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.

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• 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.

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!

The end of the year is a time to look back and reflect on what we accomplished (or didn’t!) and look forward to what will be different (we hope!) in the new year.  So here are three things that I think have changed for HR and HR systems during this rough, recessionary year — the worse economic year for business since the Great Depression. And I think these are lasting changes. While the recession will abate and the economy will slowly recover, I think these are some fundamental things that have changed for HR forever.

1) We got leaner.

Unemployment reached its highest level in 26 years (November 6, 2009 New York Times). And while it’s not front page news anymore, organizations are still continuing to “rationalize and rightsize.”  I think HR as a function was particularly hard-hit. Our continuing inability to justify the HR function as a value-added business partner has caught up with us.  There seem to be as many VPs and Directors of HR out of work as there are real estate agents without houses to sell. Yet being lean is a good thing. It teaches us to work smarter and be more efficient and effective in everything we do.

2) We got meaner.

This difficult economic year has taken its toll on the people left behind in the organization.  Called the “survivor syndrome“, the people left behind have a whole new set of challenges they have to deal with. In most cases, they have to pick up additional responsibilities because the work doesn’t simply doesn’t go away when people leave. In other cases, they may have lost a close friend or ally at work. As a result, I think organizations have gotten meaner. At a recent HR Breakfast Club meeting participants said that their companies no longer feel any obligation to provide training or development opportunities for their employees.  The feeling was that the employees should just be happy they have a job at all!  Being mean is NOT a good thing. Environments where everyone looks out for their own self create anarchy and breed situations such as Enron. While it is definitely a cold hard world out there, as the economy rebounds and as companies must again compete for top talent, I believe (hope!) that this change will soften. While I believe that people are ultimately responsible for driving their own careers, organizations have a responsibility to support and develop their workforce to help individuals achieve their greatest potential — which study after study has shown, contributes to company performance — that means growth and profitability.

3) We got greener.

The sustainability movement accelerated considerably in the last decade as people are now realizing that the earth doesn’t have an endless supply of raw materials and as organizations are now learning about the savings that can be accomplished through more effective re-use of materials (e.g., recycling paper and printer cartridges). process automation (e.g., eliminating paper forms), and implementation of self-service strategies (e.g., eliminating duplicate paper forms with multiple signatures/approvals).  The annual CedarCrestone Technology survey has consistently demonstrated that automation and self-service enablement can bring 25-75% savings, depending on the process. Becoming “greener” and providing more direct access through process automation is definitely a good thing!

So what lasting impacts do you think the recession has had or will have on HR, HR systems, and business in general? I look forward to hearing from you!

I have been honored to be selected to be among the many dignitaries to appear on The Bill Kutik Radio Show® to talk about going global with HR and HR technology.  Bill Kutik himself is quite the globalist… having traveled to such exotic places as the Arctic, Labrador, Galapagos… you get the idea… really nice vacation spots where they all speak English!  A true “globalist” in the making!

Not surprisingly, Bill starts off with his contrarian view asking just how global is the world anyway and aren’t I biased since all I see and work with are global companies. And indeed, according to a Harvard Business Review survey a couple of years ago, it is certainly the case that less than 30% of business interactions and communications take place globally.  So I prefer to use Pankaj Ghemawat’s term “semi-globalized” when thinking about the world of global HR.  While there are many commonalities around the world, there is also a lot of diversity in business practices, customs, cultures, languages, legislation, and regulations.

Working effectively in the semi-globalized world means balancing the often conflicting demands of multiple worlds: corporate headquarters, regional leadership, business unit leaders, and country management. Often the needs of these different groups can be diametrically opposed. So I often suggest to organizations to focus on being “as global as possible, as local as necessary.”

But the fact is that the vast majority of the Fortune 1000 companies do have some amount of global operations. So just how global the world really is depends on how you define “global.”  Global can mean the company has 500 people in two or three countries or 30,000 people across 20 countries or 300,000 employees across 170 countries.

But no matter how many people and how many countries, Corporate HR still wants to be able to get a global headcount report, to understand where there top-performers are for succession planning purposes, and to have some degree of standardization and oversight into hiring and staffing practices around the world. So my answer is that every company needs a global strategy for their HR service delivery, operations, and infrastructure.

So whether you work for a 3,000 or 300,000 person organization or are globe-trotter like Bill, check out our fun and informative discussion about going global in HR today, Wednesday, December 9, 2009, at 9:00 Pacific, 12pm Eastern, 6pm Central European Time.  As with all shows, it will be recorded so you can listen to it anytime that’s convenient for you.

The tides are shifting on the age-old question for Human Capital Management (HCM): Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Suite versus Best-of-Breed (BOB). The 1980’s movement toward a single vendor, single platform ERP system is altering its course toward modern, agile, single function, fully integrated systems. This change is being enabled with the growth of Web 2.0 — the method of software and service delivery via the Internet that is now penetrating all aspects of our work and personal lives.

In their article “Unbundling the Corporation,” McKinsey consultants John Hagel and Marc Singer contend that “the forces that fractured the computer industry are bearing down on all industries. In the face of changing interaction costs and the new economics of electronic networks, companies must ask themselves the most basic of all questions: what business are we in?”  The movement to outsource non-core functions to reduce ongoing costs and allow the company to focus on their core competencies is being made easier with the drastic cost reductions in communications and technology. Just look at the prices of cell phones and, in particular, netbooks, which now can do more than many desktops!

Because systems integration and human collaboration across space and time have never been easier or cheaper, it is now often more cost-effective to communicate across organizations than within one. Hence, we are seeing the un-bundling of the modern organization into separate and discreet functions — either outsourced, offshored or split off into shared services centers — so that each function can focus on what they do best. Hagel and Singer maintain that “activities that companies have always believed to be central to their business will suddenly be offered by new, specialized competitors that can undertake those activities better, faster, and more efficiently.”

This shift is causing the modern organization to un-bundle and then re-bundle their activities and infrastructure into more agile, nimble structures that can change and scale up or down as business needs dictate. So what does all this mean for the modern HR organization and for HR technology? HR has long been an organization that has worked across boundaries, and functions such as benefits and payroll have long been outsourced to third-parties. Yet, the un-bundling of HCM will have a much farther reaching impact. Beyond benefits, payroll, and call centers, we are seeing the un-bundling of HR services from RPO (recruitment process outsourcing) to off-boarding and the un-bundling of HR technology from licensed enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Adapting from Hagel and Singer’s model to HCM, the modern HR organization needs to focus on three key areas: employee relations, service delivery, and infrastructure and tools (see graphic below). These areas rarely match the company’s formal organizational structure, and each has different goals, different economies, and different competition and cultural underpinnings. HR business processes are typically cross-functional, stretching both horizontally and vertically across the organization; as they cross these different areas of the organization, the goals and expected results inevitably conflict. “Scope, speed, and scale can’t be optimized simultaneously; trade-offs must be made,” according to Hagel and Singer. Thus, it is by un-bundling HR and building dedicated teams to focus on specific areas — either within or outside the organization — that we can achieve the best results. Allow your recruiting partner to battle for the best talent, demand your benefits provider to provide the best-in-class, most flexible programs, and ensure your technology infrastructure is standardized, variable cost, and highly scalable.