Of cars and HR software: Metaphor-based HRIS tips

PARIS

Remember that great song "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" from that wittiest of musicals, My Fair Lady? Well, for the past couple of decades that I have been in the HR technology industry, I have been asking myself a similar question: Why can't my HR software be like a car? Throughout my career I have peppered my articles, presentations and meetings with car metaphors to drive the various points I was trying to make. (Here's the scene from the 1964 movie with Rex Harrison singing, well more like uttering, the song.)

You'll find hereafter some of the most frequent ones. Note that most would apply to enterprise software, not HR only; however, since I am an HR technology person through and through, you'll hardly be surprised that's my focus.

System Evaluation
This is the oldest car-metaphor case I can recall, having used it for at least 20 years. In the latest 1990s when I started out as an HR system analyst-cum-consultant spending most of my time advising French companies on which HR system to select, I would use this metaphor quite often. Actually so much that I put it early on in my book, High-Tech Planet. Here's the relevant excerpt of the metaphor which I still use to warn my clients off including ever single product specification whim that might cross their mind just because "it can be useful."

Having four wheels on a car rooftop is certainly useful in case the car were to turn over; but since no car maker offers that, it would be a waste of time to include that feature in a list of requirements, especially when every business process is now available in a computer system developed, sold and serviced by countless companies. Delphi Tech was one of such companies. Actually, it was more than just one of them. It was the biggest, the largest, the best-known one: indeed, as Dick claimed, Delphi had to a large extent created the business of corporate software, or at least contributed to its development. It was, as Dick would say, the Rolls-Royce of computer systems.  (High-Tech Planet: Secrets of  an IT Road Warrior, 2010 edition, p. 3.)

I also warn against using SIs (system implementers) as selection advisors for obvious reasons: SIs tend to focus on one or two systems; many, especially the boutique ones, are actually one-trick ponies. If you only have experience driving one or two cars, you will only recommend those ones. Or using research firms like Gartner who have limited, if any, HRIS implementation experience. This is like recommending a car based on several great features, but forgetting to ask the prospective buyer whether they can drive.

And beware overkill: When famed French soccer club Paris-Saint-Germain bought Workday, considering their small headcount and limited resources, it was clearly like buying a huge bus just for you, your wife and your two kids. Or like buying a Lamborghini to avoid walking on your driveway to your mailbox and back.

Finally, I strongly advise against falling for what I call the "critical capabilities" trap. If you only focus on these, you are likely to overlook other useful aspects and not be able to really pick the system that is best for you. Such an approach is as smart as when buying  a car to look only at the number of wheels and car paint. Three cars can all have the same features (tires, automatic transmission, air conditioning), but when you use them you will know which one is better. 

Product Design
As someone who spent a big chunk of his career in product strategy and management roles (at PeopleSoft and Fidelity Investments' HR Access) I am still amazed at how HR system  vendors make a point to diverge on fundamental design choices. If SAP decides that one process will require different screens, you can be sure that Oracle would prefer to have just one screen (albeit a long one obliging the user to scroll down endlessly) while Workday would probably prefer to have several tabs on the same screen. This can be very confusing for users who, as part of their daily HR tasks, have to toggle back and forth between several HR applications. Wouldn't it be nice if they were all designed along similar lines? 

Just imagine that if Ford puts the brake pedal to the left of the accelerator, so Renault puts it to the right. If BMW  uses a steering wheel to enable the driver to move the front wheels, so everyone else must use levers and sticks and chains. There would be almost no learning-curve effects either from a manufacturing or a usability perspective. And yet, HR software vendors do exactly that, which is quite insane, especially when you know that the musical-chairs game so prevalent among software executives means it's basically the same folks who oversee products across companies. 


Change Management
What many end-user companies are still grappling with as part of their new HR system implementations, especially in the cloud, is the right mix between configuration and training which now goes by the fancy name of change management. As I often tell my client, redoing you car's body and changing the engine would be of little use if the driver is incompetent. If you never learned to drive, buy a BMW and then crash it into a wall , how is that the car maker's fault? 

And when a client insists on implementing the same inadequate process again and again, I warn them against reinventing the flat tire.


HR System Implementation
There are many companies that in their move to cloud HR adopted the approach whereby they start with the low-hanging fruit of talent modules before, like an afterthought, implementing Core HR. More often than not, the added complexity doesn't make up for the lower risk. Core HR is your HRIS engine, without it your global HRIS simply won’t work. It is like trying to drive without a steering wheel: you’re not going to go far.

Discussing the Implementation phase one is often reminded that the Design phase seems never to have been closed since users will always try until the very last moment (and even after!) to change the design. This is very dangerous and akin to changing the tyre while driving the car: recipe for disaster.

Another maddening aspect of requirements is that companies often come up with contradictory requirements. Imagine that you're driving a car and when you arrive at a crossroads you ask for instructions, "left or right?" "Both," is the answer you get. 

Cloud/SaaS HR for the dummies
Surprising as it may seem, there are still many corporate executives involved in on-premise-to-cloud transition projects who are still struggling with the cloud concept. This is where I probably make the most of the car metaphor. Starting at the evaluation stage, I warn my clients about  dinosaur vendors like Oracle who try to make us believe that they can tweak on-premise PeopleSoft into a cloud offering. It's like saying that if you affix wings to a car and add  a pointed nose along with powerful reactors, and find a way to hide the wheels, you can turn a car into a plane. It just won't fly - in more sense than one.  

Or putting a new body on a  30-year car. Would you fall for that?

If you still decide to take the risk to adopt half-baked products, then be prepared to fork out the funds needed to have onboard several consultants for a long period of time and whose function will be to fix the inevitable bugs and issues that are bound to arise. Remember that when the first automobiles came, owners needed to hire a mechanic full-time because those first cars had a bad habit of always breaking down.

For those who can't wrap their head around capex and opex (that's capital and operation expenditure to you) I explain that Saas is like leasing a car versus buying it. When they compare that with the millions they used to pay upfront just for the honor of being an SAP or Oracle customer, these executives' eyes brighten up immediately.

One car metaphor I used a lot when the cloud model arrived, and less so now as the cloud has gone mainstream, aimed at helping users to understand the key difference between traditional ERP (on-premise) and the cloud (SaaS based.) In order to convince the pro-ERP camp I explained to them they can't stop progress.  When automobiles arrived, they coexisted for a while with horse-drawn carriages before these got ditched because everybody saw that cars were faster and more practical. As an early advocate of the cloud model, against Oracle's (in)famous scorning of the cloud, I am glad to see that I eventually was vindicated by the market. (See my Jan. 2011 article, "Can software dinosaurs reinvent themselves as cloud-based vendors?")

One concept that, surprise, surprise, dinosaur vendors  try to push is the hybrid system of on-premise + SaaS system supposed to work in perfect harmony like hybrid cars. I debunk it by pointing that it's like saying, "Oh you don’t like the engine in your car, no problem, we can remove it for you and attach the car to two horses instead." Really!

Another fallacy about hybrid HR systems is that customers are led to believe that it's the best of two worlds. Come on! Will you really buy half of a Porsche and couple it with half of a Ferrari? 

SaaS, a relatively new concept,  is often confused with BPO (outsourcing the full process, be it payroll or recruiting.) When a client tells me they are not sure whether they should move to a SaaS  vendor or a BPO one, I tell them they are mixing things: First of all, you have to analyze and make a decision whether you want to run your full process inhouse or out. And only then can you decide, if inhouse, whether Saas or on-premise; and, if outsourced, then what vendor. In car terms, it is like saying, " I’m tired, I can’t walk to work, so I’ll invest in either a bike or a car." Well, they are two different tings, you should be either comparing bike/motorbike or motor bike/car but a bike vs. a car doesn't make sense. Like the proverbial apples and oranges.

Of second-hand cars
Of  course, no car metaphor would be complete without the time-honored used-car example. When Oracle provides its prospects with heavy discounts to adopt Fusion, I remind them that you get what you pay for: If the price of a second-hand car ("used car" to most Americans) is too good to be true, it's probably because it is neither good nor true. Also, you buy a second-hand car if  you’re a good mechanic (in HR technology words, you have enough in-house skilled resources), because then you can fix it. Otherwise, you’re on your own: Compare this with the first-automobile and mechanic metaphor a couple of paragraphs before.

