systematicHR

Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.

I heard a rumor that I’ll leave as a rumor that when Microsoft Windows was put into general release it had over 60K known and documented bugs. 60K thinks in the product that did not work, but that they knew about. Now, I actually doubt this is true, but the probability is actually that there were a great many bugs that were known when the product was release.

Conservativism isn’t a bad thing when it comes to technology. I know too many companies that are on the “bleeding edge” and continuously learn to pay for it only to forget that lesson during the next vendor selection. I’m not saying that you should still be on PeopleSoft 6.5 and perhaps think about upgrading to 7.0 when 9.0 finally comes out. But perhaps it’s not a bad thing to be a release behind. When I was in sales, I never minded when a client couldn’t get the latest release because they simply bought too early. My philosophy was that someone else could test out the new releases and my clients could base their upgrades on their experiences with updated software patches.

Another part of conservativism that isn’t bad is the ability to evaluate purposefully and thoroughly. Rushing your vendor selections without the appropriate amount of due diligence into what current needs are and how the vendors will adopt or shape those needs is critical to the eventual support and execution of your HR strategy. If you’re not sure it works, don’t use it. As Donald Glade has found in many of his surveys, there is simply too much “shelfware” of software products that are purchased and never even installed because there were not actually necessary.