From 20 Years Ago: 5 Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Over the weekend I found my way, (don't ask how), to the transcript of a 1998 talk given by the late author Neil Postman, ('Amusing Ourselves to Death, 'Technology: The Surrender of Culture to Technology' and others).

In the talk, titled 'Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change', Postman runs down how he saw advances in technology, (computers, cars, planes, medical devices, etc.), impacting people, society, work, and even technologies coming next. It is an incredibly interesting, and I think prescient, take on how technology disperses across the population, influences our behaviors, and changes, well, almost everything. And what was just as interesting to me was the fact that much of Postman's thinking and work about the impact of technological change was done between 20 and 30 years ago.

I definitely recommend reading the text of the full talk, (link here), but in case you don't have the time, here are the five main points Postman made on technological change (with a little bit of commentary and perhaps an update for 2018 from me).

Point 1 - Culture Always Pays a Price for Technology

In this point Postman was essentially stating that every technological advance is accompanied by some negative repercussions and impacts. He wanted us to make sure we did not only focus on a new technology's advantages and gave equal attention to its inherent disadvantages. Postman was specifically talking about computers here, but in 2018 the obvious example would be social media - Facebook, Instagram, etc. For all the benefits of these platforms the negative consequences have to also be considered.

Point 2 - There Are Always Winners and Losers in Technological Change

Postman states "The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. There are even some who are not affected at all."

Everyone's experience with new technology is unique. And some technologies are going to harm or displace or even render non-essential people and jobs that a particular technology disrupts. And of course some people are going to benefit from that disruption. We are cognizant of this, just think about how many 'robots are going to take the jobs away' articles you see, but at the same time we're not sure how it will indeed play out.

Point 3 - Every Technology Has a Philosophy Which is Given Expression in How the Technology Makes People User Their Minds

There was actually a little more to this point, but you can read the entire talk for the additional context. But Postman was basically saying that every technology has a kind of predisposition, or that proponents of a given technology are often predisposed to think a certain way. For 'tech' people, every problem is one of data, analysis, algorithms, etc., and they can have a tendency to think about the world and its problems as simply data challenges. The drawback of this approach is to limit the importance and influence, (or to ignore altogether), human factors like emotion, judgment, even empathy. We have to always be mindful of how our chosen technologies shape and inform our thinking.

Point 4 - Technological Change is Not Additive, it is Ecological

This point is perhaps Postman's most intriguing idea about technological change. He makes the point using an analogy of placing a drop of red dye into a beaker of water. Soon, the entire beaker of water takes on a subtle shift from clear to light red. Every part of the water has been changed by the one drop of dye.

Extending the analogy to business-driven technology change, Postman suggests that the modern-day technology business innovators, (Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc.), are effectively creating massive changes in how people and businesses interact with technology, and like the red dye doesn't care that is changing the entirety of the water, these tech leaders don't care about the massive changes their technologies are driving. Postman cautions us back in 1998 about this phenomenon and in 2018 I don't think we have to be reminded about the potential for negative effects in society of too much power and influence accruing to a small group of technology titans.

Point 5 - Technology Tends to Become 'Mythic'

By 'mythic' Postman means that once technologies achieve a level of adoption, we, (especially newer generations), forget that these technologies were actually invented by someone, and at a particular place and time. The internet did not always exist. Neither did texting or Tweeting or having GPS on our phones at all times. The caution of this mythic status, argues Postman, is that once these technologies become an essential and inherent element of our lives they are exceedingly difficult to change. Postman uses the example of television in his talk, but in 2018 we could easily think about how much people would revolt if changes were suggested to social media or mobile phones. What if Facebook decided to limit your time on the platform to 10 minutes a day? Most of us would be better off, probably, but we would never let it happen.

Really interesting observations, and probably perhaps a little ahead of their time as well. While in 1998 when this talk was given society had seen and was seeing some pretty dramatic advances in technology, and the rate of mainstream or widespread technology adoption was accelerating, it is probably safe to say that now, 20 years later, these kinds of advances are even more dramatic and important.

