Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:09 Hi everyone. Happy New Year coming up. We have a series of predictions reports coming out in January, but to get you started, let me talk you through what's going on in the HR tech market and compliment the article that I wrote this week, which will give you some perspectives. The first real issue in HR technology that we have to address is the fact that the market is going to have to slow down and not because we want it to, but there has been a very, very overinvested frothy market for HR tech for the last decade or so, to some degree fueled by the low interest rate environment where venture capitalists literally threw money at companies trying to build unicorns that would go public. And as you know, the stock market has corrected. Very few companies are gonna go public for a while and will probably have a continuing decline in the stock market probably through the middle of next year or later cuz we have to work off this 15 year zero interest rate inflationary bubble we've been living in.
Speaker 1 00:01:09 That felt good at the time, but we were basically mortgaging the future. And I blame Donald Trump and all sorts of people for this, but anyway, we're gonna have to live with it. So most of you are going to find that you have less money to spend on HR tech than you did in the past. Your budgets are gonna be more constrained. The price per employee for every single tool can't keep going up. And it's amazing to me that everybody in HR Tech wants to charge another 5, 10, 50, and 20 bucks per employee per month. And that just isn't worth it. Companies won't pay it. They're going to say no, they're going to ration back and they're gonna look at the amount of money spent on these add-ons and they're gonna say, why do we need 80 tools? There are literally 70 to 80 employee systems in most large companies and nobody's gonna pay a per employee price for every single one.
Speaker 1 00:01:58 So for those of you that are investors, for those of you that are vendors, for those of you that are buyers, you've just gotta accept this, that if your system isn't providing transformational value, if it isn't really making the company operate better, if it isn't improving productivity, if if it isn't reducing a lot of extra spending, then you're gonna have a little bit of a harder time. What that generally means is that a lot of the earlier stage innovative companies who may not get more money could be acquired. Now the reason I say this is I've lived through this at least twice before and it is funny how it happens in the mid 2000 tens, there was a period of time where all of the major HR software companies were trying to build integrated talent management suites prior to that period. There was a growth cycle in the applicant tracking systems market, the learning management systems market, the performance management systems market, and to some degree the compensation and benefits systems market.
Speaker 1 00:02:56 All of those application categories were growing. The bigger HCM players like PeopleSofts at the time didn't really have all that stuff. So each one of those vendors was piling on growing and there were, you know, 20, 30, 40 companies in each category and all of a sudden someone, the name of the company was Athoria, Nope, you've never heard of them, but decided to build a suite with all of those capabilities in one system, which is very complex because each one of those applications is very complex in and of itself. And there was this massive cascade of companies trying to become suites. Saba tried to become a suite, cornerstone tried to become a Suite, tole tried to become a suite, tole bot learn.com Plateau was acquired by Success Factors. Success Factors was then acquired by SAP Tole and all of its acquisitions was acquired by Oracle and a whole new world ensued of more integrated talent platforms, which really crushed a lot of the independent players for a good five or six years during that period.
Speaker 1 00:04:01 It was right before the 2008 recession, then we had the 2008 recession and a lot of those companies struggled and we had another growth of startups. So we've been through sort of a rebirth of that category, creation phase for the last 10 or 15 years. Interview intelligence, talent, marketplace, talent intelligence, skills-based hiring and assessment. Many, many of these things that seem, you know, video interviewing on and on and on. Many of these things that seem like big businesses are really categories that are created by innovative companies. And when the market doesn't grow because of the economy, those categories collapse. So I would not be surprised in 2023 if you see some of these categories collapse, you can read the article and hear more about the categories. Now, if you're a buyer of HR tech, all this really means to you is that if you go out and buy a bunch of point solutions, which you know, you generally do have to do, they could be acquired.
