Knowledge Infuser

The end of the mass email blast - for some things

jason.averbook — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:26:45 GMT

At Knowledge Infusion we continually hear that rolling out software and processes through email blasts is a waste of time. The deployment portion of any HR, Human Capital Management and Talent Management technology initiative must be tied directly to the overall HR strategy of an organization.

Principal Consultant, Andy Gebavi has contributed a though provoking piece on social networking today and its impact on talent management. I see that Microsoft will be taking a 1.6 percent stake in FaceBook at the whopping price of 246 million dollars. This transaction values FaceBook at 15 billion dollars in today’s market. Not bad for a company that has yet to earn a profit. The value ascribed to FaceBook is based mostly on its use as a potential vehicle to push advertising to its 50 million (and growing) users.

This got me thinking about enterprise social networks in Talent Management.*One of the latest trends in talent management is vendors offering functionality *that will allow the creation of FaceBook style profiles for their employees. Our customers are using this functionality to make data-rich processes like succession planning, workforce planning, and internal talent searches much easier. New products are also emerging to capitalize on the social networking aspect of having employee profiles – Lotus Connections comes to mind. I worked with one customer recently who wants to use this functionality as part of their career development strategy by allowing employees to opt-in to mentoring and coaching networks.

There is still one missing piece in the enterprise social networking space though. The one aspect that drives the value of all consumer-focused social networking sites is advertising. I’m not talking about spam here folks. Many people often don’t realize they’re seeing advertising when they surf the web. They’ve either grown immune to it, or it’s presented in subtle ways (i.e. sponsored links in Google search results). One of advertising’s key goals is to influence consumer behavior. Why not use a similar concept to influence employee behavior? How far off can we be from having internal “advertising” pushed to employees based on the demographic data in their employee profiles or their internal surfing activities?

We already filter content on corporate intranets and portals based on the user’s roles and demographics. But think of the possibilities of pushing corporate “banner ads” - focused on specific employees based on business ctivities they perform; knowledge they have; or internal networks to which they belong. These “banner ads” could advertise almost anything such as the need for a specific skill set, services offered by a specific department, new training/development opportunities being offered, business process changes taking effect, or news about internal social networks. Folks, the days of the “email blast” as the main communication channel might nearing their end – for some things.

Another Infusion of Knowledge...

Swim. Bike. Run. Shoot. Kill?

jason.averbook — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:57:45 GMT

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Contributed by neil.jensen@knowledge-infusion.com, Principal Consultant, Knowledge Infusion

On a recent flight home to Phoenix from the east coast, I picked up a copy of Outside Magazine to help pass the time and to help fuel my passion of the outdoors. To my pleasure, the issue showcased an article about a Navy SEAL and his pursuit of the sport of Triathlon. To my surprise, this same article also emphasized one of the talent management principles that I continually work with clients on �� critical roles.

The article highlighted the US Navy��s efforts to recruit qualified candidates for its SEAL program. You see, the US Navy has identified the SEAL as a critical role that enables success in modern warfare and is making special efforts to recruit candidates that stand an increased chance of success in that role. To recruit for SEALs, the Navy has broken away from their traditional recruiting methods such as high school fairs and strip mall recruiting offices, and has gotten out into the environments that contain the talent that can excel at what they will ask them to do. They��ve taken the notion of critical roles and applied it in a way that ensures a higher rate of success. By focusing recruiting efforts in talent rich environments such as triathlon events, surfing competitions, water-polo matches, and lifeguard competitions, the Navy has increased it success rate from 26% to over 40% for candidates that can make it through their insanely difficult qualifying school (BUD/S).

As the US Navy has shown, the ��peanut butter�� approach to HR process and practice just isn��t working anymore. Applying the same processes and level of effort to all jobs and roles within your organization ends up inflating costs and inevitably wasting precious time that could have been dedicated to the critical roles that differentiate your business in the market. *By focusing on critical roles and applying special handling to these roles, you increase your success rate and enable a critical component of your talent pipeline. *

Knowledge Infusion works with client��s everyday to define their Talent Management strategy focusing on critical roles and the integrated Talent Management technologies that support them.

