Enterprise Solutions

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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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 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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Karen Beaman over at Jeitosa recently wrote about the unbundling of HCM systems that we’ve been seeing for many years now.  She is exactly right, that often times the unbundling of HR applications away from a central ERP system provides for more agile HR service delivery.  Traditional ERP systems have not been growing at...
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Global HR data is tough. Often times when we’re thinking about implementing a global core HR system, or a global data warehouse, we implement these systems according to a U.S. centric view of the world. (I’ll note here that I once worked with a U.K. based company that looked at their core HR system...
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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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Perhaps the statement that we now live in a “point solution world” for HR is a bit bold.  Certainly in large and medium sized organizations, ERP deployments are still strong.  However, we do know that these same organizations are increasingly looking at point solutions even if they have had long term ERP strategies.  Current...
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Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but I’ve been following the developments of the Hadron Collider for a while now.  In terms of physics, there have been many theories abounding, but with the lack of ability to look into the tiniest known particles within an atom and see how they re/act, it’s quite impossible to...
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The history of HR technologies has for many years been about functionality.  We have been increasing functionality levels for a couple of decades now.  Even the recent robust growth of talent management applications has been about functionality.  Vendors are fighting in a competition to have a “complete talent management suite” and adding functional components...
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Far be it for feeble minded me to critique HBR’s SOA article entitled “Then Next Revolution in Productivity,” 1  but that’s what I’ll do anyway.  While I’m a firm believer that SOA and that we’ll see high levels of SOA adoption in the upcoming years, I’m skeptical that this is the next great leap in...
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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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We were all so excited when the first Microsoft Office products came out.  Not that other products were comparatively that bad, but there seemed to be a new vision of usability in the buttons and layout of the product.  As time has progressed, we’ve all gotten very comfortable with the desktop application and most...
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The fact that the market is excited about Workday would be an understatement.  Hype around this company’s products and functionality appear to be racing quite past reality and approach mythical levels.  Perhaps the confidence in the HR industry for Dave (Duffield) to deliver another great HR application is deservedly high.  Or perhaps the marketing...
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Many might argue that this is a point solution market.  Indeed, much of what we hear these days is about point solutions.  They are the “best of breed” solutions, have the most advanced functionality, slickest user interface and self service tools, and probably the best per function process and workflows.  And while I won’t...
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Will the need for someone writing code ever disappear?  Perhaps the real question is not if, but when this will happen.  We do things today that we would not have dreamed of just fire or six years ago.  Today, our portals allow users to customize the look and feel of their interface, to provide...
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Oracle coded their compensation workbench so they could use it themselves.  It’s the best module in their HR suite.  What a novel idea to create an application you think is good enough to use yourself.  There are other models of course.  SuccessFactors and other SaaS organizations now have a healthy record of coding and...
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