Enterprise hits and misses - why HR lacks digital and CIOs lack skills
- Summary:
- In this edition: why HR lacks digital, and the looming AI problem. And: CIOs identify their digital skills gaps and battle tech administrivia. Plus whiffs of many flavors, including lazy bloggers and linkbait fails.
diginomica hit: The digital era that HR missed, and other HR Tech field views - by Brian Sommer and Janine Milne
quotage: "As an industry, HR technology vendors have been exceptionally aggressive in implementing cloud technologies and by many estimates are a 5-10 years ahead of many ERP vendors in their knowledge and utilization of cloud software. That said, while their technology chops are outstanding, their ability to see the consequences of the end of the Industrial Age and the beginning of the Digital Age, are almost comical." - Sommer
myPOV: With two HR Tech shows recently completed, we have gobs of content to sift, and who better than the canary in the HR coal mine, the crotchety incisive Brian Sommer? Sommer is on an HR binge, working on a multi-part HR Tech review. In part one, The digital era that HR missed, Sommer points to the need to quantify data science skills and salaries - data which most HR departments sorely lack. He goes on: "HR products, like their Financial and ERP cousins, were not really designed for the Digital Age and certainly not for the data volumes that go with it."
Part two, HR Tech lessons #2 – A new fear of AI/machine learning, tackles another set of consternating concerns. Machine learning to identify qualified candidates sounds promising, but what if that application relies on a flawed existing dataset from a less-than-diverse workforce? Sommer concludes: "The end result is that a company would perpetuate its existing hiring biases and choose to ignore the vast numbers of potentially great employees." Another marketing slide deck destroyed... Janine Milne filed a nifty use case from HR Tech Europe, The HR fat lady sings for Opera Software - a move from legacy HR to Workday.
diginomica five: my completely subjective "top five" stories on diginomica this week- Five thoughts from the Father of the Internet of Things - So if the Internet of Things has a daddy, is the mother a robot? Whoops, sorry Phil, just practicing my Branson, Missouri standup... In seriousness, Phil's sit down with Kevin Ashton at MaxLive Paris was a hit with diginomica readers. Ashton says that the "IoT is not an app for your toaster," so he's all right with me.
- McKinley Equipment experiments with the IoT - More IoT realities, this time a case study from Jessica Twentyman, which looks at IoT in an unexpected setting: a 115 employee company, pursuing IoT via ServiceMax's cloud-based field service system.
- NHS Education for Scotland’s digital transformation aims for ‘everything as a service - From ServiceMax to ServiceNow, this time a use case from Derek from his sit down with NHS’s IT director, Christopher Wroath.
- Is strategy an old hat discipline? Charlie Bess returns with a pair of thought-provokers. One on how to dust off strategy into a vital discipline. Check this keeper: "In today’s business environment there are no lone wolves. Strategic planning efforts need to reach out to customers and even suppliers early and often in the process and understand their priorities through timely, structured interactions." Charlie also looked at how the rise of Business Intelligence had an achilles heel in Will an abundance view put traditional business intelligence to death? ("Learn to enjoy the messiness of abundant data" - motivational words for today's beleagured CIO...)
Vendor analysis, diginomica style -Den braved the glitzy purgatory we call Las Vegas to extract insights on identity management (Okta fleshes out mobile, adds social as it seeks to connect everything). Meanwhile, Phil took the tougher draw and had to go to Paris (for ServiceMax's MaxLive). He filed an IoT view in ServiceMax: IoT means field service gets the sexiest tech. Stuart was on the ground at Inforum Europe, where the focus was on re-invention (Inforum Europe – time flies when you’re reinventing a software business). Sidenote: interesting positioning vs. SAP and Oracle "stacks."
More news from Inforum: Phil has the skinny on Infor's newly-announced "lift and shift" program - designed to spur even more aggressive cloud ERP migrations (Why Infor wants to lift and shift core apps to the cloud). Derek shares MongoDB's plans to make open source profitable, while Martin looks at the implications of the Lenovo-Nutanix partnership (he thinks the hyper-converged infrastructure movement is going mainstream).
With legacy IT services revenue on the downward spiral, outsourcing firms are digital-or-bust, and Genpact is no exception. Stuart's on the case in Genpact CEO – leaning in to digital is the future. The digital conundrum extends to governance - another Stuart Lauchlan stomping ground (Deloitte – the barriers to government digital transformation). Finally, Den has a terrific story from SAP TechEd in How Keytree built a SMILE (Keytree built a fully functioning app in two days, with applied health care use cases, and won the SAP DemoJam as a result - not too shabby).
Jon's grab bag - Barb nailed down a digital marketing bugaboo as well as I've seen it done in The Challenges of Content Marketing ROI. Martin ponders "multi-thinking" and CIO/business relevance in Huawei CIO Forum – swift talking about CIO futures. Den argues that diversity goes way beyond gender in Reframing the diversity issue to its -ism roots. He also (rightly) bemoans that the #ensw analyst circuit is about as diverse as, well, the board of Facebook. We've gotta do something about that. Finally, Stuart's back in his digital/retail wheelhouse in BBC Store – digital content now ownable, but entirely missable for now?. The BBC is set to compete with Amazon and Amazon Prime, but Stuart doesn't think the BBC is ready for prime time - yet.
