Random Thoughts, Back from Blog Hiatus

I haven’t blogged lately for lack of time, not for lack of topic ideas.  If interest in hiring automation (like our onboarding, sorry for the mandatory SEO plug) is a sign that the economy is turning around, we bottomed out over the summer; it’s been a couple of years since I personally have been this busy.  I found myself with a window of time this morning and figured I’d jot a quick blog, of no particular topic, but instead all those tiny little things that I’ve accumulated that I thought worth sharing.

Like my thoughts on Comcast Internet and phone service…unfortunately one of the reasons I’ve been so busy is the inordinate amount of time I’ve spent on support calls with Comcast.  They lured us away from Ma Bell with impressive Internet speeds, but I don’t think we’ve had a 24 hour period of consistent service with them since we switched.  I’m on my last straw with them this week.  If you’re considering Comcast Internet and phone service, I recommend you think twice.

We have a couple of exciting new partnerships brewing, but nothing I’m quite ready to mention.  For now, suffice it to say: if you need strategic HR services regarding compliance, employment law, etc. drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the right people.

On a personal note…my brother Danny (as an adult he’s gone by Dan, but I suppose I’ll be calling him Danny for all of our lives) is getting married this weekend.  At 47 he’s found his soulmate and I’m profoundly happy for him.  Congratulations, brother!

The swine flu has struck at our office: Jeff Hayden, my partner and EVP, has been out with it since last Friday.  Germ-X is in abundance in our office.  We miss him and hope he’s back soon.  It’s been interesting to watch the news and the bashing of the Centers for Disease Control in the major media, as if the outbreak is CDC’s fault.  Now I must admit that the CDC is an active client of ours and I might be a bit biased, but as far as I’m concerned the CDC is one of the most admirable of agencies in all of our federal government (don’t get me started on the SBA and GSA).  Only last spring there was no guarantee that a vaccine could be produced at all, and nobody understood the production dynamics if one was to be produced.  Only 4 months later the media is trying to hold the CDC responsible for hastily calculated estimates on production, despite the fact that CDC doesn’t actually do the production of the vaccine.  So far as our project with the CDC, I can attest that they are the most agile and nimble of federal agencies I’ve ever worked with, despite an amazing burden of regulation and oversight that would completely stifle any commercial entity.  I for one wish to say I think the CDC is doing an outstanding job when it comes to the H1N1 outbreak (and I’m really not pandering here!)

Finally I figured I’d share some really nifty websites I’ve come across lately; perhaps you will find them useful.

http://www.slideshare.net – a content creation and sharing site around presentations, i.e. PowerPoints and the like.  You can post presentations for the general public and for just your network.  From what I can see, it’s free and their revenue model is ad-based.  I plan to put some of our presentations up there and provide links to our customers.

http://www.box.net – allows you to upload files that you can make available for access or download by other people, including by a public URL.  It’s not exactly a full blown ECM, but for simple and secure file storage on the web, it’s pretty cool.

http://www.jobbankusa.com/interview_questions_answers/ - if you’re interviewing people, this is a good list of questions – by topic – to ask.

http://www.findrfp.com – a great RFP search and notify service for federal, state, and local government sales opportunities; I’m still pretty knew to them, but am impressed so far.

http://www.pgpf.org – the Peter G Peterson Foundation.  All Americans should know what they’re all about.

http://www.giftedgalaxy.com – a blog on the wonders, challenges, and responsibilities of rearing gifted children, from a VERY talented couple who believe strongly in the special educational needs of talented and gifted children

Onboarding Process, Onboarding System

One of my most popular blogs was one that I wrote last summer trying to outline the difference between the onboarding process and an onboarding system (http://chuckros.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/onboarding-process-vs-onboarding-system/)  I still find myself discussing quite frequently what aspects of an overall onboarding process can be automated by an onboarding system (and what aspects should be automated).  Any reader of my blog and of the articles my team and I have published here at Emerald Software Group know that we categorize onboarding as having two aspects or approaches: transactional and acculturation.

