Radio Show #15: Naomi Lee Bloom, Managing Partner, Bloom & Wallace

According to Naomi Lee Bloom to evaluate the HR solution one has to bring an investigator-reporter mind set to the process and add a bit of software archeology.

The most important aspects:
1. Functionality (what the product does),
2. Architecture - how it does it (the logic model and the architecture are very hard to discover, it tells you a lot about whether it is affordable, if it is easy to deal with and about the future of the product).

Always remember that if your vendor offers its own Best Practices, you sign up with those practices as well and should try to go along with that. Therefore, it is important to identify the areas where you have to be unique.

It is extremely important to look “under the covers” – this will give you a clear idea what you can configure and what not, it will reveal the nuances of the vendor’s approach to HR and whether it matches with yours.

It is also important to evaluate the vendor as a company:
People – leadership team, what talent it attracts.
Corporate culture – does it attract the best and the brightest?

Naomi gives a very valuable advice for strategic analysis – business strategy analysis or software requirements analysis. It should be:
Rich, Rigorous and Robust.

HR Technology Profile: Workday / O.Blansett and N. Tyaglo

A complete suite of business management services:
•Human Capital Management
•Payroll
•Financial Management
•Procurement
•Resource management
•Business Intelligence

Delivery Model – only over the internet
Intended users: employees, managers, back office.

Workday offers Employee/Manager Self-Service

“Under the hood”: SAAS, multi-tenant architecture – can support all of its customers in a single instance of the database


Integration Model
Workday offers hosted, packaged integration built on natively generated web services and delivered using embedded enterprise service bus (ESB) technology. Object Management Server, the core of the solution, speaks only XML. UI servers convert XML into files according to client’s needs – PDF, Excel, etc.
Workday allows universal, standards-based connectivity for virtually all types of business applications, information and processes.
Security
Database security:
Encryption Strength: AES cipher, 256-bit key
Workday encrypts every single attribute value before it is written in the database. The database sees only encrypted values, so backup files and log files contain only encrypted values. This is not possible with the conventional database schema, but workdays’ database architecture makes this possible.
Security for Communications - TLS (SSL 3.0): strong key sizes, no weak cipher suites, secure session keys to prevent hijacking.
Web Services Security: WS-Security support, Communication uses TLS (SSL 3.0)
Internet Data Centers Security:
Redundant power, HVAC, Internet connectivity, Backup Power
Physically secure
Workday owns and operates all servers

OMS guarantees one consistent approach for secured access. Robust set of password rules, multiple levels of authentication control.
Authorization: users have traditional and derived roles. Derived roles - based on the information in the database (system of record for jobs, so Workday can determine who has access to what). For example, if the manger has moved to another department, s/he automatically gains/ loses access to the department’s information.

Configuration vs. Customization
•The application is highly flexible
•The system is built with the philosophy that shortcuts should be everywhere and that power users should be able to support business change without involving IT.

Reporting/Metrics/Dashboards
Built-in Business Intelligence: Workday provides more than 1200 operational reports that deliver the information executives, managers, HR specialists, employees, and auditors need. These reports are available in a browser, as PDFs or as Excel spreadsheets. Custom report writing is available as well.
Dashboard – Workday users have personalized “My Workday” pages that present the tasks that need to be accomplished. Tailored to fit 3 types of users: casual users, managers and power users.

Upgrade Model - Workday provides updates

Global Functionality:
Workday is designed to support multi: -language, -currency, -business entity, etc. in a single global instance, enabling users to track and manage business activity locally while providing a view of your organization as a single consistent entity.

Audit Reports
Non-destructive data updates – application data is never over-written; rather the new value is recorded and can see a history of value at any point in time. Audit reports can be by user or by object.

Data transfer covered by contract acceptable to EU (“Model Contract”). Workday achieved EU Safe Harbor certification in 2007.

