Dave Ulrich on HR

This is from the forthcoming book The HR Value Proposition: Measures of HR Investment Impact
Elements of the HR value proposition Criteria for the new HR
An effective HR function . . . Possible Follow-Up Measures
(1) Knowing external business realities
Recognizes external business realities and adapts its practices and allocates resources accordingly.
Percentage of HR professionals who pass the business literacy tests laid out in Chapter 2.
(2) Serving external stakeholders
Creates market value for investors by increasing intangibles.
P/E ratio compared to competitors over time.
Intangible value (total market value less tangible value).
(3) Scores on intangibles audit in Chapter 3.
Increases customer share by connecting with target customers.
Share of targeted customers.
Extent to which customers participate in HR practices.
(4) Satisfaction scores from target customers.
Helps line managers deliver strategy by building organization capabilities.
Satisfaction scores from line managers on HR services.
Measure of key capabilities required for success (measures provided in Chapter 4).
(5) Serving internal stakeholders
Clarifies and establishes an employee value proposition and ensures that employees have abilities to
do their work.
Employee commitment.
Target employee retention.
(6) Employee productivity.
Manages people processes in ways that add value.
For each HR practice, evaluate its:
* Cost
* Volume
* Timeliness
* Quality
* Human Reaction
Perform a manager and employee assessment to see how they perceive HR
practices delivering value to them.
Do research to evaluate how those affected by an HR practice differ
from those who are not (for example, whether those who attend training
perform better than those who do not).
(7) Manages performance management practices in ways that add value.

(8) Manages information processes and practices in ways that add value.
(9) Manages work flow and organization processes in ways that add value.
(10) Building HR resources
Has a clear strategic planning process for aligning HR investments with business goals
Assess whether the HR planning process prioritizes HR investments.
(11) Assess perceptions of the HR strategy planning process.
Aligns its organization to the strategy of the business.
Evaluate the ratio of HR budget or headcount to overall corporate budget or headcount.
Survey perception of the HR organization.
(12) Assuring HR professionalism
Has staff who play clear and appropriate roles.
Evaluate the roles HR professionals play by a role assessment survey.
(13) Builds staff ability to demonstrate HR competencies
Evaluate the competence of HR professionals using the HR competence survey.
Assess the perception of HR professionals by their clients.
(14) Upgrades HR professionals
Assess behavior changes of those who participate in HR training events
Evaluate development experiences on the extent to which participants learn and change behavior
Thanks for your interest.

Protected: ODEO

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Yin-Tang, from Jerry

Yang	Yin
Masculine	Feminine
Hierarchical	Networked
Centralized	Distributed
Western	Eastern
Mechanistic	Organic
Designed	Emergent
Left-brained	Right-brained
Managed	Self-organizing
Chaos is disaster	Chaos is growth
Homogeneity	Diversity
Scarcity	Abundance
Exclusivity	Quality
Winner-take-all	Mutual benefit
Barriers	Openness
Coercion	Congruence
Consumerism	Authentic relationships
Power over	Power to
Secrecy	Transparency
Trust	Trustworthiness
Facts	Feelings
Rational	Intuitive
Scientific	Spiritual
Concrete, binary	Ambiguous
Quest for Truth	Ability to hold paradox

SkypeIn

just purchased a SkypeIn number for $12 for three months including forwarding and voice mail.

510 528 3105 charges $12 for one month’s forwarding and voice mail + another $20 for the phone line itself.

new number is 510 931-6382  (510) 931-META

A Web 2.0 Learning Pattern Language

concept:

right tool for the job

add social/dialog considerations

euphemistic terms

blog = project log
wiki = documentation, respository
chat =
IM = text messaging

breeze, vyew = conferencing

Aggregator news

I’ve been reading our blogs on our Pageflakes aggregator. It’s growing on me. A clean interface. Simple to understand. And a zillion goodies if you’re the account owner. (Start your own.) Here’s a partial sample of the widgets you can make part of your Flakes pages:

small pieces, loosely joined

clay shirky on tags and ontologies

visualize tags: http://kevan.org/extispicious.cgi

transvergence: Hezbollah, value nets

knowledge used to come in big chunks. books, courses, certifications always seem to contain more than you need to know.