Transactional onboarding is the workflow, the automation of the W4 and I9 forms, the eliminating of paper, the drastic reduction of document latency and logistics costs, the elimination of rekeying, and the reduction of risk and exposure from incomplete or missing forms and data.

Acculturation onboarding is the training and orientation of new empoyees.  It’s the socialization of new employees; it’s getting a new employee more effective, more rapidly.  It’s about improving not only effectiveness but also long term retention.

Transactional onboarding is very objective and transactional onboarding is very subjective.  As I’ve said before, it’s much more easy to quantify how many paper forms and how many hours of data entry have been eliminated than it is to quantify whether employees are becoming more effective more rapidly.  Transactional onboarding = science; acculturation onboarding = art.

The overall onboarding process accomplishes both transactional onboarding and acculturation onboarding in a mix that’s appropriate for the organization.  All organizations need transactional onboarding, but only certain types of organizations can reap huge benefits from acculturation onboarding.  If an onboarding system doesn’t take these variances into consideration, how can it be effective for every organization?  If an onboarding system offers an all-or-nothing proposition, or a “we are best practices in onboarding” attitude, how can it possibly fit for every organization?

In short, an effective onboarding system should be able to adapt to a company’s process, not the other way around.  If the onboarding system is available in only one “flavor”, then how can it effectively adapt to an organization’s unique culture and process?

If you agree, and you’re looking for an onboarding system, check ours out at www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com/onboarding, and please let us know if we can show you how we can adapt to your onboarding process, not adapt your process to our product.

Hiring Automation: A Barometer for Recovery?

You might have noticed that I took a blog writing hiatus for the past few weeks; it wasn’t really planned, it’s just that things just have been busy here in Alpharetta.  It’s been a pleasant surprise after watching the economic indicators sliding downward for so many months.  There are a whole lot of reasons to be hopeful that the recession has bottomed out, and I’ve got my own spin on this, but first, a few news items on some interesting goings-on at Emerald Software…

We’re currently in the process of welcoming several new customers, representing markets as diverse as healthcare, HR services, and finance.  All of these new customers have requested a “no promotion” clause with us, so I’ll be respecting their wishes and not mentioning their names–but we know them and they know us and that’s all that matters.  So welcome aboard to all our new friends; you have my personal commitment that you’ll be our next set of “raving fan” clients!

We’ve signed on a few new strategic partners, which were the last few blogs that I posted, and we’re working with all our new partner to implement cohesive and integrated products with each of them so that our joint clients can take advantage of some great new value propositions available nowhere else.  We are already able to present integrated product demos (mainly owing to the flexibility in our products) with most of our new partners.

New partnerships are always fun and great, but the recent achievement that I’m most proud of is our award of a GSA multiple award schedule contract.  This GSA contract offers our AllegroHR product suite to all federal government agencies and participating state and local agencies at a pre-negotiated (discounted) price that streamlines the procurement process.  We are the only HR technology firm offering new employee onboarding and HR workflow on a GSA schedule in either perpetual or term (hosted) licenses, and we’re already in discussions with some notable federal agencies to help eliminate paper in HR and improve processes.

So why do I think the recession has bottomed out?  Answer: the sheer number of companies that we’re hearing from that have renewed interest in automating their hire process.  We noticed in early 2008 that fewer companies were interested not only in hiring automation, but also in almost any investment in HR.  It would make sense that if companies were sniffing the oncoming recession that decision making would slow, then decline.  Smart and healthy companies have definitely been taking advantage of the recession, but what we’re seeing now is a completely new interest in new employee onboarding, and we’re seeing it mainly come from companies who are anticipating big hiring over the next few years; big hiring from post-recession growth, and big hiring from companies on the acquisition march (there are lots of fire sales out there still, and if I had a few hundred million laying around, I’d be buying too!)

So if we–as a provider of hiring automation technology–are indeed a barometer of recovery, clear skies lie ahead!

Welcome to the Emerald Family, New Partner: Nextanalytics

I’m proud to welcome to the Emerald Software family of partners Nextanalytics of Ontario. You can read the formal PR announcement here. Under this partnership Emerald Software will be offering to our customers some VERY impressive ad hoc reporting and analysis features to our AllegroHR Suite for workforce management.

