Blankets and employee engagement at Microsoft.
Microsoft is on a roll, on several levels. Share price, mojo, accessibility, cloud computing, patent strategy etc. It is a company rejuvenated. From the outside, it exudes confidence, but without the brashness of the last time it was the world’s most valuable company. This blog is at risk of too much Microsoft fandom. This morning […]
When Will We See an Open Platform to Connect People & Work?
I recently wrote about the difference between an application and a platform. As I wrote, “…most SaaS vendors are not platforms but merely providers of feature-rich applications”. I’ve noticed first hand two of the biggest challenges most enterprise SaaS vendors face today: 1) making it easy to integrate with and to third party applications and […]
Event Report: Microsoft Biz Apps Analyst Day Highlights Strategic Transformation #MSBizApps
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Seeks End To End Coverage Of Business Apps On February 10th to 12th, 2018, industry analysts converged onto Building 92 at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, WA, for an update on the Microsoft Business Applications. The Business Applications Analyst Forum was hosted by key executives including: Source: © 2018 R Wang […]
Research Summary: How Ensono Used Workday Finance And HR Cloud To Innovate And Save Money
One Integrated, Global System For Finance And HR Delivers Business Success This case study examines Ensono’s experience implementing Workday’s HR and Finance enterprise applications in the cloud. Ensono provides infrastructure management services for global companies. Ensono delivers next-generation IT solutions and helps organizations plan for optimized, future infrastructures. By implementing Workday, Ensono was able […]
The Role of Professional Services in a SaaS Business
I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far: Marketing exists to make sales easier. HR exists to help managers manage. I like to make them based on real-life situations, e.g., when someone running a department […]
You Can Never Fire Someone Too Early
The first time I heard the VC adage “you can never fire someone too early,” it rubbed me the wrong way. It sounded harsh and unfeeling. It seemed flippant. It felt trite. It seemed, frankly, like one of those things people say in the press box, but never on the playing field. But slowly, as with most […]
Zuora moves to the center
Zuora, the company that made its bones in subscription billing and payments held its annual user meeting in San Francisco last week and staked out some new turf. It had always been back office focused but its latest messaging includes elements of the front office. Perhaps it’s no surprise given co-founder and CEO Tien Tzuo’s […]
From Human Resource Management To Worker Management Or ???
If you’ve read even a few of my posts, then you know I focus pretty consistently on an issue that lurks, quietly but dangerously, waiting to sabotage our best efforts to achieve improved organizational outcomes through improved workforce performance. The villain of this piece is the sloppy, inconsistent, ill-defined and rampant misuse of terminology. The English major/natural […]
HR Millennial report: ‘We want transparency, honesty, and opportunity’
We often hear discussions about Millennials in the workplace. This generation, consisting of people born roughly between 1980 and 2000, will play an increasingly important role in the knowledge economy. The image shows how large the Millennial group is in comparison to other generations. To learn more about how Millennials view the work environment, I […]
Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them. (See Get Rid of the Performance Review.) Another […]