Sales 
I could spend gazillions of pixels and tire your eyes out of their sockets decrying software sales tactics (the object of my aforementioned book.) One particular tactic which I recently saw  on a global HRIS project with payroll outsourcer ADP was when the vendor stated they were willing to bid with SAP SuccessFactors Core HR (Employee Central) but on the condition that my client bought two payrolls from ADP. I shot back at them, "How would feel if your car dealer offered to sell you a car only if you accepted to also buy two bikes?"

Vendor Management
Despite the Buyer Beware motto, customers  are entitled to escalate issues, especially when a promised feature is not working as touted in sales demos - or, worse, is not available. However, I find it misguided from some customers to focus on minor issues while not seeing the bigger picture. It is akin to buying a car that is  bigger, nicer and faster and yet spend an inordinate amount of time on small imperfections. As in life in general, you should choose your battles wisely: know which ones are worth fighting, and which ones should not be launched.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!

This is the latest in an HRIS Selection & Implementation Tips series. Previous posts included:
- April 2018: Cloud HR Implementation Tips: Focus on Migration
- Jan. 2016:  Pricing and Contracting with Your Cloud Vendor: Tips and Tricks
- Jan.2013:  An HR leader's Top 10 New Year's Resolutions


(The fact that the blogger-analyst-consultant has been spending the better part of the last year and a half on implementing a new global HRIS for one of the world's largest car makers is obviously a cute coincidence, since I have been using these metaphors for two decades now.)

Cloud HR Implementation Tips: Focus on Integration and Migration

PARIS

 Most discussions on implementing a new HR system, which for the past years has meant a cloud-based one, tend to focus on the functional side of things, that is business requirements as covered by a single system. Discussing what processes will be re engineered or moved as-is, what system to evaluate and select or even how to overcome change resistance are often considered as nobler than the nitty-gritty  technical aspects usually referred to as “integration”, although I prefer interface since that is what it is: interfacing to third-party.

In the brave new world of cloud systems, the assumption touted by most vendors has been that the integration conundrum would be solved by the native vendors in a much more satisfactory way than it was in the dinosaur era of traditional ERP. Well, nothing is farther from the truth if only for two simple facts:

1. In my 20-year experience of the HRIS world, I have yet to seen a company (and certainly not a global one) using a single platform for all its HR needs. 

2. From time immemorial HRIS vendors have each had their own data model and despite all the talk about convergence that is still the same basic reality. 

So, how should you go about integration when embarking on a new HRIS project? First you need to realize that there are several tasks/phases that make up implementation activities. This post will focus on the ones mentioned in the title: Integration and Migration. Second, these two tasks tend to be considered as "technical" but the business impact is such that it would be counterproductive for SMEs or the business side of things to relinquish full control

INTEGRATION
Deciding what is in scope and what is out is one of the most challenging issues in any HRIS project. If you overindulge yourself you may bite off more than you can chew, a recipe for disaster. But leaving too much out (Recruiting*, Payroll, Time Management*) means interfacing to all these different systems and that's where the big headache starts: How to make different systems with different data models talk to each other in a meaningful way?

Particularly vexing is the situation faced by many companies  which have never had a single global HR system of record and whose users realize that moving to the cloud means having, at least, two systems where they previously had one: the old single HR-cum-payroll system now becomes a modern, cloud-based HR system interfaced to payroll. Where I used to create my positions, hire employees, define their compensation, and produce their payrolls in one tool, now  I have to do it using two user experiences. Toggling back and forth between two tools may be considered by many as a step back.

To ensure user adoption and minimize risk, pay particular attention to the following:

• What data to move to the new HR tool and what should remain in the legacy tool (see the below table for help on deciding which is which)? You can decide that structural data (organizations and jobs/positions) stay where they are, but employee data are moved to the new tool: analyze the pros and cons of each carefully. Particularly wrenching is when the new system offers some data or feature that your local tools cannot accommodate and in order not to break down what has worked fine for so long, you have to let go of a feature you were hoping to use (and loved in the demo when you evaluated vendors.)
  
  
  
  
  
• What direction should the flow go? Is your new tool going to be the master for all things HR? Will some data be updated in the legacy tool and fed back into the HR system of record? Will some process flow change directions over the course of the project? That could be useful to minimize risk but it is bound to add to complexity.
  
• What am I to do if my legacy, local tool is better at some feature than the new one? For instance, in my local tool, in the Address section, I have a City field with a picklist (often the result of heavy customization) , but the new tool doesn't offer a list of values to choose from (welcome to the wonderful SaaS world!) If a user misspells a city name or use a local one (say, Köln instead of Cologne) the downstream  system won't recognize it and will throw in an error: no address means no employee. And if this employee is a manager all the workflows that require his or her approvals will be stuck. The business impact of such a situation can be quite serious.
  
• How often do you expect to send data via the interface?  Once a day? Several times a day? Once a week? This is hardly an academic issue. If you update your employee data several times a day, you may want to just send the most recent file. Some interfacing tools allow you to send just what has changed (the "delta" file in our jargon), while others will send the whole file. 
  
• A far from unimportant question is whether you will interface straight from the new system to the legacy tool or whether you will go through a third tool in between. I have worked on several SAP-to-cloud conversion projects and often the customer would rather retain a mini HR master that would be fed from the new HRIS and, in turn, would feed the downstream system (both HR or non HR such as finance or expenses.) The advantage of such a scheme is to lower the risk and the interface complexity since you focus only on one type of interfaces and don't have to rebuild all the other "pipes."
  

MIGRATION
Since I'm writing this piece having dummies in mind, I may be stating the obvious for many but I am still surprised at how many people confuse the two terms and activities. Although the two may overlap they are fundamentally different: both relate to sending data from one tool to the other, but they do it at different phases of the project: Migration is about loading data before you go live (it is therefore a one-off exercize) whereas Integration sends data on a constant basis after Go Live.  

As with Integration, some major decisions have to be made, carefully weighing thepros and cons of each:

• The first one is about history: I have spent countless hours/days/meetings with stakeholders to analyse and explain history decisions: Many users, loath to leave their comfort zone, expect to get in the new systems all the contracts an employee has ever had, all the jobs he's ever held etc. Technically it can be done, but it is complex and expensive, so you have to explain to them that the costs far outweigh the benefits, and that it is better to just load active employees and the most current job, or at least not going back more than a year. But, again, analyze your business carefully: if your business has high seasonal turnover, and the regulatory environment in the country/ies you operate in, require you guarantee that full seniority is maintained, then you may have to load terminated employees as well.
  
• A key aspect is the source of the data: If you already have a global HR system of record (think Oracle or SAP) much of your data will most likely be stored in that legacy system (although not for all your countries, some smaller ones may be outside.)  The good news is data conversion from one tool to another is much easier to do than from multiple sources. The bad news is that in reality SAP and Oracle (both EBS and PeopleSoft) are ancient technologies, and often do not hold a lot of local data: For instance, they may hold your permanent employees, but temporary employees are managed in the local tools. You will then have to migrate them from these ones: multiple tools means added complexity, cost, energy and ...time, that commodity so precious in any global HR system project. Hard decisions to make here, based on the real (not perceived) value of having, say, banking details in one single global system or in local ones: if your employees are used to self service then the former makes sense; if HR will continue to update it directly, then it can remain in the  local tool.
  
• A key part of the Migration exercize is to validate that the data has traveled safely, hence the importance of checking it. Remember GIGO? Garbage In, Garbage Out? If your data is w in the source system, it is highly unlikely it will arrive cleaned in  the target tool. Do yourself a favor and clean up your data in your upstream tool.
  
• I have written a lot on system evaluation, and this is where bad decisions made at that phase will impact your implementation: If you have been negligent or ignorant about your business, and not realized how much historical data you will need,  you may be in for a big surprise when you reach out to your vendor (systems integrator) and are hit with the additional costs of a change request. So, as in anything else in life, the earlier you think about all possible options, the better it would be. Of course, many customers make the buying decision with scant regard to implementation and  live to  be sorry at their shortsightedness.

