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Gradual, Systemic and Genuine Change
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Many different branches of the US Department of Defense are admired for their collective people practices. (Think of examples like Army and leadership development, or the Marine Corps and local recruiting.) Organizational development inside the DoD promises to deliver gradual, systemic and genuine change for both the individuals and enterprise.
The Workforce Paradox: We're Short on Talent, Not Just Jobs
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by Tammy Erickson. It's counterproductive to discuss whether we have a talent shortage or high unemployment. We have both. Even as the economy recovers, the Obama administration's Council of Economic Advisors earlier this year projected that the unemployment rate would stay well above 6% until 2015.
At the same time, the argument that my coauthors and I put forth in 2006 in our book Workforce Crisis remains true: There are significant, growing shortages of skills in critical job categories. The recession may have obscured this trend for a couple years, but it marches steadily onward. Even at the height of the recession in 2009, U.S. companies were struggling to fill certain kinds of positions.
These two seemingly paradoxical conditions exist because many of the jobs now being created require skills that the workforce doesn't possess in sufficient quantity. This structural mismatch will be difficult to overcome, even in a climate of growth. The "workforce crisis" is a painful reality in both directions — for companies looking for the talent required to grow and, of course, for the individuals struggling to find jobs in a shrinking pool.
HR Technology Is Turning Decidedly Cloudy
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New research indicates that HR professionals worldwide are quickly turning to cloud computing and its variants to meet their key business challenges and as a means of closing the effectiveness gaps that currently exist between HR priorities and HR systems. Nearly 40% of executives surveyed indicate plans to implement SaaS for one or more core HR system between now and the end of 2011, and nearly 50% plan to have SaaS-based, core HR administration applications in place by the end of 2012.
LBi Software Releases New Time and Attendance Tracking: At-Trac 3.0
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LBi Software announced today the next release of At-Trac, its Time and Attendance Tracking solution. The newest release includes several major software updates designed to deliver efficient time and attendance tracking management to an entire organization.
Are Your HR Leaders Building a Spirit of Business Partnership?
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from Jon Younger Principal of The RBL Group and leads the Strategic HR practice area.
Over the past week I've had the opportunity to speak with the HR leaders of several global corporations. Each of these discussions had a similar theme: "How can I help my HR consultants to gain the self-confidence to act as true business partners?"
David Gergen, an advisor to several U.S. presidents, offers some helpful advice: " A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there."
What can HR leaders do to help HR professionals "raise their aspirations and release their energies?"
1. Demonstrate interest and effort in knowing the business. In a recent HR business partner workshop with HR managers in the insurance industry, we asked how many HR leaders had spent time with real customers in the past month. The answer was a dismal 10 percent.
The Haze Over Social Media Recruiting Is Clearing
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The Haze Over Social Media Recruiting Is Clearing - Author: Marvin Smith | Source: HCI
One year ago, I created some message alerts that daily searched the web for articles related to social media recruiting or social recruiting or web 2.0 recruiting. The articles were few and far between. Today, I receive multiple alerts discussing the topic.
One year ago, I was unclear as to what the correct social strategy was for my work at Microsoft. What I did understand clearly was that the social media phenomenon was having an amazing impact on talent identification. For some reason people were self-identifying and segmenting themselves into their areas of interests. By openly declaring their affinity and interests, it made my role as a talent sourcer much easier. Well, to be perfectly candid, it made finding people easier; there was that little issue of how to engage talent on social networks. Today, our social strategy is clearer, but all the hype, buzz and conversation can cloud the key issues.
Dealing With Vendor Threats To Charge For Back Maintenance Fees
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Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With Vendor Threats To Charge For Back Maintenance Fees by R "Ray" Wang
Four Common Customer Scenarios Will Trigger Vendors To Raise The Back Maintenance Fee Discussion
Back maintenance fees describe the amount an organization would have paid for maintenance if they would have continued to pay the usual stream required to access support, bug fixes, patches, and upgrade rights. As economic conditions have worsened, many organizations have turned to self-support, third party maintenance (3PM), or dropped support. Discussions with 43 enterprise software customers reveal four common scenarios:
- Scenario 1: Self supporting customers looking to upgrade to next release. Customers (44.19% n=19/43) in these scenarios typically run mature systems and are in businesses that do not face dynamic change . They stopped paying maintenance years ago and rarely make major changes to the system.
Today's Biggest Talent-Management Challenges
by George Anders - Do you have the right talent in your organization? The blunt answer for many of America's largest enterprises is: "Not yet" — and the reasons are striking.
At a talent-management meeting on March 17-18 in Coronado, Calif., experts from companies such as Cisco, Gap, Toyota, Wal-Mart and Oracle gathered to share perspectives. During formal remarks at the Conference Board event, most speakers did their best to stay upbeat. But a different story emerged in the hallway chatter between sessions.
Over coffee and muffins, attendees swapped wry stories of what it's like — even in a recession — to be battling a "talent problem." Hospital executives fretted about internal talent pipelines that keep producing the wrong kinds of leaders. Retailers fumed about promotion paths clogged with lackluster managers who can't be moved. And all sorts of attendees owned up to jitters about how well their companies' leaders can truly gauge a rising star's promise.
Do you have a technology strategy?
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Do you have a technology strategy? - by Eric D. Brown
Gene asks “Is Cloud Computing part of your Strategic Plan?”
While Gene’s question is a fair one, I have to ask a much simpler question….do you have a technology strategic plan? Or at the very least, do you discuss technology and/or IT in your organization’s strategic plan?
I know its a simple question….but its an important one.
Last year I spent some time working with a medium sized organization’s CIO and IT group. They had just finalized the organization’s strategic plan for the following year and wanted someone to come in and review for completeness and see if there were any holes.
Smarten Up, and Feel the IT Love
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Smarten Up, and Feel the IT Love by Susan Cramm - To exploit technology, companies need a combination of IT-smart business leaders and business-smart IT leaders.
If you want to make this a goal for your organization, start by baselining and benchmarking current performance. To do so, survey your business and IT leaders to assess how they:
- Perceive the importance and value of IT
- Manage the IT asset
- View the quality of the IT-business partnership
I conducted a survey last year to get a handle on the current state of the IT and Business Leader relationship, and I had a hunch that the results would differ depending on the "IT smarts" of an organization. In this survey, "IT-smarts" was determined by the survey respondents, based on an A through F self-grading system.
Here's what I found:
