Happy one-year anniversary, ChatGPT! If only you could get it right.

PARIS

It was exactly a year ago that what was to become the world's most famous AI tool was published taking the world by storm. In just 2 months, it had reached the 100-million-user mark.

Compare this with ubiquitous WhatsApp which took 2.5 years to reach the same number of users.

Internet took 7 years. Nextflix 10 years. Smartphones which nobody remembers ever living without took...16 years to reach 100 million users. 

 I was among the first to test it and like most was blown away by its magic-like qualities: providing mostly OK answers to every question asked. But, careful, ask the same question in a language other than English and you may well get a different answer. Or none. One example: Most, if not all, Danish scientists conduct and publish their research in English since they are all fluent in the language. Ask a very specific question on one such topic in Danish and since no research has been published in Danish ChatGPT will draw a blank. So, yes, it is available in a zillion languages, but its practical uses are quite limited.

Since so much has already been written on ChatGPT, no need for me to pontificate here on its pros and cons. I will just mention two things.

First, in my area, HR technology, there's little doubt that the AI potential is huge. So much of what HR does is repetitive that an AI-based tool could, for instance, provide users with lightning-speed answers to their queries, a step up over traditional FAQ or emailing somebody in HR.

Second, hoping I won't come across as too narcissistic, I asked ChatGPT who wrote my best-selling book, "High-Tech Planet: Secrets of an IT Road Warrior". To my utter surprise this was ChatGPT 's answer:

 

 

 

Hurt, I hit "Regenerate" to see whether ChatGPT will get it right the second time round (at least the description of the book was correct.) This time I got another author.

 

I wondered whether, in spite of my title being quite specific, there wasn't another, possibly two, books with the same title. So, I just searched the traditional way: I googled it and saw that only one book was published with this title and it was the one by yours truly. Sigh of relief.

Feeling much better, I remembered that Bing now comes with Microsoft's own IA tool, so I asked Bing.
And this is what I got:

So, here you go. All the hoopla may be about OpenAI's ChatGPT, but for me Bing is the most reliable of the two.

Tax Freedom Day: France's National Day of Shame

PARIS
A couple of day ago, July 14,  we celebrated our National Day of Glory: Bastille Day, that commemorates the day we shook off the shackles of an absolutist monarchy. Today, July 17, is a sad day as it is the first day in the year when French citizens can keep the result of their hard-earned income. Yes, from January 1 until July 16, every single penny a Frenchman makes goes straight to the government via income tax, VAT, payroll taxes and a myriad other levies French lawmakers show so much creativity for.

No other European or developed country has to wait so late in the year to be freed from the weight of such quasi-confiscatory tax policy. But then no other government inflicts such a punishing tax burden on its citizens the way the French government does. As the below map shows, on average the French government takes away 54.1 % of an employee's full salary (including the employer's share.) Austria is number 2 with 53.4%; followed by Germany. The UK only taxes a reasonable 35.2%, meaning that the UK Tax Freedom Day comes much earlier than for France: on May 9. Even Spaniards are better treated: They are freed of their government obligations almost a month and a half earlier than their French neighbors: on June 8. And this, despite having had to endure 5 years of a Socialist-led coalition government  with the radical left.

Now, nothing intrinsically wrong with living in a Communist society. If that's what the French want, they're entitled to it. Except that something is clearly not right. Having the government tax you more and more in order to fund better quality public services is a perfectly legitimate choice. Except that the quality of public services in France has been heading south for the past decades:

-Healthcare is no longer what it used to be: Two decades ago, you didn't have to pay anything when you went to see your GP or presented a prescription at your local drugstore. Now, Social Security only pays a fraction of your healthcare and medicine, and the percentage is decreasing year after year. And that's if you're lucky to find a doctor: Seeing a specialist make require you to wait 2 or 3 months, some operations have longer wait lists. 

-Education is going down the drain with an increasing number of  French students leaving high school unable to write a French sentence correctly.

-Recently we went through weeks of mass protest because pensions are getting miserly and you have to work longer to get them.

-And as for law and order, just as the dreadful riots we saw two weeks ago are proof enough, that is not something that our high taxes are able to guarantee. Justice isn't faring any better: File a lawsuit in any court of law and you'll be lucky if you get a resolution within one year. 

A book every French citizen
should read

I could go on and on, but you get my drift: We French citizens are paying more and more in taxes and getting less and less in public services. Shouldn't it be the other way round? 

 Why do we put with this? Are we masochists? Or mere fools? 

On that Bastille Day I mentioned earlier in my post, King Louis XVI wrote in his diary: Nothing. The possibility that his family, having ruled the country for almost a millennium, could be out of a job just couldn't cross his mind. After all, for centuries French citizens would put up with all sorts of injustice and vexation and discrimination and high taxes (then paid only by the poor, the rich being exempted!) But then, one day, the people said "Enough is enough" and rose up.

Just as with Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. As a teenager vacationing in my mother's hometown in Romania, I would tell her, "Mom, I really don't think that people will put up with this for ever." And my mother would answer with a fatalistic sigh, "Well, look around. No country that embraced Communism has gotten rid of it." She was right...and wrong, since a few years later all Communist regimes tumbled one after the other, when people just said, "Enough is enough."

