Blog Posts

Collaboration tools and platforms are seemingly everywhere these days.

Wiki-based solutions from Atlassian, PBWorks, and Socialtext.

Activity stream platforms like Socialcast, Obayoo, and to some extent Google Wave that fit in this broad category.

Or more complex and robust collaboration and community platforms like Jive, Telligent, and Awareness.

And more and more are emerging almost every week.  Aside - I checked out a very interesting tool called Dekks last week that will be the subject of an upcoming post.

All of the above solutions have their strengths and weaknesses, and intelligent use cases can certainly be made of any of them in the correct organizational setting. Since collaboration and the introduction of more 'social' capability is on the radar of many software companies and organizations even the older, more traditional vendors are jumping in to the collaboration pool.

12SPRINTS

Recently SAP, the venerable titan of the ERP market launched (in Beta) a platform called '12SPRINTS', a collaboration tool designed to facilitate information sharing, group and team-based working, and most notably decision making. 12SPRINTS offers a combination of expected collaboration platform features (status updates, commenting, threaded discussions) with a fairly robust set of traditional business tools (Pro/Con charts, SWOT Analysis,Cost/Benefit Analysis).  This nod to the more well-understood and time-tested (some might argue old-fashioned) decision support tools aligns with 12SPRINTS stated purpose:

From the 12SPRINTS home page copy, the platform is meant to help organizations, 'Bring order to chaos and transform teamwork into results quickly'.

The framework around the process is straightforward, create an 'Activity', (could be a program, project, or simply to capture information to help make a single business decision), invite other people to collaborate on the Activity, and use a long list of delivered tools and feature to communicate, share data, brainstorm, organize, and ultimately take action.

Capability

Taking a look at a few screen prints from 12SPRINTS we can get a feel for the 'business' feel of the product, this view shows the 'Consensus' widget for driving decision making inserted into the activity:

Additional decision support tools like a Stakeholder Analysis 4-box diagram can be overlaid on the project to give a graphical look to the needs/importance of various organizational constituents:

In yet another attempt to demonstrate real business and decision process support capability to the platform, 12SPRINTS incorporates the classic 'SWOT' grid.  This SWOT can be populated collaboratively by all members of the activity.

Conclusion

When you think about it from the perspective of an organization or a business leader that perceives internal collaboration efforts or (gasp) internal social networks as a time-waster, productivity drain, or an excuse for employees to get distracted from 'real' work, then a disciplined focus on a better decision making tool makes perfect sense, and may be a much easier 'sell'.  12SPRINTS looks to provide more structure around collaborative work, and by baking many classic and well-know business frameworks into the collaboration flow it offers what some organizations may see as a more logical launchpad to introduce collaborative tools in the enterprise.

SAP has built in integrations to 12SPRINTS withWebEx for web conferencing,  Evernote for collaborative note-taking and content sharing,  and Scribd for document sharing, and these hint at SAP angling to position 12SPRINTS as an open platform where collaborative activity can be collected and managed to some extent.  Will SAP place significant resources for development and education behind 12SPRINTS? Hard to say, but the mere fact that an enterprise powerhouse like SAP is at least experimenting in this space is a sign of its increasing importance to vendors and organizations alike.

12SPRINTS is in public Beta right know, you can sign up and start experimenting today, or if you prefer, drop me a note or leave a comment and I will add you to my 12SPRINTS sandbox.

The precise estimates vary, but one thing seems certain: the workforce of the future (and likely the very near future) will be more fluid, flexible, and composed of a larger proportion of temporary workers, contractors, and other 'non-permanent' staff.

A recent Business Week cover story on the organizational trend of greater reliance on freelance workers and temporary staff, 'The Disposable Worker', states that:

"Right on up to the C-suite, more jobs will be freelance and temporary, and even seemingly permanent positions will be at greater risk. "When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh," says Barry Asin, chief analyst at the Los Altos (Calif.) labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts. "The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true." As Kelly Services CEO Carl Camden puts it: "We're all temps now."