As you can see from the above examples, the impact of misguided integration and migration decisions can hamstring your business quite significantly. Undervalue these twin sisters at your own peril. To paraphrase a well-know expression, Integration and Migration are too serious issues to be left to IT: HR, as the face of the business, should own it and pay particular attention to it in order to maximize chances of success. 

*The blogger positively hates the New Age terms of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Management

**The blogger, in his Advisor/Consultant/Project Managercapacity, is currently busy with the post-design phase of one of the largest Workday projects in the world for which he has been clocking in an impressive amount of frequent-flyer miles. 

Land of the Morning Calm: Tips on implementing a global HRIS in Korea

SEOUL

Last year when I spent several days in Shanghai gathering the requirements for a client as part of an HRIS evaluation exercise, I realized this was the easternmost place on Earth I had ever reached. I am gratified to announce that I just beat my own record by spending a week in South Korea's sprawling megalopolis, finalizing an amazing global tour as part of the implementation of one of the largest HRIS projects in the world. This post aims at sharing some of my thoughts about one of the Asian dragons as well as provide tips on how to include a Korean subsidiary in a global HRIS project.

Hierarchical society
Korea's society will come across to first-time visitors as a very class-conscious one, not in the traditional British sense where one's place is determined by birth, but by the merit-based place one occupies in the corporate world. I was  struck by the constant bowing that takes place: whereas in the West people shake hands when they meet, in Korea, you take a bow, with the person occupying a lower rung in the social pecking order bowing lower - When you meet your company's CEO your body's basically at a 90° angle.

Small wonder then that your global HRIS will need to track the various statuses, grades and levels an employee enjoys throughout his employment life cycle (make sure you carefully identify which ones apply to the person and which to the position.) Just like Germans love to be addressed by their titles (Doktor and Professor have to be included in the name section of your HRIS) Koreans use their professional gradess as part of the name when addressing each other. "Good morning, Mr Lee M32"  - Bow. "Hello, Mr. Kim L11" - Deeper bow.

It was therefore quite revealing that in the workshop I ran, when we covered the list of dependents (to be used for benefits purposes), the value "Sibling" was found lacking. "We should have Elder or Younger Brother/Sister" I was told. And, of course, in this most deferential and hierarchical of societies expect your workflow to include several additional approvers as  it travels up and down the hierarchy.

Finally, make sure when you organize meetings, especially workshops where decisions need to be made, that you mix equals with equals. Should you have participants belonging to different rungs on the corporate ladder, you'll find out that subordinates will almost always defer to their superiors, never contradict them, thus preventing you from getting a full picture of the situation.

Gyeongbokgung Palace.
A haven of peace in the hustle and bustle of downtown Seoul

Strong culture of service and duty
Koreans will go to great lengths to do their duty and ensure the service they provide is first notch. Of all the countries I covered while I crisscrossed the globe none did their prerequisite homework so thoroughly and conscientiously as did the Korean team. I took the subway one afternoon and must have gotten my fares mixed up because, on the way out, I swiped my card but, after a shrill beep, the turnstile remained stubbornly stuck while a few Korean characters in scaring red danced on the small monitor. I must have looked confused or lost, or simply obviously foreign in this racially homogeneous society, because a rider stopped by, embarrassingly explained that I had insufficient credit  and then swiped his card to top me up. The turnstile opened as if by magic. I insisted  to pay him what I owed him, but he'd have none of it. "I just did my duty to a fellow human," he said. Try that in Paris or New York!

HR and Technology
South Korea (or, as it is known officially, the Republic of Korea) has gone through dizzying changes in the past few decades becoming an advanced economy, with efficient public transportation, technologically savvy (I'd even say obsessed) with a high mobile-device penetration rate (you know you're on a Seoul street when pedestrians walk with their eyes glued on their smartphones.) A global HRIS would have few issues rolling out its self service features to a nation whose mobile devices have become an extension of its citizens.

Although Korea has a vibrant democracy (they recently impeached their president on corruption grounds- a first for the country, while France is still considering whether to prosecute a former president on similar charges), there is one thing it shares with China: social media and other tools that we take for granted in most of the world are largely absent in Korea. Don't message anybody on WhatsApp -  you are unlikely to receive a reply. Facebook and Uber don't fare any better, either, as Koreans rely on homegrown tools. Global HRIS vendors face an uphill battle to penetrate this market with only a handful of mainly multinationals adopting Workday, SAP or Oracle, midmarket businesses remaining largely impervious to them, in the absence of good localization work. To take one example, none of the SOW vendors provide the controls needed for Korean address formats.

Going lunar - not lunatic

Taking a break from a punishing
schedule of global HRIS workshops

Reminiscent of a requirement I saw in Saudi Arabia, Koreans use a dual calendar: Western and lunar. By way of consequence, employees will display two ages: the one they have according to a Western calendar, and the one based on a lunar calendar. Make sure your global HRIS can handle this seemingly puzzling requirement. Some allowances are paid depending on the lunar date, and if you feel like wishing an employee Happy Birthday, make sure it's the lunar one, not the Western (or "Sun" one as I heard it referred to.)

Compensation and Payroll Interface
Since it is most likely you'll be interfacing your Core HR tool with a Korean payroll (none of the three global HRIS vendors - for whom I coined the acronym SOW - has released a Korea cloud-based payroll), figuring out where to place the cursor between Core HR (Compensation) and Payroll will be quite a challenge. Just ask Samsung Electronics, embroiled in its attempts to interface local payroll PDSS with one of the SOW vendors.

Vibrant modern culture within a traditional society
Adhering to a deferential culture (where women tend to play a submissive role), proud of its history and traditions (I strongly recommend visiting the royal palaces in Seoul such as Gyeongbokgung Palace pictured here), Korea's modern culture punches above its weight. Korean filmmakers have made a name for themselves on the map of world cinema: A recent Korean movie I enjoyed is The King's Case Note, part-historical drama (set in the Joseon era), part-thriller (Sherlock and Watson -style), part-comedy. What has become known as K-pop is now all the rage: Is there anybody on planet Earth who is not familiar with the the catchy tune of Park Jae-san "Psy" 's Gangnam Style? The song takes its name from the trendy Gangnam neighborhood, south of the Han River where yours truly stayed at the Sheraton (loved the beautiful Joseon-era chests of drawers on display on every floor.)

Language
Although Korean script is traditionally based on Chinese ("Hanja" script) , the most common script ("Hangul") is alphabet-based  with characters representing vowels and consonants, and written left to right. Many Koreans write in mixed script, meaning that your global HRIS will need to cater to both.  Note that "Korea" is the Western name: Koreans refer to their country by a different name, which itself differs whether you are in the North or the South. Land of the Morning Calm is an old nickname for the country.

Food and Coffee

Unlike the Japanese and Chinese, Koreans love their cuisine quite spicy with side dish kimchee having pride of place at any Korean meal. I was surprised when I visited a friend to see that most Korean apartments come with a kimchee fridge, specially designed to ensure the delicacy is kept in optimal temperature. The coffee addict that I am was more than exhilarated to discover the pervasive café culture. I am hardly exaggerating when I say that at every other street you cross in Seoul, you'll find a coffee place, most belonging to Korean franchises with names such as A Twosome Place, Angel in Us Coffee (sic), Tous les Jours, Paris Baguette, Hollys Coffee, Tom N Toms coffee (I cringe at the missing apostrophe for the latter two).

Overall, I enjoyed my Korean experience tremendously (pace the dreadful traffic jams.) I would gladly come back, hopefully flying airline other than Korea Air: Despite the constant bowing by the pretty all-female crew, I found the experience quite underwhelming. The business class on the Airbus A380 is inferior to the one on Air France and, of course, nothing to be compared with best-in-class Emirates.


NOTE: All pictures taken by the consultant/blogger and remain the property of Ahmed Limam who is hereby asserting his copyright.