Speaker 1 00:04:59 So make sure you're looking at products from companies that have somewhat deep pockets, that have great integration with Microsoft Workday, Oracle, sap, and have management teams that have been around the block. Because what happens when the companies are acquired is the new company oftentimes doesn't invest in the acquired company. They wanted them for their customers or their revenue. And so you end up with a product that falls behind. I'm not guaranteeing that's gonna happen, but gen that generally what's what happened. You could imagine that that might happen to EdCast now that it's acquired by Cornerstone, although I doubt it. And you know, you could play that scenario out in into every single market. And there's some examples in the article about how some of these acquisitions have taken place. By the way, for those of you that are vendors, it's gonna be a little bit of a hairy time.
Speaker 1 00:05:45 It's not gonna be as easy to raise money. You're gonna have to get out there and sell your product in a much tighter budget environment, but it's gonna make you a better company because you're gonna spend a lot more, more time thinking about the value proposition of what you're building, not just the exciting wizbang features that everybody thinks are cool because we're getting into a very pragmatic period of investment, including, by the way, for those of you that are stock market investors, if there is no return on this particular piece of software, if it's not clear what it is, then the vendor better show you what it is or you may not buy it. So that's kind of the big environment we're getting into. Okay, second thing I want to talk to briefly is the Sapien Insight study. Sapien Insight study is run by Stacy Harris.
Speaker 1 00:06:31 Stacey used to work for me, we're old friends, we've worked together for years. Stacey has this exhaustive two or 3000 company dataset of people who respond to these surveys. And what her research shows is that the average vendor satisfaction amongst the larger vendors dropped by seven to 8% this year. That's a big number. You know, I don't know the statistic validity of that sample, but that is significant enough to be meaningful. So why do you think that is? I think it's pretty simple. I think what happened is during the growth cycle a lot of us bought things that we wanted and needed because they seemed like a good solution, but the vendors had not quite completed what we had expected. And so if you look at even companies that bought Workday learning or tools from various applicant tracking systems and sourcing systems, intelligence systems for skills, they're very new technologies and they're not really totally finished yet.
Speaker 1 00:07:31 And so even though you know you need them and you do have uses for them, when you get into the covers and using them, you suddenly find, wow, this doesn't really do what we wanted to do. Let's lean on the vendor to get it fixed and they're not working on the feature you want cuz they've got 15 other things to do. So I think that 7% drop is an indication of where we are in the business cycle more than anything else. I don't think the vendor design work is any worse or better than it ever was. I actually think the engineering and design going on in the tech industry is fantastic right now. But again, be as a buyer careful that what you buy actually does what you need now, not what you aspire to need and what the vendor aspires to build. There's never a guarantee that the vendor will build exactly what you want.
Speaker 1 00:08:16 If it isn't available now, it may never be available because their priorities might change. They they, they have to do what's best for them. Okay, that's the second thing I wanna point out. Now let's get into the fun stuff. The hot white, hot new categories are created. So lemme take a couple minutes and talk about the things that I think are gonna be really significant this year. And I do believe you're gonna find transformational technologies even in a down cycle like ri. There are things that have been built in HR tech that are so exciting and so new and so important you really have to pay attention to them. The first, of course is what we call employee experience platforms. New category to some degree I may have defined it, but this is a layer of software that handles workflow management, security content management. It is a place to build an employee portal, a place to build an employee mobile app, place to deliver benefits and open enrollment.
Speaker 1 00:09:11 A place to deliver onboarding, a place to deliver management development, transition management, offboarding, job transitions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of these experiences or transitions or benefit related activities that happen that employees need help with come from a core system somewhere there's a transactional system behind it, but employees don't have the time or the wherewithal to go find that log in, execute the transaction and finish. And many of those backend systems weren't designed as easy to use systems for employees. They were designed as easy to use systems for administrators. So we have these systems called employee experience CI platforms that sit in front, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Viva, this company applaud. First up, there's a whole bunch of them and they do a lot of things that other platforms don't do well. They do case management, they do employee communications, they have the ability for non IT users to build journeys in many applications.
Speaker 1 00:10:08 I talked to one of the large security agencies in the UK that built their entire performance management system based on applaud and they didn't even have an engineer working on it was just HR people. They allow you to do onboarding, new hire journeys, journeys for people who become promoted into managers, acquired certifications for training, on and on and on. All of these things that you design and implement an hr and there's dozens and dozens of employee experience journeys. We have a couple of charts that have probably 200 of them have to sit somewhere where employees can find them. Now the backend processing that makes them work might happen in another system, but we need a place for them to go. And portals are very expensive to build. They require your IT department to spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars they get out of date.
