Imaginary…? I’ll explain.

We decided that while expos can be fun, they’re hard places to learn about vendors; we’ve always said that the best place to learn about Sonar6 is right here on the internet. So we started the “Going to HR Tech? Don’t visit our booth” campaign, featuring our fantastic imaginary booth.

Because it didn’t exist (and therefore had an unlimited budget), it was the best booth ever – laser shows, smoke machines… soon others started spreading the news about our world-beating booth. The one that didn’t exist.

This was funny for a while, but our unbooth made some people unhappy. So this year we are having a real booth. Sort of.

By ’sort of’, we mean we are actually having a real, quite large, cardboard box.

You see, we still think we should spend our money on developing great software, not on shiny stands and acrobats.

But we also want to meet y’all. So come and find us over by the big cardboard box.

We’ll be at the Expo (the mysterious and unmissable Booth 145) on September 29 & 30, so if you can’t commit to the full conference grab an Expo Only Pass, come along and have a chat. We might even hand out a few of our highly-coveted t-shirts if we feel the love…

See you there!

Register for the HR Technology® Conference & Expo
Conference: September 29 – October 1, 2010
Expo: September 29 – 30, 2010
McCormick Place, Chicago

“For six years in a row,” says HR Technology® Conference co-chair Bill Kutik, “we have asked CedarCrestone to debut its survey at our event because it is the most thorough, highly respected and useful survey on technology usage in HR. Clearly, HR and IT practitioners know that, too, because it draws standing room only attendance every year.”

We’ve been asked to pass the invitation on, so here it is:

The CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey

CedarCrestone requests your participation in its CedarCrestone 2010–2011 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics Survey, 13th Annual Edition through July 5, 2010. The survey is a comprehensive research effort designed to provide organizations with important data to plan, justify, benchmark, and execute HR technologies. The survey questionnaire is available online atwww.CedarCrestone.com/hrssv71.

All respondents will receive an advance copy of the results in late September 2010. We will invite you to a special webinar of results thereafter. The first 100 respondents completing the survey will receive a $5 Starbucks card. There are further enticements described at the end of this letter.

The 2010–2011 HR Survey covers questions about:

• Application adoption
• HR software acquisition and deployment trends
• “Going global” trends
• The value of HR technologies

The survey collects responses from HR and IT management with knowledge of the HR technologies in use and planned. We invite representatives from organizations in all industries to participate. All responses are anonymous and will be kept confidential. We will only use your information in the aggregate. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.CedarCrestone.com/hrssv71.

We appreciate your contribution to the most comprehensive collection of data focused on HR technologies usage and overall HR service delivery.

Best wishes,

Alexia Martin
Director, Research and Analytics
CedarCrestone

PS: CedarCrestone offers a special discount for survey participants that complete all sections: $500 off the regular registration price for the 2010 HR Technology® Conference of $1,695 which can be used by any employees of the company completing the survey. When you return your completed survey, we will send you a discount code to apply to the Conference fee. We will also enter each company completing a survey in a drawing to win a free benchmark project from CedarCrestone worth $10,000.*

*Benchmark project award is subject to all laws, void where prohibited or restricted, limited in scope as defined by CedarCrestone, and has no cash value

Firstly an apology. The sort of outage that we experienced is just not supposed to occur. We know this hurt several customers who were trying to complete reviews. The whole team at Sonar6 take this stuff seriously and personally. We are sorry. The following is an explanation as to what actually occurred.

At Sonar6 we pride ourselves on having an always on web presence, and as such we have built, in partnership with Rackspace, an incredibly solid and reliable server backbone to support the Sonar6 application, our website, and other related infrastructure. There are more details about this infrastructure here: http://www.sonar6.com/images/stories/downloads/sonar6_security_us.pdf

But unfortunately this issue was not caused by our servers. In fact they remained up and running, and in use by many customers during this period. The issue was actually that other internet infrastructure, outside our control, was not serving our IP address correctly. Therefore users putting our web address into their browsers were not getting to our servers. This is what you would normally call a DNS problem.

