THE CHALLENGE OF INNOVATION

Technological advances applied to human capital management

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The future of HRUsability and workforce productivityJust the other day I bought a beautiful new flat screen TV I had been eyeing for a while. I couldn’t wait to see the new high definition display wor-king, so as soon as I got home I plugged in the cables quickly, turned it on. And much to my sur-prise I discovered that the TV came with an inte-grated - set-up advisor that walked me through the steps to easily configure my preferred langua-ge and my favourite networks. Just 10 minutes la-ter, I had a wide range of local and international networks right at my fingertips.

Does this sound futuristic? Not in the slightest, this is something you already experience daily and take for granted. But not so long ago it was unthinkable. This should make us stop in our tracks to ponder on the changes we have been through recently and where we might be going in the future. Cloud computing, social networks, mobility, configurability and usability are some of the topics we will discuss in this chapter. Nor can I ignore adaptability as one of the most important challenges we face now and in the future. Susan Tan, a Gartner analyst declared, “As the economy improves, organizations are again looking to emerging technologies and innovative services to grow revenue while at the same time cut costs. A host of emerging technologies — cloud com-puting, software as a service, virtualization, mo-bility, social computing and analytics — presents exciting opportunities...”

Source: SWOT: Cognizant, Consulting and System Integration Services,

Worldwide Published: 12 August 2011 ID: G00215129)

Let’s revisit technology and HCM and take a clo-ser look down the line to see where we are hea-ded in the future.

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The dance between technology and users:Radical life style changes Mainframe HRMS systems peaked in the eighties and died when client server HRM applications took over. There were lots of important technolo-gical changes in the move to client server, but the-re was no serious rethinking of HR data design and processes. The only goal was automation that re-duced administrative burden for HR departments. Software solutions were not designed with mana-gers, employees and people communities in mind.

At the same time, 20 years ago in 1991, the in-ternet was born. In fact there was no marketing campaign, it quietly came onto the stage, and most people didn’t even know what it was. Once it took hold, World Wide Web technology began to facilitate rich internet applications (RIA) in HCM for some of the simpler manager and em-ployee functions and processes.

And 10 years ago today, tiny digital music players stormed the market. The secret of the success behind these gadgets had a lot to do with unders-tanding lifestyle needs, placing these squarely at the heart of any posterior product development. And let’s fast forward to now; new tablets were released last year, making huge inroads into the

market in the wake of the highly successful smart touch-screen phones released 2-3 years earlier. Mobility has become a way of life and the digi-tal user experience has changed forever with rich multimedia. The latest newcomer is cloud com-puting technology which revolutionizes the way HCM can be delivered via software as a service, or SaaS as it is also known in the market.

This timeline illustrates how lifestyle and techno-logy have danced together for business success as well as user acceptance and satisfaction. It also shows that the new ways of creating technical ga-dgets and gimmicks and using technology in the future don’t even occur to us, precisely because we are trapped in our current way of thinking We never imagined that what came out of the research centre CERN to serve the community of physicists would end up being the internet we can’t live without now. It’s only when we begin to explore and dance with technology, we discover new and practical uses.

Right now we are confronting several challenges and seeing new technologies that are shaping a new paradigm for HR and business in the future.

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Technology and functionality revolutions drive usabilityWhat came before, technology or functionality as embodied by lifestyle and business needs? It is a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation, actually it no longer matters. Both drive one another through innovation. That’s how the improvement cycle is set; useful technology drives lifestyle and busi-ness changes and vice versa.

Usability is the trigger for each cyclical change; it is all about hiding technology from the user to make things friendly, easy and actually useful. It doesn’t really matter what it is. It can be smart phones, hardware like tablets, intuitive softwa-re, multimedia screens, KPI dashboards and bu-siness processes. It makes applications just plug and play, where configuring and customising is as easy as setting up your TV channel networks and preferences.

When an athlete sprints towards the Olympic gold, it looks so easy. But years and hours of dai-ly intense training, careful nutrition and medical control have gone into that beautiful performan-ce—all under the supervision of top coaches, dieticians and doctors. It’s no different with HCM solutions, IT developers and architects across di-fferent areas of pure technology do all the hard and complex work that delivers the rich and sim-ple user experience that managers and emplo-yees alike can enjoy.

