Netflixification

Of course you know about Netflix, the subscription based service that for several years has kept American mailboxes stuffed with the latest feature film and TV program DVDs.  For most of its history Netflix focused on that 'hard media' delivery model. Users registered with the site, agreed to a relatively small monthly fee, set up their viewing preferences, and voila, DVDs would begin to appear in the post. Take a day, take ten days, watch the DVD as you like, mail it back in a pre-paid envelope and in a day or so the next choice on your list would arrive.Crap - but you realized it too late

Millions of DVDs going back and forth via the mail, lots of paper and energy used up in the selection, distribution, and return process, but still for most Netflix subscribers a major improvement from a trip to the local Blockbuster shop to peruse the latest DVD releases arrayed along the walls, while sneaking glances into the 'adult' section in the corner to see if anyone you recognize had skulked in for a look. 

Recently Netflix launched additional capabilities or enhancements to its delivery model - namely the ability to stream Netflix supplied content directly to a multitude of platforms from gaming devices (Wii, XBOX), to personal computers, and even handheld devices like the iPad and iPhone.  Not only do users avoid the drive to the local store, now they can skip the process stuffing envelopes and returning DVDs via the mail. Happily for some, the need for any actual human contact is eliminated.

Owning, or even renting 'stuff' is often a hassle. It takes effort, the stuff takes up space, costs are higher, maintenance is required, and perhaps most importantly owning something is often a limiting experience.  Buy that flash new car, and sure, you get to tool around in the ride and kid yourself that you look sharp, but unless you are really well off or are willing to endure some significant transaction costs, you have always given up the chance to own, or at least use the hundreds of other flash cars that you didn't choose. If 'using' cars could be made as frictionless as streaming Netflix video would anyone keep the same car for four or five years?

Beyond the sort of obvious end user advantages of streaming, and past the cost savings of from the elimination of packaging and shipping for Netflix, the newer streaming model represents as close to an optimal delivery model for the consumer. Instant access, on your choice of a wide range of devices that at least one of which you likely already own, and with almost completed elimination of the opportunity cost of a bad decision.  

It really sucked when you went to the video rental store, spent a half hour evaluating hundreds of options before finally selecting something from the 'foreign' section in a pathetic attempt to impress the store clerk with your depth, then getting home and realizing that 'Like Water for Chocolate' should have been called 'Like $2.95 for Crap', and having your evening ruined.

Netflix has it right I think, reducing the penalty for making a bad decision, or at least having a change of heart might be as important as delivering a great product/service/experience.  

I think in the future whether it is enterprise technology, consumer technology, or even lightweight goods and services, the providers that don't compel you to 'lock in' and that make changing course, adapting, expanding, or even shrinking as painless as hitting the 'delete' button on a streamed video will have a tremendous advantage over those with a variety of multi-year contracts, heavy infrastructure requirements, and high switching costs.

It is not a 'good deal' if I can't ever walk away from it. 

Never mind the mainstream

With more and more organizations attempting to internally leverage now widely known and in a way sort of similar Web 2.0 concepts and technologies (Enterprise 2.0), with varying internal goals like increasing employee collaboration, making it easier to locate and connect with widely distributed colleagues, or improving the organizations ability to generate and execute on new ideas for products and services, one can start to get a little numb or even jaded by the technologies and recommendations for the application of Web 2.0 tools at work. How many times have you heard these kinds of statements:

Why not start an internal wiki for company policies?

Set up a Yammer network for internal microblogging!

Let's get the CEO to put the quarterly newsletter on a blog!

While these may be great ideas for the organization, and certainly despite what many of us more active in these technologies would care to admit, would still represent massive leaps forward in openness and communication for many organizations, on the surface the tools and the simple, beginning approaches can seem a little repetitive.