An increasing reliance on temporary or contingent workers provides the organization flexibility to increase or decrease staffing levels to better reflect rising or falling demand, without most if not all of the additional overhead associated with hiring permanent employees. But this flexibility can lead to several challenges that the organization must manage, often with systems and processes that were never designed to support higher volumes of temporary staff.

Just some of the challenges inherent in an increased reliance on contingent staff:

Managing the churn

Traditionally temporary staff were engaged for very specific, fixed-duration tasks that were generally similar across organizations and industries, making the training and orientation efforts required for new temps reasonably manageable. As more and more strategic and managerial or leadership roles are sources via temporary staff, the time to bring these temps up to speed and fully productive will likely increase. Additionally, the flexibility of temporary work cuts both ways.  Temporary staff are likely to be much less loyal than permanent staff (many of which are thankful to still be holding on to their jobs), and will be quick to move on if and when a better (perhaps permanent) situation arises.  Today's temp worker is much more likely to have been 'forced' into temporary work than ever before.

Understanding the talent

For many organizations simply understanding the skills, capabilities, and relevant experience of the permanent workforce presents a significant challenge.  Systems that can capture and make actionable this key workforce intelligence are not yet common fixtures in many organizations.  Understanding the skills and abilities of temporary staff presents an additional challenge. Temporary staff have traditionally been sourced via the enterprise procurement function; one that normally does not possess the kind of advanced capabilities necessary to understand key talent factors.  If answering the question, 'What do our people know?' is hard for organizations, then answering 'What do the temp staff we have on hand know?' is almost impossible.

Long term impact

Increased use of temp workers may have negative implications to an organization when and if the economic climate improves. Temp workers are likely to be less loyal and even 'permanent' staff are expected to be much more willing to move to what they perceive to be a better situation.  Employees have seen downsizing, wage and benefit cuts or freezes, and in many cases increased demands to 'do more with less', further straining the relationship between employer and employee and lowering morale and engagement. These issues are not completely caused by an increase of temporary staff, but an environment that employees perceive to be 'less stable' than the one they are comfortable with could be an important factor that organizations must address.

Conclusion

Navigating though an environment of increased workforce mobility, greater reliance on temporary and contingent resources, while assessing and leveraging the strengths of all the disparate elements in the 'new' normal will serve to make HR and Talent Management professionals jobs more challenging then ever.  If your organization has already, or plans to increase the utilization and relative importance of temporary staff, these are some of the issues that will need to be considered. Workforce technologies will be forced to develop better capabilities to help the enterprise understand, analyze, and leverage the capabilities and talent of this 'extended' community.

Work and workforces have evolved, and organizational and managerial capability has to evolve and grow as well.

We are proud to welcome Beth Rivchin to the unmatched team of KI Consultants and the Knowledge Infusion family.

Beth has over 14 years of experience in the HR industry, and was most recently at Destination Hotels & Resorts as a Corporate HR Technology Manager. She began her career at Time Warner Cable where she was promoted to various HR positions over a nine-year period.  Some of those positions included People Development Consultant/Project Manager, Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) Trainer, HRIS Administrator and Human Resources Generalist. Beth was also a consultant for SPECTRUM where she managed client implementations.

Beth has hit the ground running, already making a significant impact in client engagements.

Welcome Beth!  YOU are KI!

The Friday Factoid has been a feature at KI since the inception of the company.

Yeah.  That's right.  Target - the discount retailer.  This past week I took my annual pilgrimage to Target to replenish my supply of socks.  I like having dozens of pairs of identical socks.  It just makes pairing them more easy when I do the laundry.  Anyway, on the way back to the sock aisle I stumbled upon the housewares section and got mesmerized by all the cool designs of toasters, coffeemakers, tea kettles, waste baskets, and toilet brushes.

