Quantcast
Subscribe!

 

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

 

E-mail Steve
This form does not yet contain any fields.

    free counters

    Twitter Feed
    Thursday
    Sep222016

    PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 259 - Big Data and Innovation at ADP

    HR Happy Hour 259 - Big Data and Innovation in HR Tech at ADP

    Hosts: Steve BoeseTrish McFarlane

    Guest Host: Mollie Lombardi

    Guest: Don Weinstein, Chief Strategy Officer, ADP

    Listen to the show HERE

    This week on the show Steve and guest host Mollie Lombardi were joined by Don Weinstein, Chief Strategy Officer at ADP for a conversation on how the power of huge data sets can help HR leaders and organizational leaders be more informed about their own businesses and make better decisions about people and operations. ADP's Data Cloud and Benchmarking tools are leveraging the aggregated insights from hundreds of thousands of customers and millions of employee records to provide information and insight to HR and business leaders in real-time. 

    Additionally, Don provided an update on the one of 2015's HR Tech Products of the Year, the ADP Marketplace, and the continued importance of technology to enable better, faster, and less costly integration of multiple HR and Talent systems.

    Finally, Don shared some thoughts on where HR technology and innovation may be heading in the coming years, and how your voice may become the next User Interface technology.

    You can listen to the show on the show page here, or by using the widget player below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

    This was a fun and interesting show, and we hope you check it out. 

    Many thanks to Don and the entire team from ADP for hosting the HR Happy Hour Show. 

    Be sure to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, or your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to subscribe and never miss a show.

    Tuesday
    Sep202016

    Learn a new word: Fault Tolerance

    Why does your car continue to run if one of the tires goes flat?

    How was Sully able to still steer and point the plane, eventually landing in the Hudson River, when both of the plane's engines had lost power?

    How are our organizations able to (more or less), carry on when something goes wrong, or someone fails to get the email, or Jerry in accounting just screws up?

    It's called Fault Tolerance, and it's today's entry in the wildly popular 'Learn a new word' series. First, some definitions from our pals at Wikipedia:

    Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of (or one or more faults within) some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the severity of the failure, as compared to a naively designed system in which even a small failure can cause total breakdown. Fault tolerance is particularly sought after in high-availability or life-critical systems. The ability of maintaining functionality when portions of a system break down is referred to as graceful degradation.

    fault-tolerant design enables a system to continue its intended operation, possibly at a reduced level, rather than failing completely, when some part of the system fails. The term is most commonly used to describe computer systems designed to continue more or less fully operational with, perhaps, a reduction in throughput or an increase in response time in the event of some partial failure. That is, the system as a whole is not stopped due to problems either in the hardware or the software.  A structure is able to retain its integrity in the presence of damage due to causes such as fatiguecorrosion, manufacturing flaws, or impact.

    Why does fault tolerance matter?

    Obviously it matters a ton in complex, mission-critical technologies and machines that rely on hundreds, if not thousands of components, connections, and systems. If every time a single failure point in a car or a plane or in a power delivery grid caused the entire system to crash and become inoperable, then, well, we would hardly every drive or fly anywhere and we'd be sitting in the cold and dark in our houses most of the time.

    As the sage Bender once said, 'Screws fall all the time, sir. The world is an imperfect place.'

    But why does falut tolerance matter more generally?

    Because I think we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about what will happen when something goes wrong in our organizations, or in our lives for that matter. Even just thinking about bad things happening is so unpleasant for folks that we tend to underestimate the chances of them happening, and undervalue the impact when they do happen.

    But the engineers who design systems and processes and machines with the idea of fault tolerance in mind seem to have come to terms with the inevitability of bad things happening - like both engines going dead on a jet plane, and have proactively designed the system response to such failures. 

    Put more simply, they know something is going to go wrong, because something ALWAYS goes wrong. The trick is knowing ahead of time not just that something will go wrong, but how to prepare the rest of the system and people and processes to not allow the thing that went wrong to crash the entire system.

    Something always goes wrong. In your car and in your semi-annual budget task force. 

    Be ready instead of surprised next time. Think about fault tolerance and what it means for your shop.

    Monday
    Sep192016

    PODCAST - Research on the Rocks #2 - Recruiting, Technology, and Candidate Experience

    Research on the Rocks #2 - Recruiting, Technology, and Candidate Experience

    Hosts: Madeline LauranoMollie Lombardi

    Guest: Gerry Crispin, CareerXroads

    Listen HERE

    Here at Research on the Rocks, we love talking about data. Luckily, we aren’t the only ones. On this week’s episode, we are live from IBM’s HR Summit in Boston with Gerry Crispin, co-founder of CareerXRoads and The Talent Board. He is in the process of gathering data for the Talent Board’s annual Candidate Experience survey where his team is currently, receiving 10,000 survey responses a DAY. So, we were more than a little excited to have Gerry as our first guest on the show. Listen in as we discuss IBM’s value proposition, the strategies for collecting and analyzing data, and why the word “best” isn’t exactly the best.

    You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or by using the widget player below, (Email and RSS subscribers may need to click through)

     

     

    This was a fun and interesting show - thanks to Gerry for joining us!