Usability has everything to do with improving social and organizational behaviour; it increases the potential for fast actions, communication and productivity from any place in the world or virtual space in a digital economy. It’s why the mouse is already disappearing today. New touch screens for tablets and smart phones modify user inte-ractions and interface design. There is no need to type to change configurations, do tasks or gene-rate analytics; everything is just a click or a tap. Delivering HRM to senior managers on their por-table tablets is now an interesting proposition.

Acronym Key: BPM: business process managementSOA: service-oriented architecture

Source: The Emerging User Experience PlatformPublished: 29 March 2011 ID:G00211625Analyst(s): Gene Phifer

The cloud computing revolution for HR business:Configurability, SaaS and Multitenancy Many customers have experienced long and cost-ly implementation projects with high initial im-plementation times and expenses, as well as a high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Similarly the maintenance costs and expertise required to ma-nage the IT infrastructures for these systems are high.

Today new interesting Web 2.0 and cloud com-puting technologies together with advances in software configurability and multitenancy lend themselves to designing innovative HR platforms. These in turn allow companies to benefit enor-mously from all the enriched functionalities that

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a complete talent management and payroll servi-ce can offer, without having to deal with mainte-nance and infrastructure costs.

HR platforms architected on these principles will perform better in the 21st century and allow ven-dors to offer configurable HCM solutions to diffe-rent companies who will have completely trans-parent access to global and local functionalities. It also means that vendors and HR specialists are freer to concentrate on increasing the value proposition of human capital management and to start designing HR 3.0, the next generation of Global HR SaaS.

Value added talent management:Intelligent and collaborative processes for employees and managers

Talent management is about people, behaviours, skills, attitudes and knowledge, but unfortunately this cannot just simply be structured into a strai-ghtforward model. The difference between two people with different skills and competing for the same job is much more complex to evaluate, and there are so many other variables to consider. This poses serious challenges for creating effec-tive talent management applications to handle both structured functionality and the evolving, unstructured and chaotic elements.

Unquestionably the future of talent management cannot work effectively without the collaborati-ve interaction of managers and employees, so it must be simple and smart enough to be used by non-HR professionals—self-service portals, and social employee and community networks are only the beginning. To simplify a user’s life, HR technology must evolve into flexible and intelli-gent processes to support decision-making, whe-re users are guided through suggested business steps and paths, based upon the corporate stra-tegy, resources, analytics, forecasts and simula-tions.

These tools must link together transactions, pro-cesses, analytics and collaborative technologies. Moreover, analytics must not be just a set of sophisticated indicators, like dashboards or key people indicators, but the beginning of a decision process leading to concrete actions and proces-ses. Likewise decentralized information—found in an unstructured form like the growing collabo-rative social environments—needs to merge with HCM processes to pool relevant information for

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decision making. This is an important shift, but it is just one step. The next challenge is to manage global companies in a decentralized way, while allowing local needs to be met.

Today, intelligent processes need to include and integrate transactions, analytics, processes and social intelligence into a decision process with a single aim: simplify users’ lives to improve busi-ness decision making and productivity, based on easy global access to all data. The next step hi-ghlights the importance optimizing analysis thou-gh predictive mechanisms with increasing level of granularity in decision making. Within application the user or employee will have the support nee-ded based on the established HR best practices, predictions and recommendations.

Social revolution through technology:Impact on organizational behaviour and talent managementJust by taking a look at the past at how devices and software technology have evolved, we alre-ady have the clues for future successes in busi-ness. “History shows us that whatever technology there is, we will find a way to use it to communi-cate—to make it social.” (Susan M. Weinschenk) Human beings are social animals; we thrive on community—families, tribes, guilds, nations, and

now the global village and virtual groups of all kinds.

From time immemorial we have developed tools to better protect ourselves from the outside and for greater comfort—the agricultural, industrial, printing, IT, internet and cloud revolutions and now the social one attest to this. We cannot over-look how user expectations increase with each technological advance; businesses are changing in the way they work in a global world because of the technologies already adopted.

The job of HR professionals and HR technology is to keep at the vanguard of the market and new technologies, and not lag behind on the verge be-ing obsolete.

The diversity of social media networks is already giving us valuable insights into how they shape the way we work and collaborate with one ano-ther. It is exciting to see how we can virtually or-ganize ourselves to mobilize new waves of thou-ght and business.

