HR Technology

Thanks to Bill Tincup for bringing us the marvelous series of “what’s next by some of HR’s greatest thought leaders.  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I love Sumser and am proud to call him a friend and mentor.  His entry into “What’s Next” actually did make me laugh out loud, on an airplane...
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Julian had a childhood friend named Lucy.  One day, he came home with one of those kindergarten drawings with a little girl and diamonds and presented it to his father.  John asked him what the drawing was, and Julian replies, “It’s Lucy and the sky with diamonds.”  Thus, the song. You can take some core...
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Guest Author:  Stephen B. Jeong, Ph.D. In Part 1 of Survey Design 101, we discussed two broad topics related to survey design – choosing the right topics and creating quality questions.  Survey design (or questionnaire development), however, is not complete until you can show that all or most of the redundant questions have been filtered...
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I’m sitting on a plane (delayed of course for 4 hours) thinking about the people around me.  I have the fabulous exit row seat on the A319 where there is no seat in front of me.  The guy in the middle next to me is great.  He’s not a talker, he’s slim, does not...
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I must say that Jim Holincheck wrote a quite persuasive piece a couple months ago on why vendor scripted demos will go away.  In today’s environment of SaaS applications, it’s so much easier for organizations to set up sandboxes for potential customers to play around in rather than the old model where client server...
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I’m not sure who first coined the term “shelfware.”  Most of our IT departments have all sorts of stuff we have purchased that we intend to implement but just haven’t done so yet.  Or we have implementations that we have abandoned, or we have technology and strategy roadmaps that are mid way through because...
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We always end up talking about employee adoption whenever we are implementing anything whether it’s technology, process or anything else.  When we talk about adoption, we’re really talking change management, and in that we are talking about changing both behaviors of people as well as attitudes.  We want to convert both their minds as...
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If you ever look at a snowflake dangling from the window at your local Macy’s or Bloomingdales, realize that this snowflake is only a piece of marketing, there to draw your eye, but not an accurate representation of reality.  You see, most marketing snowflakes have either five or eight sides to them.  Nobody seems...
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I was looking at a SuccessFactor’s employee laptop the other day and she had a huge sticker on it with the words “Success = Strategy + Execution.”  I could not help wondering to myself if this was really the equation, or just simplified marketing jargon.  Granted, SuccessFactors is probably pretty darn good at what...
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Guest Author:  Stephen B. Jeong, Ph.D. Those of you in smaller organizations who have worked in HR/OD for even just a few years are sure to be familiar with organizational surveys. You then also know – depending on the size and complexity of the organization – how costly this effort can be when you hire...
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I must say that sometimes M&A transitions are a pain in the *** for HR and HRIT practitioners.  It’s quite rare in my experience that a merger will be a pure 50/50%, more often than not one of the merger partners is getting a tiny fraction more than 50% and so can govern the...
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Those of you how have been reading this blog for a while are familiar with both Bill Kutik and Karen Beaman as I refer to both of them often.  In fact, It’s probably a bit of conceit for me to say that you know them from reading the blog as they are obviously industry...
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A few days ago, my fellow compatriot Jason Corsello wrote about Gartner’s new magic quadrant.  I’ve actually looked upon the Gartner magic quadrants with some disdain in the last few years, not because of any perceived lack of validity, thoroughness or any other concern with the approach to analysis that Jim Holincheck does, but...
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Those of you how have been reading this blog for a while are familiar with both Bill Kutik and Karen Beaman as I refer to both of them often.  In fact, It’s probably a bit of conceit for me to say that you know them from reading the blog as they are obviously industry...
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I’ve been through a lot of process mapping sessions in my life.  I’ve had the good opportunity to lead many, and also the opportunity to sit in and observe.  It always surprises me how often the current state processes are mapped, and then people go straight into the future state process mapping without real...
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Yeah, believe it or not, I have a GPS on my bike.  It’s even a Garmin.  With a push of a button I can go to a screen that either shows me how fast I’m going and what my heart rate is, or I can see a little map with direction arrows and everything. ...
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I’m big on the idea that consultants don’t have to be really smart people, or that they have to have an incredible amount of experience around the subject matter they are tackling.  It’s helpful of course, but it’s actually not the core competency for consulting. First, I’m a huge advocate of liberal arts college educations. ...
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Cycling is an easy sport to figure out from a measurement perspective.  Speed is a function of power output and weight (all other things held constant).  So if you’re going uphill, the number of watts you generate as a factor of your weight (you + the bike) will determine your speed.  The lighter you...
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There was a time when 10 and 12 speeds were a wonderful thing.  In fact, road bikes were routinely called 10 speed bikes.  Today, I still ride what is called a 10 speed, but it’s actually 20 if you directly compare it with the 10 speeds of the 1980’s.  As metallurgy has advanced, cycling...
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Karen Beaman wrote a guest post somewhere on the technology of tennis. I’ve occasionally written about cycling here, but thought I’d go into more detail on the technology of cycling and its impacts on performance. Cycling is actually one of the sports where in its face, technology advancements seem to be shunned....
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