Who Will be the Sponsors at HRTech 2015?

HRTech is the world’s best conference about technology for HR. 

The event brings together leading practitioners, providers, vendors, power users, consultants, investors and analysts.    At a live polling during the show approximately 55% of the audience was Director level or above (the remainder of the audience included  20% IT professionals, 20% HR practitioners and 10% consultants, investors, academics and media).

HRTech’s mission and primary goal: To help business benefit from technology.

The conference event this year focused on three critical areas to all enterprises:

1) Talent Management,

2) Collaborative Technologies (Social Media and related applications), and 

3) Human Capital Management (HCM & Workforce Planning).

 

Two key takeaways that leaped out to me which will impact the Human Capital Management space in the near-term and for the long-term are that:

1. the technology (from architecture to functionality to service) needs to be about and for the workforce and not for the HR department; and that
2. the Deployment and Usability of the technology is more important that the features and functionality. 

Why aligning HR Technology with the business is so critical:

This is where the vendors have failed the market. HR technology has focused too much on transactional initiatives, compliance and risk management, and administrative automation which greatly limits the ROI and value-proposition to one of labor arbitrage. 

“Talent Management is a business process not a technology. Talent management is not human resources, it is a business process. If you separate HR and the business, into silos or data warehouses it’s HARD to bring them  back together.” Jason Averbrook debating with Gartner’s Jim Holincheck.

Many of the technology vendors showing at HRTech seemed to be actively addressing last year’s HR issues around: a) Offering a Unified HRO Platform & End-to-End Talent Management Suite, b) Social Applications (aka Collaborative Technologies), and c) Health & Wellness.  

Deployment and Usability are as important as features and functionality.

The “consumer” is no longer HR.  The consumer is the the workforce.

With advances in portal capabilities, single sign-on, SaaS, and the fact that the average enterprise has multiple systems future software and tools are more likely to be deployed into existing platforms via “Apps” versus enterprises implementing entire new systems.

For small and mid-sized businesses, choosing systems and apps based on usability is key to realizing value.   End-user businesses need to start with Competencies and Capabilities and develop those before implementing technology or optimizing back-office processes like traditional HR.  Said differently, if you have $1 to invest in HR technology it’s best to invest it in developing and improving capabilities and competencies for the majority of businesses.

To ensure value is realized from the deployment of HR technologies over-communication and training was greatly preached by all the presenters.  Many commented that training is the best way to ensure adoption and that an added benefit is that training is the best employee retention tool as employee engagement drives all other activities and metrics.

 

So who will be the sponsors at HRTech in 2015?

My guess is that it will be a combination of:

1. technology enabled business service providers (Global BPOs, Oracle, IBM, and other major non-USA providers that have acquired the HRMS and talent management vendors), as well as
2. killer apps: new software/technology/tools providers that solve very focused niche problems. 

The killer apps will drive innovation and performance. The larger providers will provide solutions that extend across multiple functions outside of HR and also will be able to provide global practices, capabilities and competencies.

Firms that focus on deploying HR technology that provides “Business Process Optimization”versus “Doing HR automation for the sake of HR” are more likely to be presenting at future HRTech conferences.

Comments

[JonathanGoodman]

Charles,
Can you expand on or clarify this point?

"End-user businesses need to start with Competencies and Capabilities and develop those before implementing technology or optimizing back-office processes like traditional HR."

Do you mean Competencies as in a "a library of..."?
Or, are do you mean SMBs need to learn how to do HR before they go off and buy HR technology?

Really thoughtful post! I figure I'll be at HR Tech in 2015, so it'll be fun to see whose there.

Jonathan