“outside” knowledge

Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

In the past, a business clearly had to pay attention to competition and the marketplace, but not to the same degree as today.  Given our hypercompetitive, fast changing, global environment, the forces of the marketplace have achieved almost mythical status.  I think of them as asteroids pounding us with increased frequency and changing the environment, often in drastic ways that necessitate an equally drastic and rapid response from the business.  It is thus more important than ever that the business have a very clear, up-to-date understanding of the market environment, and do its best to adjust to and be in harmony with that environment, rather than attempt to fight it to try to preserve the status quo.

In such a climate, you need to pay a lot of attention to what is going on out there.  One of the key findings of the IBM 2006 Global CEO Study was that more than 75 percent of CEOs looked to their clients and business partners as their top sources of innovative ideas, whereas less than 15 percent thought that their own R&D labs were the top sources of innovation.  More and more businesses are realizing the importance of looking at the innovation of the leading users of their products and services as strong indicators of where their markets are heading.  Collaborating with universities, research labs, and open communities is essential in order to anticipate the fast-coming future with sufficient time to do something about it.  These collaborations cannot be done with corporate staffs tracking what is happening out there; the business needs to have its own talented people who are respected by, contribute to, and work closely with the communities with which they collaborate.

Thus, a major part of the bottoms-up strategy process is to help organize within the business innovation communities that can let you know what is really going on out there, suggest all kinds of innovative ideas, and vet them as a community before making recommendations to management.  Our Thinkplace initiative at IBM aims to do just that, by providing the right platform, tools and governance to help communities self-organize within the company.

A piece of the informal learning puzzle is improving how to learn from the outside….

Leveraging group performance with web technology

Communities of Practice Not.

This paper addresses getting the most out of workers who identify with one another professionally, groups some people call communities of practice.

I don’t like the word community because it has a dozen definitions. When I hear community, I first think of a small town. What’s intended is a group of people with a common background or shared interests, such as the medical community.

Practice suffers from the same ambiguity. Practice makes perfect. Tennis practice. A practicing Catholic. But what’s intended here is the exercise of a profession, for example a law practice. Yet some communities of practice, think of Alcoholics Anonymous or a bowling league, don’t involve professions at all. That’s why I’m going to write about groups, not communities. The groups I have in mind are workers who identify with one another because they do similar work.

Why groups matter

Groups of people who identify with one another, be they chefs or customer service reps, converse, share knowledge of how things really work, help one another solve problems, use the corporate grapevine to great advantage, and help new members get up to speed quickly. Sharing solutions with one another averts duplication of effort. Active social networks speed the dissemination of knowledge. Conversations in the community are the seeds of innovation. And work groups improve decision-making because “all of us are smarter than any of us.”

“Communities of practice are the shop floor of human capital, the place where the stuff gets made,” says Tom Stewart, currently editor of Harvard Business Review. “No one owns them. There’s no boss. They’re like professional societies. People join and stay because they have something to learn and to contribute. The work they do is the joint and several property of the group–cosa nostra, ‘our thing.’”

Ten years ago, these groups were thought to spring up on their own, like wild mushrooms or shooting stars. And the common wisdom was to leave them to work their magic on their own. “Fertilize the soil, but stay out of the garden,” cautioned social network analyst Valdis Krebs.

Now we know better. You can bring groups together, assuming you have people who consider themselves members of a profession and see the benefit of joining together. Some companies identify strategically important technologies and support the creation of groups around them. Others make it easy for people in similar jobs but different locations to connect with one another.

Optimizing group performance

Think of work groups as systems, as above. Inputs are news (by which I mean anything relevant that happens outside the organization) and experiences (which is what’s going on and being dreamed up inside the organization.) Processing comes from conversations, finding experts and information when needed, solving problems, sharing discoveries, and speeding things up. Outputs are better customer service, continuous improvement, accelerated delivery, greater morale, and agility in taking advantage of change. To improve performance, we optimize throughput.

For the news input, instead of having everyone with an interest in, say, signal-processing chip technology, read through journals, research reports, the trade press, and blogs to keep up with the field, some companies designate one or two sharp individuals to track signal-processing chip developments and blog significant developments. People with an interest can subscribe to the blog feed or podcasts of sector news.

Other companies host community sessions where experts swap war stories with one another, with customers, with product managers, with scientists, and with others. Every interaction is captured on video; the video is broken into short segments that are made available to systems engineers and customers as video, slides, transcript, or podcast. All of this is searchable — right down to the sentence level. Rather than looking at being interviewed for training content as a nuisance, the experts look forward to the semi-annual meet-ups with their peers.