Reporting and analysis in the new employee onboarding world is a weird thing; how do you provide off-the-shelf reporting for a product (like ours) that is so much designed and intended to adapt to the unique onboarding processes of our customers?  Everyone wants a status report, a checklist of where employees in the process, and we deliver that, but there’s infinitely more value in being able to do analysis of the affects of the improvements made to the process over time and determining some very subjective measurements like, “how quickly are new employees becoming effective” and “how effective are new employees becoming”.  I’m proud to say we’ve found a way to help customers answer these questions, and it’s routed in our partnership with Nextanalytics; stay tuned for more on this subject.

Thanks to Jay and Mike and the whole team at Nextanalytics; here’s to a long term and fruitful partnership!

Onboarding vs. Executive Onboarding: Is There a Difference?

I keep coming across the term “executive onboarding” and I’ve just gotta ask: do you see a significant difference in onboarding executives versus onboarding the masses, and if so, what are the differences?  Are there significant differences in the costs, and are you referring to unit costs (per executive onboarding event), or collective costs of onboarding all executives?

The Biggest Expectation of An Onboarding System

I continue to be amazed at how many different definitions of onboarding there are running around out there.  A few days go I came across a background and drug testing vendor who–you guessed it–defines onboarding as the process of ordering background and drug tests.  All the federal and state tax and benefits forms, all those policy forms, all that socialization and provisioning stuff, well you’ve probably already automated that nonsense; what’s really important when it comes to onboarding is buying my stuff.  This doesn’t seem like a good way to define a system.

This led me to wonder, what is the single bigges expectation of an onboarding system?  If there were any single feature that is universal to an onboarding system, what would it be?  Well in my unofficial verbal survey–executed using less than scientific means, mind you–over the last few days, the overwhelming single objective and expectation I am hearing is–drum roll, please–eliminating the paper in the new hire process. 

Now I pretty much expected this, but not necesarily as the #1 objective; I would have thought that ensuring compliance and automating data would have been 2 objectives which might have ranked higher.  I’ll continue to gather data, unscientifically of course, but if you have thoughts on what the #1 objective of an onboarding system should be, let me know!

A Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Yeah, I know, a movie review is a bit of a departure for me, but my family is filled with Potterologists and I can’t help it.  If I’ve read a book and then see a movie adaptation of it, I can’t help but be a critic, I suppose in part because I hold aspirations to be a writer myself–novels, screenplays, whatever.  So it was with great anticipation that I took the family to see Half-Blood Prince this past weekend, particularly given the great rating it had on the tomatometer on www.rottentomatoes.com (90%+ at the time).

When I’m watching a movie adapted from a novel I’m familiar with (and in this case very familiar with), three things tend to stick out to me: omissions of important details from the book, diddling with details in the book, and superfluous additions of details that weren’t in the book.  The movie is rife with all three and will likely be frustrating to fellow Potterologists.

The first scene of the movie sets the stage for these annoying cinematic tweaks.  At the beginning of the book is an endearing sequence showing the interaction between the fictional British Minister of Magic with the real world British Prime Minister (the best opening sequence of all the books, if you ask me).  After the movie release of Order of the Phoenix I started wondering if Half-Blood Prince would kick off with a look-alike of former PM Tony Blair or current PM Gordon Brown.  The answer is neither; instead we’re given a bizarre scene of Harry sitting in a diner asking the waitress out on a whim.  What?  If the scene had contributed to Harry’s character development I wouldn’t have taken issue with it, but he winds up abandoning her in favor of apparating off into the real story with Dumbledore, leaving the waitress standing on the curb and never to be seen again.  If you’re going to change the story, at least make the change useful to the movie’s rendition.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that the change in medium from book to movie often dictates some changes to the story.  But many of the changes made in this instance seem to be damaging to the story and its characters and seem to have established some insurmountable challenges to the proper telling of the rest of the story in The Deathly Hallows.  For example, in the book Dumbledore makes clear to Harry the headmaster’s suspicions that Voldemort has ensured his immortality through the creation of horcruxes (items in which Voldemort has hidden pieces of his soul), and through several memory sequences with Harry explores the possibilities of what those hidden items might be.  These memory sequences were omitted from the movie, leaving us Potterologists to wonder how Harry will discover these on his own in the final movie installments.