(This is the latest in a series of wide-ranging articles focusing on a single country. Previous posts:

July 2017: Romania: Between HR technology and childhood memories
July 2016: Middle Kingdom: Musings on Chinese HR, technology and the country
Nov. 2014: Of Switzerland, the country, its HR practice and technology landscape
June 2013: Thoughts on India, its HR/technology space 
Dec. 2012: My 20-Year Affair with Spain  - with more than 10,000 views it is one of my most popular articles
Aug. 2011: Brazil Rising: Thoughts on HR, technology and an emerging giant )

Gartner's HR Magic Quadrant: A (Strong) Rebuttal - Updated Sep. 2018

BUENOS AIRES / Update from PARIS

The 2017 edition

For someone whose HR technology career includes a couple of years as an analyst with a Gartner-like outfit (Paris-based CXP), I keep an eye out for what Gartner, IDC, Forrester and a flurry of new analyst entrants produce. Apart from some comments in LinkedIn discussions, I hadn't dedicated a full post on these research firms. Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant dedicated to cloud HR gives me the opportunity to share some inconvenient truths (some of which I already aired in my book, High-Tech Planet : Secrets of an IT Road Warrior.)

There is a lot in the report that I agree with because it is simply common sense or knowledge, just like if Gartner were to state that water boils at 100° C I would agree with that. But that doesn't mean that I do not disagree with a lot, too. And there are quite a few findings that are misleading, inaccurate, odd if not altogether bizarre. And some astonishing omissions.


Methodology-wise, Gartner is guilty of equating mid-market size in the US with Europe. As anybody who has done any market research would know, SMBs tend to be larger in the US vs Europe. The cloud definition misses out completely the private-cloud variant (Oracle recently renamed theirs Cloud @ Customer - which I always found an oxymoron.)


Speaking of Oracle, one can only wonder that it is put so close behind SAP SuccessFactors (SF) when all empirical research shows it should be closer to Ultimate which, in many respects, should rate higher than Oracle, anyway. Gartner then commits the unforgivable crime of belting out features like a good parrot without discussing their value. Why? Oracle Work-Like Solutions is a good example of vaporware, nobody’s interested in it but because Oracle stresses it in its Analyst Day presentations Gartner dutifully presents it too. Why can't Gartner be honest and tell us that customers licensing it (never mind actually using it) are few and far between?  Because  Gartner takes money from vendors, so it is not free to write what it wants.

                                                              The 2018 Edition


Sep. 2018: Oracle’s vision better than Workday? (Last year it was SAP which was ahead of Workday - see below) The company that (in)famously pooh-phoned the cloud before scrambling to tweak  Fusion to have it hosted? (Remember that I coined faux-Saas in Oracle’s “honor”) So, Oracle displays better vision than Workday, the vendor that in less than a decade has managed to win the hearts and minds of HR? Laughable. How can the new Fusion Recruiting module gets such accolades when NOBODY is live on it? I have been involved in more HRIS evaluation exercizes than most of you have had hot dinners, and no HR user has ever expressed any admiration at Oracle’s HR vision, especially not in the cloud. Gartner just buys all the marketing crap that Oracle sends its way, lock, stock and barrel and delivers it to us with no critique whatsoever, just like the customer numbers that Gartner hasn’t audited: but if a vendor claims they have 2,000 customers, then it must be as true as Holy Writ. Preposterous.

Why doesn’t Gartner tell you that more Oracle PeopleSoft customers move to the cloud with Workday than with Oracle Fusion (which Oracle wants you to believe is true cloud by slapping the moniker cloud on it – which Gartner dutifully obliges.)

Putting SAP ahead of Workday on …Vision? Is Gartner deranged? Who in their right mind can countenance such an absurd claim: Workday with its single line of code, true SaaS offering, revolutionary UI, workflow, reporting, same-platform payroll, pionnering Community. And SAP is ahead? With SF? Completely silly.

SF Employee Central (EC)  figures are not accurate: As usual with these mainstream analysts, such figures are accepted from the vendor's mouth, lock, stock and barrel - not verified. I am on record for being very critical with vendor-provided figures, but Gartner considers them like Holy Writ. Also, to mention "EC payroll" is, again, just parroting the vendor with no critical thinking: There is no such think as EC Payroll but good old SAP Payroll, just like there is no such thing as Oracle HCM Cloud but just  a rebranding of  Fusion, which is available on-premise as well. I can understand the vendor trying to mislead the customer, but the analyst doing it, too? How shameful! Gartner clearly makes a lot of money from SAP and Oracle, and being in their pay it has to put lipstick on their pigs.

Sep. 2018: As for SAP, Gartner aids and abets vendors in their well-trodden path of misleading customers, when it parrots the false claim of SuccessFactors’ “supported payrolls for 42 countries”. As I have denounced SAP for so long, that is BS, pure and simple (can BS be pure?) We the cognoscenti know it is just good ole SAP Payroll hosted and interfaced to SF. GARTNER: stop lying to customers by feeding them false information. You have just become an extension of vendors’ marketing organizations.

Very odd to see Talentia and Ramco which I NEVER ran into in any bid having pride of place (well, sort of) in this report. Just because you need to put a logo on your fancy diagram, doesn't mean that you should make up analysis. Ramco has no meaningful presence in either the US or Europe, which represent the lion's share of the global HRIS market. Shouldn't be there...yet!
Sep. 2018: Other examples of absurd findings: Ramco having 40 payrolls! Really? Only SAP (on-premise), after several decades, was able to provide that many localized payrolls. Not even PeopleSoft, for so long the best HR system around, was able to get close. Workday, PeopleSoft’s successor, has barely managed a couple of payrolls, and Gartner wants us to believe that Ramco, with limited financial and human resources vs Workday (or Oracle,) has been able  to produce so many payrolls. Puh-lease!

Same thing with Kronos whose only claim to HRIS fame is that it is the Time Management leader (I positively hate the term “WFM”), but it doesn’t have the footprint to be considered  a suite. Where is its global HR Admin (or Core HR)? And yet Gartner says it is one of its criteria, as it should be. Cornerstone has much stronger credentials to feature in the report than Kronos since it has a (light) Core HR offering. And yet the Santa Monica-based vendor is nowhere to be seen. As glaring omissions go, this one is simply bizarre.

Meta4? The zombie vendor? If you consider Meta4 as a cloud vendor just because its offering can be hosted, then why not have PeopleSoft? It can also be hosted, and is as much on life support as Meta4 is. But Gartner takes money from vendors, so it is not free to write what it wants. The shared vs public cloud is not as meaningful as the private cloud (Cloud  @ Customer as Oracle calls it) which doesn’t even get a mention. I wonder why. And of course, as is usual with those pseudo-independent analysts, many figures are given, not verified. Very sad when analysts become an extension of vendors’ marketing departments.

Echo-chamber mentality
Mind you, there are times when a vendor dares produce a truly independent analysis. A couple of years ago Forrester wrote about the low customer uptake of Oracle Fusion. The vendor immediately retaliated by cutting all funding. Since then Forrester has been toing the line. As with Gartner, you can't bite the hand that feeds you. Forrester's latest report is a case in point where it becomes almost indistinguishable from Gartner's. Lesson learned, you might (and can) say.

Along with many others, I have been demanding of Gartner & Co to commit not to take any paid assignment from vendors and avoid making money from them. But they refuse to put an end to this inherent conflict of interest and therefore lose in credibility and ability to produce unbiased analysis. It is a disservice to user organizations to make them believe otherwise.

Sep. 2018: Great minds think alike. Independent analyst Shaun Snapp from Brightwork Research just published a cogent analysis documenting Gartner's inherent conflict of interests.

Another weakness of this type of analyst reports, is that since most of these analysts have NEVER implemented an HRIS, they completely ignore the issues related with implementation. What’s the point of selecting the best HRIS in the world if you can’t find resources to implement it? Or they are too expensive? Or the methodology is fuzzy? Or the SI ecosystem is half-baked? Or building reports or maintaining workflows is too  cumbersome? Or if change management leads to customer rejection? Nothing whatsoever in the Gartner report. This is like recommending a car based on several great features, but forgetting to ask the prospective buyer whether they can drive. Largely pointless.  I checked the LinkedIn profiles of the analysts involved in the report: the "stars" (Hanscombe, Lougee, Poitevin) and most of the others have ZERO to little cloud implementation experience. And yet here they are pontificating about something they have limited knowledge of. How reassuring.

Check out my analysis done with my own two ten fingers, with no paid assignment accepted from any vendor and you'll see the difference: SOW -  A Comparison of 3 Cloud HR Vendors: SAP, Oracle and Workday.  I firmly believe that there is a lot to be said for critical thinking, lack of bias and independence. 

