“Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin’ then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’.” – Bob Dylan

The Global Recession

Re-ces-sion \ri-se-sh?n\ “a period of reduced economic activity”1

Recession: it’s an ugly word, but unfortunately a fact of life—especially these days. The current economic crisis not only affects individuals and businesses in North America, but those around the globe as well.

Nearly every day during the last six months when I’ve opened up the newspaper, there’s been some story about a company that has laid off its employees. The sad truth is that many of these layoffs are targeted toward individuals who have been working for the same company for many years and now are finding themselves looking for work in a job market for which they may not possess the skills required.

So what are these individuals and businesses doing to weather the storm? Well, I guess you could say it depends on the individual and what business he or she is in. Some industries have been harder hit than others (e.g., construction and manufacturing), but one thing is certain—the recession’s effect is being felt by everyone everywhere.

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Time and again during my decade or so of covering the enterprise applications market as an industry analyst I have witnessed what difference a year can make. And boy, would 2008 be such a year!

A year ago or so, I concluded an in-depth four-part series on Deltek (NASDAQ: PROJ), whose executives were recently happy to tell me that 2008 was not that terrible a year for the company. Quite the contrary, Deltek feels comfortable as a company even in these troubled economic times. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced and analyzed some mixed feelings and doubts that we might still have about the noble concepts of talent management and human capital management (HCM), while Part 2 provided some definitions of these two software categories’ respective scopes.

No Laughing Matter, Indeed

The discussion so far has ascertained that talent management, as a strategy, requires both appropriate systems and an organizational commitment to attract, acquire, manage, and measure the talent needed to achieve a company’s business objectives. Without the alignment of business and talent management systems and processes, and without closing the gap between workforce strategy and execution, companies will sub-optimize their benefits and put their goals at risk.

Going hand in hand with strategic alignment is another significant trend in recent years, which is the recognition that automating transactions in silos (within only, e.g., recruitment, performance, compensation, succession) is not helping the human resources (HR) department. It is indeed difficult to expect any strategic alignment between business and the talent roster with fragmented data, applications, and talent pools, where data is often lost, and there is consequently no single view (or single version of truth). Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog post introduced some mixed feelings and doubts that we might still have about the noble concepts of talent management and human capital management (HCM). This skepticism lingers in spite of the many indicators of the usefulness of these concepts in mitigating some imminent global workforce challenges, which were outlined in Part 1.

Accommodating “Generation Y”

Let us not forget about the looming demographic shifts, given that the baby boomers are on their way out. One group that has been receiving a lot of attention is the so-called Generation Y: the group mostly in their 20s that has recently entered or is about to enter the workforce. These dudes and dudettes haven’t just adopted the use of the Internet – they have grown up with it, and they rely (live and breathe) on it.

A key characteristic of basically all Gen Y candidates today (which might belong to earlier generations, like the Gen X) is that they are keen consumers of Internet technology. They are accustomed to using websites such as Amazon.com, Google, Facebook, Ask, LinkedIn, Twitter, Travelocity, and eBay (to name but a few), often on a daily basis, to buy what they want, go where they want, stay in touch with their friends and family, get their work done, and do it all and more with ease. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, by now most of us have heard about the importance of strategically managing talent and human capital, but how many of us are convinced that companies truly buy into those lofty concepts in droves? Some of us will even have read McKinsey’s now classic study from the late 1990 that coined the term “the war for talent.”

In other words, now in the new millennium, we find ourselves in the talent age. The article’s authors claimed that in an environment where competition has become global and capital is abundant (well, at least it was 10 years ago, well before the recent collapse of banking investment giants, and the US and German government interventions), “…all that matters is talent. Talent wins.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of the thrills of working as an analyst in ERP for TEC is that I get to evaluate many different ERP systems and business products. This time, I assisted my peer, Sherry Fox, for the certification of Ramco’s human capital management (HCM) product. Its HCM product is part of a complete suite of products that falls under Ramco’s Enterprise Series 4.1.

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Lawson Software (NASDAQ: LWSN), headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, the United States (US), and with offices around the world, provides software and service solutions to about 4,000 customers in manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and service sector industries across 40 countries. Its solutions include Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and industry-tailored applications.

Lawson has not lately been accused of being too exciting, glitzy or so, at least not compared to a decade ago, when its erstwhile slick marketing machine was crafting catchphrases like “self-evident applications (SEA)”, “drill-around”, “web-addressable applications” and so on.  Some recent attempts in touting corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a witty marketing spot on YouTube have been noted (even acknowledged by the competition), albeit with mixed reviews/reception.

Nevertheless, according the “still water runs deep” adage, Lawson’s relative quietness certainly does not mean that the vendor has not been active in the field and in its research and development (R&D) labs. I’ve been made aware of many recent moves to execute on the roadmap that was outlined at the vendor’s CUE 2007 conference. Read the rest of this entry »