Suggested Analytics Strategic Road Map GuidelineSource: Gartner - Strategic Road Map for Analytics Published: 29 September 2011 ID: G00219005

Analyst(s): Gareth Herschel

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Evidently, the implications are far reaching for both HR departments and HR technology. It’s easy to see it offers HR professionals an extremely rich source of potential candidates to complement their recruitment strategy. Social media provides extra information that can’t be had from a CV—like the candidate’s personal network itself.

Companies are beginning to explore corporate social networks and they are discovering this po-sitive effect on workforce productivity, learning, and knowledge retention, as well as business outcomes. They can even begin to consider using a new set of social analytics and business intelli-gence from the new mine of user-generated data in these networks.

The company Cognizant used an internal social network to analyze social media contributions, particularly internal blogs. It found that emplo-yees who contributed were more engaged and satisfied than others, and performed significantly better.

Salesforce.com, provider of service-based appli-cations for CRM and other transaction-intensive functions discovered that the heaviest users of Chatter, their own social media tool are the most productive employees.

Companies are beginning to explore corporate social networks and they are dis-covering this positive effect on workforce productivity, learning, and knowledge retention, as well as busi-ness outcomes.”

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Other companies have chosen to go with social software systems for the business environment like Jive and Yammer. These initiatives revolutio-nize corporate communications by enabling peo-ple to create private enterprise social networks. Employees use corporate networks to work to-gether internally, or easily create secure external networks to collaborate with business partners, customers, or suppliers in a virtual and mobile way.

CSC, an IT services provider relies heavily on knowledge workers and a collaborative culture. They needed to be able to effectively locate ex-perts in their global organization, on board new hires, reduce the loss of intellectual property due to attrition rates, brake down time and distance barriers that hinder innovation.

Feeding new social analytics into talent manage-ment systems will improve performance, career and succession planning, and compensation and benefits processes.

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Creating talented managers and employees for the futureWhat kind of employees or talent pool do we want to create for the future? How can we inspire innovation? How do we encourage talent to sha-re knowledge and collaborate? How do we make it so simple for managers to make global and local strategic decisions? These are the questions that HR together with top business leadership must think of to ensure competitive advantage.

The future generation of employees, managers, HR professionals, IT developers and architects are to-day’s kids who go online to watch Phineas and Ferb episodes on YouTube, on demand rather than wait to see it at the scheduled time on TV. Their social media savvy and user expectations are radically different from our current idea of rich user expe-riences. They will probably be using smart mobile optical keypads and devices that haven’t even been thought of yet. Those who become future business or HR managers may want multiple screen displays for a global view of activities to take swift decisions and instant actions with just a drag and drop across the map, rather like in the film Minority Report.

Organizations become increasingly virtual in co-llaborative digital environments, and this goes farther through fully mobile applications. Visibi-lity, performance and productivity will not be just based on the work in an office, but also on the level of communication and involvement in the-se digital collaborative spaces and intelligent HR processes.

Companies will become flatter and more networ-ked in structure. Perhaps even the roles of ma-nagers and employees may blur because of that. Next think of the technology and the implica-tions for using the same global HR software for the workforce in offices, virtual offices and tele-commuting communities, no matter where they are located, or even on future space stations one day. Geolocation technology, the internet and the cloud have to evolve in as yet unimaginable ways; the concept of local needs evolves beyond natio-nal borders. Some of it is nearly here and the rest is further along the line into the future.

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The ability to adapt to change as a premise for survivabilityThe technological revolutions are churning out at a dizzying velocity; it has escalated to levels where we no longer talk of years or months, but instead weekly or daily changes. We can follow the changes that occur from one year to the next from the list we can’t ignore, “The Top Ten Stra-tegic Technologies” list published by Gartner an-nually.

The speed at which new trends emerge and others become obsolete makes us aware of the increasing challenge organizations face, including software vendors—it shows no signs of abating. On one hand, new technologies and trends, in-cluding new models like SaaS allow enterprises to revisit their HR processes and continually resha-pe the human capital arena in innovative ways. And on the other, organizations are subject to constant changes spurred by providers, such that many have difficulties in managing and planning their portfolios of complex HCM solutions. They even find it hard to keep up with the new busi-ness needs and innovative possibilities.