The blogger/analyst/consultant is continuing his World Localization Tour as part of one of the largest global HRIS projects in the world. After Brazil last week, he is now in Argentina presenting the prototype to HR representatives from several Spanish-speaking countries. NEXT STOPS: France, Spain and Turkey.

NOTE ON BUENOS AIRES: For anybody currently in the Americas' most beautiful capital city, I strongly recommend Fuerza Bruta, a terrific Cirque du Soleil-like  show at the Centro Cultural de Recoleta. And, of course, enjoy the amazing architecture, large avenues (9 de Julio is the world's largest avenue with 18 lanes), numerous parks and the world's best meat. If you are staying near Avenida Corrientes (Buenos Aires' answer to the Big Apple's Time Square) as I am, Chiquilin is a great option. I will later dedicate a full-length post to HR technology in Spanish-speaking Latin America (already done it for Brazil.)

Cornerstone, the newest kid on the global HRIS block

RIO DE JANEIRO

Entering the global HRIS fray

In August 2015 I wrote a post predicting that Cornerstone would have no choice but enter the global HRIS space with a core HR (or HR Admin) offering which I called Cornerstone HR. A couple of months later, at its annual event the company did indeed announce such an offering, calling it Link (here's the post)

A couple of weeks ago, at the annual event held in London, Cornerstone announced a more beefed up version of Link which it now calls ...Cornerstone HR! Since I have the prior claim on the brand name, I facetiously asked CEO Adam Miller for copyright royalties, which drew laughter from the analyst audience gathered at the Hilton Metropole.

So, it is now clear that there is a new player in the game, rattling the global HRIS apple cart. Cornerstone will now start receiving more HRIS RFPs (vs pure learning or talent based ones) and you can expect an increasing number of companies, especially from its installed base to acquire Cornerstone HR. It is more likely that initially there will be more Cornerstone customers, especially those who have never had a global HRIS system in place, that will move up the value chain with Cornerstone HR. But I also expect  net new customers to go down the same road sooner rather than later.

However, for Cornerstone to live up to expectations, reach functional parity with its major competitors and make a success of this new strategy it needs to:

• Have a strong product management team that understands global HR admin requirements 
• Rewrite some parts of the underlying data model to move to a person model rather than a user one
• Beef up substantially several parts of the offering where it lags behind its competitors (see examples in the below graph).
• Include unique differentiators, maybe on budgeting and planning or around the integration with learning
  
              

 A global HRIS star is born ...

but still needs to complete its homework

With this homework done (not an easy feat - just look how long SuccessFactors struggled with Employee Central and it's still WIP), the three global HRIS musketeers will now become four, a development I always felt the market needed. And, remember, in the Alexandre Dumas novel, the three musketeers were actually four. Can you name them? (Don't cheat - I'm providing you with the names below)*

A big question, which corporate buyers may want to ponder, though, is: will this development stabilize Cornerstone as the second independent, pure HR vendor (after Workday)? Or will it make it even more attractive to predators? Rumors have been swirling around that an acquirer was in the wings, ready to pounce. Let's hope that the fourth musketeer remains independent for the benefits of the HR community and the spirit of healthy competition.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

(The blogger is having a tropical Christmas this year before heading back to the Northern Hemisphere)

NOTE: Data in this post are the intellectual property of Ahmed Limam and cannot be reproduced without prior written consent

*Porthos, Athos, Aramis and, of course, D'Artagnan.

Middle Kingdom: Musings on Chinese HR, technology and the country

SHANGHAI

The Oriental Pearl Tower  seen from the Bund.
As spectacular as un-Chinese since, unlike Muslim
minarets and Gothic cathedrals, Chinese palaces, pagodas
and pavilions have traditionally been low-rise affairs

Surprising as it may seem for the globe-trotter I am, until this week I had never set foot in China. Although I had worked on many global projects which involved rolling out an HR system for a Chinese workforce the opportunity never arose for me to visit the ancient land known to Marco Polo as Cathay* (the name is still used by one of the most successful airlines in the world, based out of Hong Kong.)

It was therefore with great trepidation that I boarded the world's largest aircraft, the Airbus A380, for the longest trip east that I had ever taken in order to spend most of the week in Shanghai with the local subsidiary of a multinational client. This was a unique opportunity to gather business requirements face to face with HR users in their local environment, something only imperfectly done in virtual meetings, on the phone or by email.

You soon realize that if in China rules and laws may not be voted on by a democratically elected parliament, but rather handed down by the omnipotent Communist Party, they are adhered to ferociously, as I was reminded when, during one of the workshops I led, I suggested we shorten the lunch break from one hour to 45 minutes. The reaction was a categorical NO. Labor laws are labor laws: one hour's break for lunch is one hour. Can't say I was shocked since that is exactly the same rule as in France (but outside the rest period, the Chinese workforce is a hard working one and I was impressed by the quality and dedication they bring to the task.) Actually, many other aspects of China's labor laws seem to be directly inspired from France's: such as the 1-2% of a company's payroll which must be set aside for the worker union to spend on employee benefits. But then French laws are at times very socialistic, if not outright Communist (ever wondered why the Labor Code in France is a little red book?)

Replica of Xi'an Terracotta Army
soldier, gifted to the blogger
by the Chinese delegation to the
UN World Tourism Organization where
he worked in the 1990s

A rapidly changing country
As everybody knows, China has managed to bring hundreds of millions of people into middle-class wealth faster than any other country on earth: in the past 25 years income per person has risen 13 times, whereas in the rest of the world the figure is barely 3 times. I see on Shanghai overcrowded roads more SUVs  than anywhere else but the US. Beijing has more billionaires than New York.  If there ever was a national success story it is China. And yet serious problems are looming: it is still an autocratic country, unemployment is rising, especially in the poorer rural areas in the country's western half, inflation is high (Shanghai home prices rose by 20% last year), the population is greying fast as a result of the one-child policy aiming at reining in demographic pressure, pollution shows its ugly face in many places with foul air a constant irritant. Some un-Chinese traits such as individualism and Western-style consumerism are on the rise in this increasingly unequal People's Republic. (I always marvel at Chinese tourists who buy designer bags at Paris upscale department stores for a price that is higher than many workers back home make in a year)

Now, to the topic at hand, requirements to manage a Chinese workforce as part of a global HRIS. In some aspects HR law and  practice in China may be complex, even cumbersome (but is there a place  where that is not the case?) However, in many other aspects it is quite simple and even free-market based, reminiscent of the practice in the (income-tax free) Persian Gulf states. For instance, in Europe and America, there is a quite clear-cut distinction between permanent employees and contractors, HR processes apply fully to the first, not to the second. In China, there are no contractors: everybody is a permanent employee. There are also no part-time workers. In other countries, some employees may work only 30% of the normal schedule, and in some cases be paid differently, all depending on labor agreements and regulations. In China, if you're going to work for a company, you work full time. Otherwise, go somewhere else. And no labor agreements either, which makes it much easier to set up compensation plans and eligibility rules

Art Deco glory.
East meets West at the spendid
waterfront neighborhood known
as the Bund

Over lunch, when the Head of HR asked me why there were so many strikes in France (yes, that national trait has made it to the other end of the world) I replied, "For the usual reason: to get more money." She looked very surprised: "Really? But if they want more money and they are not getting it from their current employer, why don't they just move to another better-paying company?" Admirable logic, which makes sense in a fast-growing, emerging market like China, but, alas, does not apply in sclerotic European countries like France.

Language-wise (you may want to brush up on my 5 pillars of "glocalization") if you're going to roll out a global HRIS in China, make sure all self service features are available in Mandarin. Otherwise, the system won't be used. Many HR power users, even if working for a multinational company, will struggle with English, so having the whole system in Mandarin is a must.

Workflows with different levels of approvals is also a must-have in a country where deference to senior management is part and parcel of the culture. Electronic notifications have made great progress in the Middle Kingdom but some document still need to be printed out for signature and be handed out to the relevant recipient. If you ever wondered why China is referred to as the Middle Kingdom it's simply the name in Chinese: The first character for the name is a horizontal rectangle cut in half by a vertical stroke, meaning, you've guessed, Middle. Like all great societies, China sees itself as the center of the universe. Can't blame them; after all, they are the most populous nation on earth, soon to be the richest, and the one with the longest continuous civilization in the world.

