An HR Technology Wish List

Since it is 'Black Friday' in the US, the traditional busiest shopping day of the year as people engage in a mad scramble (starting as early as 4AM) to secure the best deals on electronics, toys, gifts, essentially anything and everything.

For many, Black Friday is about crossing off items on their family and friends 'wish lists' for holiday gifts.

So keeping in the 'Wish List' spirit, here is my take for the 'Top Ten Wish List for HR Technology'.

1. Stuff that works

The worst, most disappointing gifts are the ones that once they are unwrapped, assembled, batteries Flickr - Jonathan Wput in, and activated don't actually work as advertised. Vendors: Deliver what you promised in the sales process. The truth is you know way more than the customer 99% of the time. Don't abuse that power. Make sure your stuff works.

2. Make it simple

If the shiny new object is too complex, has too steep a learning curve, or has tricky instructions it will quickly get crammed back in the box and shoved back under the tree. Most employees and managers do not have time or inclination to stop their 'real' jobs for very long to spend weeks learning a new technology. Simple is almost always better.  Who out there hasn't seen their little kids spend more time playing with the empty box the toy came in, than the toy itself?

3. Free Monogramming

Whatever the technology is, I want to be able to personalize it for my own tastes, role, and preferences.  I want the process to do this personalization to be simple, and completely under my control. Don't make me interact with the technology the same way as the 24 year old tech genius in the next cube.

4. Decide already

I am talking to the US Government and their seemingly endless sojourn towards Health Care refroms. Whatever is going to happen here will have a significant impact on HR and HR Technology.  Payroll and Benefits systems are at the core of HR Technology solutions, and the sooner we know what these changes are going to look like the better.  Figure it out for gosh sakes.

5. Don't make me buy more than I need

I want an HR Technology solution.  I don't necessarily want a new finance, accounting, and logistics solution.  Those may be great, and certainly others might have them on their lists, but they are not my problem.  It is like getting socks at Christmas. Yes, everyone could use some new socks, but does anyone get excited seeing them in the box? Don't sell me the virtue of 'integration', show me how the solution solves my workforce problems.

6. A good return policy

This is a big one.  I need a reasonable return strategy.  Who hasn't gotten a gift that was almost perfect but not quite.  The wrong color, wrong size, whatever.  Don't force me to live with this solution forever, either due to an enormous up-front fee that I can't walk away from, or such a lengthy and costly implementation that I feel like I am past the point of turning back.  If you believe in what you are selling, then you will have no problem providing a way out.

7. Robots

I love robots. I want a robot to make me coffee and bacon every morning.  I also want HR Technology to be smarter, more predictive, and proactive. The kind of technology that alerts me when situations warrant, offers some suggestions, and intelligently interacts with processes and people.  And makes bacon.

8. Next Year's Model

This year's hot new must have item?  I want it.  And next year when it is 'new and improved' I want that too.  And I want it automatically, cheaply, and when I am ready for it.  Don't make me pay through the nose to get the latest and greatest, or force me to buy a whole bunch of other stuff I don't care about at the same time. I am committing to a solution, don't make me keep professing my commitment year after year with more cash.

9. Let me take it with me

You know what my true favorite toy is?  My BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android.  My smartphone is so cool, powerful, and convenient that I expect to live my life via its tiny screen and itty-bitty keys.  That means the HR Technology that I want needs to be able to fit into my world and the way I want to interact with it.  If it doesn't run on an iPhone, does it really matter?

10. A Puppy

Puppies are cute.  Puppies make lots of other crappy things seem better.  So I believe a puppy belongs on every holiday wish list.

So there you have it, the 2009 Holiday season HR Technology Wish List.

What do you think?  Anything you would add to the list?

What shaped 2009 in HR Technology?

As part of their year-end special report, Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBrief on Workforce asked some of the members of their Advisory Board to write a post about a workforce trend that shaped 2009.

Since I believe I am the only 'Technology' person on the Board, I think it makes sense for me to look at the request from that angle, and try to uncover the primary trend or trends that impacted workforce technology in 2009.

I think the primary trend that affected HR and workplace technology in 2009 is the growing importance of so-called 'social' technologies in the workplace, and in enterprise systems. This trend has manifested itself in several ways in 2009.

Recruiting has gone social

In 2009, we saw the emergence in a major way of the idea of 'social recruiting', a relationship-based, high-touch, and heavily technology dependent approach to recruiting.  Social recruiting, which some argue is really no different that traditional and successful recruiting, has substantion technology components, and for HR folks, a basic understanding of these tools is really necessary to effect a successful social recruiting strategy.

The Applicant Tracking Systems (and related recruiting technologies) that got the most buzz in 2009 were JobVite and Jobs2Web, two solutions that at the center of their value proposition is there embedded integration with external social networks, and the ability of organizations to leverage the personal networks of employees and candidates to support the organizational recruiting process. And towards the end of the year, we have seen several posts advocating empowering the entire organization to support social recruiting, largely via the careful leveraging of technology and networks.

