Talking Social at The HR Technology Conference

Next week at the 14th Annual HR Technology Conference at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas I will have the privilege of participating in a panel discussion titled 'HR Technology's Second Annual Social Media Panel: Deploying Deep Social Strategies Without Destroying Your Career.'

The panel will be moderated by the HR Capitalist himself Kris Dunn who will be joined by Laurie Ruettimann, Mike Krupa, Oliver Marks, and myself.

It is no secret to anyone in Human Resources or in the enterprise technology space that 'social' needs to move past marketing buzzword and into demonstrable business value for most organizational leaders to take notice, to support social evangelists inside the organization, and to see the real benefits of deploying either social and collaborative technologies in-house, while opening up more fully and systematically to the use of outward facing social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in support of enterprise objectives. I'll bet 90% of the vendors you will see exhibiting at the HR Technology Conference will have some kind of 'social' angle in their solutions, (or at least in their marketing copy), but which ones make sense for you and your organization, and which ones look and feel like they simply bolted on some 'like' buttons and badges as an afterthought. It's not always easy to tell.

And then there is the 'personal' side of social for the HR professional - how can someone that has a day job with real responsibilities, deadlines, and managers to answer to still use social tools in a way that won't compromise their ability to perform, as well as act in concert with company-wide messaging and postioning that quite frankly, most HR people are not always so well-informed about.  What happens when one of your employees, say a star engineer starts to gain popularity on his or her blog, has about 20,000 followers on Twitter, and starts getting asked to speak at events and do vendor webcasts?

Do you allow and support them in their 'micro-celebrity', or do you worry about tasks not getting completed while the young (or maybe not so young), emerging star is building his or her name. Can you accrue value from this activity back to the organization? Do you even know how?

Just because every vendor is talking about social, and just about every person at the Conference and who might be reading this blog is participating in social, (check the graph below for more color on this), hasn't made determining where and how social technologies and processes fit in a given organization's business model and processes any easier. And just because you finally convinced your VP of HR to join LinkedIn or get a Twitter account doesn't mean determining the right balance and relationship of your talent's personal brands and online presence any simpler.

So at the HR Technology Conference (our session is Tuesday October 4 at 11:00AM),  our panel on social will certainly try to explore many of these topics, I am sure in 75 minutes we can't solve them all, (or any of them), but I think we will provide some good food for thought and give attendees some ideas they can begin to explore in their organizations.

Oh, and here is the chart I mentioned I'd share - just one data point among millions you have to consider when talking 'social'.

Source - Business Insider

Wow - 16% of all time spent online is now on Facebook.  Hmm. Better quit reading this now and get back over there - I might have just tagged you in a picture!

Hope to see you at the Conference next week!

Shameless Promotion Warning: Catch the HR Happy Hour Show Tomorrow Night

Over the last year or so I have tended to shy away from posting that often on the blog here about my other little project, The HR Happy Hour Show (Thursday nights at 8PM ET), but this week's special guest, and the topic are so important to me that I feel that no amount of shameless promotion will be, well, too shameless.

For this week on the big show, HR Technology Conference Co-chair, columnist for Human Resources Executive magazine, and leader of the best LinkedIn discussion group for HR and HR Technology professionals, and occasionally referred to as the most interesting man in the world, Bill Kutik will return for his annual appearance on the HR Happy Hour Show.

You can listen to the show tomorrow night at 8PM ET/5PM PT on the show page here - on the listener call-in line of 646-378-0186, or using the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

You can also follow the conversation backchannel on Twitter using the hashtag - #HRHappyHour

We will be talking about the upcoming 14th Annual HR Technology Conference set for October 3-5, 2011 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This is a can't miss event for HR leaders, professionals, and the HR Technology community.  So we will preview the event and make sure you understand what you need to know if you are planning your trip to Las Vegas, or if you have not made the move and booked your place, we'll make sure you have the info you need to make the right decision.

We'll also get to touch on into some other topics, like the state of the HR Technology market, the ways social networking has changed our industry, and even the best ways to get yourself in a little trouble while in Las Vegas.

Tune in to the show tomorrow, Thursday August 18 at 8PM ET to get the lowdown from the man himself, Mr. Bill Kutik.

Small Business HR Technology - What's Changed in Two Years?

I got a super question in the email yesterday from a reader asking if I had any advice or recommendations for the best, or at least most interesting HR Technology solutions for the small business.

It is a great topic for sure, and as I was trying to craft some kind of thoughtful response, I turned to the wise wizard of Google to help spur a few ideas by typing 'small business HR Technology' into the 'please tell me what I need to know box' and hoped for some inspiration.Jasper Johns #6 - nothing to do with HR Technology, I just like it

Of course there were a few sponsored results on the top of the search results, but much to my shock and surpise, the 3rd organic result was a post I had written about Small Business HRIS system over two years ago - 'HR Technology for the Small Business - Core HRIS'.  While it was neat to see one of my posts show up pretty high on page one of the results, it also made me think that two-plus years is an eternity in the technology space, particularly for solutions that are targeted at smaller organizations and even sole entrepreneurs. I took a quick look at the post from 2009, and besides thinking, (this is boring), that it likely is really out-of-date, and thin on depth for other solutions and resources besides Core HRIS that can potentially assist small businesses with HR and recruiting challenges.

