Tales from Convergence 2009
A Look Back at Cornerstone’s Annual Client & Partner Conference
If you’ve been following us on Twitter, then you know we’ve spent the past week gathering with partners and clients at our annual Convergence conference. Despite swine flu scares and reduced travel budgets, we were thrilled to welcome more than 150 attendees to Santa Monica’s Fairmont Miramar hotel for two days of expert-led presentations, product labs, networking and more.
The theme of this year’s event was “Grow Your Workforce without Growing Your Headcount.” So, it was rewarding to hear all of the rich discussions taking place throughout Wednesday and Thursday, as HR and learning leaders from the U.S. and across the pond shared best practices and gained insight in to ways to make the most of their learning and talent management strategies.
Did you Stick to Frank’s “No Business Cards” Rule?
In welcoming everyone to Convergence early Wednesday morning, Cornerstone’s VP of Client Services, Frank Ricciardi enacted a “No Business Cards” rule. This wasn’t in an effort to be eco-friendly. Instead, it was a call to action to participate in Cornerstone’s new client portal, Cornerstone Success Center, which acts as a virtual, 24x7 user group while also allowing clients to test drive our enterprise social networking platform, Cornerstone Connect.
Frank’s point is that our clients shouldn’t have to rely on events like Convergence to be able to interact with their peers and Cornerstone team members to ask questions, learn more about Cornerstone’s features, share best practices, provide product suggestions, and much more. In essence, we’ve become our own use case example of corporate social networking for the extended enterprise.
Aside from the Feature Wiki and Client Blogs, my favorite Success Center feature is the ability to create rich User Profiles, so that users can identify others in like industries and roles.
Adam’s Father is a Wise Man
In his opening keynote, Cornerstone CEO Adam Miller shared two pieces of sage advice his father had given in when founding the company nearly 10 years ago.
The first? Always make sure your clients are happy.
Adam commented that the Cornerstone team is always looking at ways we can do better and refine and improve our software and services. Cornerstone’s success is rooted in our relationships and in helping our clients to succeed. The company’s recent investments in this area, including the Client Success Services team, have garnered positive responses from clients. And this also plays into Cornerstone’s “customer-driven innovation” approach.
The second piece of advice from Adam’s father? Partner with ADP.
Of course, the big news from earlier in the week was Cornerstone’s new relationship with HR, payroll and benefits leader ADP, which significantly expands Cornerstone’s global reach. For our existing clients, it is validation that they’ve made the right choice in selecting us as their technology partner.
Key Learnings from Convergence
A huge thanks to all of our clients and partners who were kind enough to present at this year’s event. We’ll be recapping some of these sessions in our blog in the coming days and weeks so that we can share key learnings with you on a variety of topics, including extended enterprise, integrated learning and performance, global implementations, succession planning, client/vendor collaborations, and more.
Also thanks to Knowledge Infusion’s Jason Corsello and Beth Thomas of Sequent for their engaging and informative keynotes, as well as to HR Executive’s Bill Kutik for doing a fantastic job of moderating Wednesday’s industry analyst panel. In his signature “no BS” style, Bill led a lively and revealing discussion about today’s critical trends in talent management, and his all-star line-up – including Leighanne Levensaler of Bersin & Associates, Zach Thomas of Forrester, Cushing Anderson of IDC and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion – did not disappoint. Stay tuned for highlights from these sessions as well.
Charles Coy is the Product Marketing Director for Cornerstone OnDemand
