Microsoft to do payroll in Office?

Hmm, not sure what to make of this. Found this article on Information Week about Microsoft partnering with ADP in the Us to delivery payroll services to small business. (Via eHRMS)

I am sure this is going to raise some eyebrows in the SME payroll market place, especially in the Australian marketplace if they decide to enter. Why? Not only because they might cause some grief but it would be very interesting to see if Microsoft build their own or partner with local vendors. I guess time will tell if they decide to move into Australian.

Guidelines for corporate bloggers

I came across this good summary for employees who blog via Corporate PR.

If you are looking at updating your “Acceptable use of the Internet guidelines” in your organisation they might help you. I would suggest some guidelines be developed for all internet usage within your organisation just make sure they are relevant, sensible and can be adhered to by your employees. The guidelines need to take into account the type of employees you have and the industry you are in.

Sun has guidelines, however this has still not stopped their CEO getting in a little bit of hot water over blog posts.

More on eLearning

I attended today a session on business cases and ROI for online learning initiatives run by the AHRI Learning & Development SIG. The SIG had sourced a couple of interesting speakers, the first from Deloitte and the second from Roche Products.

The first session was very interesting in providing an insight into how Deloitte’s goes about building a business case for online learning initiatives. They use some interesting methods for linking learning to business strategy, or “top-down” and then they build specific plans and items around the learning activity, “bottom up”.

I had two big takeaway’s from the session, firstly was how few eLearning programs they believe provide a return on investment, less than 25%! The second takeaway is related on how few organisations still do not conduct a benefits realisation process to ensure they are realising all of the possible benefits. Quite possibly if the second items was done the there would be more successful projects.

There were discussions on how even Gen-Y’s were not adapting to eLearning. I wonder could it be that we are trying to provide a learning paradigm from the wrong generation?

The second session was more practical case study of what has been happening at Roche. It was fantastic to hear such a practical and complete case study on the benefits of eLearning. Roche take a blended approach to learning, that is a mixture of both offline and online delivery depending on the requirements of the course. Alison Bickford showed us all she is very passionate about eLearning but at the same time she seems very pragmatic about things. At times Alison was talking about personalised learning which covered a number of different areas for learning. She has a vision of providing learners with a very flexible collaborative approach to learning. I felt there were similarities to Bryan Alexander’s discussions on mLearning. How timely!

Alison seems very switched on, after the People in Business conference it is good to hear an HR professional in Australia who is pushing the envelope. She even mentioned blogs, wikis in the presentation and refers to both in her references. Wikipeida as an example of a Wiki (I wonder if there is an example wiki for eLearning out there), and Scott Aldred’s blog.

An interesting side note is Roche are installing broadband connections into the homes of employees who are being targeted for the eLearning programs. This is very interesting as I spent a bit of time talking with Tim Dean from NSW TAFE about the online learning programs they have been doing. We spoke about the potential for real time video streaming and podcasting (although I did not call it podcasting). A big barrier he has found is the lack of bandwidth within TAFE and where they do have bandwidth the high cost of it. Tim mentioned he is going to give audio/video streaming a try and see how it is accepted.

Is eLearning passé?

I found this item on Corporate PR about how learning is now going mobile (m-Learning). Elizabeth Albrycht’s comments on “the old brick and mortar college/universities need to break down the walls, admitting learners from elsewhere via cyberspace” is right on the money. She points to TheFeature where the original interview with Bryan Alexander exists. m-Learning is mobile learning, or put another way continual learning via online communities where participants are active not just passive consumers of information.

While both seem to be referring to learning in a formal institutional context the same holds true within corporations, and will become even more relevant with the growth in Gen-Y’s in the workforce. Howard Rheingold refers to the backchannel being used by the students that encompasses IM, chat, SMS and other items in cyberspace. All of these technologies have appeared in the workplace already and are disruptive to the traditional organisation. Many IT departments have been working to remove access from their workers for many reasons, which I will not cover.

But what would happen if our corporate learning groups started to embrace m-Learning in the manner referred to by Bryan? Would we be able to get closer to “the learning organisation” and be more competitive in the “knowledge economy”. Courses and content continually updated via blogs, wikis, podcasts, moblogs, supported by IM, SMS for participants anywhere in the workplace?

Would the organisation see bottom line impacts? I think so.

Baby boomers and workforce applications

Over the last 5 years or so when deploying workforce applications, such as Employee Self Service, I have regularly dealt with organisations who are concerned that their workforce does not know how to use computers or have such limited skills that deployment will be and issue. Now for a generalisation, the organisations tend to be referring to the baby boomers as they feel the Gen X & Y’s of the world know what is what. Typically this is managed via comprehensive change management, training and quite often additional public kiosk deployment to support the project.

Over the last month I have begun to have some strange experiences where baby boomers are concerned, specifically with my parents.

About a month ago my father-in-law begins talking to me about the merits of Firefox vs Thunderbird vs Internet Explorer. I found this a little different.

What got me was last night having dinner with my mother we began showing her our photos on Flickr and how she could view them as a family member. I then was asked “So what is a blog and why would you have one?” After spending about 5 minutes explaining things she calmly says “oh now understand, I have been mentioned in a blog. Someone was reading my book and put something in her blog about it and I have been wondering what they are.” I asked how should knew someone was writing about her, and was told that she regularly keeps an eye on things via searching in Yahoo and Google! On further discussion she actually turned down a Gmail address about 6 months ago.

After giving her a quick run down on Blogger she decided that it was the sort of thing she could use with her research and now wants to set on up. About 5 minutes later she pulled out a 128MB USB key/MP3 player that she had been given and did not know how to use it. Another 30 minutes later and we had completed a short training session on iTunes, MP3s, ripping and other such items. She now is set to take Mozart on the road.

Now, you might think my mother is a knowledge worker in a corporation. In fact she is so not that. She is a piano teacher, ok maybe one of the best in Australia or even the world, but still not your traditional IT savvy demographic.

Now if I look at my father he has been online for ages, my step father regularly trades online and emails. Therefore these baby boomers understand enough technology to use regular workforce applications.

Now coming back to the issue of deployment. Maybe the baby boomers in the workforce do actually understand technology and us Gen X’s just do not give them enough credit. Something to definitely consider next time you are deploying your applications.

Now off to help setup a Blogger account for my mother.

Recruiter, candidate relationships

What should the relationship be between a recruiter and the candidate? Stephen Harris over at Recruiting.com talks about the respect that should be shown both ways, something I completely agree with. Unfortunately the relationship is many time not like this, as we have all seen.

I think the whole area becomes more volatile when he recruiter is working on a contingency basis, as opposed to a retained search.

On the other side of the coin, what sort of relationship should an internal recruiter have with the candidate? I’m sure the recruiters (which I am not) out there have an opinion.