Employees are Networking

Growth for the 'big three' social networking sites, (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter) continued relentlessly in 2009.  Most organizations and HR departments finally realized in 2009 that social networking was a significant societal and workplace trend, and began to confront and address the appropriate relationship between the organization and the employee use of these networks.

Whether the response was defining a corporate social media policy, upping your efforts to actively block employee use of social networks, or actively seeking ways to leverage these networks and employee connections on them the topic was on the radar of most all HR departments in 2009. HR's response to this trend has varied of course, but it has become almost impossible to ignore.

Enterprise Systems getting more social

Later in 2009,  a fairly steady stream of announcements from classic HR Technology enterprise vendors touted either integration with external social networks and services, or the inclusion of Facebook or Twitter-like 'feed' functionality inside their systems.  Learning Management Systems integrating with Facebook, performance systems linking with Google, or core HRIS connecting to LinkedIn, there were examples of all of these in 2009, and I think it is just the start of an emerging aspect of the overall 'social' trend in HR Technology.

Other vendors moved to incorporate concepts from the popular external 'status feeds' to help illuminate HR processes, a great example is the Activity Tracker from Talent Management systems vendor Halogen Software. The merging/blending/mashup of process with social interaction and communication inside of traditional enterprise technologies is one of the most important developments in 2009.

Innovation, collaboration, connection

In 2009 a slew of tools and technologies that support employee collaboration, information discovery, and internal expertise location were either released or enhanced.  From wikis like Socialtext and PBWorks, activity stream platforms like Socialcast, or more robust internal networking technologies like Cubetree or Jive Social Business Software, it seemed that almost every week in 2009 saw a new product or some new capability added to an existing product. This week, Salesforce.com, the leading provider of enterprise SaaS solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) announced the upcoming 2010 release of Chatter, an internal employee networking application that will allow employees make status updates similar to Facebook and Twitter.

HR professionals that really want to have input and impact into the future design and implementation of collaborative computing and the continuing 'socialization' of work need to start spending more time understanding how collaboration is and needs to work in their business, and then must be able to intelligently assess and recommend the appropriate technology to support those objectives.

A look ahead

I think in 2010, we will certainly see more of this trend, and it will likely manifest itself in new and perhaps surprising ways.  Before the end of the year, I will take a shot at some more detailed projections.

What do you think, what was the big news in HR Tech in 2009? Notice I did not even mention Oracle Fusion, as I decided an announcement and a short demo in 2009 really does not count as a 'trend'.

Hit me up in the comments.

Google Wave and HR

In 2004 (which in internet time is about 49 years ago), in a Harvard Business Review article titled Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?, the authors studied productivity and the effectiveness of team-based decision making in global, distributed teams.

One of the recommendations that came from the study was obvious, that modern, collaborative technologies must be utilized to support and enhance communication and collaboration for the purposes of problem-solving.  And way back in 2004, one of the specific findings was that e-mail should be used sparingly, if at all, as it has severe limitations as a collaborative technology. Additionally, the 'closed' nature of e-mail does not foster trust in distributed teams, particularly ones where the members are expected to collaborate for the first time and do not have a history or shared experiences to draw from.

So e-mail is generally lambasted as a collaboration tool. But for many project teams and organizations it remains the primary technology that supports team-based work.  Everyone has e-mail, everyone knows how to use it, and the barriers to adoption are at this point zero.

Other tools have emerged in the last few years that can in some form replace and improve upon e-mail, (wikis, group blogs, IM, Twitter, Yammer, among others), and have enjoyed varying levels of success in supporting distributed collaboration. But since the widespead adoption of e-mail as the so-called 'killer app', no single technology for collaboration has come close to supplanting e-mail as the main tool for employees and organizations to work together and share information, and to (gasp) foster innovation. Truly, since e-mail was created over thirty years ago, the corporate world has been waiting for the next 'killer app' for collaboration.

Perhaps that will be the lasting legacy of Google Wave.  Wave has been described as 'e-mail if it were invented today'. Wave, at least at first glance, seems to address and improve upon many of the shortcomings of e-mail, while certainly offering the promise of capability far superior to e-mail.  This video does an excellent job of explaining Wave in the context of e-mail 'replacement'.

Where e-mail tends to be 'private' between sender and receiver, Wave is much more open; anyone can be invited to see and participate in a Wave. Folks invited late to the conversation can use the 'replay' function to see just how the conversation developed and to get more of a flavor for the twists and turns in a problem solving process. The contents of the Wave itself are much more enduring, accessible, and portable than long e-mail message and response chains.  For all those reasons, and probably many more, Wave offers an exciting alternative to traditional e-mail collaboration. There have already been scores of posts explaining the various features of Wave, so I won't try to re-create that again here.

But I think another, perhaps more interesting question for HR and Talent professionals than whether or not Wave is 'better' than e-mail, is this one: What is the role of HR in the assessment and evaluation of tools that can increase employee collaboration, raise productivity, and foster innovation? 