Best of the rest
Only 9% Of CIOs have the skills they need for business leadership - survey says - by Gil Pressquotage: "While 45% of CIOs identify “innovation” and 44% point to “growth” as their organizations’ most important priorities, only 15% are investing in emerging technologies . Only 16% of IT budgets are allocated to investments in innovation and growth , with the balance spent on running day-to-day operations and incremental change."
myPOV: Not the happiest of surveys but no surprises here either, right? Most CIOs are torn between their old school, risk-averse, technical administrivia and the innovation/business relevance they grasp is vital. Perhaps the most hopeful thing about this survey is that the grasp is clearly not the issue. Press reports on data from Deloitte's 2015 CIO survey, with a decent sample size of 1,271 CIOs from 43 countries.
Looks like the aspiration/reality gap is in full effect. And as for that "9 percent of CIOs have the skills they need" issue, that's complicated by the tension of pursuing digital initiatives without a clear definition of what digital really means. This is clearly a time when CIOs will either write their ticket or walk the plank of cost center irrelevance.
Other standouts
- Pivotal pivots - sorry, couldn't resist. Anyhow, Pivotal hit the tech news cycle; Holger Mueller chomped the juicier part in New Analysis: Pivotal Now Makes It Easier Than Ever to Take Software from Idea to Production. This is mostly Mueller's analysis of the status of Cloud Foundry, Pivotal's open sourcy PaaS play. Ron Miller updated the big picture with Pivotal IPO Could Make Dell-EMC Deal Even More Complicated (note to self: guess I better get those Dell t-shirts I bought for my pals at Pivotal in the mail pronto).
Honorable mention
Oracle Open World 2015: Three Important Cloud Services - A useful slice and dice of three data-related Oracle cloud services.
Hewlett Packard Reboots With Enterprise Focus - Not a landmark article but a landmark moment. Now the real work begins. If Vegas took betting on the enterprise, this one would have long odds.
Outsourcing Switching Costs – Do They Really Matter? - Another piece from a blog you should be tracking if you're in the mix of vendor pricing and negotiations. An odd combo of self-promotional and edgy/outspoken, but usually solid info.
If you are interviewing with me - How many managers tell you exactly how to nab their offer?
AltSchool's CEO Rebuilt Google's Performance Review System to Work for Startups — Here It Is - I have a soft spot for this blog's commitment to long-form excellence.
As Finance Role Expands, the Need for Analytics Will Intensify - Interesting ditties from an SAP-sponsored CFO survey.
Damn Right Amazon Runs a Fucking Deficit and So Should America - This is a problematic post and probably too political for some, but I like the combo of rancid frankness and turning assumptions on their head.
Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’ - Another feel good report on robots-taking-jobs is out... basically, we should all become oligarchs or massage therapists.
GRANTLAND AND THE (SURPRISING) FUTURE OF PUBLISHING - sorry 'bout the all caps... when I retype these, I usher in spelling mistakes so now I'm doing the shame-by-copy/paste routine. I'm fascinated by Grantland's purge, enough that I wrote my own piece on Grantland from an enterprisey angle.
Whiffs
So many whiffs, so little time... I'm not sure that this customer script from Comcast is a total whiff, but it is a bit, well, awkward to have your data-cap-outrage script exposed so transparently, ain't it? (Don’t say “data cap”: Highlights from a Comcast customer service script).
Oh, and here's a lazy article of the year candidate, The smartest people are successful because they're sarcastic, Harvard researchers conclude. The author not only didn't read the research paper he wrote about, he also made an improper inference. Nowhere does it say that sarcastic people are more successful. It said that sarcastic people are smarter. Not the same. I know a lot of idiots who are very successful. The research concludes sarcastic people are more creative. The rest of the conclusions were conjured by the author, who is mocked in his own comment thread.
I understand why The New York Times Is Considering “Technical Solutions” To Ad Blockers, but if I might make a wee suggestion to these media potentates: perhaps consider a business model solution instead? As Russell Crowe was wisely counseled in Gladiator, "win the crowd."
I check out re/code and share their pieces from time to time, but I gotta ask how is this copy/paste jobber from CNBC adding any value to anyone? (Study: Nearly 70 Percent of Tech Spending Is Wasted). re/code is hardly the only culprit; Boing Boing has perfected this trick of link misdirection. There isn't a copyright violation here, but is this the kind of click mud we have to wade through to have a viable business? I'd like to think not.
Here's a wacky idea: why not spend ten minutes to compile a few links on the topic, and add a few comments on why this story matters? I realize it would take ten or fifteen minutes, but hey, it'll save you the trouble of being perceived as the lowest common denominator. On that note, off to Boston for me...
Which #ensw pieces of merit did I miss? Let us know in the comments.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
Image credits: Cheerful Chubby Man © RA Studio, Happy Children © Anna Omelchenko, Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, King Checkmate © mystock88photo - all from Fotolia.com
Disclosure: SAP, Workday, Infor, ServiceMax, Oracle and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.