HCI Webcast - Tell the Story with Technology

Later on this afternoon I have the great pleasure to co-present an Human Capital Institute Webcast - 'Tell the Story with Technology'.  The webcast is scheduled for Thursday, May 14 at 1:00 pm EDT.

My co-presenter is Jessica Wagner, a former student and now an HR Manager at Klein Steel in Greece, NY.

Jessica gave a great presentation on the innovative use of technology in recruiting by the US Army in my last HR Technology class.

The presentation was so powerful in class, that I tweeted about it the next morning and Amy Lewis from HCI saw the update and was interested, and ultimately this led to the scheduling of this webcast.

For anyone who is interested on the details of how this came about - I blogged about it here.

The Army does some incredible things with technology, and while the webcast platform will not allow us to fully demonstrate the 'coolness' of their approach, I will leave you with an example of what the Army is doing with technology here:  

So if you have a chance at 1:00 PM EDT, stop by, the Webcast is free, just a simple HCI Registration (also free) is needed to view the presentation.

Thanks again, Amy, and HCI for giving myself and Jessica the opportunity to present to your members today.

The Classroom and the Community

A new version of my HR Technology class is set to commence this June, just a few short weeks from now. This session will be unlike any of the three prior classes, as it will be delivered 100% online.  Some changes that I have already had to make include leaving out the 'hands-on' use of Halogen's Talent Management Suite, as without the face to face meetings I don't think I will be able to effectively utilize the powerful set of capabilities that Halogen offers. I have also had to modify many of the presentation materials that I traditionally use to make them more 'wordy' and less 'visual' as so much of delivering courses online is reliant on written information. Flickr - carf

I have entered into a new vendor partnership for this session, with community platform vendor Tomoye, that should provide an equally outstanding opportunity for 'hands-on' experience with a leading enterprise technology.  A community platform is certainly easier to deploy to a 'virtual' class than a traditional Talent Management application, particularly in the compressed time frame of a summer class.

But aside from introducing the students to a community platform, I want to get the greater community of experts and leaders more involved in the class.  One of the things that I continually notice in higher education, is that many outstanding ideas, papers, presentations, etc. produced by students simply get seen only by the instructor, or sometimes by the other members of the class. Some excellent work, or decent work that with a little bit of refinement could indeed become excellent, sort of 'disappears'; used only to meet the requirements of an assignment, to earn a grade, and ultimately to complete the class and the degree.   The class is so often such a closed and insular environment, and I think that is a weakness in the traditional model.

So in thinking about this issue, I floated an idea on Twitter, to have various experts from the community help moderate some of the online discussion topics that are commonly used in online course delivery. What I am after is a way to get the students more aware of, and introduced to some of the great leaders and visionaries in HR and HR Technology, while at the same time contributing themselves to that same community.  For example, if we conduct a discussion around enterprise software delivery models, an expert with many years experience deploying enterprise solutions could be in the same discussion with the class, many of whom will be getting their first exposure to these concepts.  Later in the course when we review the impact of Web 2.0 on HR, a CEO of a software company that markets these types of solutions can help moderate the discussions.

It is not really a breakthrough concept, classes have used guest speakers for a hundred years, and this idea really is not that much different.  But it has the potential to be more meaningful to the students.  The guest speaker thing is not that interactive, usually just a speech and a few questions at the end, and like almost everything else in the class 'disappears' as soon as the speech is over.  What I am hoping to achieve with 'community' leaders helping to moderate class discussions is something potentially more lasting.  Hopefully students will get the chance for more personal and meaningful exchanges with the 'guest speaker' and that both parties and the greater community as a whole may benefit.

For those community leaders reading this who did 'volunteer' to help and to participate in the project, I will reach out to you directly as the class gets closer, and I have finalized the platform and model for the process, and I say many, many thanks in advance for offering your expertise, time, and assistance.

Higher education needs to be more 'open', and this is for me, a small step in that direction.

 

New HR Technology Class Partnership

My next HR Technology class is set to start in a few weeks, and I am really pleased and excited to announce a new vendor partnership, that will put leading-edge and exciting technology in the hands of my students.

I will be working with Tomoye, a provided of software solutions that support employee, customer, and partner communities.

Tomoye is a leader in the emerging market for these Enterprise Social Networking solutions, that organizations are increasingly adopting and deploying to strengthen employee ties, foster collaboration and innovation, and build a more powerful organization 'community'.

Some of the features of Tomoye Ecco platform that I plan to utilize in class, are the employee profile, the questions and answers tools, blogs, document authoring and sharing, and hopefully even video.

I have been eager for my classes to explore in a 'hands-on' way the real power and capability of corporate social networking, and this partnership with Tomoye will give the class an extremely valuable set of experiences.

I will be posting a series of updates on the project, as the preparations for the class progress, as I am sure the topic of Enterprise Social Networking is so complex and rich that more detailed analysis is warranted.