For experiences, the inside stuff, package them as stories. No one gets excited by new policies and product specs, but everyone enjoys a good story. As Robert Scobel demonstrated at Microsoft, it doesn’t take much technology to develop compelling stories on video or via blog. If people rate the stories as they read them, the cream will rise to the top so later on, people can skim the storybase for the great ones.

Web technology is an ideal way to facilitate group interaction, for example:

To optimize processing, community members need to know one another, be able to find people in the group, learn who knows what, have good social connections, and know who’s available. Create spaces, real and virtual, that make it easy and enticing for people to meet. Post a “yellow pages” with thumbnail photo, coordinates, background, project history, interests, expertise. IBM’s “Blue Pages,” an outgrowth of an online phone directory is the company’s most commonly used intranet application. In addition to expertise, Blue Pages shows geographic location, the local time, and whether the person is online. Call someone at IBM; if they aren’t the right person, they can refer you to someone who is within a minute — and IBM has a third of a million employees, 42 percent of whom are mobile workers.

I stuffed  Practices, beliefs, and rules of thumb into a cloud because they will be stored in many places, including people’s heads. Wikis are great as a repository, for they can be perpetually updated. Blogs and RSS feeds are wonderful for keeping up — and can easily be stored in a searchable database. Information generated from the community is always more credible than information that comes from higher-ups. Informal tagging (“folksonomies”) simplify locating information with everyday terminology. The cloud should contain documentation and outputs of past projects so members don’t waste time re-creating something that’s already there.

The cloud is invaluable for helping a new member get up to speed. This is a significant issue. Training is rarely up to date, is time-consuming, and often deals with theory, not practice. At IBM, close to 55 percent of the work force have been with the company for less than five years with many joining the organization through acquisitions. Many people are changing roles as the firm shifts from a sales to a service orientation. Easy access to the cloud is vital for rapid onboarding. A community provides the social structure for novices to become apprentices and eventually evolve into master craftsmen.

Resources like these don’t build themselves. Appoint a wiki gardener to keep things current; it’s a small price to pay, given the enormity of the payback.

Relationship with the larger organization

Professional groups are democratic. They often self-organize. They act on what their members consider right. And this threatens the authority of executives who thought they called the shots. Some organizations even think informal groups are subversive, trying to “beat the system” by making up their own rules. Other organizations are unaware that worker communities are shouldering most of the burden of keeping their members on top of things.

Enlightened organizations support their worker groups by making time for them, setting aside resources to build social networks and “cloud” infrastructure, and recognizing their accomplishments. Cisco, CGI, and others have built groups around the technologies that are strategically important to them. Finally, companies that are merging or making total make-overs have used informal groups to assist in organization transformation.

Our Unworkshops are a living laboratory for prototyping these ideas.

This essay is a work in progress. Please make suggestions.

Pick the right tool for the job

Ways of learning in a wired world

The hammer is a great tool, but hammers are not very useful for cutting wood. If only learning situations were like pounding in nails. However…

1. Learners differ: novices or pro’s, nerds or tech neophytes, outgoing or lurkers, daring or conservative, impatient or reflective, volunteers or conscripts.
2. Cultures differ: value-driven or rule-driven, trusting or controlling, dazzled by innovation or bound by tradition, breaking new ground or fine-tuning, collegial or selfish.
3. Learning requirements differ: large group or small, firewalled or open, big budget or shoestring, prototype or infrastructure, flexible or rigid, transient or lasting, self-organizing or directed, immediate need or continuous growth.
4. Learning objectives differ: exposure or how-to, stable or in flux, one-time or recurring, group outcome or individual, emotional or cognitive.

Corollary to Murphy’s Law: you can never do just one thing. Builders rarely use a single tool for a complete project. More often, they use a hammer and a screwdriver and a power drill and a ladder etc. Likewise, an informal learning environment could contain…

1. Blogs + Aggregator
2. Wiki + List serv
3. Email + Instant messenger + Collaboration
4. Blog + Tags + Wiki + Conference calls + Chat + meeting F2F

We can describe the pieces of the environment but must keep in mind that its value outweighs the sum of its parts.