It’s some of the seemingly small omissions and tweaks that seemed to get under my skin the most.  After Draco Malfoy discovers the furtive Harry eavesdropping on the Hogwarts Express, it’s Luna who discovers his hidden body, not Tonks as is the case in the book; is screenplay writer Steve Kloves trying to downgrade one character in favor of the other, and why?  Dumbledore tells Harry at the beginning of the book to keep his invisibility cloak with him at all times; in the movie not only is this suggestion omitted, practically all use of the cloak (which has noteworthy relevance in The Deathly Hallows) is removed.  Dumbledore also tells Harry that he can–and should–confide totally in his best friends, Hermione and Ron, but this also is omitted from the movie; this is a hugely important detail that I simply can’t believe the movie makers would leave out.  After all, it would have only taken a couple of seconds for Dumbledore to utter these words, which are so important to the character of both of the final installments in the series.  And then there’s the whole Christmas sequence in the movie–the deatheater’s attack on the Weasley home–none of which is in the book; why add this sequence? 

But the most radical (and disappointing) changes were made to the climactic scene of Half-Blood Prince, once Dumbledore and Harry return from their mission to retrieve a locket that is a horcrux.  In the book, Dumbledore is crippled and weakened, Harry is frozen and hidden by a spell from Dumbledore, and the headmaster is disabled and at the mercy of Draco Malfoy; Snape bursts onto the scene, quickly surveys it, Dumbledore reaches feebly out to Snape and mutters “please”, and, well, I won’t ruin it for the half-dozen people on the planet who don’t know what happens next.  This sequence is fascinating and some of the greatest story telling in English literature, a deep and significant view into the characters of Dumbledore, Malfoy, and Snape.  But in the movie Dumbledore is standing strong, calmly directs Harry to wait out of sight, and while Harry secretly watches Dumbledore assure Malfoy that he’s not a killer, Snape sneaks up behind Harry, shushes him with a finger to his lips, and continues up the stairs to Dumbledore and Malfoy.  The moviemakers have provided a hint that there’s more to Snape than meets the eye, but this is something that the book so rightly reveals to us at the very end of the last book in the series in a seemingly infinitely more effective way.  I think this sequence alone is evidence that all of the moviemakers collectively have about a millionth of the story telling capability as J.K. Rowling.

If you’ve never read the book, then you’re likely to enjoy the film; it’s entertaining and will fly by in a hurry, though it may leave you a bit confused over some issues that will hopefully be resolved in the 2-movie edition of the 7th book.  If you’ve read the book, prepare to be frustrated while you are entertained, and prepare to debate the moviemaker’s liberty-taking with your fellow Potterologists for the next year and a half while we wait for Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part I to hit the theatres holiday season 2010.

The Future of SaaS: Web Products

Software-as-a-Service has been around for a while now.  Some would say it emerged as a technology around 2000, but I’d point out this is only when the term “SaaS” started getting widespread usage.  The concepts of renting software predate any discussions using the ”SaaS” acronym, with Application Service Provider business models in the 90’s, and timesharing before that.  We love to create new buzzwords in IT, don’t we?  But how often do we really create something new?

I think the core element of SaaS–what makes SaaS, well, SaaS–is the license model, but again, selling a term license to use a product is nothing new.  But in the future, what if the license model were to evolve from a term license–”You will be permitted to use our software for 1 year”–such as is prevalent in SaaS today, to an event license?  This isn’t really new either–you pay Monster.com for a job listing event, basically; are Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and the like “SaaS”?  I would say they fall into a separate category altogether, which I call a “web product”.

