SuccessConnect 2010 kicked off today in the beautiful city of Frankfurt, our final SuccessConnect destination for 2010.

The event started with a bang with the ever energetic, Lars Dalgaard taking the stage.  Announcing the acquisition of YouCalc, a Danish company, to a jam packed house, Lars explained how SuccessFactors latest purchase will let business create and share custom reports and analytics from the cloud.

Jay Larson, SuccessFactors Head of Sales, was next up to the podium. Jay discussed HR’s new economic reality – do more with less: more ROI; greater business impact; connect HR with the business; and close the gap between strategy and execution.  He then went on to share success stories from those who have implemented more for less and have “BizX’ed” their organizations.  

Dmitri Krakovsky drilled further into SuccessFactors recent YouCalc acquisition explaining the new Calculator in the Cloud feature that will allow users to perform analytic mash-ups and what-if scenarios from any cloud based application. Dmitri also expressed his excitement over SuccessFactors new partnership with Jobvite, pointing out that the time to hire is not as important as hiring the best.

The final SuccessConnect of the year showcased the best of the best with Norbert Kleinjohann, CIO Siemens AG and Marion Horstmann, Corporate Vice President of HR, Siemens AG sharing their secrets for success.  

Marion Horstmann shared Siemens transformation of the HR function using a global people strategy of which transparency was a key element. Marion expressed her delight that her three requirements for a strong HR strategy were inherently delivered via SuccessFactors solutions: integrated applications for all people processes; a uniform product completely that speaks in a single global language; and recurring efficiency and higher quality.

Norbert Kleinjohann then went on to discuss how Siemens positioned their standard HR system, labeled 4Success, for success. “During the evaluation process, Siemens IT team worked with their HR colleagues to assess 50 possible suppliers, both on premise and in the Cloud. We awarded the contract to SuccessFactors in March 2009, based on functionality and usability and the provisioning of an integrated solution with consistent data models,” says Kleinjohann.  (See article SuccessConnect: The Biggest Cloud in the World) Kleinjohann cites: “We have seven modules in place – target setting, performance management, compensation management, roundtables, career development planning, recruitment management, and employee profiles. We went live within 6 months with the target setting module which we rolled out to 170,000 employees. We now have 400,000 employees information loaded into 4Success and have 40,000 log ins per day.” SuccessFactors had the fastest implementation, best functionality, usability, and integrated capabilities.  Kleinjohann says: “I believe that Cloud Computing will be adopted by IT sooner than we expect.”

The audience enthused over the Siemens presentation stating that it was a pretty impressive story for an impressive first day in Frankfurt!

Lars, our founder and CEO, and I are working on our book Return on Execution©. You will find posts from the research and findings that we’ll share in the forthcoming book right here on the Business Execution blog. After all driving execution is what explains the financial performance of your company. Execution creates sustained competitive advantage. With an average of 70% of your operating expenditure comprised of labor (for not taking contractors into account) there is no bigger expense post to optimize if you want to drive better execution. It’s not a matter of what but rather who drives the execution of your strategy. To learn more about this exciting book visit this Return on Execution(c) link to read the short version of it.

You’ll see posts from the SF Research team as well as guest posts from our select thought leaders on the topic of driving execution. Keith will share insights from working with our customers around the world in how they increase their ability to execute both here and through Twitter so sign up for that too. We welcome your active input and feedback. Let’s go drive some better execution.

What do the greatest companies all have in common?  You got it — the ability to focus their organization on strategy execution by ensuring that each individual is working (i.e., executing) on goals that matter to the organization.  What type of goals “matter?”  Put simply, only the ones that have a direct line back to the Strategy sitting in a binder on the CEO’s bookshelf.

We’re just researching what impact we have on our customer’s ability to communicate strategy and execute new directions faster. The early results are very intriguing and positive – and we promise to share them when we finalize our research.   The timing is also significant as the economy has forced companies to be agile and demands that companies be able to shift their strategy (and subsequent execution) at a much more rapid pace than in a bull market.

The thing that struck me when doing some desktop research was that even though we know that 85% of performance is due to execution, the amount of content available is unbelievably skewed towards strategy — a simple web search on “Business Strategy” returns 3X more hits than “Business Execution”  (80M hits vs. 24M hits).   The term strategy execution returns only 3.5M hits.

The good news is that the “worm is turning.”   Execution is the topic du jour – maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s just the natural evolution of business.   Regardless, you can put us squarely on the “Business Execution” team, and we’re looking forward to sharing our results soon.

After all, Execution is the name of the game to drive financial results