So what has changed in the last two years?  What should the small business, I am thinking under 100 or 150 employee type firms mainly, be thinking about in terms of solutions and resources to meet their HR and Recuiting challenges?  Of course the effects of mobile and social have both grown tremendously in the last two years, but what else? 

Rather than do what I (lamely) attempted two years ago, and list out 5 or 6 HR Technology solutions that I recommend for the small business, I want to put the challenge out to the readers and to the solution providers to tell me what solutions should be on the small business owner's radar screen. 

If you are an HR or Recruiting pro in a small business, what tools and technologies have you used that are helping you solve your business challenges?  Please share the names/links in the comments.

And if you are a small business HR Technology solutions provider - please feel free to describe and pitch your solution in the comments - you never know, in a few days this post might start showing up on the first page of Google search results for 'small business HR Technology', and it might not be a bad thing to have your name and link in the comments.

So what do you have to recommend?

Come at me, Bro

Relax, your 401(k) bounced back - time to make plans for Las Vegas in October

This post was more or less completed over this past weekend, and I fully intended it to run yesterday. But after the bloodbath across global equity markets on Monday, it seemed a bit ridiculous to run a piece on Tuesday morning with a pitch to attend not one, but two events in Las Vegas this October. Sure, they are both fantastic, can't miss type events, and yes, I can offer you a really attractive discount to attend one or both of these events, but let's be honest - was anyone on Tuesday going to think seriously about approaching the boss for some travel budget, or consider a little additional personal investment in their professional development on such a disastrous financial day?

But then, perhaps shockingly, the markets rebounded yesterday, and while certainly the uncertainty surrounding US and global economic conditions are likely to persist for the time being, the sting of Monday's sell off has been assuaged at least somewhat, and I figured I'd better make my case quickly this morning, since who knows what might happen when the bell rings a couple of hours from now.

So here are the facts, and once I lay them out it will be clear what the only logical conclusion will be for you, the Human Resources or HR Technology professional at which to arrive:

1. The 14th Annual HR Technology Conference is set for October 3-5, 2011 and will be held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Resort. This event continues to be the pre-eminent event in the world of HR Technology, and in fact, rivals (and likely surpasses), any mainstream Human Resources conference for its sheer number and depth of exceedingly outstanding sessions, the scope and breadth of the solution providers that exhibit in the Expo hall, and the opportunity to rub elbows, break bread, and engage with the sharpest and savviest thinkers in the world of Human Capital Management.  

2. If you skip this event, you will lament your decision for the remainder of 2011, and will almost certainly begin scheming planning to attend in 2012. Why put yourself through a year of regret?

3. At no other event can you attend presentations from executives from the most important, innnovative, and exciting technology providers in the space, see case studies from innovative organizations like Facebook and Groupon, and even get the opportunity to hear from me, your dedicated servant not once, but twice during the course of the event, as I have the privilege to co-present a session with the HR Ringleader, Trish McFarlane, as well as participate on a HR and Social Media panel moderated by the HR Capitalist, Kris Dunn.

4. If you move fast, (or really before September 19th), you can use the discount code STEVE11, (all caps), to receive a $500 discount off the published registration price. Again, the conference information and registration details can be found here. And you should really take advantage of this opportunity. Truly.

But wait!  There's more!

If you act now you can double your learning experience in Las Vegas this October!

Here's how:

The 4th HRevolution conference for Human Resources and talent professionals will be held on October 2, 2011, one day before the HR Technology Conference kicks off. HRevolution has partnered with the HR Technology Conference to present the latest in what has become well known in the HR community as a challenging, engaging, informal, and boundary stretching program of facilitated conversations that is sure to enhance and support your HR Technology experience. With sessions from leaders from Zappos and Glassdoor, as well as some of the leading voices in HR and social media today, the HRevolution - Las Vegas is the perfect way to get your HR Technology Conference experience started. And thanks to the partnership with HR Tech, all attendees of HRevolution will receive a special, top-secret discount code (even better than STEVE11), that will give you the best value for HR Technology that you can find.

So here is what I really think you ought to do:

1. Register for the HRevolution event on October 2nd. You can get your tickets here.

2. Then take your HRevolution discount code and register for the HR Technology Conference here.

3. Book your room at Mandalay Bay or at any one of the dozen nearby Vegas hotels offering rooms at half the price.

4. Get ready for the best learning and networking experience you will ever have.

Take my word for it, or better yet, ask anyone that has attended HR Technology or HRevolution, you won't regret it! 

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.