Have a look at this video.

A couple of things stood out for me.

1. Innovative idea and great execution. Genius. Braille on the burger bun.

2. Wimpy get the fact that People with Disabilities spend money just like other demographics.   Designing solutions and marketing for that segment makes business sense.  Part of this is about equal rights and access, but it isn’t charity.  Humour works.

3. The power of the referral. See the stats at the end of the presentation.

As part of my academic research, I’m looking at how enterprise software companies approach accessibility. Wimpy puts them all to shame.  Well done Wimpy.

Click on the the link and then head back here.

This is one of the better examples of linking corporate and employee branding for recruitment I have seen.

• Low cost
• Innovative
• Targeted
• Measured (note the stats at the end).

It cleverly reinforces the corporate and the employee brand.  I wrote a note several years ago now (client link here) where I stressed the need for organizations to get marketing and HR to work more closely together on recruitment branding. This is probably the best example I have seen of a company doing that. Ping me others that you have seen, please.

A clever play like this does put pressure on the rest of the recruitment process. Make sure you have good, solid administrative processes in place to process the applications effectively.

My colleague, Michael Maoz, has been critical of those that try to do Social CRM without getting the rest of their CRM in order.  The same goes for recruitment.  If you target your customer channel for recruiting, make sure you give them prompt, polite and top notch service, especially if you don’t end up hiring them. Applying for a job is a big step for most people, so treat that step with respect.  If you mess someone around in the recruitment process, the chances of you keeping them as a customer are next to zero.

Continuing this theme, a Belgian cartoonist, Canary Pete has a lovely take on the next stage of the IKEA hiring process.

• Launched
• Introduced
• Announced
• Previewed
• Pre-Announced
• Private Beta
• Beta
• Selective ramp up
• Ramp up
• Rolled out
• Limited Availability
• Shipping
• Limited General Availability
• General Availability
• Functionally complete

I go to a lot of software conferences, and read many press releases.  In the last few weeks I have seen and heard all these terms, and a few more that I have forgotten to note.  For all the talk of the move to Apple-like simplicity in enterprise software, trying to figure out when software is real or still in the imagination of its creators is becoming more and more difficult.

It is short, sharp, engaging and easy to read. Put down that Scandinavian crime novel, ignore your travel expense application issues and read this book instead. I’m perhaps reading too much into the title,  but I can’t help wondering if it isn’t a hat tip to the rock band Rage Against the Machine.  If it is, deeply nifty sub-editing coolness.   If not,  it is a lovely  unintended consequence.

The book highlights the accelerating disruption that technology brings to the workplace and to the very definition of work. There is dark side to technology, and the authors have done a nuanced job in exploring this.  It makes a worthwhile change from the technology=progress drum beat.

It was especially good to see a section on the growing gap between wage  and productivity growth.  To see disquiet about median wage stagnation from technology focused researchers is a very fine thing.  There is more than a whiff of valorization in their argument.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee make excellent use of statistics, and this work is no exception. They use numbers to illuminate, and they do it well. The Bill Gates in a bar story is a lovely explanation of mean and median. They explain, but don’t condescend.

As with much of US business academia, the book is centred on the US economy, with fleeting mentions of the rest of world.  I didn’t spot the dreaded phrase “Corporate America”, but it may have been lurking there. In particular the solution section was too US focused. Moaning about  H-1B visas etc… However suggestions 17,18, 19 are spot on.

17. Reduce the large implicit and explicit subsidies to financial services. This sector attracts

a disproportionate number of the best and the brightest minds and technologies, in part

because the government effectively guarantees “too big to fail” institutions.

18. Reform the patent system. Not only does it take years to issue good patents due to the

backlog and shortage of qualified examiners, but too many low-quality patents are

issued, clogging our courts. As a result, patent trolls are chilling innovation rather than

encouraging it.

19. Shorten, rather than lengthen, copyright periods and increase the flexibility of fair use.

Copyright covers too much digital content. Rather than encouraging innovation, as

specified in the Constitution, excessive restrictions like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term

Extension Act inhibit mixing and matching of content and using it creatively in new ways.

There are strong echoes of Larry Lessig in the IP section (as an aside I’d like to get the authors’ views of Lessig’s recent work on political corruption).

More broadly though I’d like to see business school academia and IT research engaging more with the rich research tapestry of sociology and political philosophy, how about more Jessop and Harvey, and Herbert Marcusse needs a serious dust off.  I fancy I heard the very faint clang of  Weber’s iron cage in this work. I’d suggest that Maslow and maybe Hayek can take a rest for a while.

This book is excellent,  but would have been seminal if it had built upon the work of that chap from Trier.

My colleague Alexa Bona and I recently published a note on contracting behaviors and strategies for SaaS HCM.  SaaS and Human Capital Management: Avoid Risky and Expensive Deals (client access).