Have a great week!

Succeeding with HR Tech, Five, Make it Six Things HR Needs to Know

I did a Human Resource Executive Webinar on Tuesday titled 'Suceeding with HR Technology, Five Six Things HR Leaders Need to Know (and an HR Technology Conference Preview), and while it would be hard to share the information shared in webinar in full, I thought I would pull out the FiveSix 'Remember This' kinds of takeaway slides to share here, along with a little of the pithy commentary I dished out on the live Webinar.

Also, if you head over to www.hrtechconference.com, you can probably access a recorded copy of the webinar when it posts in a day or two.

(Email and RSS subscribers may need to click through to see the images)

Number One: In the Pre-Contract stage of the project, here's my one thing you need to know/remember:

Always. Be. Negotiating. Don't fall in love with the first demo you see or with the vendor that takes you out to the swankiest dinner at HR Tech. Play the long game if you can. You have just about all of the power before the contract is signed.

Number Two: In the Planning stage of the project, here's my one thing you need to know/remember:

We, all of us, humans primarily, are terrible at estimating how complex most undertakings actually are, and how long they will take to complete. Planning for HR tech projects is not immune to this phenomenon. Take your time, find some experienced implementers, challenge your assumptions, and be realistic about your organization's willingness, capability, and capacity for change when you set goals and milestones down. And it might not hurt to add another 15% for 'you never knows'.

Number Three: In the Teambuilding stage of the project, here's my one thing you need to know/remember:

One of the surest ways to limit your success with HR tech projects is to fail to devote the necessary resources for the needed time to the project, and get them some relief from their normal, day jobs. Almost every large project struggles with this to some extent. Getting a resource for 10 hrs/week does not automatically free that resource up from their normal duties, and you just may have added 20% workload to a key person you are counting on for the project.

Number Four: In the Managing Relationships stage of the project, here's my one thing you need to know/remember:

Your HR Tech project team will likely consist of a slew of different groups and organizations - core team, project sponsors, vendor staff, external consultants or SIs, and maybe even independent contractors. Managing the ownership, accountability, and communication across and among these different groups is so important, and a skillful and savvy project manager spends a ton of his or her time in this area.

Number Five: In the Technical Considerations stage of the project, here's my one thing you need to know/remember:

While many of the technical tasks have migrated from customer-owned to vendor-managed in the HR Cloud environment, most medium to large scale HR Tech projects have important technical considerations, chief among these are the integration needs from cloud solutions from different vendors, as well as the integrations from HR cloud solutions to legacy and sometimes on-premise downstream or upstream systems. And be mindful of the Planning Fallacy from a few steps ago when planning, scoping, and finding resources for your integration tasks.

Number Six: In the User Adoption stage of the project, here's my one thing you need to know/remember:

Most people don't like change. We like what we know, but maybe would not mind it if things were just a little bit better or faster or easier or more enjoyable. A good approach to user adoption is to couch and describe the change you are creating as the beginning of a movement towards something better, not necessarily a complete overhaul of systems, processes, and the way people work. We like 'better'. We don't always like 'different'. It's a subtle difference but maybe one that will make user adoption efforts and results more effective.

Ok, that's it for my Top 6 things to remember. If I would have had more time on the Webinar I could have come up with more, but these are a decent starting point. We will be hitting all of these topics in much more detail at the HR Technology Conference in September - use my code STEVE300 to get $300 off the best rate available when you register here.

HR Executive Column: Thinking about Design Thinking in HR

I have been a little slack in posting links back to my monthly column over at HR Executive Online but fear not gentle readers, I have not abandoned this essential public service.

So without further delay, here is the link to my latest Inside HR Tech piece at HR Executive - How to Make Design Thinking Work for HR.

From the piece:

Why are so many HR leaders talking about design thinking?