That is why I have every confidence that the Second French Revolution is on its way, and may arrive faster than we think. We will finally get rid of this discredited political class and its incompetent civil service partner in crime.

My 10th anniversary as a global Workday expert: Ready for the next 10 years

PARIS

 In that distant summer of 2013 when I spent ten intense days in London going through the highly demanding Workday certification process, I wondered whether that was time well spent. After all, few people in continental Europe could spell Workday then - actually, the only place to go through the certification course and exam was in London, nothing in Paris or Amsterdam. Apart from the UK, there were few customers in Europe, and most were just subsidiaries of US companies. Many of my friends and professional contacts questioned my sanity as it made more sense to continue as a system selection consultant dabbling in several tools like Oracle, SAP, Cornerstone and the myriad other HRIS systems available on the market rather than getting associated with just one. 

 Rewind a couple of years. I was presenting at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago and one late afternoon as I walked back to the hotel, whom did I see walking in the same direction? None other than Dave Duffield, the legendary founder of PeopleSoft and Workday. Many people will remember that his fight to protect PeopleSoft from Oracle's clutches are now the stuff of legend (I recounted that epic fight in my book High-Tech Planets: Secrets of an IT Road Warrior). I went up to him, introduced myself as a former PeopleSoft product manager in Sandy Riser's global team. "Great team," Dave was gracious enough to say, "you guys built an amazing number of payrolls in just a year and a half." I then asked him the burning question that has been on my (and many people's) mind: "After PeopleSoft, why didn't you just retire rather than embark on such a difficult project? After all, you revolutionized the HR technology space with PeopleSoft. Isn't it time to relax and enjoy a job well done?" I still remember his reply as if it were yesterday: "Two reasons. One, at age 60 I am too young to retire. Two, having lost PeopleSoft was a blessing in disguise because unencumbered by a legacy system we can focus on building an entirely modern system that would fix the limitations of the older generation of HR systems and be a native 21st century tool." 

My 12 clients made it happen

 I couldn't agree more as I had reached the same conclusion that our profession and industry needed a true cloud-based system. And since I did not want to be a mere gawker the way many analysts from Garther & Co are (pontificating on systems they have no idea how they are built or implemented), there was no other choice: I had to get my hands dirty and what better way to do that than on a new system with the potential to disrupt the market? So, after joining Wipro, then a Workday partner, I got my certification, started working on the first implementation in France and other countries. A year later, I went solo making a second strategic decision: to give a wider array of customers the benefit of my two decades of HRIS experience and now with the added benefit of being able to implement the most sophisticated HR system on the market. 

 We all make mistakes in life (business and otherwise) and I've had my share of those, but when it comes to investing in Workday and becoming a well-known expert in this system in addition to overall HRIS, that was one of the best decisions I ever made. Fast forwarding to June 2023, the exact month when 10 years earlier I became the first person in France to get certified on Workday, when I look at all that I have accomplished, I need to pinch myself to make sure I am not dreaming. I have been involved in 12 Workday implementations, many starting with Core HR as the foundation module, others on specialized modules, especially my favorite, Compensation: today more than one million employees are managed in Workday thanks to yours truly's modest efforts (in conjunction with others, of course). 

 Having my base in France, my clients have been logically Europe-based, but my international outlook means that most of them are global and in pre-Covid times I visited more countries around the world than many people have had hot dinners, in order to organize workshops, demo the system as we go through various iterations: design - build -test - training and deployment. I have partnered with hundreds of heads of HR, HR managers, Comp & Ben experts, HR Business partners, IT professionals as part of a client's resources along with dozens more of consultants and managers with Workday and the myriad implementation outfits part of such projects. A cast of thousands, literally. Just one round of Workday testing (End to End or User Acceptance) can easily bring me in contact with 100 people between individual testers, test leaders, system consultants and various managers involved in the process. 

The blogger with a Workday partner

 So, what's next? I'll answer with another question: Why change a winning combination? I may dedicate some time to helping a company re-engineer its HR processes, search for  a new system (where I keep a strict neutrality), even implement another system (always good to look at what others do - as I did recently with an Oracle implementation.) But most of my time will be spent on bringing my expertise to companies helping them make the most of their Workday investment, especially in my favorite areas:
-Core HR
-Compensation (both Core and Advanced - but also Payroll with the number of countries covered increasing)
-Security
-EIB (mass loads)
-Reporting.

(The last three running across all modules as I think no Workday expert can afford not to be cognizant of these three features as they are key to any implementation, be it Financials, HR, Recruiting or Learning.)

More modules/products/features around the above but also Extend and AI will appear which will keep me busy in the foreseeable future. Even current features will become more sophisticated to the point that most consultants will have to decide what their areas of expertise are, and these will become more and more limited in numbers as they specialize. 10 years ago, one could have a good command of most of Workday's modules. It is now nigh impossible. The future looks therefore quite bright, especially when no serious alternative to Workday is appearing on the horizon.