It's all about Human Resources

HR rules and HR Departments are nothing new in this country. The US only got its Civil Service with its grades and steps and examinations at the end of the 19th century, but the Chinese Ming dynasty, which ruled the country until 1644, already had a Department of Personnel with a nine-grade bureaucracy and legendary examinations one had to sit for and pass before being entitled to a position. Modern China is simply the heir to a long, centuries-old  tradition.

Among the various HR domains and processes, time recording can be quite complex in many Chinese companies, especially manufacturing now that China has become the world's factory. However, soaring taxes, transportation and energy costs means that China's labor force is no longer as cheap as it was. China will increasingly have to move up the value chain, which explains the strong emphasis on training, competencies, learning and development, and executive assessment. Again, nothing surprising in this ancient Confucian culture where learning values  are rated very high.

The blogger ready to board the Shanghai
MagLev Train. At an average speed of 300 km/186 m
per hour, with a peak speed of 430 km/237 m per hour,
it is the world's fastest train.  It is also the only one that runs on
magnetic-levitation technology.  Whether it is profitable
remains to be seen as it is pricey and covers a short distance
(in a highly congested area, though)

Payroll, is of course, highly regulated like everywhere else, but China is far from being the worst offenders. And there are limits to nannying employees: for instance, salary advances, which in some countries are mandatory if requested by the employee, simply don't exist in China You are paid for the work done, not the promise of it. For any help, go to your family, is the message in a culture where family bonds are stronger than in the West, but weaker than in Mao's times (In China people don't resort to banks for their savings needs but rather to the family or peer-to-peer networks.)

Absence management is also complex, and China is rather unique in that it distinguishes between absence types mandated by law and  those awarded by a company as a benefit for a differentiated treatment. The former  have to be taken during the take period, and if the employee leaves before its end they are compensated; whereas the latter, if not taken, are lost and are not compensated. And just as part-time employees are unusual, taking an unpaid leave or a sabbatical is unheard of for most people. Note the existence of many recruiting and training agencies (such as Zhaopin or 51job.)

Benefits involve many players: government, worker union and employer. Noteworthy that if some benefits (such as birthday allowance) are not provided by the worker union then the employer will play the substitute role and provide them.

In a  country where education has long been seen as a passport  to success, small wonder that competency frameworks, training agencies and learning models are all the rage. Many companies would finance employee degrees in exchange for a guaranteed stay with the company (similar to tuition reimbursement by US companies.) For some useful training (such as languages), private enrollment would also be refunded by the employer if the employee brings evidence of the certification thus earned.


China's HRIS vendors hold their own
To meet the HRIS needs of Chinese companies, whether domestic or subsidiaries of multinationals, the array of providers is quite large. SAP's market share is largely around its on-premise offering, and Oracle's is based on PeopleSoft. Cloud vendors are represented by Workday, a distant third but growing fastest. Kronos is well-entrenched when it comes to time management. Unsurprisingly for such a highly patriotic, even nationalistic, country, Chinese vendors have, together, a majority market share. They include household names in China such as Beisen, the undisputed talent company, and other vendors such as Neusoft (or even micro-blogging firm Weibo) covering various HR processes, when not the whole gamut of functions.

The biggest challenge facing homegrown vendors is how to go global, not an easy task when some tools which we take for granted are not available in China. First-come visitors to China may be surprised, even shocked, to find that social media and internet tools like Facebook and Google are banned (unless you, or your company, are lucky to have your own VPN.) In the West, and even the rest of the world, so much HR work, actually so much business work, involves using these platforms that you may be thrown offbalance when you realize you cannot keep up with your friends (on Facebook), get your email (on Gmail), check a video on YouTube, or plan an itinerary on Google Maps. Surprisingly and erratically WhatsApp, despite being a Facebook product, is allowed to operate in China. The Chinese make do with local variants such as Baidu, Weibo or WeChat (which is integrated with LinkedIn.).

The Chinese are a justifiably proud nation, but also a pragmatic one. They will find ways to live up to their full potential and be a full member of the global business community, something they've longed for and craved for a long time.Needless to say that this post only covers the People's Republic of China (PRC) aka Mainland China. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao are completely different in terms of context, HR maturity and vendor landscape. In due course they will warrant their own blog post.

(The blogger is currently crisscrossing the globe gathering requirements for a multinational company. Next stop: Detroit, USA.)

(This is the latest in a series of wide-ranging articles focusing on a single country. Previous posts:

August 2011: Brazil Rising: Thoughts on HR, technology and an emerging giant 
December 2012: My 20-Year Affair with Spain  - with more than 9,000 views it is one of my most popular blog posts
June 2013: Thoughts on India, its HR/technology space
Nov. 2014: Of Switzerland, the country, its HR practice and technology landscape)

NOTE: All photos are the work of the blogger and copyright applies

From the blogger's library

*I strongly recommend Gary Jennings' superb novel, The Journeyer, about the great man's 13th- century travels throughout a China few  people had ever seen then. 1,000 pages which you can't put down until you reach the end. For anybody wanting to understand China's wrenching changes in a historical perspective, Jonathan Spence's In Search of Modern China is a must-read. Nobel-Prize winner Pearl Buck's novels, set in pre-Communist post-Imperial China,  have a lot to say about the Chinese soul and experience. The movie buff I am relishes Zhang Yimou's movies (especially when the incomparable Gong Li is in them): Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Red Sorghum and Flying Daggers are favorites. He is also the man behind the highly acclaimed opening and closing ceremonies at Beijing's 2008 Olympics. 

SOW - A Comparison of 3 Global Cloud HR vendors: SAP, Oracle and Workday

GENEVA & NEW YORK

The leader, the follower and the laggard

I have been asked for a while to share my system-evaluation and -implementation experience with the community and my readership by comparing the three most frequently shortlisted cloud HR systems: SAP (SuccessFactors), Oracle (Fusion) and Workday. I will from now on refer to them as SOW, to be pronounced either to rhyme with "low" (as in "low adoption") or to sound like a female pig since some of these vendors' features are no better than lipstick on a pig. *

Of apples and oranges
Although there are more than three cloud-based HR vendors, the reason I am limiting myself to the SOW usual suspects is because they are the only ones with a global reach to meet the complex requirements of multinational companies. Despite attempts to the contrary, Ultimate is still a US vendor, Meta4 has all but disappeared, HR Access has been folded into Sopra and Cornerstone has yet to make up its mind whether to develop a full-fledged HR Admin module - and without an HR system of record you cannot have a global HRIS worth its salt. ADP is mainly a payroll outsourcer with multiple products (some in the cloud and covering various HR processes) but not a global HR system of record. Infor has yet to rationalize its product offering à la Fusion and its Lawson offering was never a truly global HRIS. And some of these vendors' "cloud" offerings are really nothing more than a quick repackaging of their old hosting business. So, here we are, stuck with SOW.

This being said, it is worth remembering that to a large extent  we are comparing apples and oranges since there are such key differences between these vendors that some evaluation exercises can turn to the surreal. Oracle, for instance, is mainly a database vendor with a strong anti-cloud history and a PeopleSoft legacy customer base which has yet to endorse Oracle Fusion. SAP, which comes from the application world, has therefore more serious credentials, reinforced by its continuing investment in the SuccessFactors platform. Its main issue is that, in addition to some questionable product decisions, it has yet to articulate a cogent cloud-based ERP strategy.  This is the main reason why I refer to Oracle and SAP (along with some others) as dinosaurs in a popular blog post. Workday, on the other hand, is of course a native cloud vendor which has quickly shot to the top of the league table with an offering, business culture and service quality that the other dinosaurs can only dream of emulating. Yet, Workday is far from perfect and also has some serious issues.

