Actually, ADP was ranked 2nd. This however, is quite impressive considering they are an HR company and just a scant 5 years ago they barely knew what XML was.
The 2006 InformationWeek 500 list of most technologically innovative companies. “Unique among corporate rankings, the InformationWeek 500 spotlights the power of innovation in business technology, rather than simply identifying the biggest IT spenders.” ((Retrieved from InformationWeek.com on October 27, 2006.))
What’s interesting about this is that ADP is usually not thought of as a technology company on the leading edge. That’s probably because they are not. They are however, a fairly conservative organization that waits for technologies to be proven before rolling them out to clients. What comes out or the organization are solid platforms, smart partnerships and acquisitions, and steady market growth.
Let’s think about this for a moment. We always think of ADP as the mainframe payroll engine that is very old school. But back when PeopleSoft was in its infancy, ADP had the foresight to buy their source code and re-brand it as CSS HRizon (we now know it as Enterprise). Just in the past year, their acquisitions of Virtual Edge and Employease just show how smart their decisions continue to be.
Then comes my comment about them being a bit more conservative. I’ll be the first to say that it would have been nice for them to adopt real portal technologies earlier. They were a couple years late to the game there, and they are just now thinking about federated networks, but if you’re happy outsourcing, your technology philosophy might just be to lag a year or two, so this might be ok for their client base.
Kudos to ADP – brick and mortar old school turns technology innovator.
In other HR related organizations:
ACS at #77
Convergys at #81
Gevity at #214
Paychex at 242
3 responses to “ADP Ranked As Most Innovative”
impressive stuff indeed, thanks for pointing me to this!
It does add some credence to my argument that ADP is the number one SaaS vendor, not Salesforce…
http://theotherthomasotter.wordpress.com/2006/11/29/the-cult-of-saas-nobody-expects-the-saasquisition/
This comment e-mailed to me by “LL” – I thought it deserved a voice:
“Your Article – ADP Ranked as most Innovative – Did you really talk to a large user or did you listen to the company’s propaganda? If you truly evaluated their technology, I have a difficult time understanding how you could come to the conclusion trumpted in your article’s title. Info week may suffer from the same malady.”
I’m not sure I voiced my surprise in the post as I was really just conveying the results of the survey by IW. However, I do think that I was clear stating that I and most would consider ADP a technological lagger. Based on some recent activity and this article, I’ll assume that they are making the necessary changes. Some of the current users may have the same view I did (and maybe still do) a few montsh ago. Wait until an upgrade to see where ADP is going.
[…] ADP Ranked As Most Innovative by Human Resources (Human-Resources) @ Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:29:18 +0000 This however, is quite impressive considering they are an HR company and just a scant 5 years ago they barely knew what XML was. … In other HR related organizations:. ACS at #77. Convergys at #81. Gevity at #214. Paychex at 242 … Original post: ADP Ranked As Most Innovative by at Google Blog Search: human resources […]