Thomas Otter

photo via cc flickrstream of PMarkham. Thanks cc attribution

I had big plans for my blogroll on my personal blog. It was going to be that place where I had a list of my favourite blogs. I was going to constantly update it. I really got a kick when I first started blogging if someone added me to their blogroll. It felt good. Blogrolls were hip.

I realised the other day that my blogroll hasn’t been updated since about 2006, roughly when England last won a rugby match.  I did a quick on-line scout and saw that most of my blogging mates were in the same boat.  Manual blogrolls don’t work unless you have Chuck Norrisesque discipline.  Let’s face it, updating the blogroll is one of things you planned to do, but then you got offered tickets to a Violent Femmes concert or realised that your tax return was late, or the dishwasher needed unpacking.

This reminds me of the state of many HR / HCM systems.  Lots of brave visions of up to date succession plans, and real time goal management. Lots of cool fields, but all too often, too few people actively maintaining them.

Now, some clever blogs, instead of blogrolls, have a link to recently read posts/feeds. Although a handpicked blogroll that is perfectly up to date would be lovely, I’ll take a slice of an active feed reader above an obsolete blogroll any day.

To those building and maintaining HR systems,perhaps it is time to move beyond thinking of  cool ways to capture stuff and start deriving HR data points from other business processes. It is time for a switch of metaphor: Start thinking twitter streams and feedreaders, and less about blogrolls.

If I want to know who is the top salesperson in mid-size accounts in France, I shouldn’t be asking someone to fill that it in a screen. Some clever software should get the CRM and Finance systems to tell me that.  Top salespeople at risk of leaving, how about a list of those who recently closed a big deal, and now have thin pipelines?  Top producing developers? check the bug reports and code forums.

I want to see a demo of a talent management system that doesn’t have any data entry. Don’t show me cool UIs first, show me what you can do without capturing new stuff.

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Category: HCM software design     Tags: analytics, blogrolls, feedreaders, HCM

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