As in a cubist painting, we must address the tools issue from numeous angles. At the most basic level, we will need:

• a glossary that defines the basic technologies
• a sorting by application in learning
• frequent combinations (plus, where possible, cases where they are being used)

Other breakdowns:

Design Patterns of Social Computing uses name, problem, example, context, solution, implementation, variance, and consequences for patterns such as collaboration, mentoring, tutoring, apprenticeship and the democratization of ideas.

Fit with informal learning, which rests on a foundation of self-motivated learners, discovery, small pieces loosely joined, collaborative learning, communities of practice, self-organization, visualization, prototyping, personal knowledge management, social network analysis, conversation, story, dialogue, and spontaneity. Jay thinks of what’s being learned as flowing, with meaning defined by the learner; control is a delusion; the world is on Moore’s Law; transparency works.
How-to lessons and hints, e.g. how to Skypecast

Coming of Age, an Introduction to the New World Wide Web classifies educational tools as:

One-to-one
Email and SMS Texts
Instant messaging
VoIP
Some games software
FOAF
One-to-many
Static content web sites
Dynamic content web sites
RSS
Blogs
Podcast
Folksonomies (or social tags)
e-portfolio
Many-to-many
Content management systems (CMS)
News servers
Forums Discussion
Chat
Games
Wikis
Version control systems

Why do they leave out simulation, gaming, job aids, social software, RSS?

---

FormThis material will be changing continuously. If managed with wiki and tags, it can be a resource that improves with time. Imagine the value of embedding case examples for the major technologies.

It will be challenging to come up with a good indexing & tagging scheme. Novices need a quick hit; experimenters need more depth; do-ers need the how-to. This may end up as a big, clickable cookbook.

potential glossary items from new WWW

Glossary of terms used
Alpha release
The very first release of a program, ready for in-house testing. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage.
Becta
The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency:
http://www.becta.org.uk/.
Beta release
The version of the software ready for testing by “real” users. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage.
Blog
Short for web log, or online journal.
Blogosphere
The “universe” of blogs as a whole.
Blogroll
A collection of links to other people’s blogs.
Constructivism
In education, the idea that knowledge is created through an active process on
the part of the learner. (Social constructivism is similar, but involves
collaboration and exploration with others. Hence, the blogosphere and,
especially, the edublogosphere are excellent examples of social constructivism
in practice – or ought to be!
CV
Short for “Curriculum Vitae”, this is what the Brits call a resumé.
DfES
Department for Education & Skills – the UK’s education arm of government:
http://www.dfes.gov.uk.
Edublogosphere
The same as blogosphere, but applied to education blogs.
Open source software
Software which is distributed free of charge with its source code, enabling
others to take part in developing it. See:
http://www.terryfreedman.
org.uk/artman/uploads/computers_in_classrooms_15.pdf for a special
edition of the Computers in Classrooms newsletter focusing on open source
software.
Podcast
This is an audio recording that you can subscribe to via RSS and listen to on a
computer or (usually) an mp3 player at a time of your choosing. It takes its
name from the iPod – but you don’t actually need an iPod to either make or
listen to a podcast.
Resumé
This is the American term for CV.
Coming Of Age: An Introduction To The NEW Worldwide Web
16
RSS
Usually taken to stand for Really Simple Syndication, RSS is what makes it
possible to subscribe to podcasts and blogs. See the chapter by John Evans,
What Are RSS Feeds and Why Haven’t I Heard About It?(RSS Feeds from an
Educator’s Perspective) on page 11 for a fuller explanation.
Semantic web
The semantic web is an extension of the web that will allow people to find,
share, and combine information more easily. It works by using machinereadable
information.
Shibboleth
This is a “universal” method of website log-in being explored and piloted by
Becta in the UK. See
http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/display.cfm?section=22&id=4665 for fuller
details.
Vlog
A video blog. This is a relatively new development. A vlog is similar to an
ordinary blog, but uses video rather than text. See Video blogging: Terry
Freedman interviews Paul Knight, on page 48, for more details.
VLE
Virtual learning environment: software which allows teachers to track students’
progress, manage course content, and so on. See
http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?page=248 for a fuller explanation.
Vygotsky
A great proponent of social constructivism, Vygotsky introduced the concept of
the zone of proximal development. This is the area of knowledge that is just out
of reach of a learner, but which can be brought within his or her reach through
working with a peer.