Talent Management Interview: CDW

Zak

Hello, and welcome to People Performance Radio, sponsored by SuccessFactors, the global leader in performance and talent management software solutions. Without further ado, please allow me to introduce Dr Steve and Jim "The Mad Dog" Matheson!

Jim

Welcome back to the show everybody, this is your host, Jim Matheson, and who do I have with me?

Steve

Steve Hunt.

Jim

The Doc!

Steve

The Doc! Hey, how are you doing?

Jim

Good, good—how are you doing this week?

Steve

I'm doing good, suffering from allergies a little bit, but other than that, feeling good.

Jim

OK, so before we jump into the show, just wanted to remind everybody that you can get a hold of us by giving us a call—what's the phone number, Steve?—just kidding, I know you have no idea what it is. 650-425-7474, just remember that.

Steve

That's right.

Jim

You can also email us at podcast@successfactors.com, or follow us on Twitter, twitter.com/ppradio. Don't forget to give us a review in the iTunes music store, we don't have too many in there, so we're looking for reviews. And onto this week's show—you pumped up about this week's show, Steve?

Steve

I am, we're going to hear from another great client from Success Connect, who I think had a highly energetic style, which I appreciated, but also some really interesting comments that he made.

Jim

Yeah, I'm afraid that he could take over my job, and he'd sound pretty good, he's got a pretty good radio voice. We're talking about Troy Heinritz from CDW, he's the Senior HRIS System Analyst over there. Have you ever used CDW? (outside of work).

Steve

I don't know, what does it do?

Jim

They sell computers and what not through the web, they mostly sell b to b, but you can go on there and buy stuff too. They usually have really good deasl on stuff.

Steve

I'll have to go check it out. I guess that goes back to you making me feel like a technology troglodyte on every show.

Jim

Yes. CDW, they're big time, man, you should check 'em out.

Steve

I will.

Jim

In fact, Steve, they are ranked number 39 on the Forbes list of America's largest private companies, and CDW's a leading provider of technology products and services for business, government, and education, so that's what they're all about. So what's this interview all about?—what do we need to look out for?

Steve

Well, this is a SuccessFactors' client, and I think he talks about use of the system, but he has some things that I think are really useful if you're a company that's considering using talent management software, because he has some very good realistic observations about it. A couple of things he talks about, one is he talks about how they started out focusing on automation, but as they started using the technology, decided they could do a lot more with it than just automate their processes, and it really enabled them to take a different approach to talent management, basically technology enabled them to think differently about people, and also has very realistic expectations about the ROI of talent management technology. I think one of the challenges, especially if you're somebody trying to get budget for talent management technology in companies, people are always focusing on, "What are the quarterly results?". Well, when you're talking about people, people don't change that fast, and when you're looking at implementing things like succession planning and performance management, you can get immediate ROI from the automation which he mentions, but as far as getting the transformation of changing people's behavior, it takes a while for that stuff to kick in, and he talks a little bit about that, about how they're looking, as their case changes over time, saying, "Yes, we are going to get the ROI, but it starts out with getting the automation, and getting high adoption rates, and I just think it's some really good observations.

One last thing that he said, that I thought was quite interesting, was, I never had really thought about as much, but one of the advantages of SuccessFactors' particular Software as a Service model is how he said, when new clients come on and use Success Connect, he was really interested, they've been using this system for a while, looking at new clients, because new clients are more likely to use some of the newer features in our system, knowing that they'd be able to turn those on if they wanted to use them, which is interesting. In most of these users' conferences, the new clients are looking to learn from the older clients, and in Success Connect it was going both ways, which I think is kind of cool.

Jim

Yeah, that's true, I think that's because, with SuccessFactors, even though it's a Software as a Service, right, you're not forced to upgrade, so you have the option to flip it on when you're ready, so a lot of the customers, especially enterprise customers, who have been on the system for a while, weren't quite ready to make that upgrade, so I think that's where that came into play, correct?

Steve

Absolutely, very much unlike Windows Vista, which kind of forces you to accept everything, whether you want it or not.

Jim

Yeah, I'm on Vista, I'm not really a big fan, some of the people on my team are still holding out, but we'll see. OK, well let's go ahead and jump into the interview with Troy from CDW.

Troy

My name's Troy Heinritz from CDW Corporation, currently the Senior HRIS Systems Analyst there for CDW, in charge of the SuccessFactors' admin and guiding the OD leadership and development group that's driving the talent in the organization.

Jim

Great, well thanks for joining us. Were you involved in the selection process with SuccessFactors?