Is this the natural evolution for SaaS products today?  Is this the future of SaaS?  Well from my own experience, I am inclined to say quite possibly.  Our own onboarding system can be purchased through a pretty simple and straightforward event-consumption model: you pay for the number of hires you conduct in our system (we have other license models, but this is our most active model).  If you think about it, even products that at first don’t seem to lend themselves well to the “web product” model can be delivered in that model.  An accounting system, for example, in conventional SaaS sense is termed, usually for annual periods; what if you were charged instead by the number of invoices you send to your customers, or a percentage of those invoices, or the number or amount of payables you processed?

Dont’ think that this is too far fetched; what, after all, is the value proposition of cloud computing?  Completely on-demand computing power, i.e. the ability to dial up, or dial down, our infrastructure investments, right?  If you think of your operational software systems the same way, doesn’t this mean we’re evolving toward the web product model?

Personnel Folders; Why Are They Different from ECM?

In my post last Thursday I talked about the need for a personnel folders product for HR, and discussed the conditions that would drive HR to implement a personnel records system separate from the ECM strategy implemented by IT.  In this post I want to point out a couple of reasons and ways that a personnel folders system is different than an ECM system.

But first, let me say that, by nature, an ECM system is horizontal–generic–enough that yes, it can be made to serve as a personnel folders system.  In fact there are many organizations who utilize their corporate ECM system for personnel records, but there are also many who do not, and I’ve talked with a bunch of them (hence the “reasons” I cited in my previous blog). 

So the primary difference is in the understanding, the skills, and the experience of the team managing the personnel folders system.  As I said in my previous blog, there are tons of compliance and privacy issues surrounding HR documents that IT simply doesn’t have to contend with.  A personnel folders system is going to be implemented and maintained by a team who understands these issues.

A personnel folders system is also going to be relatively consistent among many companies when it comes to configuration.  There is a core set of indexes that all personnel folders, regardless of the company or organization, are going to utilize: social security number, employee id, last name, etc. 

A personnel folders system is going to employ a folders structure, such as the dossier structure in our own system.  The typical configuration of an ECM system is to store documents by document type (such as W4s, I9s, etc.) along with indexes; this structure makes it easy to locate and retrieve a particular document quickly.  In a personnel folders system, it’s preferable to add to this capability a folder structure that logically groups documents together–such as an onboarding package–for a number of reasons (purpose of the document collection, cross-document rules compliance such as supporting documentation on I9s, etc.)  To this folder structure can be added additional information, such as checklists testing the completeness of a particular forms package, or even indexes unique to the folder.

An ECM system might also index the entire text of the documents (which may be desirable for unstructured text such as offer letters, but is unnecessary overhead for structured forms such as W4s); a personnel folders system should be configurable enough to identify which documents are appropriate for full text indexes and which are not.

A personnel folders system is going to employ records management features, particularly concerning version control and the lifespan of the document (i.e. trigger rules to automatically dispose of expired documents, or fire off notices when critical documents expire).

Increasingly, employee communications (email) is a topic of particular liability to HR.  If you’re in HR and you’ve not heard of e-Discovery, then you should read up on it and discuss it with your legal department.  A personnel folders system today should at least provide the option–when you need it–to accommodate e-Discovery requirements.

And finally, quite a few documents that flow in and out of HR today are not actually form documents, or don’t necessarily have to be documents if there were a better way.  Why do we collect a paper report from the background testing vendor in addition to the XML file they send?  Why not consume the XML file during normal processing, then drop the XML file into the personnel folder for that employee?  I’ve actually seen HR departments receive emails and faxes, then print them out so they have a copy to drop in the file–why can’t these documents be indexed to the unique requirements of a personnel folders system and remain completely electronic?

In short, there are several unique requirements that will be placed on an ECM system when implementing an electronic personnel folders capability, requirements that are often best served through a specialized edition of a document storage platform for HR.

Thanks Again to HRchitect!

Today I participated in HRchitect’s WebMingle, and I just wanted to thank them again for inviting me to participate.  Everyone at HRchitect, especially Matt and Tiffany, are a joy to work with; keep up the great work!