There are lots of Enterprise 2.0 tools on the market, but at some level they all seem kind of the same.  I know that isn't really true, but still, the sense at least to me is that while in many of these kinds of projects selecting the right kind of technology to solve the specific and pressing need is important, the specific solution selected is probably less important. And for me, a technology person, that can be a little tough to admit.  Or at least we are at a point where the secondary or below the top level distinctions between competing solutions now matter, and will likely be the differentiation criteria for selection. When the base technology, say a wiki or an internal blog, is so technically simple, what matters more are things like customer service, integration with existing solutions, longer term product vision, and vendor and solution viability.

It seems not that different to the reasoning that is frequently cited around a more traditional HR Technology solutions say for Performance Management or Succession Planning.  Many of the leading solutions are really quite similar once you get a bit below the surface, and often success or failure of these projects is more about whether or not your managers really understand the importance of the process, are trained and rewarded to have regular and ongoing performance conversations and coaching with staff, and finally that they see the value is using a new set of tools to support these processes. If you have those fundamentals right, the specific solution is relatively less important.

Recently the inventor of the term Enterprise 2.0, and one of the leading authorities in the application of technologies to solve business problems,  Andrew McAfee observed that for many larger organizations the recognition and the inclination to apply E2.0 technologies and strategies has become mainstream. From even a casual observation of the volume and breadth of articles, white papers, conferences, blogs, and other non-traditional coverage of the E2.0 movement it seems apparent that there is no shortage of attention being spent, technology solutions to choose from, and set of experts both individual and well-established to turn to for help in the E2.0 space. 

So if Prof. McAfee is right, and E2.0 is really becoming mainstream that begs a few questions.

1. What's next?

2. More importantly, if you missed the mainstream (the equivalent, I suppose of clinging to your CDs in an iPod world), is it too late?

The worry also about the 'mainstreaming' of a set of technologies is that they will continue on the path towards homogenization, be individually non-distinctive, and leave the typical buyer discounting their importance since 'they are pretty much all the same'. What made the iPod so great was that it was not just a better version of something else (it was), but that it changed the game of buying and consuming music entirely.  

So, what's on your iPod this morning?  

Workday 12 - Working for you

If you have any interest at all in Human Capital Management software then by now you are familiar with Workday, a provider of Enterprise Resource Planning solutions to mid-size and large organizations.  Founded in 2005, by industry legend and pioneer Dave Duffield, and former PeopleSoft Vice Chairman Aneel Bhusri, Workday has experienced early success and remarkable growth, leveraging the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model to push innovation and new capability to market and in the hands of its customer base faster than it’s traditional on-premise deployed competitors (SAP and Oracle/PeopleSoft) can match.

I don’t need to repeat the Workday story again here, but the general narrative is this: by building a modern, next generation ERP/HCM solution from scratch, taking advantage of SaaS deployment to rapidly iterate and deploy new features and capabilities, and lastly (but perhaps most importantly), by giving mid-size and large global customers a real choice outside of the ERP trinity of SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, or Oracle PeopleSoft), Workday has become the most interesting company in enterprise technology in the last 5 years.

Recently Workday released the latest version of the suite, Workday 12.  The team at Workday was nice enough to give me a briefing and demonstration of a few of the new features in this latest release.  And there are lots of new features in the HCM and Talent Management areas.  But during the demonstration one new feature in particular, called ‘Faceted Search’, stood out for me, and I think provides some insight on what has been one of the traditional failures of big, enterprisey technology solutions, and perhaps gives us a glimpse at what a better and more flexible enterprise solution landscape might look like.

With Faceted Search, Workday provides the ability for line managers, project managers, HR leaders, talent planners - pretty much anyone with the responsibility for finding, assessing, and deploying the ‘right’ people to the ‘right’ roles, projects, and assignments; to flexibly and with a high degree of personalization locate, tag, and take relevant actions on a group of resources. These groups can be created on the fly, in real-time, and shared as needed and desired across the organization.

One use case might be for an HR Talent Planner to run an advanced search for all Director level employees that are high performers, but have compensation below the average for their peer group.  

