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The intersection between HR strategy and HR technology

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Applying the Cheat Code

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I’m pretty hopeless in most games.  There are always levels, other people to compete against, and too many tasks to get done.  Inevitably, I run out of patience before I reach the top state, or I realize I’m not very good at the game and I just give up due to incompetence.  The wonderful thing about many games is the “cheat code.”  The cheat code often gives a specified commodity that might be useful in helping a player reach that top state.  The cheat code might come in the form of unlimited gold to but things, extra power for killing things, or even the ability to jump levels.  My only hope is the cheat code, the lame player’s way to the top.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could apply a cheat code in our work lives?  If there was one, it can’t possibly be as simple as a game where you just google to see if a cheat code exists.  In real life, cheat codes are incredibly hard to find, but perhaps they do exist somewhere.  In the world of technology deployments, we certainly know what are NOT cheat codes.

  • Lift and shift deployments.  Let’s say you have a user experience problem and you want to implement a new core HR system and have much better cloud systems that employees interact with.  The reality is that you will end up with a much better UX, but when your employees log into the new system, they are not going to be any happier with the experience if you did a lift and shift implementation.  Simply going in and changing the technology without any of the other foundational factors really does not help you.  It turns out that other factors like your process design, your portal and content management, and your approval chains are still an obstacle.  Let’s say for example an employee has moved homes.  The fact that they still can’t find documentation in the portal that tells them an address change is only the first step, and payroll/state tax changes might need to happen, or how benefit pans are impacted is still a problem.  Sure, getting into a more beautiful system might give them incremental happiness, but it’s not enough to overcome the significant shortcomings in your overall program.
  • Radical technology transformations only.  In addition to #1, many organizations do radical technology transformations and completely forget the amount of change management they will need, or they defund the change management work stream after the first change order comes in.  It’s always sad to see an organization that has spent millions of dollars implementing technology that users don’t adopt because there was a poor change strategy.  Often there is nothing wrong with the technology, or the processes.  But when a user finds something hard the first time because they were not coached on the new process, the repeat user is hard to come by.
  • Saving costs by changing your processes only.  At the end of the day, you do have to realize that your users really are dissatisfied with your technology too.  Yes, they do hate the process because it takes too long and involves too many people that don’t matter to the outcome, but the interface is terrible and hard to navigate.  I’ve seen company after company implement new processes on top of really old technology and then wonder why the end users still complain.
    The moral of the story here is that people (change), process and technology all matter, and it’s hard to have huge successes if you don’t transform all of these three components together.

The good news is that there actually are some valid cheat codes.

  • Cloud.  Wait, didn’t we just say that you can’t just do technology alone?  Yes we did, but the facts are that today’s best cloud technologies allow organizations not only to shift cost and headcount resources in a highly efficient manner by removing in-house technology management, but process design is simply so much easier than it was with legacy platforms.  We’ll still need to remember to have good change management, but cloud really also makes adoption easier since the UX is so significantly better than older platforms.  Compared to legacy on-premise software, cloud platforms accelerate people, process and technology components and serve as a game changing cheat code.
  • Crowd.  I’m not seeing crowdsourcing in HR yet, but I think it’s a major cheat code for whoever can figure it out first.  We have build such huge and costly infrastructures around shared services, but today’s social technologies combined with metadata/tagging structures have the ability to let end users manage their own inquiries with the corporate cloud.  Imagine the employee who moves homes and asks the corporate crowd what to do, and receives multiple answers from the crowds with links to the address change function in HR, payroll tax forms, and benefits enrollment.  HR now plays the content curator role rather than the source of all content.

The thing to remember is that these cheat codes only are available for a short period of time.  At some point, everyone else figures what the cheat code is and everyone has the advantage.  The early adopters can leverage an advantage for a few years, while laggers suffer higher costs, lower adoption, poorer UX, and slower processes for years to come.

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3 responses to “Applying the Cheat Code”

  1. Ceil Tilney Avatar

    This is a particularly rich post – would be great to flesh it out into a series of ruminations with examples. Just a thought – perhaps we can find someoplace willing to host a panel with representatives from each of the 3 legs of the effective technology + process + change stool.

  2. Henry Avatar

    I’d just like to add something about “the cloud”. It is promising but you also need not to overtrust it. Particularly in business environments, where some information just needs to be kept private, trusting “the cloud” may be careless.

    If you have that clear, then, go ahead.

  3. systematicHR Avatar

    Hi Henry: Interesting comment. I’d actually argue the opposite in that private data might actually be more secure in many cloud environments than in corporate data centers. If I’m looking at an IBM, AWS (amazon) center, or if I’m looking at one of the major HR providers like Cornerstone or Workday, their data centers are probably more secure than corporate centers. Since they securely deliver data to the firewall, any breach is the corporation’s breach, not the vendor’s.

    I agree with you that “trusting the cloud is careless” but we don’t actually just subscribe to the cloud – we pick a vendor who happens to be in the cloud. The clarification is certainly necessary though.