photo via glyph

An Apple “employee to be” has done the geeky thing of unboxing his offer letter. full details here. His excitement and pride jump out at me. This fellow is engaged before even getting in for his first day at work. 

He isn’t the only one. Justin Reid also unboxed his first day welcome kit. It also included a t-shirt with your hire date on.

photo via Justin.

 Jim Holincheck and I take a lot of calls on onboarding software and processes, but at least in terms of getting branding right, well done Apple. This is design thinking in what is often a neglected process.

Your HR brand is part of your corporate brand, treat it with care. It is valuable and delicate. Many organizations can learn from Apple here.

photo via Justin.

(photo CC 2.o attribution, thanks to g-hat!)

World leaders are gathering in Pittsburgh to discuss banking reform and other pressing matters. According to the Guardian,  the discussions are likely to be rocky.

European leaders appeared to be on a collision course tonight with Barack Obama and Gordon Brown after Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, warned that the G20 summit must not be diverted from clamping down on bankers’ bonuses and hedge funds.

The article continues.

Sarkozy has suggested that bankers’ pay should be capped at a certain percentage of their institution’s assets or revenue.

Fredrick Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister and current president of the European council, promised a “specific discussion” on bonuses including proposals for individual caps on bankers’ bonuses, that bonuses would be linked to achievement and not given if there were losses, and that there would be transparency on precise decisions taken by boards. “We from the EU will ask to be very clear on that” he said.

Putting aside the ethical and political debate, if Fredrick and Nicolas have their way, this would particularly riveting for anyone in the business of HCM software.

It looks to me this is a demand for an integrated employee goals / performance management, compensation and incentive compensation system that also integrates into a corporate performance and risk management system, combined with a significant dose of compliance reporting. 

This then takes you to the LinkedIn page of a Gartner recruiter, Peter Fay.

To those that say this social software stuff isn’t having a fundamental impact on HR processes, I say see above. If your organization isn’t using or seriously thinking about using these channels for passive candidate search, then perhaps it is time to start doing so. If you build recruiting software and you don’t have a plan on how to integrate all this social software business into your offering, I’d suggest you have some work to do.

Oh, and if you are interested in the job, please do get in touch with Peter.

There is also a cool job looking at privacy too. I’m almost tempted to apply for that one !-)

Photo via the cc of sgt. PepperedJane. thanks!

To score well at Scrabble, you need to look at the score, not the just word. Long words across the board might look good, but unless they land on double or triples, you simply waste letters and open up the board for the others to score. Literary types like to think that they are good at Scrabble because they know lots of words and are well read, but Qi or QANAT aren’t something that even the most literary of souls come across in literature. To win at Scrabble you need to look at the numbers and the odds, know what letters have gone already, and have a mental database of short nasty words like ZO and XU. Sure, a love of words helps with Scrabble, but to score well, you need to engage the numeric side of your brain.

It may be stretching it a bit, but I think HR has a similar challenge.

To be a top HR professional, you do need to have empathy for people. It is probably what attracted you to the job in the first place. But if you are going to succeed you need to be analytical too. HR professionals that can see patterns beyond the incident, abstract the problems from the personal, and make the best move given the constraints  they have been dealt with, will have a real impact on shaping the business and their careers.

We are doing a lot of work at the moment on pattern based strategy here at Gartner (clients see this). I’m going to be exploring this is in an HR context later this year.  Extracting and analysing patterns out of the mass of data sources and conflicting signals. HR is going to get a lot more analytical.

My regular readers will know that I’m doing lots of research into the impact of social software and user driven applications in an HR context, but there are some core applications and processes that need to be non-negotiable. Senior HR management need to put the discipline and governance in place to drive standard system usage. It doesn’t happen by magic.

It may well be that the earlier implementation of the standard HR system didn’t meet user needs, and the decision to re-implement makes sense. They have an experienced partner this time around, who has a pre-configured solution that has a good industry fit. The standard software’s latest release is improved.  They will use a proper formal project methodology. All goodness.

But I heard a couple of things in the discussion about the re-implementation that worried me in particular.

1. HR are too busy to dedicate resource to the project.

  If the user community for the application can’t dedicate resource, then don’t do the project.

2. The key user can only spend one day a week on the project.

One day a week on a project means you have a spectator at best.  Take the key people and put them full time on the project. Make their careers, bonuses and corporate happiness dependent on the success of the project. You need committed, not involved.

3. The key user is really technical. He can build the most amazing stuff in Access and Excel. It is great that you can find someone in HR that is interested in technology, but if he/she is the one who has built their empire in excel, you have some significant work to do to make them the champion of a standard application.

It sounds so obvious, but if this the system that will be supporting day to day HR activities for the next decade or two, then HR need to get their best and most motivated people on the project. Otherwise, IT should be spending their time elsewhere.

Last week I suddenly felt like one of those people you meet in IT who keep telling you that computing hasn’t really changed since punchcards or Fortran, and that everything just repeats itself. Either that, or I had stumbled upon the flux capacitor. I shuddered briefly.

Let me explain myself.

Just after I joined SAP in the mid-nineties, PeopleSoft won a significant deal at Siemens. This really shook SAP up, and led to significant investment in the HR part of R/3, especially for the global market.

Then PeopleSoft stumbled, sucked into the joyous complexity of German payroll.

A few years later, SAP won back large parts of the account. I didn’t really realise it at the time, but SAP was pretty agile in its response to the loss. It had long term positive benefits for SAP’s HR product.

At first sight this month’s win for SuccessFactors seems remarkably similar.