Link to Outside article

Talent Management in Healthcare Organizations

jason.averbook — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:04:50 GMT

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Great article from the Healthcare Financial Management Association on the impact of Talent Management in HCO's. As we at Knowledge Infusion work with more and more HCO's, talent is a true CRISIS in these organizations and a focus on Talent Management NOW is an imperative. This will effect all of us and our families in the upcoming years, and is one of the reasons that KI feels so strongly about making a difference in this area.

A few excerpts:

With most hospitals and other HCOs barely able to keep enough staff to meet quality standards, and often having to rely on involuntary overtime even to do that, the challenge of attracting, motivating, and retaining employees has never been greater. The concept of ��talent management,�� i.e. identifying, attracting, managing, motivating and retaining truly talented individuals, in contrast to merely adequate staff, may seem far beyond what job market and revenue realities permit. * HCOs that can succeed in boosting the talent levels, as well as sheer numbers of staff they have compared to what they need, will enjoy significant advantages in their market. * When HCOs are paid on the basis of explicit measures of structure, process, outcomes, or value, it makes sense for them to measure their talent in precisely the same terms as it is being paid. And once measured, it makes sense for them to pay their talent based on the same measures. * One classic example of this effect occurred in the first year that one firm switched from a normally distributed hourly wage compensation system to one based on objectively measured productivity. The major direct result was a 44% improvement in productivity at the cost of only a 10% increase in compensation. But perhaps an even better result was the reduction in turnover by 21% among those rated as high-performers, while turnover among those rated average or low performers increased by over 10%. E. Lazar ��Performance Pay and Productivity�� American Economic Review 190:5 Dec 2000 1346-1361

Share your healthcare TALENT experiences. Good experiences? Age of caregivers?

Another infusion of knowledge...

Link to Article

HR Technology Deployment: How we can learn from Washington Post

jason.averbook — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 01:13:07 GMT

We found the below letter from the editor of the Washington Post excellent and a great example of how we can learn to both design and communicate our internal HR websites and portals. A few things to note:

Listened to the clients; elimination of clutter * Addition of blogs and user comments * Personalized content tied to zip code * Most popular section * Faster response time

These are all characteristics that we can learn from as we deploy our HRMS and Talent Management functionality. The HR world has much to learn from the business to consumer world and this is just the start of our communications on this topic.

KI continually works with clients to design websites, portals and deployment of direct access solutions that follow these characteristics. Make sure that you are adopting these tenets and also communicating the changes. The example below is excellent; bravo Washington Post.

Another infusion of knowledge...

To our readers,

Welcome to our new home page. I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about some of the key changes, and the thinking behind it.

One of the most frequent complaints about our previous home page was clutter, specifically the number of links and lack of open space on the page. In this new page, we've added more white space and cut down the number of long lists of text links. The hope is that these changes give the page more of an open, inviting feel and make it easier to scan. We've also moved to a more modular layout to make it easier to find your favorite home page features.
To better highlight our award-winning video and photo content, we've added a multimedia strip to the page. This band will be comprised of videos, photos and interactives, and by using the scroll arrows or the iTunes-like buttons, you can scroll to see more multimedia features. We've also created a similar strip for features content, allowing us to better showcase all the content we have in that area.
This new home page also highlights the site's newest section, Smart Living. Designed for those seeking information to manage their lives, Smart Living will aggregate the best stories, blogs and columns from The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com in the areas of parenting, health, food and dining, home and garden, pets, relationships, personal finance and more. Prior to this launch, consumer content could be found in many different areas of the site; the goal of Smart Living is to provide a one-stop destination. Because we thought that sounded, you know, smart.
Because of the popularity of our Live Discussions, we've anchored a placement near the top of the home page to help readers find our schedule, previous transcripts and featured guests.
As you may know, we have two home pages: One for readers with Washington-area ZIP Codes, and one for our national and international readers. On our Washington home page, we've added a "Local" button to our global navigation to provide easier access to local news, weather, traffic, classifieds content and more.
On our national home page, we've anchored a Most Popular module on the upper right of the page. On the local page, this Most Popular module is located farther down the page, right below the features strip.
To make it easier to find our video, photo and audio assets, we've moved to using icons to signify those content types. One of the valuable pieces of feedback we've received from you over the past year is that you find it difficult to locate our multimedia content. Between the new multimedia band on the home page, our recently launched video player and the switch to these more eye-catching icons, we hope we've addressed that concern.
We've also added a strip across the top of the page that makes it easier to locate your user information, change preferences or set washingtonpost.com as your home page (c'mon, go ahead, you know you want to). Additionally, incorporating more of the feedback you've given us, we've added a label on the upper right of the home page to let you know which of our two home pages -- Washington or U.S./World -- you're looking at. There's also a handy link that allows you to set which home page you'd like to see.
We've also built this new home page to have a lighter page weight, and thus, faster load times. We have also built this page to make it much easier for those with disabilities to read our home page with screen readers.

