Sonar6 - Performance Management Blog

We’ll be unveiling Sonar6 v3 at the huge HR Technology Conference in Chicago this month, as well as presenting at the Cool New Technologies session. Since the conference this year is showcasing Talent Management, Web 2.0 and Workforce Analytics/Planning, it’s the perfect opportunity to show our exciting new release off!

Sonar6 received the HR Technology award at last year’s conference but we weren’t there to collect. This year we won’t be receiving an award, but we’ll certainly have a lot of great new features on display! If you’re in the area, we’d love you to stop by and visit us on Stand 100. And if you haven’t picked up your ticket yet, simply print out this PDF and present it at the venue for free admission.

Full v3 press release here.

Interesting few days with prospective clients in Australia. The focus on workforce planning and talent management in general is very clear, with several of the initiatives we are involved in having CEO and or Board sponsorship and involvement.

There is also more interest from traditionally “talent averse” sectors of the market such as manufacturing, where cost reduction and revenue growth have been the dominant elements of business / value creation strategies.

Definitely a market we will spend more time in during 07.

Talent is the new king asset, yet most established business disciplines are designed to manage capital, rather than human, assets. In this whitepaper Mike Carden discusses how a new decision science is rising up to help businesses make better decisions about their people. The Sonar6 term for it? Talent Science…

Talent Science Whitepaper 

Read more Talent Science articles from Sonar6.

Our first business partner in North America / Canada is Jackson Leadership Systems - www.jacksonleadership.com .

The team at Jackson Leadership have been studying and consulting on leadership and the things organisations can do to improve their position and develop and grow their existing and future leaders more effectively.

CEO Eric Jackson also has a blog: http://breakoutperformance.blogspot.com/

Fast Company is a great magazine generally but the article they published in August last year really created debate and invoked a passionate response from supporters and dissenters.

“Why we hate HR” is a clear and aggressive title but the perspectives and depth of the article make up for the initial give away of where the author stands on the issue.

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What a fascinating article on CNN’s money.com - HR = Higher Revenues http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/07/01/8380516/index.htm

These results are compelling given the basis and expanse of the research data, and highlight the need to focus on talent management in even small businesses. The upshot - “small businesses that granted workers more autonomy grew at more than four times the rate of those that relied on tight top-down controls”.

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Jason Corsello knows his stuff. He should do; he is in the privileged position of looking at and evaluating the software and strategy of the future in HR technology and services. Great blog at http://jasoncorsello.blogs.com/jason_corsellos_weblog/

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Last week was full of comments and frustrations around succession planning - it’s a huge issue for big and small companies alike. A lot of owner managers are unsure of their actual exit strategy - sell or employ a successor and allow them to buy in?

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Fantastic piece from Drucker on Systematic HR:

systematicHR - Human Resources Strategy and Human Resources Technology » Peter Drucker on the Manager’s Major Problem

It’s a huge challenge for most organisations to balance functionality with usability and user engagement to ensure quality data.

Drucker sums it up eloquently in this commentary on the need to drive for effectiveness not efficiency - seriously smart.

It’s been another huge week in the world of Sonar6. Customers take less than 5 minutes to engage in their own specific issues around people and their management and growth.

This week we saw a large and consistent amount of pressure around the retention of staff - a key person snaffled away for 40k more than market rate, a star sales person leaving without so much as an “I’m unhappy and you need to take better care of me”.

It’s happening everywhere and it’s unlikely to stop, or is it?

What do you think?