As SaaS HCM deals come up for renewal,  and procurement gets involved, it is now crystal clear that most HR departments have been contracting for HCM software without IT procurement involvement.  One of our findings is that most of the time, HR departments are rather poor negotiators.  Software vendors have had a field day, and not just on pricing.  Most of  the time HR just signs the boiler plate, and the boiler plate is typically one-sided, like All Blacks v Japan one-sided.

Here is a quote from the note.

SaaS vendors in HCM have successfully spun the myth that they are kinder and fairer than megavendors when it comes to contract negotiations and terms and conditions. This is a fairy tale. The vast majority of SaaS vendors are as avaricious as any ERP vendor, and their contracts are often nearly as complex, with changing product names, gerrymandering scope and vague platitudes, instead of solid SLAs

IT Procurement departments need to step up too.  A 9 month procurement cycle for software that takes 3 months to implement isn’t on.  IT procurement departments have a lot to learn about SaaS. The negotiating techniques that may work with huge ERP deals don’t work for smaller SaaS deals and renewals.

image via nesjumpman under collective commons.

I enjoyed working on this note.  Hopefully it will help HR leaders pause before signing that once in a lifetime special offer SaaS deal.

But please don’t cut and paste real people’s  data from Linkedin or other social networks and use it in your demo.  You are trampling over their privacy and copyright, and you are probably  in breach of the Linkedin or Facebook  T&Cs too.   If you use photos,  get permission, even from your employees.

Be careful when you demo social software integration too.  People linked with you to be friends, or connections, not demo fodder.

Tread softly, for you tread on my data.

Apologies to W.B. Yeats.

This is like the gathering in the Highlander. And Bill Kutik is the Christopher Lambert character with the beard and vast broadsword.  Bill as been around in HR technology since the Lyons tea room payroll, and  he is  constant as the northern star, of whose true-fix’d and resting quality, there is no fellow in the firmament.

Actually its the best opportunity to check out the latest in HR technology in one place.  I get to lurk this year, but my colleague Jim has a starring role, doing the final keynote.

I’m not planning on taking a lot of formal meetings. Lots of vendors have been asking for meetings, but we can do these anytime during the year, just set up a call via vendor briefings.  I plan to walk the floor, catch some customer sessions and avoid injuries.

I’m interested in sophisticated workforce analytics, innovative use of social software beyond recruitment, mobile otherthandoingthestandardapponthephone, workforce management systems and tales from the nitty gritty of global HR systems deployment.  I also want to discuss how New Zealand will cope with yet another Rugby World Cup defeat with the Sonar6 folks.

Assuming the flights work, I’ll make it to Naomi Bloom’s soiree too.

Seriously, if you are evaluating HR technology, this event is well worth attending,  eventhough it is in Vegas, that blasted heath.  I’ll only be there for the first two days, but I’m really looking forward to it.

Back to the M3.

It has a very fancy double clutch gearbox with Drivelogic.  It is an automatic and a manual.  It changes gear in milliseconds, depending on the aggression setting on the Drivelogic.

It has electronic damper suspension. (EDC)

It has Dynamic Stability Control (DSC)

It has variable servotronic steering support

And lots of other clever stuff

In the hands of a total amateur, these three letter acronyms stop you from fishtailing into the wall.  The default mode for all these settings is on. In order to override them, you need to know to hold down button A for 10 seconds and then press button B.  It then warns you that you have switched off the clever computer and it emails your friends and family your last will and testament.

Now Facebook is in trouble with another German Organization, the Hamburg Datenschutzbeauftrager, according to the Deutsche Welle. English Article here.  The Data Protection Commissioner,  Johanes Casper, had this to say.

A legal assessment by our office came to the conclusion that [Facebook's] face recognition violates European and German law because Facebook is providing its users with contradictory and misleading information,” he added.

“A normal user doesn’t know how to delete the biometric data. And besides, we have demanded that biometric data be stored with the subject’s express consent. At first [any company] has to ask if the user wants their data stored or not. Facebook just gives them the possibly to opt-out. If you don’t opt-out, you’re not consenting.”

Facebook has a long history of confounding us all with their privacy settings, and it looks like the folks in Hamburg have had enough. Face recognition is the privacy equivalent of 420 horsepower without traction control.

I think I will need to do what the M3 can teach ERP vendors post, but that will need to wait till I’m back at work.

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

While I’m somewhat uneasy about the impact of  the iPad and Kindle on books and literature generally  because of the intellectual property control that it gives the device maker, I’m rather impressed with the implications that it has for poetry (thanks Lia for the link).

Watch this video from the Guardian about Elliot’s Wasteland. It is simply delightful.  Congratulations to Faber for doing this.  It is doing things with poems that weren’t possible before.

For the enterprise software vendors reading this, doing the stuff you do on the desktop or the laptop on the iPad doesn’t really impress anyone, it merely illuminates the gap between yesterday and tomorrow. Do something that you couldn’t do before.  Surprise and delight. Innovate rather than replicate.