Longtime readers might know that I founded and co-host with Trish McFarlane the popular HR Happy Hour Show, a podcast covering HR, HR tech, HR leadership and more. In the last several months, a number of the show’s guests—HR leaders from Red Hat, T-Mobile, General Motors and NBCUniversal, for example—have brought up a phrase that, even as recently as last year, I don’t recall hearing.

That phrase is “design thinking,” and while you probably have heard the term, you might not have considered it from an HR or HR-technology point of view. Design thinking has been described as an iterative process that tries to understand a business problem, as well as who and what it is impacting. Those using this strategy challenge existing assumptions and approaches to solving a problem, and ask questions to identify alternative solutions that might not be readily apparent. Design thinking is a solution-based approach and usually prescribes a series of specific phases, stages and methods to help designers and business teams arrive at improved, user-focused solutions.

Since I’ve been hearing so much lately about this idea, I thought it would be a good topic to explore for this column.  I’ll look at each of the typical stages of a design-thinking process, their application, and how we can leverage these ideas as we evaluate, deploy and manage the HR technologies.

Empathize

The first stage in the design-thinking process is gaining an understanding of the business or people problem you are trying to solve. This is different than trying to determine the list of detailed technical requirements for a new HR system or the specific elements that need to be included in a new course for first-time managers in the organization. Design thinking suggests that the designer or the project leader thinks deeply about the people who will be impacted by a new solution or process, engage and spend time with them to better understand their motivations and challenges, as well as develop a deep appreciation for any physical or environmental characteristics that are important to the solution. But the key to making this information-gathering stage successful is empathy, which can help designers and leaders to get past their own assumptions and gain insight into users and their needs.

Read the rest of the piece over at HR Executive Online...

And remember to subscribe to get my monthly Inside HR Tech column via email on the subscription sign-up page here. The first 25 new subscribers get a new set of steak knives. Well, maybe. 

Thanks and have a great day!

Making it easier for employees to get paid

I caught some news last week from the small business payroll provider Gusto announcing the initial launch of a service called 'Flexible Pay', a service designed to give employees at companies using the Gusto payroll service the ability to choose their own pay schedule and get paid whenever they want for hours they have already worked.

Think about how most shops run a typical Bi-weekly, hourly payroll cycle. The employee works and clocks their hours and OT for a 14-day period, often ending on a Friday. The employer (or their service provider), sums up all the hours, calculates gross pay, sorts out the taxes and other deductions, and issues a paycheck or direct deposit for the employee's net pay about a week later - usually the following Friday. So the work done by the employee is essentially loaned to the employer until the two-week collection period ends, and the week of processing time is over. And for lots of employees, ones who might be facing bills or other obligations that don't line up well with the employer's pay schedule, that delay in getting their pay presents a problem.

They might look for a payroll advance, put more spending on their credit cards, or even seek out a high-interest payday loan - often because the one to almost three week 'float' doesn't work for them in their lives.

So the idea that a payroll service provider like Gusto is making it possible for employees to have more choice in when they get paid for time already worked, while also making it available to employers, (Gusto is basically fronting the funds for the employer until the 'real' payroll runs), I think is one that is long overdue, and is needed and will be appreciated by lots of employees.

A couple of disclaimers here - this service is really new, and so far only available to Gusto customers in Texas, (more states are on the way), Gusto did not ask me or compensate me at all to post about this, (in fact I am pretty sure they did not even contact me about it), and finally, there might be other payroll providers out there with similar products and services (ADP, Paychex, Ceridian, etc.), I don't claim to know that this is an offering that is unique to Gusto. So please let me if your company already offers this, and I will add a footnote to the piece. But regardless, this is a cool idea and I hope it catches on with more companies and payroll providers.

I will leave with this image - a crude Google map of Las Vegas with location pins for Starbucks locations, (which seem to be everywhere), and for Payday Loan Companies. Can you guess which is which?

Have a great day!