SaaS and cloud
Some companies may not care about the differences between SaaS and cloud, some may even be ignorant of them, but it is good to remind my readership of the meaning of these  two concepts which are often and wrongly used interchangeably. SaaS is the most advanced form of the cloud where all parts of an offering (hardware, database, software) come from a  single vendor. All you the customer need to provide is a browser-toting device (desktop/tablet/smartphone) and you're in business. Workday is thus a true SaaS vendor. SuccessFactors, whose offering relies on some on-premise legacy features which are hosted, is getting there but cannot be considered 100% SaaS. As for Oracle, who first developed its Fusion product as  an on-premise solution, and can deliver it as a hosted system, it is therefore in the cloud but of course not SaaS. So remember this key differentiator: All SaaS systems are by definition cloud-based, but the reverse is not true.


Stats wars
As the community knows, I have zero tolerance for fanciful figures, especially around customer numbers. Some of the fairy tales I hear are so absurd that I am unsure whether to laugh or sob when I hear them. The below scorecards provide a reasonable count of LIVE customers as per each cloud system. If the customer is still on PeopleSoft for HR Admin and has interfaced it to Taleo or some Fusion talent modules, Oracle will refer to this misleadingly as Cloud HCM. I don't. Same thing for SAP: If Employee Central is not implemented, then I do not count SuccessFactors as a reference - it is only a talent project, not a global HR one. Workday is easier since, by definition, their system cannot run without core HR as a foundation (although some customers use a light HR version to start with talent processes such as performance.)

Integrated/interfaced/unified/organic etc.
After phony customer count figures, the biggest source of BS that comes from vendors has to do with how well integrated the offering is. Here misinformation is rife, with Oracle the undisputed leader. Fusion, which can come in different flavors as mentioned earlier (public cloud, private cloud, on-premise - see below) does not necessarily cover all HR processes and most customers prefer to hang on to the legacy core HR. Talent features can come from either Fusion or Taleo. And within Taleo remember that the Learn.com product was built on .NET technology whereas Taleo was built on Java.

SAP SuccessFactors at least developed Employee Central on its own technology stack; however Plateau was not a 100% SaaS offering, and Concur and Fieldglass are based on other technologies. The other SF modules are also on different technologies which means a customer running the whole suite will have different code bases AND versions. (And as for Multiposting, well, nobody knows when/if it will be integrated in SF/EC.) Not pretty, and not full SaaS. And, of course, Employee Central Payroll is anything but an Employee Central payroll.

Workday, on the other hand, as befits a product developed from scratch and organically, has the cleanest data model with all HR processes now available, except Learning. Payroll is largely work in progress, with the last two countries released (UK, France) yet to go live with a customer. I still have my doubts as to the ability of a single global SaaS payroll vendor to deliver the goods in an efficient manner.
I can already hear some jump and say, "Hold on a second. Workday, too, has integrated third-party technologies after acquiring Cape Clear and Identified." Most true, but there is a fundamental difference when you integrate a third-party product as part of your underlying technology and when you do it to cover a specific HR domain. With the latter you find yourself with a different look and feel, different workflows, a different data model. Any HR user who had to struggle with different products would tell you what a nightmare it is.

3 -VENDOR ANALYSIS: COMPANY COMPARISON

Oracle Fusion has come a long way from an on-premise, complex-to-implement, functionally limited product with an ugly look and feel (those overloaded screens with horrid blue!), to one that can be deployed in the cloud. To get a sense of Fusion's background, refer to my post "Error 404: Oracle Fusion not found".) Since then, it has made progress (especially on the  UI front when it moved from FusionFX to Skyros), but its two other competitors, both cloud natives, have moved faster and often better. Oracle still misses many key HR domains (see the product scorecard below) and its vision and roadmap at best are fuzzy, at worse don't make any sense: Why waste its time developing unneeded products such as Employee Wellness, Reputation Management, My Volunteering or low-priority ones such as HR Help Desk, and still miss, Tier-1 country localizations or Recruitment on the Fusion platform? The co-existence or hybrid approach is not a meaningful differentiator, but actually a sign of weakness: Missing key bits, Oracle tends to lump everything together and it's up to the customer to make sense of what is what and how to integrate it, not an easy task when Oracle is still not very forthcoming when it comes to its offering, as explained below.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Cloud ServicesThe Taleo product line is a case in point: Officially rebranded as Oracle Talent Cloud (but on their website still referred to as Oracle Taleo Cloud) it is supposed to be the Recruiting offering to be interfaced to Fusion Core HR. However, the overlap issues (Fusion Performance vs Taleo Performance, say, or Fusion Compensation vs Taleo Compensation) has yet to be resolved. Ask the question and  you'll get a mumble from poor sales executives who are none the wiser. Note that Taleo is a hodgepodge of various acquisitions itself: Learn.com (with its scaling issues), Jobpartners, Recruitforce and Vurv, and Wordwide Compensation. (Not to mention that there are two Taleo flavors that go by the Enterprise and Business monikers)Talking about Compensation I find it a pity that Fusion does not allow user-defined logic to go into compensation elements, for instance to add a regional rate to a pay rate and calculate an employee's compensation on that basis.
Fusion, born as an on-premise product, can be hosted in a private cloud (customer's own environment) or shared (public cloud) with different deployment implications.
As if  the (con)Fusion was not enough, you have PeopleSoft Cloud Service which is as far from a SaaS offering as St Petersburg, Florida is from St Petersburg, Russia.
Then there is a host of other products such as Right Now Policy Automation (benefit eligibility), another acquisition, which Oracle throws at befuddled customers.
Making sense of Oracle's offering is clearly not for the faint-hearted.

Great products are built by great people. The converse is also true: Mediocre people build mediocre products. Oracle, with its stifling bureaucracy and awful management, has problems attracting and retaining quality people, especially in the HCM ¨product line. Add to that the fact that in Oracle's highly political culture the technology side has always had the upper hand versus product, and that HCM has always been the Cinderella application, only getting attention when a top leader emerges (first PeopleSoft, and now Workday.) This explains why the company never features in Great Places To Work league tables and has suffered from a steady hemorrhage of its best and brightest from PeopleSoft who have been poached from Workday, leaving a lot of deadwood behind.

An even bigger biggest issue with Oracle is how it (mis)treats its long-suffering customers. Just this week, an old customer, the  French Civil Aviation Authority, who has had enough of Oracle's abusive licensing and audit practices, decided to discontinue the use of all Oracle products. Last year, two other French companies, Carrefour and AFPA, went to court over the same issues and won. In 2014, a survey by the Campaign for Clear Licensing of 100 global Oracle customers found that 92% of them were deeply unhappy with the vendor. In the US, none other than the federal government decided in 2012 to ban Oracle from bidding for its business due to the vendor's questionable sales practices. Well, you get the idea. Unless you evince a particularly strong masochistic streak, selecting Oracle often  means tough times ahead.

On the technology front, Fusion, contrary to the vendor's spin, is not a "fusion" of its portfolio applications, but neither is it exclusively based on its unpopular EBS product line even if it borrows many features from it such as FastFormulas and Flexfields - the latter permeates Fusion even more than with EBS thus allowing good customization possibilities. However, Forms have mercifully been retired in favor of more modern Java and SOA-based technology. Outbound integration is a big headache as is data migration, even from Oracle's legacy systems. It is noteworthy that if many Oracle customers prefer to implement Fusion in the cloud rather than on-premise it is (in addition to the natural preference for the cloud), because, first, the HR Admin part has yet to reach functional parity with PeopleSoft (or Workday) and, second, the technical complexity of doing so is not to be ignored (just the sizing requirements would discourage the best-intentioned customer.)

Although initial pricing can be quite seductive (Oracle heavily discounts Fusion in order to drive up customer adoption, or offers a credit to swap on-premise applications for cloud-based Fusion), the vendor's customer-relations record, as mentioned earlier, is far from reassuring. Also, if you are an-on premise customer and are renewing/extending your license, Oracle will throw a cloud subscription at you included in the package. You might as well take it, even if you are unsure whether you'll actually move to the cloud.

