Notes from Chicago HR Tech
November 3rd, 2008
What a killer week! An unparalleled opportunity to talk to literally hundreds of clients, prospects, competitors, industry analysts and other luminaries. Here are the three big recurring themes from these conversations:
Continuous versus Discrete
Performance management as a practice is so often centered around the performance review, which often happens only annually. Which means in many organizations performance management is viewed as an annual exercise. However smart businesses know that good performance management is continuous – managers should be having frequent conversations with employees about reaching goals and personal development – and the systems will need to start to support that shift. Jason Corsello gives his views here.
Web 2.0
It’s on everyone’s lips, but what does it mean? Particularly to HR. The commonest definition of web 2.0 is the internet as a platform, made up of engaging interfaces where users create content. Like Sonar6, and like the emerging space of internal social networking. There are now some cool applications of Facebook-like sites used within corporations as a way of getting people to share knowledge and capabilities with each other.
Sonar6 presented at the Cool New Technologies session where many of these web 2.0 plays were demonstrated. For two great examples of web 2.0 checkout cubeless.com (intranet social networking) and interviewstudio.com (online applicant screening).
Business not HR
Okay, we’ve been banging on about this since the start, but there is a definite shift in the language here. HR applications are now generally talked about as business tools rather than as HR tools, and the expectation is of business ROI (not just HR cost savings) in any HR system implementation. Heidi Spirgi of Knowledge Infusion noticed this too and talks about it at length here.