We believe that these changes will make it a much better and organized experience for you. But we'd like to hear what you think, so please feel free to send an e-mail to executive.editor@washingtonpost.com.

Thanks,

Jim Brady

Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com

The Role of the Recruiter

jason.averbook — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 22:55:00 GMT

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A great post from systematicHR as usual. One of the things we see over and over, is the everchanging role of the recruiter. Besides all that is mentioned in the post a few other things we see changing and impacting HR and talent management technologies:

Recruiters are being brought into the mix regarding holistic talent management more than ever. The concept of only recruiting from the outside for recruiters is DEAD.* Recruiters are focusing more on internal mobility than ever before. This being said, they are looking at talent pools. performance management ratings, learning management (LMS) tools and succession plans. Recruiters roles will continue to evolve into much more holistic in nature.* The HR, Talent Management vendors are already moving in this direction, and many recruiters are as well. The integration of talent acquisition into the talent suite is not only a fad, but the future of talent and will continue to force recruiters to be more broad in their thinking.* Finally, the internal career brand is equally if not of greater importance than the external career brand. The efforts must be synchronized to insure what was sold, continues to be reinforced throughout the employment lifecycle.

Here is a link to the post

Another infusion of knowledge..

Link to systematicHR - Human Resources Strategy and Human Resources Technology �� The Role of the Recruiter

Labor Department Report - Skilled Worker Shortage Hurts Economy

jason.averbook — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:08:14 GMT

Today's Labor Department Report was another in the recent string of CRIES for the HR organization to step up and manage and develop a plan for talent today and into the future. This is an impossibility without the help of technologies in the areas of:

Workforce Planning* Talent Acquisition* Performance Management - Not the appraisal only* Learning and Development Planning* Compensation and Incentives* Succession Planning* Mobilization of the Workforce

2007 the rest of this decade WILL be the time that HR differentiates the entire organization by either focusing on talent or ignoring it and letting the competition take over.

Many economists and labor market experts say that job growth and the economy overall would be significantly stronger if employers could find the skilled workers they really need.

"I'm hearing across the board, across industries, companies indicating they can't exploit market opportunity because they can't find people with the right skills," said Jeff Summer, an executive at Deloitte Consulting who leads the firm's management practice. He said that there's virtually no long-term unemployment for skilled workers.

"It's down to the nub already," he said. "Supply and demand is completely out of whack."

Anthony Chan, chief economist for JPMorgan Private Client Services, said employers are constantly citing the inability to find the workers they need as one of their top problems, if not their biggest worry.

Businesses "feel there's real (unmet) demand out there," he said, adding that "economic growth would be faster" if there wasn't this tight supply of workers.

Mark Vitner, chief economist for Wachovia, said another sign of the tight labor market is the growing number of job openings being reported by the Labor Department in a separate report, even as hiring posts modest gains.