Cost Model – subscription fee based model

Support Model - Saas is customer driven. Saas puts the customer in a driver’s seat. It eliminates really expensive IT items: servers, database software, operating systems, people who have to support it, etc. Saas can really shrink the overall costs of supporting a large customer base. This allows the company to focus on one product – one instance instead of wasting time on products installed at the customers’ premises. The company can throw all its resources to make that version superb.

Six Steps to Company-Wide Adoption

The technology is constantly evolving. Many big companies consider adoption of the integrated solutions for the company-wide interactions. As Michael notes, company-wide deployment drastically differs. The author draws parallel with a presidential campaign - the goal is to win the vote of the nation, however, it breaks down to crafting your campaign for each state, each region…

His advice for the company-wide social software implementation is:
1. Encourage a broad range of use cases.
2. Recruit energetic champions across the organization.
3. Launch the tools with hands-on experiences for new users.
4. Route repeated activities through social software.
5. Integrate with existing systems of record (can significantly enhance CRM)
6. Leverage public communities.

HR's struggle with Web 2.0

That’s pretty much the reality of today. I agree with the author that those companies that are not learning how to leverage Web 2.0 are set to loose the competition. So, why HR is not pushing for it? The root of the problem is partially in HR’s role in the organizations. Web 2.0 can be regarded as a revolution in the way people socialize today. However, most of the businesses are not ready to adapt to the change. Just as they have not adopted the strategic view on HR.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Amazing! It’s interesting that the author, Michael Wesch, has PhD in Anthropology. Web 2.0 has incredibly transformed human interaction. Also, it is important to note that there are tons of things to rethink, including those mentioned in the video: privacy, ethics, copyright, etc.

Social Technographics Data

Interesting article! Companies that fail to adapt to the change will lose their competitiveness in the market. Web 2.0 has changed not only how people socialize but enter many other spheres of human life. Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp… Others go as far as IBM. The company has established a virtual island in Second Life for the employees’ collaboration and customers interaction:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/122007-ibm-virtual-world.html?ap1=rcb

Personally, I am :

• An avid Spectator – love listening to podcasts, watching videos and reading forums.
• A reluctant joiner – have profiles but do not update or even visit regularly.
• Enjoy collecting - use RSS, however, it happened to me that some of the interesting stuff was removed from the web. So, if I find something really important, I copy it and save in my on-line “docs” library.
• A critic from time to time .
• A lazy creator – so far, that’s the only personal blog I have created.

2003 Trends and Where We are Today

The goal of the article was to identify the main trends of the changes in a workplace for the next 10 years. So, let’s see where we are 5 years later:

1. Email: Web 2.0 offers new ways for collaboration and data processing. The technology went much further than just unifying the information flow in the inbox. Call centers were pioneer-industry.
2. Organized labor – will always fluctuate depending on the economic conditions. With glooming recessing no wonder the unionization rate went substantially up in 2008.
3. Biz Goes to Kindergarten – still a wishful trend. Kindergarten could be a bit too early, but middle and high school in US urgently needs a reform. Little if no progress has been done in that sphere during past 5 years.
4. Going Euro - goes both ways. US takes ideas from Europe just like Europe looks for the standards in US to stimulate the entrepreneurship in the “Old World”.
5. Companies won’t sleep – true to some degree, especially for IT. As an example, it is usual for software engineers to spend a night in the office working on developing a program (inspiration like). However, it is rarely 24/7 and more like a flexible work schedule – work during the night, come in later tomorrow.
6. Artificial Intelligence – still lots of interest and potential
7. The simmering malaise – don’t we all have in our contracts “employment at will” clause?
8. Office design – is very diverse nowadays. “One set up for all” does not work any more. It depends on lots of factors: industry, corporate culture, workforce demographics, etc.
9. Defined Benefits Plans – proved to be false. Less and less companies offer defined benefits plans. The tendency is to the contrary – the majority try to convert defined benefits plans into defined contribution plans.
10. Telework - pretty common today. Still presents some challenges from HR prospective (workers’ comp., engagement, etc.)
11. Consumer-driven health care reigns – it does. With the healthcare inflation consistently outpacing economic, more companies choose to introduce / raise employee contributions. This creates more awareness of the costs among the workforce.
12. Child care – still the same.
13. Help wanted: 10 million workers – still possible to happen. However, the major problem is not only the lower birth rate but the qualifications of the workforce. Again # 3, education reform is needed.
14. Outsourcing – still the same.
15. Recruiting older workers – still an issue. Any HR magazine publishes strategies how to engage and attract aging baby-boomers. Unfortunately, the “quality” of younger workers is not the same in terms of education and experience. Lots of corporations invest into development of in-house knowledge centers to capture and preserve the knowledge of the retiring experts.
16. Mergers – still true. Lots of the failures are to blame for the culture incompatibility.
17. Freelancers and consultants – is very attractive for highly qualified experts. However, the government made 1099 compliance very tricky. Business still risks a lot by misclassifying the employees as contractors. Examples – FedEx, Microsoft, ect.
18. Pay for wellness performance – not much has changed.
19. Spirituality at work – still the same. Some companies, like Google, offer workers to dedicate 25 % of their paid work time to the project that matters to an employee.
20. Women at work – still the same as 5 years ago. Unfortunately, the glass ceiling is still there, and the last elections showed that sexism is still blooming in the “male” job sector.
21. Skills shortage – very true up to today. Protectionism is not an answer… Going back to #3.
22. Security vs. Privacy - security technologies are getting more and more sophisticated every day. However, Patriot Act is scary.
23. Accounting for people – more companies see their competitive advantage in human resources that they have.
24. Universal health care – let’s ask Mr. Daschle. Hope he’s got a good plan.
25. End of HR as we know it – no more paper shuffling, let us contribute to the strategy!

