BYOT - Bring Your own Technology

Spent some time Sunday morning (the extra hour of 'sleep' we got in the US), reading some excerpts from a book titled 'The Tower and the Cloud',  Chapter One : 'The Gathering Cloud: Is this the End of the Middle' by Richard Katz.

The book is an examination of the technological changes and forces at work that will dramatically impact and inevitably alter the structure and delivery of higher education in the US and worldwide. One of the Flickr - prestamost interesting observations from the first chapter concerns the how the academic institution will be effected by the increasingly technical acumen demonstrated by its incoming students:

As the explosion of content continues along with the increasing maturity and availability of web-based academic services and applications, tomorrow’s students will arrive on campus with their own IT architectures and service arrangements. These students—and tomorrow’s faculty—will have little use for or patience with college or university offerings that under perform or force them to lose precious connections to people and processes that they have accumulated since childhood.

This idea has certainly been discussed and observed in the workplace or professional context as well. How does the organization react when new employees (typically Millennial or Gen Y age) enter the workforce carrying with them (and expecting to leverage) different, and many times superior technical capabilities than the organization has deployed?

Whether it is Gmail with its huge storage capacity, external social networks for connection and information sharing with their personal communities, cloud based file storage and collaboration services, or free web-conferencing and conference calling on demand, or event the latest in slick technology the new (and existing) employee has the ability, and perhaps the expectation that they can and should be able to leverage these capabilities in the workplace.

In 'The Tower and the Cloud', Katz suggest these factors (and several others) will force a fundamental shift in the traditional role of the university as the 'center' of learning, research, and access to technology. Since information access, computing power, and ability for experts to connect directly with students (and potential students) without the need for the physical university as a kind of broker the university will be forced to adapt to this reality, and evolve in order to survive.

In the corporate world, while it does seem that such dramatic changes are less likely (at least not as quickly), there are certainly some implications.  In an environment where employees (especially younger ones) move much more frequently from one firm to another, does it still make sense to spend the first 'X' days/weeks/months teaching these employees all about your unique and in many cases proprietary systems? Or would that time and effort be better spent building bridges from these internal systems to the ones that employees are already familiar with and have already adopted?

Technical capability, access to information, employees understanding and leveraging of networks, cloud capability and new and better solutions for collaboration all are advancing faster than most organizations ability to keep up.  Finding the correct balance between forcing employees back inside the corporate 'technology box' and leveraging the tools and capabilities they bring with them is one of the most important challenges for organizations today.

The ones that strike the correct mix will be in far stronger position than the ones that don't.

Can Compliance be Strategic?

Last night on the HR Happy Hour Show I tossed out the idea that perhaps to further the HR organization's ability to pursue more strategic objectives and more value-added activities, that the traditional 'compliance' related functions be spun-off to another part of the organization, (perhaps finance and accounting).

My (shallow) reasoning was simple: if HR departments are truly getting bogged down in compliance and and administrivia, why not spin off those functions to another department (or outsource them)?

Shedding those non-strategic processes, I proposed, would really empower the HR organization  to focus on strategic planning, aligning the workforce and their skills and capabilities with the organizational objectives, and equipping line managers with the tools and abilities they need to succeed.

A win-win right?

Well, some of the guests on the show, China Gorman, Mike VanDervort, and others did not like the idea. They essentially said that giving up the control of these processes to accounting (or someone else) would not be a mistake and that HR has to own those processes.

So here is my question:

If HR needs to get more 'strategic' and compliance and regulatory issues are in the way, can you just outsource, spin-off, or otherwise de-couple them from the real value that HR can deliver to the organization?

Can compliance really be strategic?

You can listent to the entire conversation, and the rest of the HR Happy Hour 'Is HR Dead' Episode here:

Social Software in the Workplace

This week analyst firm Gartner published its 'Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace',  a review and categorization of 35 different solutions that in one form or another support internal employee 'teaming, communities, and networking'. Flickr - dsevilla

It is an expensive piece of research, but if vendor Jive Software is making copies available via its site here, (registration with Jive required).

I don't want to get into the never-ending debate on whether these analyst reports are biased or not, or even if the Magic Quadrant model is all that helpful, but I point out this research to illustrate for the HR community (the primary readers of this blog), how diverse and crowded the market for internal social software has become.

If you believe that organizations can achieve significant competitive advantage by more effective internal communication, collaboration, and teamwork, then you as an HR pro and leader will almost certainly be called upon to either participate in either a software selection project, lead an internal deployment of collaboration technology, or devise ways to design and implement performance, recognition, and compensation programs that reflect the impact of collaborative tools in the organization.

There are really several keys for the HR leader in approaching social software:

One - Identification of the business issues that can be solved by more frequent, effective, and sustainable collaboration and expertise and information discovery.

Issues centered on Research and Development and Marketing collaboration may require a different set of tools than ones between Account Management and Customer Support.  A large company in numerous countries and locations typically faces much different challenges than a smaller, single location enterprise. The point is that your organization's challenges are unique, and blanket approaches, 'Let's get everyone on Yammer', may not really solve any specific business problem.