    Remember to subsribe to Research on the Rocks and all your favorite HR Happy Hour Podcast Network shows on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, or your favorite podast player app. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to subscribe and never miss a show.

    Thursday
    Sep152016

    Maybe automation will hit managers as hard as staff

    Super (long) read from over the weekend on the FT.com site titled 'When Your Boss is an Algorithm' that takes a really deep and thoughtful look at the challenges, pain, and potential of automation and algorithms in work and workplaces.

    While the piece hits many familiar themes that have been covered before in the ongoing discussion and debate about the cost/benefits of increased automation for front line workers, (Uber and the like largely controlling their workers while still insisting they are independent contractors, the likelihood of reduced wage pressure that arises from increased scheduling efficiency, and how the 'gig economy', just like every other economy before it, seems to create winners and losers both), there was one really interesting passage in the piece about how a particular form of algorithm might just impact managers as much if not more than workers.

    Here's the excerpt of interest from the FT.com piece, then some comments from me after the quote:

    The next frontier for algorithmic management is the traditional service sector, tackling retailers and restaurants.

    Percolata is one of the Silicon Valley companies trying to make this happen. The technology business has about 40 retail chains as clients, including Uniqlo and 7-Eleven. It installs sensors in shops that measure the volume and type of customers flowing in and out, combines that with data on the amount of sales per employee, and calculates what it describes as the “true productivity” of a shop worker: a measure it calls “shopper yield”, or sales divided by traffic.

    Percolata provides management with a list of employees ranked from lowest to highest by shopper yield. Its algorithm builds profiles on each employee — when do they perform well? When do they perform badly? It learns whether some people do better when paired with certain colleagues, and worse when paired with others. It uses weather, online traffic and other signals to forecast customer footfall in advance. Then it creates a schedule with the optimal mix of workers to maximise sales for every 15-minute slot of the day. Managers press a button and the schedule publishes to employees’ personal smartphones. People with the highest shopper yields are usually given more hours. Some store managers print out the leaderboard and post it in the break room. “It creates this competitive spirit — if I want more hours, I need to step it up a bit,” explains Greg Tanaka, Percolata’s 42-year-old founder.

    The company runs “twin study” tests where it takes two very similar stores and only implements the system in one of them. The data so far suggest the algorithm can boost sales by 10-30 per cent, Tanaka says. “What’s ironic is we’re not automating the sales associates’ jobs per se, but we’re automating the manager’s job, and [our algorithm] can actually do it better than them.”

    The last sentence in bold is the key bit I think. 

    If the combination of sensor data, sales data, and scheduling and employee information when passed through the software's algorithm can produce a staffing/scheduling plan that is from 10% - 30% better (in terms of sales), than what even an experienced manager can conjure himself or herself, then the argument to replace at least some 'management' with said algorithm is quite compelling. And it is a notable outlier in these kinds of 'automation is taking our jobs' stories that usually focus on the people holding the jobs that 'seem' more easily automated, the ones that are repetitive, involve low levels of decision making, and require skills that even simple technology can master.

    Crafting the 'optimal' schedule for a retail location seems to require plenty managerial skills and understanding of the business and its goals. And at least a decent understanding of the personalities, needs, wants, and foibles of the actual people whose names are being written on the schedule.

    It seems like algorithms from companies like Percolata are making significant advances, at least on the first set of criteria, that include predicting traffic, estimating yield, and devising the 'best' staffing plan, (at least on paper). My suspicion is the algorithm is not quite ready to really deeply understand the latter set of issues, the ones that are, you know, more 'human' in nature.

    Or said differently, it is unlikely the algorithm will be able to predict a drop in productivity due to issues an employee may be having outside of work or adequately assess the importance to a good employee of the need to schedule around a second job or some other responsibilities.

    There is probably a long way to go for algorithms to completely take over these kinds of management tasks, you know, the ones where actually talking to people is needed to reach solutions.

    But when/if all the workers are automated away themselves? Well, then that is a different story entirely. 

    Tuesday
    Sep132016

    PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 258 - HR Gives Back

    HR Happy Hour 258 - HR Gives Back

    Hosts: Steve BoeseTrish McFarlane

    Guest: Mollie Lombardi

    LISTEN HERE

    This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve sat down with Molllie Lombardi, Co-founder of Aptitude Research Partners, co-host of the Research on the Rocks Podcast,  and a driving force behind the HR Gives Back effort.  We had the good fortune of recording live from IBM HR Summit in Boston event held last week. 

    On the show, Mollie shared the background and history of the HR Gives Back effort, how people can get involved in this year's initiatives both at and outside of the upcoming HR Technology Conference, and talked about the important work that the HR Gives Back organization is helping to support.

    In addition, Mollie talked about living and working with Parkinson's, and shared some advice and encouragement for both individuals, families and friends, and even organizations that can help them in their ongoing support and care of people diagnosed with Parkinson's.

    You can listen to the show on the show page here, or using the widget player below:

     

    This was an important and interesting show, and we hope you check it out. Many thanks to Mollie for all her hard work with HR Gives Back and please do visit the HR Gives Back website to get involved with this fantastic cause.

    I hope you give this episode a listen, and be sure to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, or your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to never miss a show.