But history doesn’t always come around the same way. For history to repeat itself here, three things need to happen:

1. SuccessFactors stumbles.

2. SAP delivers a comparable offering via SaaS

3. SAP convinces Siemens to change back.

SuccessFactors today is more globally aware than PeopleSoft was in the mid-nineties, and it has the chance to learn from history. It has a broad European customer base, and well established operations here. It is also steering clear of German payroll.

In the mid-nineties, R/3 was already on the way to dominating the client/server ERP market. Today SAP is dabbling with SaaS in various forms, but I do wonder if it will react to this with the same agility and focus that it did back then. Also, the Siemens of today is different from the Siemens then.

Earlier this year I wrote a note about the SAP German HR congress ( Gartner clients see) Observations From SAP’s German HR Congress (G00165965), 06-MAR-2009 One of the things I said was.

"German organizations are in a good position. SAP perceives that it has significant competition in the talent management space and is strengthening its products, while best-of-breed vendors see an opportunity to gain an increased foothold in the market. There is nothing like a DAX 30 company selecting a best-of-breed vendor to focus the minds of SAP management and its development organization, as no organization likes to lose at home.

We will be watching with interest.

From the cc flickrstream of sludgegulper Thanks!

I have been watching and reading about the goings on with the UK parliamentarian expenses with a mixture of incredulousness, dismay, horror, and anger. As this isn’t the place to charge off on a political rant, I’ll leave my criticisms to a minimum, save to say this is a grave insult to the UK tax payers, and a blow to global democracy.  

Other than all the information about moat cleaners, tennis courts, duck shelters, large screen TVs, iPhones for husbands, 200 mile taxi rides, tax advisors, and mortgage payments on mortgages that no longer existed, I was struck by the absolute lack of process and systems to manage the expenses. The inefficiencies and the lack of control are astounding. 

The problems are bigger than technology, The whole process needs a complete overall, but essentially we are talking about some basic compliance procedures. Workflow approvals, automated routing of claims out of policy, electronic receipt management,and SOD (separation of duties).  Even simple expense management system would go a long way to stopping this sort of abuse happening again. Rules can be easily automated and enforced, and with a bit of configuration, even issues such as flipping and claiming for trivia could be managed.

Driven out of a good process system, the data could also be easily mashed up with consumer analytics tools such as Google maps, and a simple query tool, allowing concerned citizens the right to audit.

Indeed, there has been a wave of excellent mashups and analytic reports based on the data that has been released and collated.

Charles Arthur over at the Guardian has a closer look.  Tony Hirst’s blog gives an excellent account on the technical efforts needed to do this. Looking at what he has done with essentially free software. It is interesting to see how various technologies and techniques have been deployed. more here.  It is a fascinating study for anyone interested in analytics and data visualization. It does make the analytics offerings of many of the software vendors I cover seem rather dowdy, but that story is for another day.

Shining a bit of sunshine on the issue by opening up the data  is the best remedy. After all, when I last looked, parliamentarians work for the citizens.

More generally, there is a lot of HR technology innovation coming out of Australia and New Zealand. Expect to hear more about HR technology innovation from outside the US in my Gartner research over the next few months. Global companies looking at talent management processes would do well to cast their net wider than just the leading US and European Vendors. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see Australian and NZ vendors start to succeed globally. They seem to be growing in confidence and reach through the success with the larger Australian multi-nationals. Now the next test is to see if they can make the big leap and compete for other multi-national business.

Keeping up with the rate of innovation in HR technology is challenging, so if you have come across an innovative smaller vendor,  no matter where in the world you are, let me know what you are doing with them. If you are a small vendor innovating in the HCM space, arrange a vendor briefing with me or Jim Holincheck.  Rolf Jester and I are also interested in talking to SIs that focus on HCM technologies, would love to hear about what you are up to.

The best job in the world campaign from the Queensland government has gone brilliantly. It created masses of publicity for the barrier reef, on prime time TV, in the press, and across the full spectrum of social media.  It won best advertising campaign of the year.

According to my favourite newspaper, the Guardian.

A PR coup for Australian tourism, the whole campaign has generated around A$148m (£73m) worth of publicity for northern Queensland. In a clever piece of marketing and timing, they sent out news of the concept on a dreary Sunday afternoon in Britain, and subsequently the idea of a job reclining on a beach in Australia promptly received a prominent news slot in Monday morning’s papers

British Charity worker, Ben Southall landed the job, beating out 35.000 applicants.

There are a number of technical innovations that are worth noting for those of us involved in recruitment and recruitment software. Strong use of video based CV/Resume, Viral campaign, Voting, Community, multiple social media channels, psychometric testing…

I could pick up on those here, but I think there is a more important point here for recruiters and HR folks. Do you align your recruiting strategy with your overall branding strategy? Can you turn your recruiting strategy into a brand advantage? What does your  recruitment process say about your brand?  Do you work closely with marketing to position the employee brand in the broader branding strategy?  Do you measure the impact of your recruiting strategy on your brand?  Can you clearly articulate why someone should want to work for your organization?

If your organisation is skeptical about the power of social software and the web,  then you could do worse than remind them of this campaign.

If anyone has any details on the technology platforms used to manage the application process and the selection, I’d love to hear from you. What innovative recruitment strategies have you seen? Do let me know. please.

As organizations grapple with a very different economy from this time last year, we are seeing a growing interest in addressing cost issues associated with core HR processes such as time recording, leave management, shift and schedule optimization. Many organizations haven’t given these processes much attention, yet they are important.

I’m planning more research on workforce planning and time management systems, and I’ve already published a note on absence management. (Gartner clients Managing Employee Absence: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, and Time Is Money (G00165198), 09-FEB-2009)

There is more to HCM than talent management.

Speaking of time and absence management, I’m off on vacation, so this blog will be quiet for a while.