Speaker 1 00:10:52 They have to integrate with all of the security and authentication to the backend. So there's this new market and it's a real market and it's really big. And honestly the value proposition of the exp is sometimes greater than the core HR system. The core HR system. You can't run your company without it of course, but it is a little bit of a commodity. But what isn't a commodity is the employee experience you create. By the way, great XP strategy will allow you to change the way you operate your company. We get a lot of calls from companies that have R transformation problems. They have too many people in hr, they have a lot of administrators, a lot of bureaucratic processes. They have no self-service or not enough self-service. They want to implement a chatbot, they want to have ai. So they hire some big consulting firm.
Speaker 1 00:11:40 They spend 10, 15, 20 million. They end up with a whole bunch of stuff. But really what they need is an employee experience strategy and a platform on top of that to build on. So I think this is a big, big exciting area and uh, something you have to take very, very seriously. Second of course, is talent intelligence platforms. You've heard me talk about this a lot. Talent intelligence platform is not an interviewing tools or an assessment tool. It is a data system. It is a system like Eightfold or Gloat or Beamery or Sky Hive that can look at the data of the people in your company, identify their skills, recommend successors, recommend mobility, recommend mentors, tell you things about the organization's capabilities that you didn't know and compare it to the outside world. Now if you really wanna understand how talent intelligence works, download our Talent Intelligence Primer, which is on our website.
Speaker 1 00:12:31 It's free. And look at some of the work we're doing in the global Workforce intelligence project. We are doing talent intelligence by industry and it is absolutely just spectacularly interesting what we're doing and we will teach you how to do it. We're gonna do a talent intelligence bootcamp at the trade show March or April, I forget which one, I think the Unleashed one in Vegas. We're gonna do a talent intelligence bootcamp at our Resistible conference in noon and you can learn more about it from us and we're gonna need one of these things. Regardless how big you are, you're gonna need this platform. Now, Oracle, sap, Workday will tell you they have this technology, they really don't. They have skills inference technology and they have skills matching technology, but they don't have the data platform. They don't have the sophistication to put all sorts of new data into that system and make sense of it.
Speaker 1 00:13:19 So stay tuned for more on that. That's gonna be really hot. Third thing that's huge is the talent marketplace and career planning systems. Now these are built on talent intelligence, but they're different. Gloat, fuel 50, eightfold, phenom, Beamery is now doing this. These are systems that an employee can go to, like a portal. You could call them an employee experience platform and they will tell the employee about projects, gigs, assignments, mentors, developmental activities recommended for them based on their job, their role, their skills. This is a huge, huge new category. And the reason it's so important is it is really hard to hire people and it's gonna be hard to hire people for a long time to come for many, many reasons, which I won't go into here. The number of workers, the number of employees, the number of people with the skills you want is not growing.
Speaker 1 00:14:10 It's probably shrinking. And so you're gonna find it hard to hire even if we have a recession. So you're gonna wanna move people around much more strategically and it's just good business for your company because every time there's a new business opportunity or you shut something down or you do an m and a, you need to move people around. We have a, an employee in our company whose husband works for one of the large software companies that won't mention who it is. They went out and bought a new company they are doing away with the project that he's in and they just told him, you're out of a job. You've got 60 days to find a new one. They gave him no help, no support, he's gonna probably quit. They're gonna lose a very senior engineer because they don't have a system to help him.
Speaker 1 00:14:45 There's no excuse for that anymore. These systems are out of the box ready to go. And let me add, there's a new wrinkle to this, which is what I call the career pathway solutions from Guild and edis and others will get into this. What if you have a whole bunch of hourly employees or contract employees that don't have a college degree or don't have the credential to move into the nursing or operational roles or manufacturing or truck driver roles that you need. How do you get them there from here? It isn't just a matter of finding the job. They can't even apply for the job because they don't even have the basic credentials. Well, the cost of you educating those people is much lower than the cost of hiring somebody else who has that education. If you have a solution provider like Guild Education or edis to help you.