Ending 'Upgrades' Once and For All

About a hundred years ago (ok, it was not actually that long, just feels like it some days), I participated in my first, real 'Enterprise' technology project - helping to implement an Oracle E-Business Suite solution for a foreign division of a massive US-based telecommunications company. Even with that small, early scope, (the project continued for some years covering more and more countries), it was a pretty substantial piece of work.

We needed DBA's to configure our servers, install the Oracle Applications, and do 'normal' maintenance like patching, load balancing, security, and cloning, (basically creating copies of application setups and configurations to create test, QA, and development environments). 

We needed Analysts to figure out the business requirements, map these to the application functions, set up the apps accordingly, run tests, identify gaps, and train the end users.

We needed Programmers to develop custom data loader programs and custom interfaces to other systems that the Oracle Apps needed to feed, or to be fed data by. And of course these programmers needed to develop custom capability that the business needed but the Apps, as least out of the box, could not provide. And don't get me started on all the custom reports that had to be built - even for a small implementation in one country initially.

Add in to all this documentation, test plans, user process scripts, communication, change management - and the countless other things that need to be done in order, back then, to complete a successful implementation of traditional, (read on-premise), enterprise technology.

And after all that work, all that time, resource allocation, investment and effort, after it was all done and the system was live do you know what we found? That by then Oracle had released a brand new, better, more capable and upgraded version of the Applications, and if we and the users really wanted the latest and best functionality we had to, wait for it - upgrade.

But the problem was back then, and to some extent for many companies this is still true today, an upgrade was almost as much work as the initial implementation. The upgrade from one version of a large, on-premise, set of enterprise applications, (with customizations and interfaces), required the efforts of all those same groups of people mentioned above. Upgrades were really manual, required tons of validation and testing, and if the functionality had changed enough, also necessitated significant user training and change management efforts. Frankly, upgrades stunk. And so many organizations running enterprise apps on-premise avoided them as much as they could, preferring to stick with and maintain older versions, (with fewer features and capabilities), as the tradeoff. And that tradeoff has perpetuated. Way longer than most of us thought it might.

Even in 2018, in this time when we like to assume that every large organization has moved their enterprise systems for Finance, HR, Operations, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, etc. to the cloud, many large organizations have not, and are still running versions of on-premise Enterprise solutions, as the cost, complexity, and resources needed to do a 'upgrade to the cloud' were just as massive and daunting as the old on-premise upgrades were back then. In fact, many of these cloud migrations are not upgrades at all in the classic sense - they are full-on re-implementations - huge technical and functional projects that as I said, many firms have continued to avoid or postpone.

Sorry for the history lesson, but it's important for the news I wanted to share today.  

Earlier this week, and in a way that particularly resonated for me given my history with Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle announced the Oracle "Soar to the Cloud" solution - an automated set to tools and processes to enable customers running older versions of Oracle Applications on-premise to migrate to the Oracle Fusion ERP in the Cloud solutions much faster than ever before, and with the assurance that data will be migrated, configurations will be applied consistently in the cloud, and even any customizations done on-premise will be addressed with a new library of pluggable Fusion ERP integration capabilities.

If you want to deep dive into the nuts and bolts how this process will work, take a look at this video of the presentation made this week by Larry Ellison, Oracle CTO and Chairman, as he walks through the process. But even if you don't need r want to understand all the technical details - just remember this - the Oracle Soar to the Cloud program promises to make your organization's 'upgrade' to the cloud truly the last upgrade (in the traditional sense), that you will have to undertake.

Once you make it to the Cloud - your organization can get the benefit of regular, continuous, and frictionless updates to your enterprise apps - making the ability to adopt new capabilities, remain compliant with new regulations, and move more quickly and innovate more rapidly than at any time in the past. 

Your organization probably knows you want/need to be in the Cloud for these reasons and more.

But if you are in one of the organizations that for one reason or another has avoided the cloud, avoided the dreaded 'upgrade' - this new Soar to the Cloud program might be just what you need to kick start those plans. 

Learn more at Oracle Soar.