A comment was made on the blog recently by a well known industry journalist who is also one of programmers of HR Tech. He was unhappy with some of my posts on the conference, specifically   my post on the Pay for Performance breakout session. I want to respond to the criticism publicly, because I think it is both valuable and important.

This journalist felt I was remiss in not mentioning that Authoria, the vendor involved in the presentation, is a direct competitor of SuccessFactors and that they beat us in the Performance Management Shootout. He felt this lack of context was misleading.  Let me say very clearly that if anyone was misled by this post, I apologize. I did, in fact, mention that we were beat in the shootout in this post about the shootout, but not directly in my post about the pay for performance session. I have now updated the post to reflect this.

I do not want my opinion on this one session to represent my opinions on the conference as a whole. I thought the conference was very worthwhile in general – well executed and, as tradeshows go, quite excellent. You can see my actual conference review form here.

Now switching gears – let me also be clear about this: I am not a journalist, and I do not intend to be. Journalists have a responsibility to be fair and factual and to provide context and background. And, while I personally strive toward that, Bloggers as a group do not have this responsibility. That is the strength and the weakness of this or any blog.  This blog is a single perspective, just one opinion, one view, one side of the story on what is happening in the HR Technology space. There are other perspectives (here are one and two), and I encourage everyone to see what they have to say as well.

The beauty of this format, however, as opposed to a magazine or newspaper, is that people can talk back in real time.  If you don’t like what I said about this conference or if I got something wrong, please feel free to share your opinion by posting a comment. Correct me in public. It’s okay! I have never filtered a comment (except for language). You can occupy the same space as I do and I want to encourage that as much as possible. The value for this blog is in the sharing of opinions and information – SuccessFactors the company and Max Goldman the guy want to know what you have to say – so get to it!