a moment, there is an 'office' somewhere), and all the things you thought you'd be doing, the meetings that you had booked, the 78 emails that showed up in your inbox overnight, the phone calls you planned on making - what if all of those things were suddenly and simply gone?

What would you do, or more importantly what would the team do if they were completely and unexpectedly freed up for some period of time, could be an hour, a day, whatever?

Not so long ago I rolled up the office to find that overnight storms had knocked out all power to the company headquarters. No email, no phones, nothing. It was a mild day, so the loss of power was not a hardship or safety hazard, just really an inconvenience really. But it was instructive to see the different reactions amongst the staff to their sudden 'dilemma of freedom'. Some immediately calculated the power outage as a 'free' day off and wanted to leave, or go to the mall. Some looked for other productive tasks that actually could be done without the power being on. And some were genuinely inspired, seeking to collect up other members of the team for chats and starting impromptu and completely serendipitous conversations about all kinds of topics, as if the unplanned loss of email and phones and schedules suddenly created a burst of excited energy and even fun.

I think you can learn a lot about what is really imporant to you when faced with some unexpected free time, and you can also really get a sense of the engagement, burnout levels, and overall creativity of a team when the entire group finds themselves in the same situation. I think sometimes all the 'stuff' we have to deal with every day keeps us from ever having the chance to see things in a different way.

What do you think - what would you do if the power was out, or if your email and phones were down, or if all your meetings were canceled today?

Peer to Peer Knowledge Sharing

Have you checked out a site called Skillshare? 

Skillshare is a kind of learning community where members offer to share their knowledge, sometimes for a fee, on a wide variety of topics ranging from design, to development, and even to hobbies like cooking and photography. Other Skillshare community members can register for these classes, which are all delivered live and in-person, (currently Skillshare does not offer eLearning capability).

The Skillshare site serves as a kind of marketplace or clearinghouse for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge from experts that are interested and incented to offer their skills and expertise to participating community members who are hoping to increase their knowledge on a given subject for personal or professional reasons.

Underlying the concept of a site like Skillshare is the notion that more traditional and 'formal' avenues and mechanisms for delivering this type of instruction frequently can't react quickly enough to changes in the public's demand for specific learning content, and by the time they could assemble resources, develop a curriculum, complete all the administrative tasks associated with offering new learning programs, that enough time may have passed that the demand for the learning content may have waned, or the market may have simply moved on. In a way just like these formal institutions Skillshare is the middleman, but one with much less friction and cost that can serve to separate producers of learning content from consumers of that content.

The other interesting angle of Skillshare is how it democratizes the learning process, any member of the community can register to offer a course or class; (currently topics are being vetted by the site curators before being offered), and any other member can attend. Integration with Facebook on the individual course pages adds an element of social participation and feedback to the design and delivery process. It represents a model worth examining by those of us that may work in a corporate or organizational setting and are tasked with creating, distributing, and evaluating the effectiveness of training and learning content and opportunities.

Could you imagine the adoption of the Skillshare model, with it's disaggregated and de-centralized provisioning of access to and opportunity for topic and project-specific expertise in a large or traditional organization? If an organization truly followed the Skillshare model and focused exclusively on small, in-person group based courses, and did not try to get overly heavy and dense with complex eLearning technology, then the development and rollout of the concept would be exceedingly simple. Just put up a simple website that allowed employees to volunteer to teach on subjects they have expertise and passion around, have HR or the Learning group do a bit of vetting to make sure the content is (mostly) aligned with business objectives, and open up registration to the population of potential learners. Add another area of the site for learners to suggest topics they are eager to learn more about, maybe add some simple voting, commenting, and rating functionality for courses and instructors and you'd be all set.

One of the frequent worries that HR and organizational leaders express is capturing and understanding so-called 'tacit' knowledge of the workforce, the kind of insight and understanding that isn't really written down anywhere or is easily transferred from one employee to another (or to many) by traditional and typical methods. In HR we can mean well, but we can end up creating too much infrastructure, impose too many demands, or simply not be cognizant that simple facilitation of more peer-to-peer knowledge sharing would benefit the employees and the organization in a significant manner. 

Sure, an informal employee knowledge sharing community could not or should not replace essential training related to safety, compliance, operation of equipment and such, but in today's modern organization most of what employees really need to know, and what others would likely be happy to share, seems to fall into that vast category of learning that a less-formal, more nimble, and employee driven approach would be more suitable for and possibly more effective.

What do you think - does your organization make it easy for people to share what they know? And for people to ask for help and guidance on subjects they would like to learn more about?

Have a Great Weekend!

New Technology for Recruiting - on the HR Happy Hour tonight

Tonight at 8:00PM ET on Episode 99 of the HR Happy Hour show, (can you believe Episode 100 is just one short week away?), we will be joined by Ty Abernethy of Zuzuhire, and Craig Fisher the genius behind TalentNet Live and a million other cool things in the recruiting and technology space.

You can listen to the show from the show page here, using the listener call in number 646-378-1086, or using the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

At the recent HRevolution event in Atlanta, Craig led one of the most popular sessions about 'Cool New Tools for Recruiting', and Ty has actually created and operates one of those tools at Zuzuhire. If you had not had a chance before now to check out Zuzuhire, give it a look - it provides an innovative and fun way to create online interviews and applicant screening processes that can incorporate video and audio response, text, and simple multiple choice questions.

But beyond the 'cool factor' of these new tools, tonight we will also dig a little deeper as to how corporate recruiters and hiring managers can make better decisions around technology in the hiring process, and even how candidates can better prepare themselves and make the most effective presentations in this rapidly changing space.

After all, cool is only cool if it helps us hire better, faster, and more efficiently.

It should be a fun show and I hope you can join us live, and be sure to follow the backchannel on Twitter using the hashtag #HRHappyHour.