Speaker 1 00:15:32 So read our research on career pathways and it will blow your mind. This is gonna be a very big area next year too. Okay, third one, lifecycle employee listening. Now I have been writing about and talking about feedback systems for a long time. I remember feedback is a gift on and on and on writing articles about this when we went from annual surveys to pulse surveys. Well we've gone way beyond that now. Annual surveys, pulse surveys, passive listening, listening to people through video, listening to people through sentiment, looking at chatbot interactions, getting information from Outlook, getting information from people's calendars, getting informations from organizational network analysis. There's a massive amount of data about employees sitting in companies that hasn't been used. Now the reason it gets used in the consumer market by companies like Google is cuz they can sell ads. So they know all sorts of stuff about where you went and how much time you spent here and there and everything else.
Speaker 1 00:16:28 Well you have that data about your employees too, but you never cared about it. But now you do care about it because you're finding out that actually you can measure productivity, you can measure engagement, you can understand why one group is performing better than another group. You can understand why you have labor union problems in one division or one department or one city. You can see which managers are burning people out, which ones are not. And you can understand some fundamental issues like trust and confidence in management and whether people believe what leaders are saying. This is a big, big deal. And these systems are not only listening systems, they're action systems. We wrote a big piece called Shortening the Line between Insights and Action about the need to take this data and feed it back to managers or call centers or leaders when it comes in.
Speaker 1 00:17:17 So if you look at Qualtrics, Perceptyx, Medallia Glint, which is now part of Microsoft Pecan, which is now part of Workday, these are very, very sophisticated applications and they do a lot and you're gonna need at least one major platform to do this and it needs to be a platform. It's not just a survey tool because they do a lot, they do real-time analytics. They will provide feedback to managers. And if you use some of the passive listening tools and I mentioned the names of the vendors in there, they will tell you things about your workforce that will have direct impact on individual leaders and productivity and job design. Very hot space. Number four, capability academy or mastery learning platforms. We are all over this. The jba, the Josh Person Academy is built on one of these. We are really excited about the jba. We got a whole bunch of new stuff coming out next year on that.
Speaker 1 00:18:08 What basically happened in the learning space was we had 10 or 15 years of learning management systems, very big market, very hot. Everybody went out and bought those. Those things are badly needed. They're really backend systems for learning management, not for learning. Then we had the learning experience platforms, degreed, EdCast and many others that were basically portals into content. So all the content that was developed in the LMS or out on a content platform that you bought, which was very hard to find, became discoverable and organized through the LX P. But we never had a system to learn. All we had was a place to go click on content and browse through chapter by chapter videos. Well as you know, real learning requires mentoring, live learning, developmental assignments, coaching projects, cohort based learning where a group people in small groups, all sorts of hands-on experiential learning.
Speaker 1 00:19:01 The four E's as we call it, that we didn't ever had a platform for this. So companies had like 15 or 20 different learning systems. And by the way, VR and immersive learning is another part of that. So a bunch of companies are building this now and they're really hot new companies, they're listed in the article, take a look at them. It's long overdue. I actually worked at Digital Think in the early two thousands. We built one of these, called it the LDS Learning Delivery System, but that was long, long time ago and we were mostly focused on IT training. So a big, big thing there. If you really wanna experience the Capability Academy, join the Josh Person Academy. It's very inexpensive. There's so much stuff in there. We're gonna do some reorganization of it next year. But you will learn a lot and you'll learn a lot about how these systems work and how you can create a really incredibly compelling learning experience for your employees based on mastery.
Speaker 1 00:19:52 Not just clicking on a video and learning a few little things. Really developing mastery. Number five, redefining the talent acquisition suite. I think one of the areas of suites that really is happening again is talent acquisition. Cuz talent acquisition's, very innovative, very creative, very fragmented. There's tons of different tools. There's interview intelligence tools, video intelligence tools, sourcing tools, assessment tools, interview scheduling tools, external third party interview tools, detailed assessments for technical professionals, benchmarking tools, on and on and on. Lots and lots and lots of them. Do you really wanna have 25 vendors in your talent acquisition suite? I don't think so. So the bigger players, iSims, smart recruiters, Oracle, maybe Eightfold will get into this. Phenom and others modern hire are gonna start acquiring. I mean there was, you know this big acquisition frenzy at the company company called Employee iSims is out looking for more vendors.
