How many times have you ended your workday and are packing up to head home and you wonder what you really accomplished that day?  How many interruptions and distractions and menial, irrelevant activities diverted you from your best-laid plans?

We live in what Tom Davenport calls the “Attention Economy.”  How do we get and keep our attention focused on doing the right things — the important and relevant activities — and avoid the constant distractions that interrupt every aspect of our professional and personal lives and keep up from achieving our goals?  Davenport defines attention as:

“… focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act” (Davenport and Beck, p. 20).

But we live in the age of information overload.  So how do we manage and direct our attention effectively?

Ray Wang’s blog, “A Software Insiders Point of View,” this week talks about why the next generation of software applications must improve what he calls “activity streams.”  Activity streams help to organize and contextualize the massive amount of information that flows through our networks and in and out of our email/facebook/linked-in/twitter accounts all the time. And the flow of information is continually increasing such that people are literally drowning in what Ray calls “data deluge” with little hope of surfacing.

Ray describes the “four forces of data deluge that … paralyze both collaboration and decision-making:”

1. Massive activity stream aggregation by enterprise applications
2. Explosive growth in the “Internet of Things”
3. Flood of user-generated content
4. Proliferation of social meta data

So how do we get control over this information flow and sort out the relevant and important from the superfluous and un-important?  Ray maintains that application vendors must provide filters to give users greater control over what they see and when and how they see it.  Filters by people, location, date/time, event, topics, etc. that users can manage to uncover trends, perform modeling/simulations, and make predictions.

Kevin Kelly, digital age guru and founding executive of Wired magazine, in Better than Free, describes the internet and technology as a “copy machine”.  When things are so easily copied, they become abundant, and when things become abundant, they become worthless.  So the goal is to differentiate our systems and processes so that they add intangible value which is not so easily copied.  Kelly talks about eight “generatives”  that create intangible value:

1. Immediacy – priority access, immediate delivery
2. Personalization – tailored just for you
3. Interpretation – support and guidance
4. Authenticity – validating whether it’s the real thing
5. Accessibility – wherever, whenever
6. Embodiment – books, live music
7. Patronage – paying for things simply because “it feels good”
8. Findability – how do you find things when there are millions of requests for our attention

There is no question that we live in the “attention economy.”  Kelly’s generatives and Wang’s filters are two key concepts that we will surely be seeing more of in the next generation of HR technology.

Do you need help in evolving your HR applications to the next generation?  Jeitosa’s global and local experts, with their depth of industry knowledge, breadth of global expertise, and hands-on experience with all of the major HR applications on the market, are here to help you achieve your goals.  We provide services in the following areas:

• HR Strategic Planning
• HR Process  Optimization
• HR Shared Services Design
• HR Technology Evaluation and Roadmap Development
• HR Systems Deployment, Conversion, and Integration
• International HR Requirements and Compliance
• HR Leading Practices Evaluation and Benchmarking
• Global HR Readiness Assessment
• Change and Culture Management

We provide workshops, as well as guided and fully supported services, in each of these areas.  Call (+1.415.874.8566), email (contact@jeitosa.com), or visit our website (www.jeitosa.com) for more information.

Today Patersons Press Release hit the news wires announcing our newest partnership. Patersons offers a single global payroll solution across 120+ countries.  They employ a “hybrid” approach, meaning they have their own payroll in some countries and have entered into strong partnerships with best-of-breed, local payroll vendors in other countries.  They provide a single Web-based front-end for data management and they take responsibility for managing the interfaces back and forth between the HR front-end and each of the local country payroll engines.

Our expectation is that this solution will help our global clients meet their global payroll challenges:  Patersons provides the software (yes, it’s SaaS) and Jeitosa provides the project management, business process optimization, and technical support, such as conversions and other needed interfaces. We are looking forward to continuing to help our clients go global!

In this month’s Jeitocast Karen Beaman interviews Sandee Piece on the cultural differences around the world that impact effective working relationships on a global project. Sandee shares her experiences and learnings developed over many years of managing large global teams and provides some helpful tips and recommendations to ensure effective global collaboration. Three areas in particular, she feels are critical to successfully managing a global team:

• understanding of the team’s level of project management maturity,
• differing perceptions of time and meeting attendance, and
• managing team expectations and completion of assignments.

 

 Standard Podcast [13:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this month’s Jeitocast Karen Beaman interviews Mike Kent on change management, why it’s important, and why people should care about managing change. Mike talks about the key components of a change management program, who should be involved in the change management process, and who should manage the overall effort.

 

 What is change management and why do I really care? [15:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thank you to those of you who commented on my previous post on this topic. Continuing this theme with one last look back to some of the lasting impacts of the 2008-2009 recession on the HR function, I offer three additional perspectives:

4) We became more process-oriented.

With the reduction in funds for new capital investments, organizations started looking closer at what they already had in place and how they could improve on it. While the vast majority of companies have systems in place for core HR, Benefits, and Payroll, most started looking at what additional processes could be automated or self-service-enabled in order to gain efficiencies and effectiveness, but mostly to reduce costs. Moving from transaction-oriented, organizations today are becoming process-oriented, meaning they are taking a holistic view of business activity and integrating processes across functions, such as pay-for-performance, development and succession planning, and staffing and workforce planning. While we still have ways to go, there is a definite movement toward process-oriented HR.

5) We became more talent-focused.

Talent Management has been the fastest growing area in the HR space for the last several years. Organizations are finally executing on what they have long maintained, that people are the most important asset. Gartner’s Jim Holincheck at IHRIM’s Global Forum in Chicago this past year reported that Talent Management grew ~7% through Q2 of 2009 while core HRMS revenues grew just ~4.5%. Clearly the HRMS market has matured while talent management is still in its infancy, but there is a definitive movement toward a more talent-focused HR approach and there will be no turning back. With a talent-focused approach, HR moves another step closer to becoming that elusive HR business partner.

6) We became more business-centric.

The successful HR professional today, post-recession, is a hybrid developed out of varied experiences who realizes the need to be business-centric, metrics-minded, systems-savvy. While many HR professionals may be stuck in an administrative quagmire, unable to focus on more strategic issues due to a lack of tools and strategies to eliminate and automate much of the administrative backbone of HR, there are few who don’t realize the importance of business knowledge and financial acumen to be a successful strategic partner to the business. Business-centric means understanding the role that HR strategies and services play in driving business growth — sales, revenues, and profits.

Other ideas?  What do you think has changed forever for HR as a result of the last two tumultuous years? I’d love to hear from you!