Analyst Panel Shares Expert Take on Latest HR Technology Trends
HR Executive's Bill Kutik and top industry analysts from Bersin & Associates, Forrester, IDC and Knowledge Infusion discuss the down economy, social networks, succession planning, ROI measurement and more at Convergence 2009
If you are looking for guidance and insights on the latest HR technology trends and best practices, then who better to talk to than an all-star line-up of the industry’s leading experts? That’s exactly what we did at our recent client and partner conference, Convergence 2009. We hosted an expert panel entitled “Critical Trends in HR Technology,” featuring top industry analysts in the learning and talent management software space, such as:
- Leighanne Levensaler, Director of Talent Management Research, Bersin & Associates
- Zach Thomas, Senior Analyst, Business Process & Applications, Forrester*
- Cushing Anderson, Program Vice President, Project-Based Services, IDC
- Jason Corsello, VP, Head of Center of Excellence, Knowledge Infusion
*Note: As of earlier this month, Thomas is no longer with Forrester.
Moderating the panel was Bill Kutik – technology columnist for Human Resource Executive, co-chair of the HR Technology Conference and the host of the "Bill Kutik Radio Show". Topics ranged from the impact of the economy on the HR technology market, the impact of social networking and Web 2.0 tools on talent management strategies, succession planning strategies, what the recent vendor consolidations mean for talent management, and more. Even Cornerstone OnDemand CEO, Adam Miller, joined the conversation at certain points.
For those of you who weren’t fortunate enough to join us live in the room, here’s a recap of the discussion.
BILL KUTIK: What impact has the economy had on the talent management and general HR technology market?
LEIGHANNE LEVENSALER: Companies are looking to their talent systems to help them make decisions about downsizing and reviewing the critical talent in their pool. Also, who are the low performers? Because of this, organizations are saying that talent management is important.
(To the attendees) Do any of your companies currently have travel restrictions? (Not many hands are raised). Restrictions seem to be easing up.
Talent management and enabling technologies help to respond to business opportunities. One example is Chevron and clean energy. Chevron is completely retooling their entire organization, identifying and cultivating talent pools to take advantage of clean technologies. Another example is Cisco, which is retooling leadership and workers to support new software initiatives – capitalizing on opportunities, retrenching and retooling. It’s not just about surviving the downturn.
KUTIK: Are companies buying new solutions or just adding on to what they already have?
CUSHING ANDERSON: There have been different responses to different trends. Differences between organizations that are in cost control and needing to reposition and realign themselves. You need to pick your own strategy. Your response is based on your corporate philosophy. Buying is slowly coming back, but the responses will be different.
KUTIK: According to IHRIM survey data, early 2009 figures say 66 percent of companies are spending as much or more on new technologies this year. I was shocked.
ZACH THOMAS: Our research supports this as well. One interesting trend we seen in talking with clients is that they are not looking at an entire suite – rather it is more about addressing specific pain points. There is now a wider scope when talking about performance management or succession management.
JASON CORSELLO: There is a shift in terms of people trying to get more out of what they already purchased – either fine-tuning or consolidating and trying to determine what is or isn’t working.
LEVENSALER: People are still interested and looking to buy, but the cycle is taking longer. Why is Cornerstone doing so well? Because they are solving a specific need, and having the learning component helps. Companies also are looking at vendor viability, which is essential.
KUTIK: Many are predicting that social software will have a negative impact on formal learning strategies. For instance, the idea that “search-learning” will replace formal course learning. How would you suggest using both to deliver a learning strategy that, while effective, still gives HR sufficient control of the process?
ANDERSON: In regards to search learning, I would define it differently than just searching for information. It is also about searching for experts. And, it is all about self-service. It has got to be the way that organizations serve up the information. The strategy is to identify or acknowledge that training organizations don’t know everything your employees need to know. You are not the holder of classes – you are the source of knowledge transfer. You need to put in place the tools to allow people to find what or who they need to be effective. In cost cutting times, HR executives or CIOs may say, “Let’s cut classroom learning.” But it should really be about, “How do I do this better?” What are the five to ten courses that are absolutely essential? You would never be able to agree – all courses would be seen as important but not necessarily essential. And what about the information you don’t have? Or, what if there are not enough people to warrant a class? But if you can facilitate people sharing information amongst themselves, organizations will find success. Organizations that realize they don’t have the information will be more apt to adopt these social tools.