Two - Assessment and selection of the best technologies that will support the solutions identified in step one.

The 35 solutions listed in the Gartner report, while all broadly defined in the 'social software' category, have unique feature sets, characteristics, capabilities, costs, and in some cases deployment options.  HR leaders will have to invest the time to develop a better understanding of market segment that they likely may not have much familiarity with.  Fortunately many of the solutions have free trials, or other low-cost options for targeted pilot projects.

Three - Design and implementation of the technology solution accompanied by change management, communication, training, etc.

Definitely part of this step is the development of new performance management metrics and possibly compensation plans to support the project's goals. 

Four - Evaluation of the solution and the implementation.

Are employees adopting the new collaborative technology and the associated changes in process? Do metrics like content creation, participation, activity, etc where you want? And most importantly, is the solution meeting the desired business outcomes?  Many organization are absolutely littered with rarely updated wikis, or internal blogs with only sporadic posts and comments. The causes of failure vary from the wrong technology being chosen, a company culture that does not embrace the new collaborative process, or perhaps a lack of adequate change management and communication to the employees as to the benefits of the new technology and process. 

Five - Refinement of the technology itself, or the process based on the evaluation in step four.

Does the organization need some additional or enhanced system capabilities? Have the employees taken the system to places you had not considered, but they find valuable? Unlike traditional enterprise software, where business processes are usually clearly defined and employees simply follow user instructions, with these collaboration tools employees will almost always adopt ways of working and using the tools that you as the HR leader and implementer had not considered.  Hopefully, your initial projects were successful, and now you can plan ways to expand the footprint of the solution to more employees in the organization.

For HR, the opportunity to help drive superior business performance by designing and implementing strategies to increase and reward effective collaboration has never been more apparent. Understanding the related technologies that support these initiatives is a critical component of the process.

In the next few weeks I will highlight some of the specific solutions reviewed in the Gartner report, particularly some of the newer ones, to try and provide some assistance in your learning process.

What do you think, do you feel as an HR leader prepared to drive internal social software adoption?

A Spirited Carnival of HR

Today the HR Bartender is serving up a fantastic Carnival of HR - the Halloween Spirits Version.

A fantastic selection of posts from your favorite HR blogs sorted by the author's favorite beverage.Flickr- Steve Snodgrass

I recommend you check out the Carnival, some of the posts that I particularly enjoyed were:

Wally Bock at Three Star Leadership shares An Appraisal System Carol Bartz Can Love

Lisa Rosendahl at “Simply Lisa”, on her Social Media and HR stories.

and

Michael Krupa at InfoBox with his post, Is HR Afraid of Technology?

Great job Bartender!

Is HR Dead? - The Reading List

Thursday night October 29 at 8pm EDT the HR Happy Hour show will take on the topic, 'Is HR Dead?'.

There is nothing like a little in-depth analysis and self-examination of the HR function to rile up the community and this topic certainly has been poked and prodded for the last several weeks.

Since the instructor in me wants to be sure everyone is well-prepared and ready to jump in to the conversation I thought I would assign some pre-reading, to get us all on the same page prior to the show. Flickr - KiltBear

In the blogosphere as far as I can tell, the most recent 'Is HR Dead?' conversation started with this post:

'Is Human Resources Fatally Flawed' - Lance Haun at Rehaul

It was followed by numerous responses (or rebuttals if you prefer), a few of which are listed here:

'HR is Dying: Yes? No?' - Laurie Ruettimann at Punk Rock HR.

'HR - Not Dead Yet' - Mike VanDervort at Human Race Horses

'to HR, on news of your death' - Fran Melmed at free-range communication

'HR is Dead: Some Mourn, Some Celebrate, and Others Say "What?"' - Mike Haberman at HR Observations

'HR is Obsolete! Isn't It?' - Joel White at Joel's Views

'Human Resources Departments: I've never understood the point of them' - Sathnam Sanghera at the UK Times Online

And in the last week or so:

The Future of HR - Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Point

'Slow Dancing in a Burning Room' - Maren Hogan on 'Marenated'

Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series Again, Nietzsche, and Other HR Thoughts - Frank Roche at Know HR

The HR Profession, Business Leaders and the Future of Work - Sharlyn Lauby at HR Bartender

But if you think this is somehow a 'new' discussion, it really isn't, the top Google result (at least at the time of this writing) for the phrase 'Is HR Dead' was this piece from 2003 on Workforce.com.

And of course we should not forget this gem from March 2009 - Memo to CFOs: Don't Trust HR - David McCann writing on remarks from Professor Beatty for CFO Magazine.

So you have your assignments, catch up on your reading and join the discussion on the HR Happy Hour Show, Thursday October 29, 2009 8PM EDT, call in 646-378-1086. Frank Roche and Mike VanDervort are set to appear, and perhaps another special guest or two as well.

What do you think, is HR Dead? In need of revival?  Need to be scrapped and re-built from the ground up?

It should be a great show!