Speaker 1 00:20:50 And so you will see more of a suite approach to talent acquisition. I don't think the talent management suite world is gonna come back. I think it's gonna come back in a different form. But that's another one that's really big and you can read more about that. And the article number six, contract worker management. This is a really interesting space. If you interview companies like Microsoft or pharmaceutical companies or Google or retailers or most manufacturers, what you actually find out is that many times half of their workers are contractors. Sometimes it's more than half and they're doing piece work or gig work or contract work. And so they're not really managed as strategic full-time employees. There is workforce scheduling systems for them and obviously they get paid and there's information about compliance and they get some training, but there really isn't a lot of management tools for them.
Speaker 1 00:21:41 Well those tools exist. They were often called VMs or vendor management systems because they managed employees as vendor contracts, not as human beings. And that is going to get bigger and more integrated into hcm. It's been going on for a long time. This is not a new idea, but I think it's gonna become more exciting this year because of hybrid work. Hybrid work is now mainstream. Companies are okay with you working part-time next to a contractor at home or remotely. And so they need a system that brings all that together. The big players there are this company called Magnet that used to be called Pro Unlimited. Legion is a hot space there, KG is big there, SAP Field Glass, and there are many, many smaller players. I would not be surprised if Microsoft got into that. I mean Workday has a solution that space that's fairly successful.
Speaker 1 00:22:30 So that's another hot one that I think will be a big one in 2023. One more or two more and then I'll wrap it up. Workspace management. This is something you probably have not thought about, but it is real and it's coming and the vendors that have been really focused on it most recently are serviced. And there's some new stuff coming from Microsoft and others when you have a bunch of buildings that are half empty and a bunch of offices that nobody wants to sit in and you want to rearrange and reorganize the facility for hybrid work and you want to have more active workspaces that are used on demand and you need new tech so that everybody can connect online and better video cameras and you need to schedule that and you need to create satellite offices because your rent in the downtown is too high and everybody wants to go to the suburbs.
Speaker 1 00:23:18 You got a big management problem here. You got a lot of money tied up in real estate, a lot of empty spaces. And the CFO's gonna ask you, what is going on? What's our workspace utilization? Where do we ratchet back or reallocate our spending? Who's using the facilities? How do we make it easier for employees to find the space they need, et cetera. I mean I've been through a lot of companies the last three years where I entered the office and it's empty. There's five floors of people with no people in it with desks and there's 20 people and that only goes on so long. Eventually those leases run out and we want a more dynamic workspace management. That is a huge, huge software market. And I know there are vendors working on it, I won't mention the names. And they do all sorts of exciting things around workspace management for employees and managers, scheduling for individuals, understanding capacity planning for the cfo, and then optimizing the experience of somebody who walks into a building and wants to know where to go to get their work done.
Speaker 1 00:24:17 We had some cool stuff like that at Deloitte that was custom built, but that's gonna be a pretty big space. So put it on your list and the next time you go to one of these HR tech shows, look around the metaverse. Okay, I wrote an article on this piece on this. I have some strong opinions here. First of all, immersive learning is big. If you look at Striver and many of the immersive learning platforms, they're all growing. They're applications in technical training and compliance in soft skills and recruiting. Very, very successful technology. As Apple and other tools get better and better at managing vr, we're gonna be able to use that with or without glasses. And I'm sure there will be an AR set of solutions coming soon. Microsoft's announcing more and more VR stuff. Accenture's been doing a lot of experimentation with this, but is it the big goal?
