After spending the week in Chicago talking with over 1000 enterprises including HR technology vendors, what struck me and others a Knowledge Infusion the most was an undying desire to change the industry.  Some of the things that I see positioned to change or currently changing include: 

* CHANGING...How vendors are positioning their company's name....Many vendors are still trying to help clients understand that they do more than what they might think they do.  A few that stood out to me that did a great job included Salary.com and Workscape.  These are vendors that some have no idea what they do, and these companies invested heavily in making sure people knew they were players in the space.  It is simply amazing how customers buy software from what an analyst says is in a leader position without truly knowing the space.  All vendors and analysts need to help the market understand that each client has unique needs that cannot be met by all vendors, in fact, very few vendors truly match the unique needs of a client.  HR technology buyers need a eHarmony to realize it is much more than just looks that drive a decision on a future mate. 

* CHANGING...How vendors talk about their products from a technology standpoint...SaaS, ASP, Hosted, On-Demand continue to be the deployments most frequently talked about.  The interesting thing that I noticed is that vendors talked a lot about what the deployment model is but NOT much about how they are CHANGING the implementation model.  It is simply amazing how vendors are bastardizing new technologies with old implementation models.  This has the potential to be very damaging to our industry in the not too distant future. 

* CHANGING...How and what we are asking HR to pay attention to.  Business value, business value, business value is how HR will prove itself and how we are asking HR to CHANGE to truly be part of the business and prove value.  I personally was able to co-moderate a session on this topic which had me leaving the session feeling amazingly fulfilled that we were able to help nearly 500 people understand the importance of tying talent to business value.  The problem I soon realized is that I walked into the HR Technology Expo and hardly any of the vendors were providing a solution that matched what we just told the room they needed to do. 

We are CHANGING the TALK and NOT the WALK (as one of the audience members astutely pointed out).  HR Technology 2008 was about CHANGE.  The jury is still out whether the CHANGE that is happening is right for the industry. 

In my humble opinion, the CHANGES that are mostly cosmetic and still leave HR in the same position it has been in the past half decade, ill equipped to demonstrate value.  Another infusion of knowledge...