Finance
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Merge, Outsource, Re-merge
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Imagine this. You’re fixing your house, and you take down a few walls to reconfigure how the place looks – it’s a bit more open, you can see more, put more people in it when you entertain. While you’re at it, you decide to put new walls up – perhaps a new powder room where…
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Stop Selling Apps: SaaS is a Service
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Increasingly, I’m seeing organizations change their buying habits, at least in theory. Vendor selections are no longer the total domain of functional requirements as they once were. We don’t care nearly as much about feature functionality and our ability to customize the software to our specific needs. Instead, we’re shifting to a couple of different…
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Engagement is Economic Theory
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I was having a recent conversation with John Sumser where we discussed my need to be an engaged employee. Indeed, I’m that guy who is almost always engaged because I honestly love my work. I’m one of those unique people who actually find the world of HR and HR technology interesting. In general, I’m the…
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Which Version of Reality?
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I’m an advocate of reality. It’s nice when you can look at something and immediately recognize it. In most cases, a reflection of reality is quite obvious. When I say the word “chair” each and every reader automatically has a concept generate in their heads – some with an armchair, some with an office chair,…
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The “Other”
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Why can’t we get along with payroll? What makes them so different? It really does not matter when Payroll reports up to HR and when they report up to Finance. There always seems to be some friction. Often we like to think that they are just “different” people. HR people are strategic and nurturing and…
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UFO’s: Unfinished Objects
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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 we…
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Market Salary Rates
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The HR Capitalist had a post the other day about pricing candidate salaries. But as usual, I have my own opinions. Say it with me – the market rate for any candidate is the $$ amount they will accept. They’ve got info about what they are worth, you’ve got info about what they are worth. …
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HRO is not Dead
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HRO has seemed dead for at least a couple of years now. A couple years ago it was almost all I was writing about, and there were mega deals to be had every other month. All consultants were talking about to their clients was deciding if they should outsource or not. At the time, HRO…
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Employee Engagement Surveys – Cost-cutting strategy when using a vendor
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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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Normative Data for Employee Surveys – Worth the Spend?
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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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The Money Multiplier
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I’ve put a lot of faith and hope in businesses as the economy continues to trend downward. I had initially thought that this time around we would be smarter. Smarter than in 2001 when the bubble burst and HR technology spending almost completely stopped for 3 years. In that time, there was virtually no growth…
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CedarCrestone Pulse Update
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CedarCrestone recently updated their annual HRIT survey covering the trends in HR budgets. It’s especially interesting right now as the economy swings down. There is obviously much more content and charts in the real report you can get from CedarCrestone, but here’s a quick summary and my comments. During December 2008, CedarCrestone conducted its first…
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SuccessFactors Results
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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 layoff ((I don’t have direct knowledge, but the word on the street was that they did 20% across the board))…
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US Businesses for Sale?
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Back in I guess what was the 80’s, there was all the rage over Japanese money buying US property and business. Well times have changed and there is an interesting dichotomy going on. Now, the U.S. economy is outsourcing to China and India (and others). Low skilled labor is going outside of the U.S. and…
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HR Budgets & the Economy
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The economy is in the tank, and while predictions are that things will get better in 2009, many HR leaders are doing budgets right now. The problem with recessions and HR is that HR budgets often take longer to come back than other budgets. Take 2001 as an example. The “bubble” burst with such ferocity…
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Recession Technology
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With the U.S. and probably global economy slowing down, we’d all expect technology spending to slow down with it. After all, in 2001 when the “bubble burst,” it took a few years (I’d guess 2004) for the IT money to really come back. Smart companies will continue to invest in infrastructure. As Andrew McAfee writes…
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ROI and Sensitivity Analysis
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I’ve written before about how often HR does not speak the language of finance that executives need when presenting business case. Often, HR’s projects are on the backburner or are not approved because HR simply can’t articulate to the same degree what all the possibilities are when they need money. A simple ROI or TCO…
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Connecting Employee Performance and Enterprise Performance
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Should Employee Performance Management be integrated and considered in Enterprise Performance Management? In an interesting twist, Thomas Otter and Jonathan Becher started a conversation here at exactly the same time that I was participating in the same conversation at Knowledge Infusion’s COE. Thomas states: One of my present irks is that both the finance community…
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Choosing the Right Talent Strategy to Drive Profits
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So how much does it cost to drive up revenues by 1%? There are many possibilities including: Cost of acquiring new talent versis: Cost of developing new talent Cost of rewards versus: Cost of 1% increase in engagement So which of these has the largest actual impact to the bottom line? It’s not as if…