Speaker 1 00:25:03 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse? No, I have very little confidence that that's gonna be a big deal. I think there will be niche applications of it. I think it, you know, will be used in some cases for recruiting. There's some virtual recruiting platforms that are kind of interesting for young people. Could be used for virtual meetings where you have a town hall and employees can go to the town hall and browse around and go to different places to learn things virtually. And then of course it'll be used for training and education, which I think is really the, the core of it. Is it gonna be mainstream? I just doubt it. I think the headsets and the equipment is too expensive. I don't trust 90% of the things that Facebook does as high quality anyway. So I doubt they're gonna be the leaders. When Apple announces something then you know, we'll talk about it or Google or Microsoft.
Speaker 1 00:25:54 But at this point I wouldn't get too wrapped around the axle. Just keep your eye open and we'll tell you what we learned in the area of crypto and web three. I am not particularly high on this. I studied and worked in distributed computing in the 1980s. I know all about remote procedure calls and remote security and two-phase commit and all sorts of distributed authority systems. We had 'em in ibm. There was, they were part of the SNA protocol. We used them for distributed computing of um, mid-size computers where you had distributed authority and distributed control for large, you know, manufacturing companies. This is not a new idea. All these young guys that have built this stuff have this sort of political vision that we're gonna decentralize authority and there will be no central control. Well how well did that work out for ftx? The reason there is central control is because that is the way the economy works.
Speaker 1 00:26:47 The reason Google exists is not because somebody decided that it would be good to have Google. It's because people want a trusted source for a lot of things. Who's a good company that you can rely on? That's the reason banks are regulated. That's the reason LinkedIn is successful. Yeah, it's a nice theory that we're gonna have this distributed blockchain based credentialing system and you know, all my educational credentials and my work experience is gonna be floating around on the blockchain somewhere and nobody owns it. Why? Why do I, what's the benefit of that? I can put it on LinkedIn and I know LinkedIn's gonna take care of it and if my profile gets messed up on LinkedIn, they're gonna fix it and they're probably gonna even answer the phone. If it's on some blockchain system and there's a hundred different companies futzing around with it trying to make money on it, I got nobody to trust.
Speaker 1 00:27:32 I am not a fan of crypto. I didn't buy a lot of crypto for those of you that did. Good luck with that. I see no real reason for it. I don't see any utility for it other than a gambling casino. So I have yet to see a really compelling application of web three in hr. I've heard the theories, I've heard the ideas. If you have one let me know. I will write about it, okay, I'm more than willing to be convinced. But just because it's distributed computing is not enough. There has to be an application that is significantly different or better than it was in the current architecture. The cloud as it exists has a long way to go. So for those of you that are web three fanatics, I am all ears, but I'm not predicting a whole bunch of big things there yet.
Speaker 1 00:28:16 One thing that will start growing is what I call next gen hcm. Lemme take one minute on that. So you know, the most modern HR technology stack in HR in the core HR is Workday. Workday was founded in 2008, it's now 15 years old. But it was a really radical new idea to have an object or an architecture designed for the cloud integrated workflow, et cetera. It has been around a while. The architecture's been extended, they opened it up the last couple of years because they couldn't build everything themselves. So it's becoming a much more open platform as a service system. Oracle has re-engineered its system along the lines of modern cloud success factors has done the same. Success factors is now offering dynamic teams OKRs of much more irresistible. If you've read my book style of business management system, by the way, a lot of things in my book are, are sort of forecasts in many ways of where the tech market is going if you, if you read it.
Speaker 1 00:29:13 But they really aren't NextGen systems. They're mostly old systems or older systems that have been retrofitted and updated for what we would consider to be graph databases and cloud-based networks. Well, companies today do not look like hierarchies. They operate in a very dynamic fashion. We have lots of contract workers, we have um, organizations that are changing. We have people working on multiple project teams. The role of managers and leaders is not the same as it used to be. And you know, all, all this, I mean we've been writing about this for a while. What is the system that's designed for this? Honestly, there really isn't one. The hot vendors that I'm kind of watching are unit four, Darwin Box, which is a very exciting next generational system that's mostly used in Asia, but they're coming to the US really smart guys, very modern system. The ADP Next Gen ACM system, which is very cool.