CORSELLO: There are tremendous opportunities for informal learning. For example, for people starting a new job and being able to connect with others in the company. There isn’t one or the other though – solutions should be blended. You need to figure out how your employees are going to get knowledge.
THOMAS: I would argue that rather in three years or five years, social learning is happening today. I think of IM as a learning tool. I use it to get the information I need from the right people. The real place where learning pros can become strategic is in figuring out how to institutionalize what is already going on in their organizations. For example, rather than providing a course catalog, create a wiki that can constantly evolve.
KUTIK: What about people who get questions that aren’t relevant to them?
THOMAS: It’s not about the number of connections. It’s more about how often people come to them for information.
LEVENSALER: Control should not be the right attitude. It is more about “formalizing” informal learning. Alignment is the goal, not control. For example, with coaching programs, HR has been successful in formalizing an informal role. Control is not the objective.
THOMAS: When we talk about social learning and technologies, it is more about a means to an end. Don’t lead with the technology.
KUTIK: We’ve all seen plenty of vendor consolidation in the last three years. Most recently, the bidding war over Sum Total. Do you think any stand alone LMS, compensation or performance management vendor can survive? Will there still be room for an old-fashioned best-of-breed – companies that do one thing well?
THOMAS: In the coming year, we will see solutions evolve. We’re already starting to see, horizontally, a suite approach, and the same with vertical solutions. Vendors start strategic at the top, with more tactical solutions at the bottom. And there are companies that are looking to be more holistic – for example, ADP’s partnership with Cornerstone. Lawson and Workday are two other examples. So why does this make sense? According to Naomi Bloom and the HR Object Model, tactically it is important. If you are going to have a successful rollout, you need to have a unified user interface, or adoption is going to be low and the ROI will not be as good. At the end of day, it is the data that is going to help you be more strategic and win the day. How do you start tying solutions to the bottom line financial networks within your organization?
KUTIK: Basically, you don’t get to sit at the table if you don’t have the numbers.
CORSELLO: There is a circle of life in enterprise software. And then a few select vendors emerge as leaders. There are no defined leaders in talent management software today, but we’ll start to see them. We’re also seeing new companies being formed, and new technologies to support this. It means looking at performance differently and how you get real-time information to executives.
ANDERSON: The circle of life is much longer than any analyst would like to admit. I have been doing this for ten years, when eLearning was the new thing. There were 60 companies then, but now that number has doubled. Of course, this is an unverifiable fact. Most people don’t have a problem that all parts of a suite can address. The market is growing, and in the next 12 months there will be a new vendor out there claiming to have 200 clients. For Cornerstone and others, it is having the right features and innovation.
KUTIK: What about silos, about people not communicating and working together?
LEVENSALER: Learning management systems are an $800 million industry, not all of learning. It isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. You’re with Cornerstone for extended enterprise, LMS and other platforms, and it isn’t just a development plan. These little LMS companies are not going away anytime soon.
KUTIK: A recent technology survey indicates that succession planning is what HR wants most to do but is investing in the least. Wouldn’t this be useful in layoffs?
CORSELLO: The fundamental flaw is that companies assume managers have time for succession planning, but they don’t. They don’t have time to move chess pieces around. I have one client approaching it in a way where a Talent Development Consultant sits with the CIO or CFO to create a work form, identify what they need in six to 12 months, and then create a roadmap. A shift needs to occur where there is less dependence on managers for this. HR needs to help with the process, and the technology exists to support it.
KUTIK: I hear stories about managers freaking out about self-service offerings.
