I've got some suggestions for your screenplay

Not really, and unless you are up to something on the side, you probably don't even have a screenplay (or a short story or a book for that matter). But what you might have, still, is that problem of folks in the HR and even IT game have been lamenting just about forever - no 'real' business people take you all that seriously.

For whatever reason the people in the organization that get to decide the 'what' of what people do are more important and 'strategic' than the people that (largely) are responsible for finding and hiring those people in the first place (HR), and identifying, procuring, deploying, and maintaining all the technologies that the people rely on every day (IT). That is probably true in most organizations and it's also true that it's unlikely to change unless HR and IT start to think a little differently about the problem.

I was thinking about this over the weekend when I read this piece in the New York Times, Solving the Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data, about a new method or process where Hollywood film scripts are evaluated, and suggestions for improvement given, based on data-driven analysis. How does the process work? From the NYT piece:

Netflix tells customers what to rent based on algorithms that analyze previous selections, Pandora does the same with music, and studios have started using Facebook “likes” and online trailer views to mold advertising and even films.

Now, the slicing and dicing is seeping into one of the last corners of Hollywood where creativity and old-fashioned instinct still hold sway: the screenplay

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

Pretty interesting and still in this age of data trumping everything kind of unusual. Although even as I recently wrote about here, data and algorithms and machine learning approaches encroaching on formerly 'creative' endeavors are starting to pop up more and more.

Applying intelligence, Big Data, and more powerful technologies for improving movie screenplays does more than just fix up the dramatic scene in Act III, it allows a guy like Vinny Bruzzese, who as far as we can tell had no 'real' movie experience, to become an influential participant in the movie-making process.

His data, team of analysts, and statistically-backed conclusions and suggestions, now put him more and more 'at the table' (sorry), where formerly only writers and movie producers used to meet. It doesn't really matter that he didn't go to film school or he didn't spend the 80s directing episodes of Full House, his data-driven solutions make him a Hollywood player.

Influence in business seems to be becoming more about who can gather, assess, and make data actionable, than who has the 'right' degree or experience. And the background of the people who can do that might be a lot different than who normally used to have that kind of influence. 

What if there was a Yelp for HR Software?

I'm a little late on this since some of the big tech news sites like TechCrunch and CIO.com covered this back in February, but over the weekend I finally got around to checking out a site called G2Crowd, and the simplest way to describe it is as a 'Yelp for Enterprise Software.'

By now we are all familiar and possibly reliant on the crowdsourced reviews and ratings paradigm popularized by sites like Yelp for restaurants and bars, TripAdvisor for travel destinations, and certainly Amazon.com for books, music, heck just about everything. There continues to be tremendous popularity and value for sites to gather, interpret, and categorized real live customer experiences with products and services for just about anything that can be purchased. But while consumers and users love these sites, as they generally provide neutral, unbiased, and sometimes massive amounts of information about the quality and value of a product/service, many suppliers have come to fear and loathe these sites, as one or two poor reviews can sometimes cause serious damage to a business' reputation and sales.

HR Software Comparison

But for whatever reason despite there existing a 'Yelp' equivalent for seemingly just about everything, there really isn't a large, successful manifestation of the crowdsourced review and ratings site for Enterprise Software. That is the gap that G@Crowd is trying to fill, providing a platform and frameworks for enterprise customers and users of technologies like CRM, ERP, Accounting, and yes HR Technology as well, to enter product reviews and ratings just as people do for the local BBQ joint on Yelp.

The process to create a software product review on G2Crowd is familiar to anyone who has used Yelp or TripAdvisor, but with one important difference - G2Crowd requires the reviewer to log in with their LinkedIn credentials, which serves a few important ends. One, (with limited exceptions), reviewers identities are not anonymous; two, G2Crowd 'knows' based on the LinkedIn profile, at what company and in what role the reviewer was working in at the time of the review; and three, G2Works can police phony reviews left by people working for or against any of the software companies themselves.