As I perused the merchandise, I realized that many of the items were designed by true architects and designers like Michael Graves and others.  Due to a passing interest in architecture, I realized this was the same Michael Graves that has been designing some of the world's most beautiful (and functional) buildings since the 1960's.  Graves truly sees the art of everyday life.  Apparently Graves has become a household name over the past few years through this design relationship with Target.

Then it dawned on me.  That's what is missing from most business software today - There is no art in it.  There is very little true design in it - other than technical design.  User experience appears to be an afterthought.  The systems are designed to process transactions, capture, fetch, and display data.  User interfaces are usually designed by software engineers - few of whom see the art in every day life.

How much time do we spend making toast, tea, coffee?  Cleaning our toilets?   Far less time than we spend using business software.  Yet the design bug has not bitten the software providers yet.  If Target can team with talented designers to produce inexpensive housewares, why can't software vendors team with talented designers to produce highly usable, expensive software?  Imagine....

Hmmm....Food for Thought...

Have a Great Weekend Everyone!!!

Today Knowledge Infusion made a donation of $1000 to the non-profit organization Doctors Without Borders, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/.

Doctors Without Borders, a Knowledge Infusion client, has done extraordinary things to help the people in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. They have given primary care to an estimated 3,000 people in the capital and performed more than 400 surgeries over the past week. They have begun to build an inflatable hospital with two operating theaters and 100-bed capacity in an open field not far from the airport.  You can follow their reflief efforts around the world on Twitter @MSF_USA

Our continued thoughts and prayers are with the people of Haiti and the volunteers supporting relief efforts.

It seems that at least two to three times per week I am working with an organization who is struggling to understand the role that HR should play when it comes to the enterprise wide intranet or portal and how HR can use these technologies to deploy and empower a workforce.  The question of who “owns” the tool and who is making decisions on rollout is usually where the conflict occurs and the usual result is a stalemate where the organization ends up not moving forward in anyway and who is the loser in this stalemate – the workforce.

In each organization there is a corporate communication role that is responsible for information to the enterprise from the executives within that organization.  In this case, the role of corporate communication will determine a tool that best meets their needs to communicate information.  From that point, is where things get messy.

HR must play a significant role in pushing workforce facing transactions, content/collaboration tools and intelligence to the enterprise.  This can be done in one of two ways:

• The HR organization can work together with corporate communications and the IT organization to leverage the existing intranet/portal to make this happen as a single workforce facing tool
• The HR organization can create its own workforce facing intranet/portal that branches off from the corporate intranet/portal to push its content to the workforce

Both of the above scenarios work well and are used in organizations throughout the world today.  A few key things to remember about a intranet/portal deployment:

• HR must play a key role in making the intranet/portal site a true “destination” where the workforce will want to visit and “hang out” in.  This is done by truly putting content and tools on the site that add value to the workforce.  Think “What’s in it for me?” and the ME is not YOU, the ME is the WORKFORCE
• The workforce intranet/portal should be a “mashup” of all of the tools, templates, reports, transactions, systems, information that is needed by the workforce.  It should NOT be a series of links to systems that have different navigation methods, different sign-ons and left dated with stale content.  You will lose the workforce and they will never visit your destination again
• You must think of the workforce intranet/portal in “perpetual beta” meaning it is never complete.  Think about production on a daily or weekly newspaper/magazine. This is the same type of mindset you need for your workforce intranet/portal
• The workforce intranet/portal is a joint effort between HR, communication and IT.  HR can’t do this alone, but at the same time, the IT organization can’t do this alone and meet the needs of the workforce.  HR needs to lead the initiative and bring in the remainder of the enterprise to add content and value
• Enterprise collaboration tools (social networking) should be part of the workforce intranet/portal strategy.  There is nothing that drives employee engagement in organizations today as well as these new web 2.0, collaboration tools
• Look inside your closet – your enterprise more than likely already owns a toolset that you can use to make this a reality such as Microsoft SharePoint or the Oracle/PeopleSoft Portal, SAP NetWeaver Portal, Enwisen, Authoria or an ADP portal

At Knowledge Infusion we call this Digital HR and believe strongly that every HR organization in the world needs a true Digital HR strategy and mission along with resources dedicated to making this vision a reality.