LEVENSALER: Succession planning means different things in different organizations. It gets blurry when defining succession planning versus workforce planning. A lot of vendors don’t have that level of sophistication.
KUTIK: What do you do if the jet crashes and all your executives are on it?
ANDERSON: They don’t know who a successful candidate is or who to dismiss. They just don’t. I love the idea of succession planning. Most organizations don’t know as much about their people as they need to know. The key is that we don’t empower our employees enough to say where they want to be in a certain number of years and provide them with the tools for getting there. For employees, though, it needs to count – why would I do it if it won’t have any impact?
KUTIK: Armed forces do workforce planning 30 years out.
ANDERSON: The Army shows cadets what they should aspire to be. We don’t do that in the workforce. The point is that, if nothing else, you should encourage employee self service. Look ahead five jobs out, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to get there.
KUTIK: For succession planning and social networks, why wouldn’t there be a tie into a social network scenario, where users feature the information that HR wants to know?
THOMAS: It is called mentoring.
ANDERSON: It is a profiling problem. I try not to rely on anyone else for me to be successful. You need to empower people to do it for themselves.
LEVENSALER: It could be like a self-nomination.
ADAM MILLER: Cushing, you painted an interesting picture of a system where people have access to the information they need, when they need it. But who should own corporate social networks? Different silos within the organization often fight over it. Is this an opportunity for people to own it and build importance?
LEVENSALER: Ownership is like control. If the goal is to solve a problem or create opportunities, then you need to understand what that is in order to determine who should own it.
ANDERSON: In Jason’s presentation regarding what the new organizational model looks like, there is no one place in the organization where you can easily map a nexus that makes the most sense. It more naturally plays in the OD department, but it doesn’t necessarily exist anymore.
CORSELLO: It is the CEO’s role to embed it into the culture. The others are stewards to make this happen.
THOMAS: Tactically, let’s get the same people who represent C-level responsibilities in the HR department.
KUTIK: Does the increased focus on social learning imply that the LMS is becoming irrelevant? What key innovations have you seen in LMS that will prevent it from becoming irrelevant?
ANDERSON: Learning departments need to get away from being a course catalog. It should be more about giving advice.
LEVENSALER: They need to support user generated content, but how they will stay relevant is certification and compliance training. An LMS can hold on to this and do it really well.
KUTIK: Social networks are not good about being bi-directional. You never know who read the information.
ANDERSON: You don’t want the LMS to become a reporting function.
THOMAS: Show me an LMS that can predicatively drive performance and directly impact bottom line.
KUTIK: The jungle drums have been sounding that some talent management initiatives have failed. How do you convince senior executives that yours won’t?
THOMAS: There need to be resources for effective implementation. You need to look at software that is being delivered as a service. And you need people with deep expertise.
CORSELLO: You need to bring facts and data, but it needs to be the right data. HR facts are not the right data – you need to focus more on dollar figures and attaching results to those numbers.
KUTIK: The ROI from a performance management report is really good.
ANDERSON: It is less about ROI. If you ask, you’re dead. If your managers buy into defined success criteria, then it is not about numbers or facts, it is about those success criteria.
KUTIK: Of all the talent management applications, how should social networks be used?
LEVENSALER: It should be integrated or embedded, not separate. You should be using these tools to supplement the solutions you have in place.
CORSELLO: I agree with Leighanne. The future is a few years out, but by then you will be able to analyze the value of those networks and evaluate the performance of different divisions and the strengths of the different talent pools. But this isn’t available today.
KUTIK: How is Adam Miller going to embed Cornerstone Connect into the different applications?
ANDERSON: I will coach Adam from here. It is not about one thing, it is about a collection of tools. And they each have a role. You can apply each to the talent process – attaching the right ones to the right place in the cycle. It needs to appear wherever appropriate.
MILLER: Ultimately, the point is to embed user-generated content with traditional data. It is taking organizational data that everyone uses and meshing it with user-generated content to give you a holistic picture when making decisions about your talent as well as your business.
Charles Coy is the Product Marketing Director for Cornerstone OnDemand