Where is your organization on the CMM?

Our organization is stuck in between 2 and 3. HRIS is used corporation wide, including staffing branches. There is a team in our IT department dedicated to support of the system. It is used for payroll, supports recruitment cycles and has capabilities of reporting. However, very often to create a new report, introduce new metrics or modify parameters of the existing report systems requires support of the IT team. The HRIS is very antiquated and not user friendly.

HR as a Business Partner

In today’s world a strategic HR role demands proactive, competent leadership. HR professionals should take an active role in determining direction, influencing the team and aligning it with the organizational goals and strategy. However, there are still a few organizations which regard HR as a business partner. The problem comes from both sides – the organization and the HR professionals themselves.

The expectations from the HR have shifted tremendously. However, in lots of organizations the “place” of HR is still low on the corporate ladder. On one hand, the leadership holds HR responsible for delivering true business value, on the other – top HR people still are not included in Sr. Management team, getting the updates on the strategy from a “second hand”. HR professionals should not be expected to only “execute” what has been decided, but should be regarded as partners in crafting the strategy itself. It’s the only way to enable them make a strategic contribution to the success of the organization. Instead HR is given a tactical role – Sr. management delivers the message ‘why?” and expects to get a “how?” plan.

Another problem lies in HR professionals themselves. I tend to agree with Jay Jamrog about educational incapacity. Human Resources people are stuck in a traditional mindset vs. strategic approach. I see HR function as “glue” which brings different layers together: the goals of the business, team and an individual. Instead, quite a few professionals tend to take sides: executing the goals set by the C suit of the organization and treating people as expenses or taking a role of employee advocate. It is absolutely critical for the HR professionals to focus on acquiring and developing leadership competencies: being proactive vs. reactive, the ability of mastering “business language” quantitative analysis and business case instead of high “rhetoric”, adapting to constant change vs. focusing on securing stability, etc.

The role of HR in business has evolved from administrative function to strategic partner. However, the transition has been effectively implemented only in a few organizations. To be successful in strategic partnership HR professionals should “have a seat at the executive table” and focus on constant development of their leadership skills and competencies, including business expertise.

Bill Kutik Podcast Thoughts

http://www.knowledgeinfusion.com/coe/docs/DOC-4268

The main focus of the companies' leadership is to align the workforce capabilities with the strategic course of the organization. However, the majority of the managers still do not know how to read employees’ profiles from the skills standpoint. Web 2.0 has revolutionized the internet environment making communication much more usable, more real-time, more collaborative and more community based.