To explain what happened, first a very basic primer in how the internet resolves web addresses. When you type in a web address, it is translated by the Domain Name System (DNS) from a human readable web address (like www.sonar6.com) into a machine readable IP address (which in this case is 98.129.95.226). The Domain Name System is a series of servers around the world that between them store the IP address of all internet addresses. Generally they resolve from right to left. When I put in www.sonar6.com, then the first query will go to a “dot com” part of the Domain Name System, that will tell it on what name server to find sonar6. That next name server is known as the authoritative server for the sonar6 domain. Once on that server the IP address for the various servers that Sonar6 runs are served up. There are IP addresses for our www site, for mail, for our v3 server and so-on. This information is cached all around the world, so if there is a problem with one element of the system often it remains running in other places. Likewise any change to the system can take some time to propagate.

We have remote monitoring at sites throughout the world, and this issue was first alerted by the DNS not resolving for www.sonar6.com in the UK. Our engineers were immediately put onto the problem. What was discovered was that for some reason when www.sonar6.com was queried against the DNS it was not resolving. The normal path of action here is to check that there is not a problem with the name servers that have authority for the sonar6.com domain. However these servers were working fine, and the records on them were all correct and unaltered.

On digging it was found that for some reason the dot com part of the Domain Name System was not serving sonar6.com’s authoritative server. This is now getting to a very basic level of the internet. Because of DNS caching this was not impacting everyone. We worked with the dot com registrar where the problem was, and after considerable time they were able to rectify the problem. Once the problem was rectified, because of caching it also took some time to propagate throughout the world. Some users were also not impacted at all because they had the Sonar6 IP address in their local network DNS, or the DNS servers that their ISPs worked with remained cached.

The real difficult factor of this scenario was that for customers impacted they could also not reach our email servers (as the DNS was not serving our domain at all), and without a properly resolving initiating domain we could not send email to many customers. Some temporary email services were put in place to contact impacted customers, which worked for most customers but not quite all. Likewise, as you could imagine, many of our systems depend on functioning DNS, support being one of them.

This was an extraordinary problem that we would never expect to happen again. While horribly uncomfortable and stressful for everyone in Sonar6 and disruptive for several of our customers, these are actually the greatest learning experiences. We have identified four areas in which we will improve out of this.

1. The DNS problem. We are working with the dot com registry involved to see if we can ascertain how such a fundamental issue could occur. The right locks on our authoritative server record have been put in place to theoretically prevent this from occurring again, but we continue to work in this space to be rock solid.
2. Outside of domain support system. We are putting in place a new support system and console that will allow our admin contacts within accounts to track support queries. This will sit outside of the Sonar6 domain, so that it will continue to function in any scenario. Details will be circulated in the next month.
3. Increased outbound support capacity. We are still hiring in Sonar6 support! Part of this is to increase our outbound support capacity. In some areas we were able to call customers proactively which we know was appreciated, but we didn’t get onto this in all time zones. This experience added weight to our earlier decision to add three more open headcount to our support team.
4. Distribution of alternate domains. There are other ways into our servers (for example via www.sonar6.com.au). We will be working to see whether it is useful to communicate these to IT contacts in accounts, and add them to our standard testing regimes.

With any situation like this it is difficult to cover every question that people might have and still give a readable explanation. If you have any further questions, or want any clarification, please contact  support@sonar6.com

Again, sorry if you were impacted, and thank you for your ongoing support.

What IS SaaS?

SaaS is software that’s hosted by a vendor and delivered to clients via a network (in Sonar6’s case, delivered via the internet and accessed with a web browser). Unlike ‘traditional’ software, there are no CDs, no DVDs, nothing to install.

Why not do it the usual way?

SaaS has a couple of major advantages over locally installed software: it usually costs less, and it’s far more flexible:

• You pay for the actual software, not for production and distribution costs
• You always have access to the latest versions, updates, upgrades and bug fixes
• You can influence the software’s evolution. Flexible development means SaaS solutions can easily adapt to the ways actual users interact with the software
• You avoid getting locked in to one product or one vendor. SaaS is usually subscription-based so if your needs change it’s relatively painless to switch to something different. It’s a little bit trickier to be that flexible if you’ve spent thousands of dollars on software and the tech to support it!

What do you need to know?

In our 5 Weeks to Really Useful Performance Reviews, we suggest some questions to ask vendors when you’re looking at performance management software. We go into specifics, but the things you need to know are the same regardless of the type of SaaS solution.

As a starting point, we quite like this list of considerations from Xactly Corp (a Sonar6 customer and a leading provider of on-demand sales compensation solutions, so they know whereof they speak!)