Troy

Absolutely, it was actually back in 2005, we really took a look at, how do we automate the binder process, it was really where it started from, and we had a new VP of HR that just came in at that time.

Jim

So those were your main challenges, just trying to automate the form?

Troy

Yeah, automate the succession, automate the form, but then when we really got to HR Tech back in 2005 in Chicago, and really started to see some of the software that was in the landscape, it was truly clear that from a succession standpoint, SuccessFactors was far and above everybody else in the organization, and the landscape of the niche vendors to bolt onto the core HR system, so it was really interesting to us that you could have this automated live profile, you don't have to have the binders, you could have org charts, you can have bench strength, and it was like, "Oh, this is all good stuff – we need to have this", and then of course after we decided to go forward with succesion, did we get told by the sales guy that, "Oh, we also have performance and TGM and compensation", and all that good stuff, so of course we had a home-grown performance system, so we got rid of the home-grown performance system at the same time and did TGM and performance as well.

Jim

Interesting, so initially you chose SuccessFactors for succession, and then sort of from there you took at look at the whole suite?

Troy

Exactly.

Jim

And you guys are using pretty much all of these modules today?

Troy

That's correct, we've actually added on CDP on top of that. We haven't really used the career portion of the CDP yet, we're more just the development planning, because in our, we call it the talent review process or TRP, that's really where we're taking the, who's really ready to take these next steps in the organization, in order to get the right talent at the right time, not necessarily because someone might be leaving, but truly, what's their job going to look like two, three, four years down the road, and then who can we get groomed two, three, four years down the road to then take that job when it comes available, so the development portion really came into play, so we really tried to tie the development and individual development plans around towards the preparation of those new roles, rather than just a year to year kind of process, as it's been in the past.

Jim

I see. Is the entire company using the system today, or certain roles?

Troy

Sure, from a useability standpoint, we load everybody in, so everybody has the capability of filling out profiles, kind of looking around the system, using the directory against some of the resources, like to coach, and those things, and as well as doing their career pathing, if they want to.

But from a core perspective, every one but our, all the non-commissioned co-workers go through the performance and goal setting process in order to have their annual appraisals done every year within the system, and of course then feed to our merit process that happens early in the fiscal year, and then from the talent review process, everybody's encouraged to do a live profile, but it is required for managers and above.

Then we truly have, we've broken down the silos when we talk about talent but we still have siloed functional meetings, so really it's the directors sit down and discuss with the managers and then the senior leader discusses with the directors, and then the senior leaders get together at an organizational talent review meeting, where for two days they truly talk about their, we call them "the top box", it's the 987 Lominger Box positions that we really talk about as well as critical positions, minorities and females.

Jim

Great. So what sort of results have you guys accomplished after implementing SuccessFactors?

Troy

We really wanted to make sure we got the adoption rate down first before we started looking at the true ROI, so now that we're in the third, going into the fourth year, we're really going to start taking a look at certain critical things like, now that we've identified high performers, what's the turnover for high performers? Are we losing people before we get them to move? Are there opportunities within the organization that we're missing, because we're not strategically planning for those specific roles? So once we can finally sit down and say, this is the direction we want to head, we're definitely going to get some ROI going here in the next year or two. But for the most part, it's really trying to get, it's more been the usual stuff, form tracking, are people completing the process, are they logging into the system? Is the adoption there? Because in order to get the true ROI, we need to get the adoption rate up first, and get people really engaged with the system, and the new Ultra interface, I think, is probably one of the best ways to do that, because it gives us a way to kind of reinvent the system now in our third year.

Jim

We were, so we're on V10, and we actually just upgraded to Ultra the Saturday before Success Connect started, so literally this week we're kind of testing while we here and getting some input from some other people, from the newer customers actually, because it's really, in the Success Connect tracks, while we were at the conference, it really showed us there were advanced courses and new courses and new tracks for new implementers, and we really wanted to take a look at the new implementers, because the new implementers are implementing Ultra, so they probably have more to offer some of us old hats, if you will, as far as how we could use the system better.

Troy

Yeah definitely, I've played around with Ultra myself, and it's definitely much more user-friendly, so hopefully you guys can get those adoption rates capped out there.

Jim

If nothing else, it's a way that we can start on a new communcation to say the system is up and running, it's brand new, a new look and feel, we'll probably see the log ins spike probably in the first week or two, but if they really see some of the new things, like the Facebook integration, and the ceiling charts, and the new live profile layouts, just some of those things are really going to engage some of the individual contributors to really start making their presence known in the organization, so we can find those diamonds in the rough.

Troy

Great. Right, well thanks for joining us.

Jim

You bet, have a good one.

Speaker

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