Is your vendor certified?

With the HR-XML organisation announcing over a dozen new certifications under the HR-XML program “HR-Certify” users of HR technology need to begin to take note of if their vendor is on the list and if not why not.

HRcertify.org allows users of technology to check to see if their vendor (or proposed vendor) is certified and against which specifications. In addition to the specification the site provides some background information of how the integration is provided. This allows users to validate vendors claims of integration through a unbiased third party. For example if you have Taleo, you can check which HR-XML specifications they support and see they support the BackgroundReports ( xsd -version 2.0) message. Now if you wanted to automate the background checking process you can use the service to find a supplier who can receive the request and send the results back. For example Truescreen is certified to use the BackgroundCheck.xsd (version 2_0) and BackgroundReports.xsd (version 2_0) specifications.

Now this is not the end point in your investigations and nor does it mean that every single instance of these two vendors products will work together. You still need to go through further technical analysis around communication methods, ensuring firewalls, and other such technology do not get in your way. However because both vendors are certified you can at least be sure that given the right environment the technology will work. And this my friends should reduce your overall implementation time and cost.

Future ideas for hrblogs.org

I am growing hrblogs.org slowly and while I have a large list of what I would like to see on the site, time just does not allow for everything in one go. Following this theme I noticed a “review” of sorts on scale|free a week or so ago with some very useful ideas and thoughts. The register your HR blog idea is along the lines of what I did with the HR Bloggers OPML file, I even hacked up a self registration system but did not use it because I could not secure the process from spammers. A couple of the other ideas are in the works and I hope to leverage the work from WPMU community to get these up and going.

iTunes Music Store is here

Guess what, today iTunes Music Store launched in Australia!!

After a very very long wait Australia has joined many other countries with an iTunes Music Store, and not surprising SonyBMG are not yet participating, too bad for them and their artists. I was a little slow off the mark getting the news today as I have been in a two day workshop but as soon as I got home :-

I am now busy at purchasing music! I listened to Adam Curry’s DSC 265 heard The Doors Riders on the Storm and tonight I now have the song.

Organisations that influence

While I was out for a walk on Sunday morning I caught up on some listening, one of the shows I listened to was Episode 19 of the Cranky Middle Manager from The Podcast Network. During this show Wayne interviews Gary Neilson about his new book, “Results”, they talk about 7 types of organisations and the impact they have on an organisation. This got me thinking about grey zones again and that the size of a grey zone would likely be directly related to the type of organisation. I am sure the Passive Aggressive organisation would have a larger grey zone than the Military Precision organisation.

links for 2005-10-16

Interviews

Over the last couple of months I have been interviewed twice by mainstream media on blogging and HR. First was by Jean-Paul Pelosi from Human Capital looking at how blogging is finding its way into the corporate world and whether the trend should concern HR and business leaders. Jean-Paul also interviewed Richard Giles, Cameron Reilly, Brad Howarth and Simon Van Wyk (Hothouse). The full article can be found
here, the article was a balance view point and overall showed blogs in a good light.

The second is yet to be published with David Stonehouse from The Sydney Morning Herald looking at on how the Internet has changed the way we find information about other people and the specific recruitment spin. Not sure when this one will surface or what my input will look like once the editors finish with it but I will post a link once it is out.

A culture for collaboration

In the comments of my last post Regina Miller points to her posts at Corante’s Future Tense on creating a culture for collaboration where she extends some of the ideas and thoughts from Nancy White on collaboration with Web 2.0 tools. Nancy tries to dispel the myth of “effortless collaboration”, which is what the marketing hype will be selling and provides some great insight into why there is no such thing. Regina also points to Steve Coats on the softer side of collaboration which adds further depth to the discussion.

Fundamentally it all comes down to corporate culture. Some companies just do not generate a culture of collaboration and I would also suspect that they also have a larger grey zone. Culture influences so many aspects that it should never be ignored or even underestimated.

One final thought IT should never drive broad workplace technology projects. However they tend to end up at the helm because no other department stands up. In my personal view a technology project should be driven by the function who services end customer and owns the end result. Where employees are concerned, this is HR. If you are an HR director where are you? Marketing would never let IT drive a CRM project, Finance a new finance system the same should be for employee tools. Period.