In summary, customers  who already run an Oracle HR application (PeopleSoft, EBS, JDE), have a good rapport with the vendor (admittedly a rare occurrence), negotiate a financially interesting migration, do not need cutting-edge technology or terrific look and feel, and don't mind not being pampered or the complex integration behind products that come from disparate technological stacks, can look at Fusion seriously, especially when taking into account a strong point: its reversibility. Surprising as it may sound, there are still companies out there that are wary of the cloud (after the NSA snooping scandal and the current legal tug-of-war between US authorities and Apple and Microsoft you can't really blame them): With Oracle you can bring your HR system within your corporate firewall without having to switch systems and go through another complex implementation. This advantage comes at a hefty price, though: no single code line for all customers since, depending on what flavor of Fusion customers have, they can stay on their version much longer than public cloud customers. There are therefore multiple versions of Fusion at any given time, which increases the cost of running the product. And, as we all know, the customer always ends up bearing the costs. And if you are a customer who is still on the old look and feel, moving to the new one is not a straightforward process.

The world's largest business-software vendor, and the one with the most localized payrolls, took a leaf from its nemesis Oracle when it went down the acquisition road by acquiring SuccessFactors (SF). However, as I explained in detail in my blog post on their strategy just after the transaction was announced, SAP differs markedly from Oracle: Rather than build from scratch a product for the cloud, in which neither had any experience, SAP decided to continue investing in the SF platform by beefing up its Core HR/HR Admin product a.k.a. Employee Central (EC). Although the latter has grown significantly since its earlier releases, it has yet to catch up to the group's leader, Workday.

One increasingly important strong point of SF is that it belongs to a European vendor. With all the data-privacy issues raised by NSA snooping, many companies (especially European ones) are loath to go with a US-based vendor with a loss-of-data Sword of Damocles hanging over them.

Three weaknesses from SAP SF have yet to be solved:

-SF is still missing a payroll module based on its own platform, and the misleading Employee Central Payroll (in reality a hosted SAP Payroll) is no substitute for a truly integrated offering. SAP brought us the largest number of localized payrolls on earth; Why can't it use that expertise to enhance SF and make it a truly global and comprehensive HR offering? No full-fledged global HR system has come to market without its own payroll, so the jury is still out on whether SAP can be the exception that proves the rule.

- The multiple code lines and releases that make up the SF platform need to converge on a single code line and release based on EC. It is bad product design and worse customer support not to inform a customer that they are not enjoying a critical feature because they are on a older release  as happens with many customers. (Workday would never allow that to happen if only because the window customers have to move from one release to another is expressed in weeks, not months or years as is the case with SAP or Oracle.)

- SAP is also the vendor that brought us the integrated ERP. But it seems that all the strongly vaunted advantages of a single-platform ERP got lost in the move from on-premise to the cloud. All the HANA'ing in the world cannot hide the fact that the company that gave us the on-premise integrated business software is incapable of pulling the same trick in the brave new world of the cloud.

In a recent blog I compared SF's and Workday's pricing so no need for me to repeat myself since that analysis is recent and  therefore up to date. Oracle's talent-retaining issues are not unknown to SAP (I covered it in my recently updated blog post "Could the last executive leaving SAP turn the lights off, please?")

Another issue SAP needs to fix is the implementation methodology. SF came with its own methodology, SAP had another one, and integration partners are at times unaware of which is which. This will hardly help in building confidence in the offering. And the implementation template that SF provides does not list implementation activities in detail so you are often on your own. (Compare that with the fastidiously detailed documents you get from Workday)

Noteworthy is SAP's equivalent to Oracle's co-existence deployment model called here the Talent Hybrid model. The two approaches are not much to write home about since customers have been doing it for a while: Integrating their on-premise HR system of record with cloud-based talent features. Actually, customers started doing it even before SAP and SF found themselves under the same roof.

Who is the most likely customer for SF as a global HRIS? Experience shows that it is mainly SAP's on-premise customers who move to the cloud with it, especially if they are already using SF for their talent needs (in particular Performance or Learning.) However, an increasing number of SAP's on-premise customers include Workday in their cloud evaluation, and a worryingly lengthening list have decided to go with it. SAP, as a vendor, and SF, as a product, need to make themselves more attractive to retain these fickle customers.

3 -VENDOR ANALYSIS: PRODUCT COMPARISON

The HR thought leader and Wall Street darling has revolutionized the HR technology world (that search-based navigation was truly something out of this world when it first came out) and has just passed $1 billion in revenue (in comparison, Oracle's cloud HR business makes up less than 1% of its total revenue.) Workday also has more customers using it as a cloud-based HR system of record than Oracle and SAP  put together. They say that plagiarism is the best form of flattery; considering how many features of Fusion and SuccessFactors were obviously copied from Workday who premiered them, the newest kid on the block still retains its thought leader's crown.

What is attracting the crowds is a native-cloud product, built with consumer-grade usability, a depth of functionality that only those who built PeopleSoft could engineer, a customer focus and engagement that is still unique in the industry. The latter has made the vendor evolve its approach significantly: For instance, from the four releases a year at the beginning to a more manageable two now. Workday has also listened to customers and forsaken its rigidly neutral system-integrator (SI) approach: it will now recommend a specific SI for a specific project, something that was anathema for so long.

All the oohing and aahing about Workday, most of it well deserved, cannot hide that not everything is hunky-dory in the Pleasanton, CA-based HRIS heaven. You can read my Open Letter to Workday's founders for a discussion of these issues. There are still some surprising holes to plug in the offering such as the production of contracts and offer letters or some workflow limitations (despite the fact that their workflow framework is the best of the three.) So far, Payroll has been limited to North America and no date has been set for the release of the Learning piece. The talent features have been improved significantly, in no small measure through the addition  of a Recruitment module (some integration issues with their Core HR need  to be fixed), but Workday has yet to reach functional parity with SuccessFactors in the talent space.

Reporting is undoubtedly one of Workday's strongest suits. For those who use PeopleSoft, it is such a relief not to need to be a PeopleTools expert to write Workday reports. To a large extent you can even say that Workday is a collection of reports since wherever you are in the system you can pull up the relevant reports many of which are "actionable" to use the hackneyed word. But, careful, user-friendliness here is more for the HR team, not occasional users, and it may be better to restrict the creation of reports to a core reporting team rather than jeopardize consistency by having any/everybody duplicating existing reports.

Customization, or lack thereof, is the hallmark of SaaS systems. Unfortunately, in the  real world companies need a certain amount of customization which will not be lost when upgrading. Squaring the circle, you may think.  Workday's custom objects is a move in the right direction, but it has its limitations: There are only so many custom objects you can have, you cannot use them where you see fit and cannot pull them up necessarily where needed. SuccessFactors, with its Metadata Framework-based extensibility approach (especially in Employee Central), does a better job in that respect and so does Oracle (with Flexfields, as mentioned earlier), as befits a product that is available both on-premise and in the cloud.

Workday's greatest success has probably been that a significant segment of their customers comes from companies that either had a Tier-2 vendor or did not have a single, global HR system of record (they used various payrolls and different talent tools.) When these customers finally get their act together, they tend to look at Workday first, rarely at SAP or Oracle. However, cloud-seeking SAP and Oracle customers will almost always evaluate Workday, even if they don’t systematically select it: that does not bode well for the dinosaurs’ cloud future.

3 -VENDOR ANALYSIS: TECHNOLOGY COMPARISON

NOTE ON SCORECARD METHODOLOGY
The grading is based on the many RFPs I have worked on and demos I have attended, along with my own knowledge of these products (derived in no small part from my own use of the systems) and feedback from customers other than the ones I have worked for.
The analysis has been done based on three sets of criteria: Vendor, Product and underlying Technology. Where awarding a grade does not make sense (such as pricing: expensive does not in and of itself mean bad, since often quality comes at a premium) I have left the relevant cells colorless. An explanation of most of the grades can be found throughout this blog post, but I have also mentioned them in the scorecards so that the reader can understand why a vendor is getting a YELLOW rather than an AMBER, for instance.

NOTE ON SOURCES AND COPYRIGHT
All data and graphs are by Ahmed Limam who is hereby asserting his copyright. They can be referred to with proper copyright and authorship acknowledgement.

*Some of the ideas in this post were first presented in an article I wrote for TechTarget in January 2015.

(In addition to the vendor-specific posts I mention throughout this piece, there are many more I wrote in the past few years focusing on a vendor or a particular issue. The most popular ones can be found in the list provided in the top-right corner and automatically updated based on viewer number. For other posts, you'll have to scroll down and search for them one by one).