The idea is simple really, a set of unbiased ratings and reviews of enterprise software solutions like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, etc., that can be aggregated, (over time, and if enough scale is achieved), produce a valuable and previously unavailable resource for organizations that are evaluating software for themselves. In addition to the individual product reviews, G2Crowd has started to create, based on the review data, their own version of the 'analyst grid', positioning competing firms in a given market segment in comparison to each other, the most famous of which is the Gartner Magic Quadrant. But rather than a Magic Quadrant that represents, in the end, the opinions of one or a few analysts, the G2Crowd grid would reflect the collective experience and opinion of potentially thousands of users. In theory not necessarily a 'better' way to compare vendors, but certainly a different one, and one that if G2Crowd can continue to keep the reviews clean, would potentially be more important, (and accessible), than what the traditional analyst firms create.

Will G2Crowd catch on with enough users and customers to generate the kind of scale it needs to be a truly valuable resource to the enterprise software buyer?

Hard to say. It is a new site, and there seems to be some decent traction and volume on the CRM market. If you spend some time checking out the HR software reviews you will see they are a little thin.

But how about this? How about if everyone who reads this blog and is a current user of one of the big HR software solutions heads over to G2Crowd this week and drops a product review?

That might be a way to get this kind of endeavor a little more attention for the HR market, and perhaps also show how all of you as users of these solutions really do have the power to influence the market.

What do you think - would a site like G2Crowd be helpful to you and your organization?

Big Oil and BYOD as a recruiting strategy

This short article, 'Shell plans to move 135,000 staff to BYOD' about the internal IT strategy at the giant Shell Oil company in about 300 words manages to highlight probably the two most significant trends driving big enterprise IT today.

Trend #1 - The Cloud (and it is kind of past calling this a 'trend' anymore, it's now just reality.

  From the Shell piece:

Two years ago, the firm adopted a cloud-first policy, which means that any new applications have to be in the cloud unless there is a business case for them to be on-premise.

Trend #2 - BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) - the tendency of employees wanting to use their device of choice to accomplish their work, rather than being forced into some kind of corporate device standard that often is inferior to the technology they prefer to use in their 'real' lives.  Again Shell's take on BYOD:

Shell is undertaking a huge bring your own device (BYOD) project which will see it supporting around 135,000 devices picked by users rather than dictated by the IT department. The BYOD scheme is a major undertaking. Shell has 90,000 permanent employees, and an additional 60,000 on a contract basis so the company is managing 150,000 clients, from desktops to portables to tablets. 

Part of the decision for the BYOD drive is around recruitment and staffing. “In about five to 10 years, 50 percent of our staff worldwide will retire,” (Shell's) Mann explained.“We’re going to have a lot of people turning over, and we want to be able to attract and retain talented and young staff. They don’t want to come into a locked corporate environment.

Neither of these decisions by Shell is really all that newsworthy excepting for the fact that these same IT strategies and philosophies were until fairly recently only undertaken by smaller firms and start-ups. When massive, entrenched, and hierarchical industrial titans like Shell start sounding like 15-person tech start-ups, you know that there really is no turning back. Big companies might not hold sway over how a technology achieves popularity in the macro-sense, but their signing on to a given IT approach tends to validate what the market is saying on a smaller scale.

Also, I don't know for sure if the recruiting angle to the BYOD strategy at Shell  is really that important or not - while I tend to agree that people don't want to use inferior equipment in the workplace, I don't think that point of view is limited to 'young' people. (Anyone reading this that is doing at least some of their 'work' email in Gmail because their corporate Outlook mailbox keeps going over capacity will be nodding in agreement right now). And while using lousy technology at work does kind of stink, I also think lots of people want to keep their personal technology, well, personal. 

Not everyone wants to be reading work email on their iPad when they are chilling on the sofa at night.

Right?

Job Titles of the Future #3 - Networking Wingman

First off you are probably asking just what exactly is a Networking Wingman?

The details you need can be found in this recent Fast Company piece, 'This Woman Wants To Be Your Networking Wingman' - a profile of Christine Hauer who as far as anyone can tell has invented a brand new category.  What does a Networking Wingman actually do?  Details from the Fast Company article:

For $28 you can take Christine Hauer for a walk in the park. For $165 you can bring her to a party and introduce her as your "assistant" or "friend" or "colleague"--"whatever you feel most comfortable with."