Speaker 1 00:30:03 They have about 50 customers using it. Of course they don't sell to large organizations. It's a little bit slower for them and there could be others. And so if you're working on one of these or if you're wanna talk about it, this is another one that I think will be a little more visible to us this year. Okay, what else in HR tech? The final thing I will say is if you read the end of the article, I talked a lot about the HCM excellence maturity model. One of the things we've done for the last three years is Kathy Andis has been leading this project with TCS and others to interview 20 or 30 companies about their HCM implementation. So we have these very, very detailed case studies of what they did. And what you essentially find is that there are a fair number of projects that don't go well and they don't go well for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1 00:30:49 Usually the reason they don't go well is that the implementing company, not the third party vendor, not the integrator, but the actual buyer didn't buy the system as a transformation tool. They bought it as an automation system. And so they replaced an old system with a new one and they copied the implementation processes from the old one to the new one with the hopes that it would be easier to use and more transactionally efficient. And they didn't get a lot of value out of it. And they had sometimes what would be called a failed implementation. I've talked to some very, very big companies who told us we implemented vendor X, nothing about the vendor and it just didn't do what we wanted it to do. Well it wasn't because there weren't features, it was because they didn't think about how they wanted to use the system differently.
Speaker 1 00:31:33 And of all the technologies I've worked in, in for years, by the way, lemme tell you one story about this. When I was at Sybase and the early two thousands, we bought Sibel, which was the predecessor to Salesforce. And Siebel was a terrible system. It was a big order entry system where you had to enter all of your sales information into this big massive sales database and theoretically it was gonna make you more efficient as a salesperson. And nobody used it. It just was a complete flop because it made no sense. We had no idea why we had to enter all this data in there. Well, I don't know if that was the fault of the vendor or the fault of our IT group at Sybase, but we never sat down and talked about how sales was gonna be different with this new system. They just told us, here's a new system, we're gonna teach you how to use it.
Speaker 1 00:32:18 Here's how you put your data into it and nobody had the time. That's the same thing here. These are systems that should transform the way you operate, which means you have to be a business consultant and you have to work with the business counterparts around the world to make sure these systems are used in a strategic way. When you buy a new HR tech platform, you get better workflow management, you get better user experience, you get better data managers and leaders should have access to information they didn't have before. Employees will spend less time using it. Don't just look at it as a replacement for something you already had. It's not that it's a chance for you to do things differently. It's takes a little bit longer to do that. It might take you a year or two to really figure out to use the system well, but if you do it in an iterative way, you can get value from it very quickly.
Speaker 1 00:33:04 We went through an implementation here of HubSpot and because we have a lot of tech consultants in the company, we didn't sit down and go through the CRM database in great details and design every P piece of screen we wanted to do. We turned it on and started using it and started figuring out how we could do things differently almost immediately. And within a couple of weeks, month or two, we had this incredibly different way of doing marketing than we ever did before. And we're relying on HubSpot to do things for us that we just didn't do before or we didn't do well or we didn't do efficiently. And that's what these systems are like. So if you look at the H C M excellence maturity model, you'll see these are transformational tools. That's why there is a high roi even in a down economy.
Speaker 1 00:33:46 If you think about this market strategically, and let me make one more plug for our membership. We now have really beefed up our corporate membership. So for those of you that are in medium size to large companies, all this stuff I'm yaking about here is written down in case studies and examples and tools and assessments. And then we will work with you to understand this market. That's what we do for our members directly. So I just wanna make a quick plug for that. It will be a great year. We will have a lot of exciting things happen. There will be mergers, there will be acquisitions, there will be some incredibly successful vendors, we'll have a lot of focus on productivity, we'll have a lot of focus on next generation user experiences. You're gonna see AI disappear into the background as things are just gonna get smarter and work better. And you're not gonna know why we're not gonna have to talk about AI too much. Chatbots are gonna become much more ubiquitous and much more useful and some of these categories I've talked about are gonna be really, really big spaces that will threaten in some sense the vendors that can't keep up. So anyway, that's a little bit of a motivation for the coming year. Have a great New Year's holiday and we will talk to you in.