When an interesting and potentially groundbreaking technology is created that has such potential in the workplace should the HR organization, the ones that are meant to be the leaders in helping to find and assess talent and to position that talent to ensure organizational success, be on the front lines of these technology discussions and tests? 

I think the answer is yes.

These evaluations and determinations of what technologies to try and implement in the workplace, particularly ones that may reach deeply in to the organization have to be influenced by HR's unique position as the 'talent' experts.

These decisions are too important to cede to the IT department.

Facebook and Talent Management Technology

Recently Talent and Learning Management vendor SumTotal Systems announced a set of new integrations meant  to present information from the system, "where employees live most, applications like Microsoft Outlook and Facebook". In Facebook, for example, and employee could see updates and alerts from the SumTotal system, and connect with their internal colleagues without leaving the Facebook site.

While most would not argue that corporate workers spend ridiculous amounts of time in Outlook, the idea that enterprise Talent Management systems should be connected with Facebook and LinkedIn is certainly an interesting and new development.

Heck, pretty much every day I see a new article or study on organizations that block access to Facebook and LinkedIn. But that is not really the 'core' issue as I see it.

I think the important message is not really about social networks and their use in the workplace, but rather a signal that the 'enterprise' platform as a required destination for employees and managers will erode in importance. More and more the 'official' home page or portals are going to be supplanted by interactions with the 'enterprise' information and processes via external networks (LinkedIn, Facebook), other internal enterprise tools (Outlook, intranets), and mobile (iPhone, Blackberry). If employees and line managers only have to visit a tool or system to accomplish one specific task, and that task is not somehow incorporated into their 'normal' workflow, the likelihood of adoption and effective utilization is far lower. 

You may have a fantastic system, full of incredible content, but if no one goes there to leverage that content then it may as well be not there at all.

Additionally, as the definitions of work shift, and the relationships that talent maintains with organizations become more fluid, much more versatile and agile tools for talent management will be needed.  Certainly part of the versatility will derive from embedded integration with Facebook and LinkedIn, but the larger work that remains is to convince organizations and vendors that their fancy home pages and dashboards, while interesting and exciting to look at, might not matter one bit to the employee and manager that never wants to visit them. 

For some time it has been fashionable in marketing circles to declare that the corporate web site is 'dead' and that no one really cares what is on there, I wonder if one day enterprise systems home pages will 'die' as well and be replaced with a collection of widgets, add-ons, browser toolbars, and mobile applications.

While HR is Waiting for Fusion

Ok, I know Payroll is boring.

Compliance reporting is exceedingly boring.

But chances are a wide cross-section of your employees view your Payroll function as the most important 'people' function you do today.  And it is likely in many shops, compliance reporting, also known as 'we better not get fined this quarter', grabs the bosses attention as much if not more than any other people process.

Today I spent an hour trying to wrestle around new NACHA rules for reporting certain international payments, and some new American Re-investment and Recovery Act reporting requirements. After that fun, it was on to trying to sort out changes to benefit plans and making sure systems were ready to handle changes in deduction schedules for 2010.

None of that stuff is even remotely interesting.

None of it helps to make the 'people' function more 'strategic' or contributes much to the execution of the organization's critical initiatives.

Unless avoiding a riot in the payroll office next Friday is considered 'strategic'.

But the day reminded me yet again that in HR organizations these new issues, new requirements, new laws and regulations, most of which will not help your organization one tiny bit in what we all talk about as being critical in HR Technology are constantly in the way, and in many cases directly in front of and hindering the pursuit of truly breakthrough projects.

Aligning corporate goals with individual work plans, linking performance with training and development plans, or building out portals or new tools to better connect the workforce and increase innovation and collaboration; we did not talk about any of these for one minute today.

And I suspect we won't talk about them tomorrow either, since the wrestling match with changing regulations and new compliance requirements never ends quickly.

Yesterday at Oracle Open World, we got the first meaningful look-see at the long awaited suite of Oracle Fusion next-generation applications.  It was a pretty slick demo, and did much to showcase just how far the Oracle team has come in user interface, integrated intelligence, and dynamic organizational charting.  For several years, Oracle has been developing Fusion, delivered technical components of what will support the Fusion Apps, but mostly just made promises about what might be coming with Fusion. Yesterday we got some more clues, but with so many questions remaining about General Availability (sometime next year?), the upgrade path from Oracle EBS or PeopleSoft, and no clear idea about what if any of Fusion is 'free' (i.e. part of the normal and ongoing maintenance fees that EBS and PSFT customers pay forever).

Lots of questions still.

But tomorrow, and I suspect the next day, and the next week (single payer health care anyone?), the question lots of HR folks will need to answer is not 'When are we getting Fusion?' but rather, questions like when will EBS or PSFT or whatever else we are using support the latest changes in transmission and reporting of foreign deposits.