She isn’t offering what your dirty mind is imagining, though. She’s "confidence building" in the park and being a "networking sidekick" at the party. They’re micro-services that are usually small parts of the larger job of doing public relations, but now, thanks to the Internet, can be purchased as discrete components

"I’m like this personal legitimizer, that doesn’t do it awkwardly," she told me. "It’s like I’m a friend." She demonstrated how she would work the room, praising me effusively to other partygoers: "Ahhh! I love Stan! Oh my God, he’s crazy! Look at him! He’s like the best writer, and he’s here! You’ve got to meet him!”

'Networking Wingman' might not (yet) be a job in the classic sense, but as odd as it sounds it could be representative of how technology and crowdsourcing and crowdfunding concepts are combining to allow creative individuals to well, create brand new types of services and value.

But even more interesting than the technology, social networking, and micro-services platforms that are at play here, the networking wingman role and described services ask questions about the very nature of promotions, marketing, and PR.

Let's say an author has a new book to pitch - he or she might engage a PR firm to try and connect with press and bloggers to get the book reviewed and generate some buzz and interest. The PR person will send an email, typically describing what a smart or thought-provoking or leading-edge thinker the author is to try and pique the interest of the journalist or blogger.  And mostly, these PR pitches get ignored. We don't really care what a random PR person has to say about another random author.

But take that same pitch - what Ms. Hauer says is part of her bag of tricks as a networking wingman, and put it live, in person, and in a totally different context, then maybe, just maybe you will 'believe' that the author really is 'like the best writer', and 'You’ve got to meet him!'

When the networking wingman story first ran a week or so ago, I noticed several snarky and dismissive comments and tweets about the new 'job' that Ms. Hauer created. Many folks said it was the stupidest idea that they'd ever seen.

I don't think it's dumb at all. I think it is a genius mash-up of tech savvy, entrepreneurial thinking, and understanding of our incessant need to have other people talk about how fantastic we are. 

And it makes the Steve-approved 'Job Titles of the Future' list.

#HRHappyHour 161 PODCAST - 'Building a Smarter Workforce'

This week the HR Happy Hour Show/Podcast is back with a fresh episode recorded earlier this week - 'Building a Smarter Workforce' with guest Jonathan Ferrar, VP, Smarter Workforce from IBM (you can follow Jonathan on Twitter as well - @jaferrar).

It was a fascinating conversation with Jonathan - a leader with over 20 years of Human Resources experience across the globe - about the changing nature of technology, expectations, and how HR and organizations are starting to react to those challenges. 

You can listen to the show on the show page here, using the widget player below, and of course on iTunes - just search the podcasts area for 'HR Happy Hour'.

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

The Smarter Workforce is certainly more than just a marketing angle, it really is a concept that reflects the way that organizations are starting to combine things like existing investments in Talent Management technology and programs, new initiatives in social collaboration tools, and finally incorporating Big Data and analytics in order to produce better results, and create more opportunities for innovation.

We talked about some of the opportunities for HR in leveraging these tools and approaches in new areas - like turning recruitment into a high-functioning marketing operation and how mobile and social technologies can transform employees into on-demand learners and teachers.

Thanks to Jonathan and the folks at IBM for taking the time this week - and a a shout-out to HR Happy Hour Show co-host Trish McFarlane, who was a little under the weather this week and could not make the show.

Finally, for listeners of the show an announcment of sorts. For the next little while anyway, Trish and I will be doing the HR Happy Hour Shows more as a traditional podcast - recorded in advance, perhaps a little shorter than the live shows were, and hopefully posted to the site every other week. With our schedules and lots of travel on the horizon this year, doing the shows 'live' on Thursday nights has become increasingly challenging. Trish and I hope that by changing how the shows are produced it will allow us the opportunity to continue doing the show/podcast in a way that will work with our schedules as well as our future guests.

Have a great weekend!