Industry News

Thanks to all my readers, collaborators and mentors.  I made John Sumser’s list for the top 100 Influencers in HR.
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Guest Author:  Stephen B. Jeong, Ph.D. As a child, whenever I would screw up, my mother always said, “Why can’t you be more like Billy?”  Billy was a straight-A student who excelled in every sport with which he was involved – an all-around “wunderkind” who could do no wrong.  Needless to say, I didn’t like...
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I recently talked to an organization who is moving their organization from one end of the city to the opposite far end of the same area. The commuting time between the cities is about 40 minutes, and some employees would benefit and have reduced commute, others would certainly pick up longer train or car...
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Well, it’s been a full week now, and I feel like I have enough information to formulate a decent opinion on the merger between Towers and Wyatt.  Here goes: Was this a merger, or an acquisition? Well, to be honest, my first reaction to this was that Wyatt got the upper hand.  I think I’m...
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I was recently getting caught up on some blog reading and noticed Josh Bersin’s post on the Talent Management Software Slump.  I’m not sure if I’m just a pessimist, but I thought I’d post a reply.  (granted, Josh wrote his post in early May… Despite this difficult Q1, we believe the market is going to...
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No pun intended. But I’m troubled and I don’t get it. This morning the acting CFO over at Freddie Mac committed suicide.  He was brought in after the bailout, so theoretically he should not have a ton of direct responsibility over the causes of the current economic crisis.  People seem to be committing suicide at...
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It will be interesting to see what the SuccessFactors executives say on their 4th quarter performance results, and even more so for their projections for 2009. Given that they just did an across the board layoff1 it would be hard for them to say that they are still projecting strong growth.  This goes for...
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LinkedIn is expanding it’s corporate recruiting functionality today with Talent Advantage.  Really, all of the functionality is old stuff that has been rebranded.  There is a new “Custom Company Profile” which I think has existed in one form or another for some time, but now has new functionality for employer branding and some cool...
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Being that Workday is announcing their Fall 2008 update today, I figured it was a s good a time as any to get this site back up and running again.  As probably the most hyped vendor in the HR space this year, they have still had impressive growth with 67 current total clients and...
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There are a few conferences that I think are great.  There are others I think are pretty mundane.  The great ones are about content, the mundane about sales, vendors, and vendor presentation.  One of the great ones is the HR Technology Conference in Chi-town annually.  We’re always interested in things like the vendor shootouts,...
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It’s not often that you get to see the results of a survey before the submission deadline is up, but Lexy Martin shared a few preliminary numbers with me. While these are very preliminary numbers, it’s interesting to see the directionality of the numbers.  She was thinking that with the down-economy, that some of...
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It’s not mystery that Oracle’s Fusion Middleware product was really only a half baked cobbling of old products when it was released a couple years ago.  Much like Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” sign, Oracle proclaimed “Half Way to Fusion!”  We all waited expectantly for either a set of Fusion applications to be as half baked...
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Jobvite released their new survey on the utilization of social networks for recruiting.  Most of this is not a surprise as recruiting seems to be the early adopter for some new HR technologies well ahead of everyone else.  Remember recruiting systems was a major market before any other point solutions (outside of benefits and...
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I haven’t written about HRO for a very long time.  Part of it could be just my simple disillusionment of the space.  The outsourcing of payroll and benefit transactions make total sense to me as they are complete commodities.  If we talk about F&A (finance) the transactional side of procurement, AP and AR at...
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I suppose that I do need to put together a list of things I’m especially interested in this year. Many of these are already trends. Some of these will never be, but are things perhaps only I am interested in. Other ideas might actually emerge in 2008. The War for Talent: ...
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So I took a brief 3 week pause from writing in December and quite a bit happened.  Here is a brief summary of the news: December 4:  Reuters reported a rumor that Microsoft was looking at a possible acquisition of SAP.  While I find this highly unlikely, and while rumors of this also happened back...
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Out comes a new release of SuccessFactors popular talent management system.  My general opinion is that the leading talent management systems are all playing on a fairly level playing field.  They are all pretty well integrated, they all have good functionality, and most are operating on a SaaS model.  When you’re looking at feature-functionality,...
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Respondents to a recent McKinsey survey show widespread but careful interest in this trend. Expressing satisfaction with their Internet investments so far, they say that Web 2.0 technologies are strategic and that they plan to increase these investments. But companies aren’t necessarily relying on the best-known Web 2.0 trends, such as blogs; instead, they...
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Right on the heels of SAP and Business Objects is the IBM and Cognos announcement.  Once again and like SAP, IBM didn’t need the capabilities.  They are in all probability doing this to pick up market share and taking a major competitor off the market. On November 12, 2007 IBM announced that it has signed...
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“Several factors are spurring the growth. New software design and delivery models allow many more instances of an application to run at once in a common environment, so providers can now share one application cost effectively across hundreds of companies—a vast improvement on the old client-server model. Bandwidth costs continue to drop, making it...
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