I believe that community based web has tremendously advanced our communication possibilities, however, it raised lots of issues to solve as well. I find Jason’s statement regarding privacy a bit far-fetched. It seems like people do not want privacy any more. Nevertheless, when their personal information is utilized against them, employees do see it as privacy invasion and sue the companies. Search for a “perfect” candidate may go too far. The example with “kayaking” sounded a bit disturbing. If from the very beginning you focus on that as a selective factor, will the manager consider a disabled candidate with a great skills-set for the position?

Jason mentions the war for talent vs. skills. I rather believe in focus on transferable competencies. I disagree that there is no shortage in talent, instead the companies have hard times finding a person with the right skills. A person with the right competencies may develop new skills much quicker in a constantly evolving business environment vs. a person with strong skills set but low adaptability.

Another thing is that some company leaders and HR professionals get overly excited about new HR software and rush to implementation without assessing the organizational readiness for it. Before choosing the software it is important to clearly see the alignment of the organizational goals and strategy with the skills of the workforce, understand the “demographics” of the workers and the organizational culture, identify the problems that you are trying to solve with it, what training will be required before the implementation.

W2.0 Project Solutions

Web 2.0 offers amazing tools to collect and analyze flow of data. One of the interesting technologies is GroupMail. In our company’s business it could be utilized in multiple ways. First of all, it could serve as a great tool for the newsletters. For example, if I was to send an important announcement, e.g. policies and procedures update, I would be able to track who opened the email and what links they clicked on. That information could be used for the audit purposes. It also allows creating, sending and tracking surveys. The surveys can be customized with the company’s logo and color scheme. The received data can be exported for the analysis. Also, it could serve as a great marketing tool: it can collect subscribers to the web-site, automate subscribe/unsubscribe services, etc.

Security is one the main factors to consider in choosing a browser-based and a document-management platform for creating Intranet. SharePoint looks like an interesting product to me. It can be used to access shared documents, workspace, contact, surveys, etc. Google Docs is very attractive since it is an open source, but its’ “openness” is also a major factor of concern when it comes to HR applications.

Technology Analysis

It is an amazing professional social networking tool. Creating professional profile helps to keep in touch with the former colleagues, business clients and partners. It is free to join and also offers paid tools to reach out to the professionals who are not in your network.
Comparable technology: social networking like Facebook or recruiting sites Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, etc.

Problems solved: The list of connections can be used in so many ways. It is a great recruiting / job search tool. For example, it creates more transparency making it harder for the applicant to embellish his/her job profile since the ex-coworkers have access to the information online. You can also post professional recommendations. It is extremely useful in business opportunities pursue. You can identify and track the connection to the right person at the potential client company and get the introduction through the people who are in your network already.

Recently they introduced LinkedIn Answers, similar to Google Answers and Yahoo! Answers. It allows members to discuss business-related issues, and receive answers from their personal networks or professional group and the hundreds of thousands of professionals in the LinkedIn community.

Pros: easy to access and utilize. Account settings allow to manage the privacy: access to view your connections, control the updates about your profile status, etc.
Cons: It limits the total number of invitation and you cannot join more than 50 LinkedIn Groups. Also, very often it fails to display the actual number of connection showing 500+ or 1000+ instead.

Project at Work

Our company is at the start-up stage. For market differentiation one of our goals is to personalize our technology and services.

Currently, I am working on creating a community for our payrolled workers. The industry specifics, temporary workforce, are the main challenge: the workers perform assignment at different companies, diverse industries (IT, financial services, engineering services, etc), high turnaround rate due the nature of the industry. Some of the ideas include creating an Intranet for the payrolled workers, regular newsletters, conducting surveys and processing the collected data in order to improve customer service.

First Class

I have missed first 2 classes due to the late enrollment. So far, I am very impressed with the collaborative environment and the flow of the information. I do find it a little bit overwhelming but it gives true hands-on experience with all the technology out there.
Looking forward to the class on Monday!