The big news is that Wise Consulting is now a Sonar6 service partner (our first on the East Coast) and will be providing consultation and implementation services to clients in the US. We’re excited to have them on board – it’s always gratifying when a client digs Sonar6 so much they want to share the love with others!

Some kind words from Wise Consulting President Jennifer Wise:

“From the first moment I saw Sonar6, I knew this was a great fit for evaluating and aligning our dynamic workforce.  As consultants, we are anxious to bring this success to our clients and Sonar6 customers.  We are proud to be selected by Sonar6 to represent them!”

We’re really looking forward to working closely with the Wise Consulting team to reach more of our US clients.  Exciting times…

Read more: Sonar6 & Wise Consulting Press Release

February seems to be a ‘why do we do performance reviews?’ month, with everyone busy completing their reviews or getting all introspective, pondering why they’re necessary in the first place.

Some very interesting opinion pieces on just this topic have cropped up recently: check out what Jim Holincheck, Bob Sutton and Todd Dewett have to say.

We tend to side with those arguing that the traditional understanding of performance reviews – forms filled out once a year, a perfunctory conversation (if you’re lucky), receiving your number and spot on the bell curve – is probably deserving of all the hate. Useful reviews on the other hand (and we can help you achieve those) have a place in any successful company.

One thing we think it’s important to remember is there’s a difference between performance reviews and ratings. If you don’t actually need to give ratings and rank employees, why bother? If they’re a necessary evil (ie, used when calculating compensation), then ratings and rankings still have to be reached via a robust review process.

Another thing to bear in mind: that normal distribution graph we all love so much doesn’t account for shifts over time (unless your organization really is extremely average and nobody ever gets better or worse. In which case you probably have other worries). Let go of the bell curve and base your decisions on your actual people information – it means something.

Useful reviews aren’t about assigning numbers, they’re about the conversation. Whatever tools you’re using should be gathering the information that will help you discuss performance with your employees, your managers, your exec… If they’re not, they’re not doing their job.

We don’t hate reviews, and we don’t think they’re going anywhere any time soon, but we really do feel for those poor people currently suffering through their ‘traditional’ reviews. There is a better way!

So how do you feel about performance reviews? Take the quiz to see if you’re one of the haters. Nobody’s claiming scientific accuracy, but we’re sure most people will identify with at least a couple of the responses…

Thanks Karen!

Too often, feedback is delayed (annual performance review, anyone?) or negative (even though this does have its place). How often do you give praise or celebrate success? And do you give positive feedback across the board: to your top paid executives as well as the little guys working away in the background?

It doesn’t have to get complicated: employee recognition isn’t just about elaborate rewards or bonuses. While it may seem blindingly obvious, research has shown that just thanking employees results in increased engagement – and an engaged employee is a more productive employee.

One of the configurable aspects of our new system is that 360° feedback can either be anonymous, or can be attributed to the person who gave the feedback.

There is a tradition of 360° feedback being anonymous. When 360° reviews were primarily used as part of a leadership development framework, it was thought that anonymous feedback would be more candid. Of course, some will tell you it was also full of inaccuracies and injustice!

Newer uses of 360° (as in Sonar6) are less about developing leaders and more about gathering input into a performance review process for all staff. In these scenarios we are seeing lots of companies go down an open feedback path, believing that any challenges in getting candid feedback are outweighed by using the process to improve team dialog.

We thought we’d make a list of the benefits of each approach from our research.

Why anonymous is good

1. People are more likely to give candid, objective feedback
2. Reduces the likelihood of punitive consequences for poor ratings (especially from subordinates)
3. Allows people with less forthright personalities to give feedback
4. Allows management to couch potentially bad or damaging feedback

Why attributed is good

1. If you are accountable for your feedback, you will put more effort into providing it
2. Prevents “back-stabbing”
3. Encourages team dialog and getting feedback out into the open
4. Removes some of the ability to “game” the system
5. Some opinions are more important than others (eg a close work-mate or a big customer), so it is useful to know
6. It is easier to address an issue if you can understand where the feedback comes from
7. Often the people with the strongest opinion (either very positive or very negative) want their feedback to be attributed
8. It doesn’t feel like your destiny is controlled by a group of anonymous people

It was probably best summed up by one manager I talked to who said “The ideal is an environment where you can give direct open feedback, safe in the knowledge that you won’t be somehow punished for it.”

I am really interested in opinions on this. Please comment!