In this scenario, we can only conclude that the key to success depends on the ability to decide which technologies to adopt and discard, and the ability to adapt to these giddy rhythms of change. Orga-nizations will have to go with the flow and change when customers and trends change. Companies that manage to define and control their portfolio strategy for HCM solutions are better equipped for adapting to customers and the market. At the end of the day, all that counts is: simplifying a user’s life. The user couldn’t care less about the underlying technologies, but rather the user ex-perience which must always be agile, intuitive and transparent.

In recognition of the challenge this scenario po-ses for organizations, Gartner proposes that com-panies use a model to manage trends and their impact on organizations. Tina Nunno, VP of Re-search explains, “The model borrows from the way architects design buildings—separating what has to change frequently - from what is founda-tional and longer-term in nature.” She also points out, “As people we are, by nature, unpredictable. The only way we can work together successfully is by being adaptable and breaking boundaries, rather than creating them.” And ultimately she declares, “Cloud and context aware computing can break down boundaries and create customer intimacy and greater partnership.”

We can apply this model to HCM functionalities, processes and best practices. We can separate HCM into different layers: the foundation as a system of record in core modules, the system of differentiation in extended modules that meets the particular customer needs, and the system of innovation that allows us to offer added value to customers in novel functionalities. The provider must be capable of offering the solutions their clients need allowing them to configure accor-ding to their requirements, while adapting to re-lentless changes to the business and in market.

Source: Gartner – The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2012,Presentation given by David Clearley at:Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2011

November 7-10, 2011,Centre Convencions Internacional Barcelona, Spain

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ConclusionsDespite this, as much we adopt technologies marked by high usability, social networks, cloud computing, as much capacity we have for mana-ging high volumes of information and processes, or however much there be rich functionalities that enable new HCM applications, we will not be capable of incorporating or grouping it all if there were no models that enabled high configurability and adaptability.

Despite this, no matter how much we adopt high usability, social networks, cloud computing te-chnologies, however much capacity we have for managing high volumes of information and pro-cesses or there be rich functionalities that enable new HCM applications, we will not be able to in-corporate or group it all if there were no models that enabled high configurability and adaptabili-ty.

According to Brian Prentice and Eric Knipp, Gart-ner analysts, “ Apps intelligence is a dynamic capability involving a continuous cycle of appli-cation improvement that incorporates instru-mentation, forensic examination, agile develop-ment and operational practices, and user-centric design. It is a dynamic capability that will lead to ever-improving applications.”

“Apps intelligence is particularly important for application development (AD) initiatives involving systems of innovation and systems of differentia-tion that are intended to deliver competitive ad-vantage to the enterprise.” These analysts conti-nued further, “Apps intelligence is a product of economies of scale and economies of scope. The ability to serve a single customer cheaper than competitors enables a firm to offer lower pricing, higher margin or a combination of the two. The ability to serve a single customer more complete-ly than others allows a provider to capture a lar-ger percentage of IT expenditure for a particular set of capabilities”

(Source: Apps Intelligence: A Dynamic Capability for Application Develop-

ment Published: 3 August 2011 ID: G00214710)

The required flexibility of today’s businesses needs these intelligent applications to be capable of responding to changing demands, delivering easily adaptable and configurable systems and services.

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About UsMeta4Meta4, with 1,300 clients in 100 countries, ma-nages more than 18 million people worldwide through its software. Meta4 R&D and innovation centres in Europe and the Americas develop ad-vanced applications to fully address both local and global needs for any company, regardless of size and complexity.

Our Human Capital Management solutions and HR and Payroll Outsourcing services leverage the full human potential of private enterprises or pu-blic institutions.

Marc Sabbagh

An electrical engineer from the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité Paris, France; Marc Sabbagh joined Meta4 in 1997 as R&D+i and Services Director in France and then became the Director of World-wide Product Strategy and Management. As of 2004, he is Vice President of R&D Worldwide ma-naging a group of 200 developers focused on the driving evolution of Meta4’s flagship product and researching the latest trends in both technology and people management.

During his tenure, Marc has been a key driver of Meta4’s participation in a number of significant European Innovation Projects amongst them LIP, SWAP, ASP-Net and ONTOLOGGING.