Thanks very much to the great folks at Tomoye for generously agreeing to support graduate HR education.  It is a great thing when industry and academia can partner for mutual benefits. And a special thanks to Maggie Patterson, PR Consultant extraordinaire, who facilitated the agreement, and is a great person to work with.

How to contact the Professor? - DM me on Twitter

I have been thinking long and hard about the best and most effective way to integrate Twitter into my next HR Technology Class.  In the last three class sessions, I have variously discussed Twitter, demonstrated Twitter, and even had an HR expert panel web conference that was organized completely on Twitter.

Yet, I still feel like many students are slow to embrace Twitter and to leverage the vast pool of resources and contacts that can be found there.  I am such a huge proponent of the potential of Twitter for networking, for research, and for connecting to some of the best HR practitioners that I feel the need to 'force' students into the Twitterverse.

So in the spirit of the old-timer professor that props up sales for the ancient textbook he wrote years back by making it a 'required' reading, I am going to make Twitter a 'required' aspect of my next class.

In addition to crafting an assignment or two involving making connections with HR experts on Twitter, I am going to enact a new policy.

I am going to instruct the students if they need to contact me, that they have to send me a DM (direct message) on Twitter. That way I ensure two things, one, that they have actually created an account on Twitter, and two, they have figured out the basics of using the service (at least enough to send me a DM).

So, from this day forward students, if you need to contact me, do what plenty of HR experts, consultants, bloggers, and friends have already done, send me a DM.

Steve on Twitter - SteveBoese

Corporate Social Networking Vendors - Here's your chance

to give something to the community, support an educational program in Human Resources, and get some free publicity.Flickr - pascal.charest

Some background - I teach a graduate course at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY.  My course is one the very few in existence 100% devoted to Human Resources Technology.

We cover the fundamentals of HR Technology (ERP, HRIS, SaaS), the important Talent Management processes (Performance, Succession, Comp, Recruiting), and lastly the emerging and growing area for corporate social networking and collaboration tools (blogs, wikis, Twitter, and such).

Since I started teaching HR Technology almost two years ago, I have spent considerable time soliciting assistance and trying to build partnerships with the HR Technology vendor community, in an effort to get more hands-on access to software and 'real' experiences for my students, the vast majority of which have not ever had such an opportunity before my class.  To date several vendors have graciously offered access, assistance, and support, most notably Halogen Software and SpectrumHR. To both of these organizations, once again, I offer my sincere thanks, and I certainly hope that we will be able to continue our partnerships in the future.

But for my next class that starts in June, I am faced with a new challenge that makes integrating a core HRIS (like Spectrum's iVantage), or a robust Talent Management suite (like Halogen) quite difficult. I will have  a class of students unfamiliar with these types of systems and the course will be offered completely online.

No 'in-person' class meetings means no opportunities to do 'live' demos or in-class exercises that were the primary benefit of using these 'donated' platforms. Based on my experience with the class so far, attempting to integrate these systems in the manner that I would prefer is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible in an 100% online delivery method.

So for the new class, the online class, I still need to provide a 'real-world', 'hands-on' experience with a relevant technology that the students could very well encounter in their workplaces, or better still, bring to their workplaces, armed with the expertise and knowledge gained in class.

What better technology then, than Corporate Social Networking?  The very type of solution that is designed to foster connectivity and collaboration amongst a dispersed workforce, is meant to be simple enough to use to achieve rapid and widespread adoption in the organization, and is growing in popularity in the corporate world, thus exposing the students to a technology that is suddenly 'hot'.

My idea is to essentially 'run' the class in the social network, have the students collaborate on assignments, post and respond to discussions, create 'HR related' content and resources typically housed on corporate intranets, and interact with each other in real time from their dispersed locations.

The types of vendors that I think would be a good fit for this project would be SelectMinds, Jive, or perhaps Telligent. There are many other vendors as well that would be a fit, too many perhaps to list here.  Or perhaps one of the newer, less well-known vendors would like to participate in the project to generate some publicity.

It would be a pretty simple effort on the vendor side, since I need a hosted solution, the vendor would need to create an instance for my class, with perhaps 20 user licenses for a period of about 3 months. I would set up and administer the class network, and the students would be the 'users'.  At the end of the class, the vendor could simply close off access to the network.

In return for the software use and support, I would offer good, constructive feedback from the class as this project amounts to a 3 month extended 'test', I will publicly blog, tweet, and otherwise promote the product and the vendor, and make myself available to the vendor as a reference for articles, internal blogs, press releases etc.  It is a mutually beneficial arrangement that I think worked really well last class with Halogen, and I think it would be a good opportunity for the right vendor.

Ok, that is the pitch.  For any social networking vendors who might be interested in this project here is my contact information:

E-mail - steveboese@gmail.com

Twitter - sbjet

Or simply leave a comment on the post and I can get in contact with you.

Thanks in advance for your support of my class and the education of some future HR leaders.