Blog Posts

Last week I attended Lawson’s CUE event in Boston. The specter of acquisition that hung over everything gave the event an unusual feel, but the professionals at Lawson managed to showcase their products and future plans very well. There were a number of new product announcements (Lawson App Marketplace, Lawson Mashup Designer, and Lawson Viewpoint) as well as some pricing announcements, but I had two major takeaways from the event.

• Lawson HCM software is the top product for the company. One thing that came in loud and clear during the entire event was the Lawson’s HCM product is now the most important software the company sells. Many of the presentations were focused around the innovation in HCM and Lawson Talent Management and the sales growth that they’ve seen over the last year. This is a great credit to the HCM team who have taken their Core HR product and built out an impressive Talent Management suite in a relatively short period of time. The message and importance of HCM to the overall company was communicated consistently throughout the day’s sessions.
  

• Lawson clearly thought through the Enwisen acquisition to a degree not seen in many other HR technology acquisitions lately. Lawson has very smartly continued to market and position Enwisen as a separate offering to appeal to buyers looking for help solving their HR service delivery or knowledgebase needs, but they have also layered Enwisen’s value proposition into the Lawson Talent Management suite. This dual sales approach allows Enwisen to continue to appeal to non-Lawson HCM customers, while also giving a new product to sell into existing customers. In my mind this functionality also provides one of the few true differentiators in a space that too often seems to have competitors all racing to develop the same functionality.
  

Overall I thought it was a fun event and the Lawson team did an excellent job highlighting their products and communicating a very cohesive message through the entire week. Like everyone else I’m waiting to see if acquisition changes future plans, but for now it seems like the Lawson Management team has a very clear plan for their software moving forward. For more thoughts on Lawson and Enwisen please check the KI OnDemand Vendor Center (available to premium members only).

Last Friday, Knowledge Infusion CEO, Jason Averbook, tweeted that “…it was great to see a non-HR person leading HR” while listening to Kristin Trecker, SVP of HR for Lawson, speak at an event. The concept of taking the leader of another part of the business and placing them into human resources is something that is frequently discussed as a good thing, but for some reason the tweet struck a nerve with me.

What would you think about someone who said “Hey, it’s great to see a non-financial person being named Chief Financial Officer”? I’m sure some of you just laughed and thought to yourselves: Finance is much too complicated and specialized for someone without a finance background to lead the department/division. But what does the fact that it is accepted, and even encouraged, to look for HR executives from outside of HR say about how HR is truly viewed by business leaders? Isn’t the top HR position of a company also responsible for being the expert on a number of ever-changing laws and regulations? Doesn’t HR have just as much specialized knowledge and unique skill requirements as marketing or finance? So HR clearly has a communication or a perception problem (probably both).

Now we work with a number of clients who have great HR executives who began their careers in other areas of the business and then transitioned to take over HR, so I’m not saying that it doesn’t work or shouldn’t be done. But the next time you hear someone say “It’s great to see a non-HR person leading HR” as an HR practitioner that should make you angry. The HR community needs to start challenging the perception that anyone can do HR, and until that becomes more widespread HR practitioners are never going to be treated with the same level of respect as other C-level executives.

This is the second post analyzing some of the data from the 2010 Knowledge Infusion & ERE Future of Recruiting & Sourcing survey. In this post I’ll reflect on some of the survey responses regarding social media in recruiting.

Obviously this is a hot topic within companies and I believe there is a sense that companies need to do more in social media, but the numbers tell a more complicated story. When asked about investment in recruiting, 38% of respondents said they planned more investment in social media, which was the highest of any of the options. The interesting part is that when asked what their company uses social networking for, and what social networks are being used at work, those numbers remained nearly unchanged from last year’s survey. The only significant increase was that 35% of respondents said they were going to use twitter for recruiting, up from 25% in 2009.

One way to read these numbers is that there is a divide between the companies that use social media for recruiting and those that do not. So if you are already using social media you are planning to increase your investment, but for companies that have not used social media in the past they are not planning to start this year.

What do you think about this data? What are your company’s plans around social media this year? I’m interested to see if companies who haven’t adopted social media in the past are coming around, so please leave a comment on the blog.

On November 14, 2010, Knowledge Infusion colleagues, customers, partners and friends will be taking part in the Big Sur Half Marathon. As part of the Knowledge Infusion philanthropy program launched last year, we will be running 13.1 miles in an effort to raise money for a great organization.

Last year, we were fortunate enough to raise over $10,000 for The Toys for Tots Foundation. We have an ambitious goal this year to raise over $25,000 for the LIVESTRONG/Lance Armstrong Foundation. Earlier this year, many Knowledge Infusion employees had a chance to meet Doug Ulman, CEO of LIVESTRONG, at our Summer Executive Forum and got a chance to learn about the amazing work he and the LIVESTRONG/Lance Armstrong Foundation team do on a daily basis to improve the lives of people affected by cancer.

Please help us in our efforts by making a donation. Donations can be easily made on our Knowledge Infusion Fundraising page.  You can donate online with a credit card. All donations are secure and sent directly to LIVESTRONG by Firstgiving, who will email you a printable record of your donation.

On behalf of Knowledge Infusion, I thank you in advance for your support.

Knowledge Infusion today announced the launch of the fourth annual talent management joint survey with Human Resource Executive®. This year’s survey will focus on how organizations are moving forward with integrated talent management and workforce planning initiatives, including:

• How talent management strategy is evolving.
  
• Organizations approach to deploying a talent management suite.
  
• Successes, challenges, and future plans for workforce planning.
  
• Buying trends as we move towards economic recovery.
  