The most recent report shows 4.2 million job openings in October, up 8.8 percent from a year earlier, while hirings rose just 1.5 percent. Meanwhile, the number of workers quitting, retiring, getting fired or laid-off grew only 0.6 percent.

"With this level of unemployment, the only way they can find the workers they need is to hire them away from someone else, hire them from someplace else, or hire someone without the necessary skills and grow them," said Vitner. "All these things cut into productivity growth."

When the economy hits some natural barriers, it slows it down, and one of those barriers is when the pool of workers begins to dry up," he said. "The lifeblood of the economy today is skilled workers."

Deloitte's Summer said that the current tightness will be a problem for business at least into the next decade, when demographic trends should start to help.

"We start to see some relief in 2012, but we'll probably be dealing with this through 2015, even 2020," he said. "Companies that are looking at this are saying, 'We have to re-invent what we're doing here.' Just paying people more won't be the answer. They really need to be treating the talent market as a customer market more than they ever have before."

[Give your organization a jumpstart on the competition and create your Talent Management StrategyMap today!!|http://www.knowledge-infusion.com/services/strategy/]

Will Talent Management Save Our Economy?

jason.averbook — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 03:34:07 GMT

[http://knowledgeinfusion.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/ki 1_1.jpg] Anyone who owns economically sensitive stocks (e.g., retailers) likely took a hit to their portfolio on Thursday. I was reading a story on TheStreet.com (see Gold Up on Dour Data) today about a spike in gold prices due to the soft or hard economic landing that may be upon us. The storyâ??s focus about a commodity whose price goes up when the strength of the dollar goes down was not particularly compelling to a management consultant like me. What struck me was news out of the Labor Department driving the fear that the Federal Reserve might have to put the brakes on our economy with further inflation-fighting interest rate hikes.

What news, you ask? The Labor Department reported that productivity in the third quarter was flat, as the tight labor market led to less output per worker. Economists Embedded in the productivity report, unit labor costs rose 3.8%, higher than the 3.4% rise that economists expected. The jump means unit labor costs are rising at a 5.3% pace year over year -- the highest level since 1982, and well above the 20-year average of 1.9% according to the report.

So does this mean that talented people are really getting harder to find? I think itâ??s an indicator. While the numbers above represent just a few data points marking what occurred in a 3-month period, anecdotally, I can tell you that a lot of the clients Knowledge Infusion works with have more openings than qualified people.

Do the higher wages mean that employees are gaining leverage with their employers? The ones with the right skills and experience are.

Does it mean that US companies have stretched the limits of business process re-engineering and outsourcing work or starting new operations in regions where wages are lower? No. But the shortage of qualified people in this country will far outstrip what multinationals can reallocate for years to come as Baby Boomers opt for a gold watch (i.e., retirement). Research from a variety of credible sources like The Conference Board, The Economist, and Knowledge Infusion (You probably guessed Iâ??m partial to this organization! You can download the results of a benchmarking study we did on the impact of Baby Boomer retirement, how a shortage of talent is hindering shareholder value at a lot of companies in many different ways, and how organizations are dealing with it here or just email me at mailto:mike.brennan@knowledge-infusion.com so that I can send it to you.).

Is this good news for smart HR and non-HR managers who are adept at efficiently managing talent (i.e., attracting, developing, deploying, and rewarding skillful people)? You bet it does. And it is also good news to the technology and services vendors who can help.

Am I painting the picture with broad strokes here? Absolutely. I realize the tight labor market is not universal, not every organization is starved for senior leadership, and that not every talented person has a great job and 3 offers from other employers. However, Iâ??m not just reading about a talent shortage. Iâ??m hearing it from clients every day â?? from the retailers who canâ??t find enough people to open new locations to a global financial services firm who would like to fill 6,000 positions yesterday.

WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING AT YOUR ORGANIZATION? ARE GOOD PEOPLE TOUGHER TO FIND? ARE WAGES GOING UP? IS PRODUCTIVITY AT RISK? IS HR BEING CALLED UPON TO HELP? SEND SOME COMMENTS!