Screen 1 - Search results with corresponding user-defined tag

The talent planner can immediately create a custom ‘tag’ or grouping of the selected employees, e.g., ‘Retention Risk - Directors’, and from there with one-click a number of actions can be launched for the new talent pool’  - start a development plan, initiate a one-time bonus, or add to a project resource list, etc.  

Screen 2 - Launching a targeted action on behalf of newly defined Talent Pool

This is cool and noteworthy not just because of the slick user interface and the powerful functionality, but because it allows the talent planner to make the system adapt to the way he/she needs it to work, and not the other way around. Identifying the target population, creating the search, modifying the search results, augmenting the results with descriptive meta-data (the tag), and finally taking specific and targeted actions based on this brand new construct (the Retention Risk - Directors group), supports the talent professional in their needs and the needs of most organizations to better understand their talent, to deploy that talent faster and more efficiently, and to adapt to changing conditions and requirements.

Look, I am not so naive to know that for many organizations the exceedingly hard work of performance management, compensation planning, and talent assessment would all (or mostly) need to be in place before they could fully leverage this kind of powerful capability to turn the information into action.  But, I do think that by allowing more user control of the experience, the definitional data, and with the ability to rapidly and broadly share and socialize these user-created constructs, that organizations will have more opportunity to take advantage of these kinds of advanced and powerful capabilities.

There are numerous reasons why (for most users) traditional enterprise systems suck.  Having to change the way you want to work to adapt to an inflexible, rigid process and structure is certainly chief among said reasons. Rigiditiy and repeatability is great when the process is paying bills or calculating quarterly taxes; it isn’t so great when the question to be answered is how to find, deploy, and reward the ‘right’ people to the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time.  The answer to that question changes every day, and tools like Workday’s Faceted Search are a step towards providing solutions that can help talent professionals come up with the right answers.

Thanks very much to Leighanne Levensaler and the team at Workday for the briefing last week.

More on Collaboration (I know, you're bored too)

Last week on the HR Happy Hour show, Jon Ingham from consultancy Social Advantage, and Matt Wilkinson from Enterprise Collaboration Technology vendor Socialcast joined us on the show to talk about HR and Collaboration, and more specifically the approach to and importance of technology in organizational initiatives to enhance and improve collaboration, innovation, co-creation, and likely several other important sounding words ending in '-tion'.

It was an interesting and informative show, but while looking back on some of the comments in the #HRHappyHour Twitter backchannel, and then upon reading this post today from Laurie Ruettimann on The Cynical Girl blog I think that perhaps we did not really do a good enough job making the case (as our guests certainly believe), that not only is enterprise collaboration fast becoming a critical concern and initiative for many organizations today, but that HR is uniquely positioned to be the key leader and driver in the organization for these projects.  I know that on the Happy Hour show the core audience are not tech geeks, and that doing shows too focused on specific technologies will unleash the snarky comments on the backchannel faster than dropping the 'seat at the table' reference.  But since I believe strongly in the importance and potential of these technologies, I am going to try to give the HR professional three compelling (I hope) reasons you should care about these technologies (while trying not to talk about technology).  

Failing that, I will revert to the 'Because I said so' line of reasoning.

Reason 1 - Twenty Years of Change

The last major change in organizational collaboration technology was the introduction of individual email accounts and widespread access in the early 1990's.  Since then, for the vast majority of mature enterprises, email remains the dominant tool used for almost all types of workplace collaboration.  And it is an awesome tool, the first and perhaps only 'killer app'.  Despite tremendous (and recent) advances in email capability by public and free email providers (Google, Hotmail, Yahoo), the email application and service that most knowledge workers utilize at work isn't tremendously different or superior to the 1992 model.  

Almost everything else about work, the organization, the nature of the global economy, the demands of the worker, the modern attitudes, technical ability, and expectations of the newest entrants to workforce has changed.  The need to adapt, to create and organize, to source information and expertise from the extended enterprise, and to develop new ideas and innovations faster than ever before are all real organizational challenges, and increasingly the anchor of email as the primary or sole collaboration tool to meet these challenges is seemingly more and more unsustainable.