Who owns it?  You do as a HR technology professional.  Who is the loser with multiple links to different systems, navigation, training courses, entering data multiple times and a prehistoric feel at the workforce – the employee who will eventually leave and go somewhere that fits their expectations regarding “keeping up with technology”

Drop me at note with questions anytime at jason.averbook@knowlegeinfusion.com

Another infusion of knowledge…

I had the opportunity to spend the day today with an organization that has fully bought into a ERP HR product that would fulfill all of their HR and talent management needs if implemented and deployed to meet their needs.  Just like many of the customers and community members that Knowledge Infusion works with, the question that comes up over and over again is, is this the product we should use since we already own it and are paying maintenance on it?   The answer - IT DEPENDS....on what you might ask?  Here are 5 key areas.

• What kind of internal support the organization has for the software it already owns.  Deploying any software solution requires a great deal of support both from a HR functional standpoint as well as from a IT standpoint.  If the organization either DOES NOT have this skillset in-house or it continues a trend in IT that it will only focus on areas of the business in 2010 that give it a "competitive advantage"; this raises a big red flag as to whether a successful deployment can be had.

• What functionality is already deployed within the HR function using "best of breed" software and is the function willing to replace its existing solutions with the solution from the ERP vendor.  This is a major question as it becomes necessary to look at what portions of a complete ERP HR solution will a company deploy,  If the answer is only Core HR since it is already outsourcing payroll, benefits and many other functions; is a full-blown ERP truly needed as a system of record?

• What level of integration is needed between HR data and other applications within the enterprise.  While we aspouse the fact that HR should be a single source of the truth and data should not be "re-entered" anywhere else in the enterprise, in reality, this is a vision that not many enterprise IT organizations share with HR in todays world.  What are the true integration points?  Is a "integration" needed or will an "interface" suffice?  Are the systems we are looking to "integrate" to also run by the ERP vendor in house?  Each of these is important and has a weight when making this decision.

• A simple answer from many is "we are already paying for this, so why would we not use what we already own?".  The fact of the matter is what you are paying for maintenance is likely only one-fifth to one-eighth of the total cost of ownership after deployment, change management and ongoing upgrade maintenance.  It very well might make sense to use what you "already own".  But you must understand that even though you already "own" the software, this cost is minimal compared to what it will take to implement, maintain and deploy the solution.

• Is the vision of HR/Enterprise from the standpoint of reporting and analytics (Workforce Information Management) supported by the ERP application already owned?  Will we build all integrations back to the ERP HR solution?  Do we have a data warehouse in place that means we do not need to the ERP HR application to be a overall data store for all information?  Is there "pre-built" integration between the HR application and the other components fo the ERP that actually integrate the way you need them to in order to meet your reporting needs?

There are many areas that I did not discuss here such as overall usability, ongoing support to maintain the applications as well as the overall vendor vision and committment to the HR and talent management space.

What is most important to take away from this read is that the answer is NO, just because you own software does not mean it is the software you should deploy.  It very well might be the right fit, and in that case, great and you will more than likely be successful.  If it is not the right fit, and you go ahead with deployment anyway, you will find yourself spending a great deal of time, money and resources that will more than likely fail and result in some form of "re-implementation" in a very short timeframe.

These decisions have cost many their jobs over time.  Be sure to ask yourself these questions and more before making this large decision.

Another infusion of knowledge...

We're often asked by our clients to help them craft their corporate Social Media governance models.  There are many factors to be taken into account when developing social media policies and guidelines for a given organization such as the industry, the target audience, employee demographics, the unique culture of the organization, etc...   I stumbled upon a treasure trove of examples of social media policies over on the Social Media Governance website.  It includes examples of policy documents from organizations in virtually every industry.  Thanks to Chris Boudreaux & friends for assembling this useful database.