He’s Baaaack!
After a lengthy respite from the rigors of blogging, Jim Hollincheck just published a short piece that demonstrates why he’s the dean of the HR Software Market. Citing Dirk Gently (a “holistic detective” who makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person”), Hollincheck makes the case for a results first, process second approach to HR Systems.
(Naomi Bloom, the dean of HR’s Tech Systems school, also cites Gently as a pime source for her ‘outcomes first’ systems design approach)
The idea of placing results at the heart of HR Tech design is key to understanding why the rest of the organization has such a hard time with HR.
Can you imagine what would happen if the manufacturing department exclusively focused on the process of making widgets and its improvement? That VP of manufacturing would be history within a quarter.
Suppose that the Marketing Department chose to focus on improving marketing processes rather than improving the brand or the volume of lead generation. Yup, bye-bye Ms VP.
Envision the head of sales who focused on the improvement of the sales process without regard to quarterly figures. You guessed it. The trip down memory lane would be very short.
The perplexing tendency of HR Departments to place process improvement at the heart of their operations makes them very hard for their peers to comprehend. Everyone else is measured on a performance basis. Results are the sine qua non of any organization. Process and its improvement are way, way back in the distance.
This is what Neil McCormick (of our Editorial Advisory Board) means when he says, “The Output’s Connected to the Outcome“.
In HR, all of the attention goes to the Performance Management System rather than to the Performance that you want to manage. Somehow, the results you want from the organization, get disconnected from the administrative process once the ball is handed to HR.
It’s not that process improvement isn’t important. It’s that it is meaningless unless it is firmly grounded in actual stuff getting done.
Expect to see increasing pressure on HR Tech vendors to explain the end goal of tools that automate processes. In some ways, this is the story that SuccessFActors has been telling the market with appreciable success. Their challenge is to bring that same business sense to the backwaters of Applicant Tracking and Talent Management.