How much stuff have you kept around since 1992? Besides your plumber.  Good plumbers are like gold.

Reason 2 - It is happening already, probably without you

Whether it is rogue departments that seek out new and better IT solutions that are currently available and are 'officially' sanctioned, or leveraging external and public networking technologies liked LinkedIn, the shift inside enterprises towards more collaborative and open technologies is begun.  And for a time, and perhaps for just a bit longer, the classic IT and HR reactionary response from the 'block/control/write a policy' playbook will no longer serve the interests of most organizations. In fact, CIO's at large companies seem to already have started to come to this conclusion, witness the growth of the IT-dominated Enterprise 2.0 conferences and the recent observations from industry leader Andrew McAfee about E2.0 beginning to go mainstream.

Reason 3 - Get that seat, place, position...  Dang it - help deliver results to the C-suite

In her piece Laurie notes, correctly I think, that the 'business leaders hate HR Technology more than HR itself'. Which is probably accurate when HR Technology is viewed through a lens of compliance, administration, and policy enforcement.  If all HR Technology delivers is accurate Payroll results every two weeks and on-time affirmative action reporting (while both necessary), then I don't blame the C-suite from getting bored by the whole thing.  Time and attendance systems simply aren't sexy.

But these new enterprise collaboration technologies are much more about creativity than compliance, and designed to better connect people with ideas, content, and more importantly, each other.  These tools are meant to support the generation of new ideas, to allow the entire organization to participate across locations and time zones, and to enable the organization to more rapidly find, surface, and validate innovative ideas and the people best positioned to act upon these ideas.  The reason these technologies are exciting are mainly because they are not traditional HR Technologies at all. So when you as an HR leader decide to pitch or promote these tools, you are 'selling' the ability to deliver results, to address business issues, and to squeeze more out of less.  

Ok, I am done - there's three reasons why this stuff matters to HR.  

And if I did not manage to convince you, well then -  these tools matter Because I said so!

Where can we find someone that knows...

Check out the embedded map below (email subscribers may need to click though).

It is from a free service called Map My Followers, a site that presents a mashup of information about a given user's followers on Twitter, superimposed on a Google Map.

The image above presents a visual representation of a sample of 100 of the folks that follow me on Twitter, overlaid on the standard Google map, and hovering on the little marker for each person pops up their Twitter name as well.  On the lower right, a tag cloud of common terms from my followers profiles is displayed, which provides additional insight (beyond geography) of these 100 followers interests.

Sort of neat, kind of cool looking, and quite honestly the kind of capability, presentation, and wow factor usually lacking in the traditional workforce analysis tools that attempt to perform similar functions. 

Imagine if you were the person in charge of sourcing and staffing a project team to support some new organizational initiatives.  Factors like geography, skills, interests, availability, and prior experience would all come in to account as you attempted to assemble the team. Instead of a map of Twitter followers, your 'map' would be sourced from core HRIS information,  internal talent profiles, internal skills inventories, and perhaps even insight from the CRM system (as to the size and strategic importance of the opportunity), and augmented by your database of external talent (maybe even a custom LinkedIn or boolean search result on top of that).

Build in more advanced filtering capability and have the tag cloud on the right be user configurable and actionable (let me click on a tag and have the mashup highlight all the people that match that tag), and now you have the start of more dynamic and adaptable tool for insight and action into the workforce (and perhaps even all the available and accessible talent).  Make hovering over the map marker pop up a lightweight bio, with essential information displayed, and include the ability to quickly contact the person via email, IM, or even a Tweet.

I love checking out all these new and innovative services that seem to be proliferating lately, the cleverness and industry these developers show simply by accessing open APIs and re-imaging the data is outstanding.

What I don't love is after spending a lunch time playing with a cool site like Map My Followers is having to try to piece together similar organizational insights in an aging set of enterprise tools that were designed in a different age.