The data collected will be analyzed by Knowledge Infusion experts to bring organizations tangible actions to be successful with talent management technology initiatives. Participants of the ten-minute survey will get a full copy of the results and be able to benchmark themselves against other organizations.

HR professionals are invited to take the survey now.

The title is dramatic, but it is something that bothered me as an HR practitioner, and this past week I heard someone describe the issue nicely.  I just returned home from TaleoWorld in Chicago, where General Colin Powell was one of the keynote speakers.  It was a great speech, not just because Gen. Powell is surprisingly funny, but because he hit on many important topics about leadership and organizational growth.  One that struck me the most was when he was discussing the end of the Cold War when he released 200,000 servicemen, but asked for an increase in the recruitment budget.  As he described, Congress balked at the request but he said he felt that “the organization that isn’t recruiting is dying” and eventually got his budget increase.

Think about that statement: “The organization that isn’t recruiting is dying.”  Now think about what your organization has done over the last few years to bring new blood into the organization.  The young people that you hire today should be your organization’s leaders in 20 years, and new talent brings with it a fresh perspective and new idea.  Without new talent it is easy for an organization to grow stagnant and stop innovating.  If you are not developing new talent who is going to replace the current executive team when they leave or retire?

Many organizations have cut back on their recruiting efforts during the recession, but as an HR professional one of your responsibilities is to help plan for long term success.  If you are not recruiting and developing young talent and high performers in your organization then you are handicapping your company’s future.  Any organization that does not develop their own people is counting on their competitors to develop leaders and executives, and their own ability to recruit that talent away.  Do you really want to put that much faith in your competitors, or pay a salary premium to recruit because you did not develop anyone internally?  Everyone understands making long term investments in other areas of business….so why not start applying this basic business principle to people?

One of the many things that I truly LOVE to do in my role as CEO of Knowledge Infusion is to showcase some of the best thinking in the HR and HR technology space and conferences, forums and summits around the world.  The LOVE of this has probably come from a friend, Bill Kutik, and his mastery of the "panel facilitation" domain.  At the HR Technology Conference 2010 in Chicago in a short 3 weeks, I get the opportunity to moderate the 4th annual Talent Management panel which is made up of Knowledge Infusion customers and I am very excited about taking a bit of a different approach.

To me, the value of conferences and panels is not to hear the "love fest" stories of vendors; but to hear the reality about what goes into success in a specific area of focus.  This reality is not always positive and not always "music to the ears" of many; but I truly feel it is the only way we continue to move our profession forward.

The topic around talent management this year deals with how organizations have failed (not met expectations) of their initial deployment of talent management processes and solutions and what they are doing to "turnaround" a failure to a success.  The panel pre-discussions have been truly fascinating to me and wanted to share some of the highlights.  Hopefully you will be able to make it to the session on Thursday September 30th from 1:45p - 3:00p, but if not; I am sure the Twitter stream will be flowing.

A few nuggets of interest:

• None of the companies on the panel COMPLETELY blame their failure on a technology vendor but more on a lack of an integrated plan and approach to actually reach the outcomes they were looking to achieve
• Many of the panelists note that during an implementation, their vendor looks to get them live quickly without truly understanding the big picture of what the organization wants to do with data in the long-term
• Consolidation into single "talent management suites" or back to the "ERP" talent management function is the only way to truly achieve the success an organization is looking for without tremendous spend in other technologies
• Change Management has been completely underestimated and overlooked in the talent management space and has killed deployments and caused vendors to lose customers
• The world of Software as a Service (SaaS) makes switching costs lower than previous technologies; therefore more movement from vendor to vendor in the market
• The talent management leaders in an organization DO NOT see the integration points between talent management processes and therefore blame the vendor when the solution does not meet their needs
• The only way to be successful in a talent management deployment is to "break" old school processes and redesign processes to meet desired outcomes

We have panelists who have left SaaS vendors, we have panelists who have left ERP vendors only to come back, we have panelists who have tried to use their talent management suite as a Core HR solution and we have panelists who have replaced one SaaS vendor for another.

Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating...

This is what I love about the space.  People willing to share their stories and giving a community the opportunity to learn from mistakes and not make them within their domain.

Visit http://www.hrtechnologyconference.com to learn more about the conference (it truly is the best in the world for the HR/talent management space and it is NOT all about IT and technology).  I believe you can still use Knowledge Infusion discount code KNOW10 to save registration dollars.

I hope those that attend find the panel of value and for those that cannot, follow hashtag #ki or #hrtechconf on Twitter where I am sure there will be coverage.

Another infusion of knowledge...

Lately we at Knowledge Infusion have been spending a ton of time working with HR and IT organizations trying to help them understand the best structure for their ownership and support of various HR technology initiatives.  The term HRIS has been out there for decades and when you look at the definition of IS it looks something like this:

Information systems are implemented within an organization for the purpose of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of that organization. Capabilities of the information system and characteristics of the organization, its work systems, its people, and its development and implementation methodologies together determine the extent to which that purpose is achieved

When HR defines a role as HRIS and/or depends on HRIS to develop its overall process approach to human resources, the outcomes of the HR function within an organization and the overall HR strategy, it takes a very myopic look at what HR truly needs to be successful in driving global processes, defining change and metrics to measure that change as well as structuring people in the HR function to meet a long-term HR strategy.

Leading edge HR organizations today are looking at focusing on what processes and people are needed to execute it's long term strategies and determining what level of IT support may be needed to ensure that technologies are an enabler of a HR strategy, not what is driving it.

The term HRIS still may live on within IT as the group that maintains and supports a HR technology implementation, but it is not the right placement, treatment or priority for a group responsible for implementing process transformation and change throughout a global enterprise.

Do you still use the term HRIS?  What does it mean in your organization?

Another infusion of knowledge...