SuccessFactors last week released  "Professional Edition" a version of our workforce peformance management application for small and medium sized businesses. The idea is that by embedding the best practices we’ve learned from our 300+ implementations, we can help smaller companies get off the ground faster and get to results quicker.

I had a chance to sit down for a short interview with Ligia Zamora, Product Manager for Professional Edition and Andy Cohen, General Manager of the SMB group at SuccessFactors to talk about the launch of Professional Edition. Have a listen to the interview – our very first podcast. Let me know what you think.

Definition of Podcast at Wikipedia (if you were wondering). 

Update:
I also refer you to the Professional Edition Cupcake. Art created by Ligia Zamora.

Further justification for the on-demand model: get bug fixes faster. If anybody tells you software doesn’t break – they’re lying. Software is fallible. Sometimes the best QA misses the most tiny error that only one person in a billion will ever come across. But with SaaS it gets fixed fast, and it gets fixed for every customer simultaneously.

From the post:

Of course, conventional on-premises software vendors already realize that this is an advantage and are straining to rearchitect their legacy code along service-oriented lines. These projects, variously named Fusion, NetWeaver, Nexus and Dynamics are due to bear fruit sometime between 2007 and 2012, if anyone can be bothered to wait that long.

Read more at the Software as Services blog at ZDnet

This article at Management Issues brings home the fact that poor succession planning can really hurt a company. According to the article, when a top executive leaves a public company, stock prices tend to fall. But when the company has no succession plan in place, they fare much worse in terms of stock price than those companies that do.

From the article: 

It found that companies with clear succession plans performed more than seven per cent better on the markets a week after their change than those that delayed appointing a replacement… Companies with unplanned successions – where no replacement was immediately announced to the markets – saw their share prices fall by 2.1 per cent more than their peers with planned succession processes.

I was telling the truth. Our CEO, Lars Dalgaard really did dress up like Elvis at the HR Tech show in Chicago last week. And here are the pictures to prove it. Click the thumbnail for a bigger version.

IF (a blog for brand planners and creative thinkers) published an interview with me today. We spoke about the nature of corporate blogging and some of the thinking that goes into producing this blog.

Thought you might be curious to see what I thought of the HR Tech Conference in black and white. So here’s a scan of the evaluation form I filled out. In general, I thought the conference was worthwhile but I was dissappointed with the quality of some of the break-out sessions.

Did any of you make it to HR Tech? What did you think?

At the HR Tech show last week, I was confronted with a classic question. "If I want X, can your software be configured to do it, or will I need customization?"  According to Frank, our RFP Guy, “customization” has become a dirty word in RFPs, with  many companies stating upfront that they want to avoid it if possible. It’s an important consideration, and one that could save you a ton of money and some really bad headaches.

Here’s the lowdown: if something is configurable, it means the existing software can be worked (via the standard user interface) to reflect the change. If it requires customization it means software code has to be changed (added or moved around) so the software can do what you want it to. Guess which one costs more?

Changing code means sitting an engineer down at a computer to make changes that are often unique to you. This means 2 things. First, it means money. Engineers make a lot of it. So more costs upfront. Second, it may mean that your individual system is now unique – different from every other customer’s system. That can cause problems with upgrades and maintenance. Unique software means unique problems – problems that cannot easily be solved by the help desk. That can mean more money in the long run.

Every vendor deals with customization requests in different ways. It’s important to ask anyone you’re thinking of working with how they deal with them. Choose configuration vs. customization if at all possible. If you must customize, make sure you don’t get stuck with a system that can’t be upgraded and will be expensive and difficult to maintain.

This month, FastCompany is printing the feedback to its cover story last month entitiled
"Why We Love to Hate HR."  Apparently there was a huge volume of responses (43% for and 57% against the article).

 My favorites:

For
The fundamental problem with HR is that the service work such as payroll, benefits and compliance is commingled with the strategic work such as job definition, cadidate assessment, employee-performance management, and succession planning. When service and strategy aren’t separated, the immediate service needs take precedence over the more important but less tangible strategic work. And the death spiral begins… In short, HR needs to free iteself from the slavery of service to provide the leadership of strategy. – Thomas Hattersley

 Against
I am currently an HR director and am disgusted with your cover and negative, stereotyped, and immature comments regarding the profession. In my career, I’ve been a finance director, plant manager, safety director, and operations manager. All of those positions were easier than being an HR director. I am not a "dull tack in the drawer." I have three college degrees, including an MBA and an additional master’s degree. — Deborah Roberts

Please forgive a newbie to blogging, but here I go…

A really interesting article from Veritude recently brought to my attention to the idea of measuring Employee ROI.  The article puts forward the following issue –

“Executives rank productivity as the most important labor-related metric for their companies to track.  Curiously, though, productivity isn’t the most widely used metric today or the one that executives would most like to use in the future.”

The article goes on to link productivity to a metric called Employee ROI.  It points out that the most commonly used metrics in HR today are turnover and labor cost as percentage of revenue.

Linking Employee ROI to productivity and drawing contrast to cost focused metrics such as labor cost as % of revenue and turnover % is extremely interesting because it implies the recognition of productivity increase as including revenue increase as well as cost savings.  Maximizing productivity is fundamentally maximizing revenue and minimizing cost.  This concept is easy enough to understand, but business cases for new initiatives and projects to boost productivity are almost always based on cost reduction rather than on revenue increase.

(more…)

I actually had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Jac briefly at our exhibit booth and I was really glad to see that he was the closing keynote at the show.  I certainly didn’t see every speech or every session, but I felt the "big thinking" was somehow missing from the show. Dr. Jac fixed that right up (even if it was basically a pitch for his new service).

The presentation was fast moving, and far ranging, but the main idea was that talent is the core of any organization and should be optimized, leveraged and aligned for maximum results. Unalignment is the "common cold of business" – a drain on productivity and results.

He quoted Abe Maslow, who in 1964 said "If everybody concerned is absolutely clear about the goals and directives and far purposes of the organization practically all other questions then become simple technical questions of fitting means to ends."

He belives that other disciplines (sales, marketing, finance) all have metrics they work against. Execs have the Balanced Scorecard, Finance has Accounting, Production has Quality and Sales and Marketing have CRM. But HR doesn’t have anything, at least until now.

And so the talk was really about using his new metric for HR, dubbed TMI, Talent Management Intelligence, as a framework for starting to solve business problems through talent management.

My favorite quote came from Dr. Jac himself: "To think of people as an expense is so stupid it makes me want to throw up. People are hired to add value."