Enterprise hits and misses - HR tech gets a hard look Uber and Lyft get an election day reprieve and algorithms get a fairness backlash

Enterprise hits and misses - HR tech gets a hard look, Uber and Lyft get an election day reprieve, and algorithms get a fairness backlash Jon Reed Mon, 11/09/2020 - 16:34

Summary:
This week - HR tech is murky, but a closer look at the HR Tech show clears the view. Uber and Lyft get good news on election day, but the issues of the gig economy linger. Algorithms-in-practice prove

problematic. Your whiffs include leadership satire - and Kubernetes PR poetry.

Lead story - HR Tech 2020 - Murky signs of what’s next in HR, with a hint of clarity MyPOV: Usually around this time, Brian Sommer is tweeting about getting stuck in boarding group FU with a bag of nuts as his only comfort the heady future of talent management via the HR Tech show in Las Vegas. Nuts or not, the show must go on; Brian has the virtual HR Tech breakdown for us this week. He covers a wide swath down his virtual exhibit hall, from the future of recruiting to the “new urgency of payroll.” But the cautious approach to AI caught my eye: What I heard was that many firms will use machine learning technologies to schedule interviews and automate processes. Some will use advanced technologies to score/rank jobseekers' applications or resumes. But, no one I spoke with will touch the use of facial recognition to assess a person’s truthfulness, intelligence or other characteristics. Why? The current state of the technology does not ‘read’ the faces of persons of color well and certain cultural differences may not be within the experience set of the technology either.

Next-gen HR projects aren’t just cautious about technology. As Brian notes, recruiting top talent in the midst of a pandemic isn’t easy. Nor is managing projects to the result: One of the HR vendors I spoke with last week, Moovila, brought this point home with a graphic showing that only 1 in 24 managers knows how to manage a project. I concur.

Brian isn’t sure HR vendors are even building apps - or, are the building the right ones? That’s the problem with the virtual life; it’s harder for all of us to press into the truth behind the marketing. Brian is right to flag that problem. That said, reading his piece, you do get a flavor of upstart HR vendors across HR disciplines. Some of them may get swallowed up by mergers/acquisitions, but I’ll say this much: it’s not a dull area of the enterprise to cover (anymore). Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week

Sainsbury’s job losses and store closures signal rapid digital change - Derek finds there is more to the Sainbury’s store closings story than meets the eye. CMWorld 2020 - content marketing is evolving, are you ready? Content is the only form of marketing that really matters (if you ask me), but it can also be an ROI bog pit. Barb has the latest from CMWorld: “It’s not enough, Rose said, to be the FAQ of your industry. “This puts you in the zone of passivity.” You need to get in the zone of action where you create advocates early and often who will help you reach and move audiences.” Barb wasn’t done, see: CMWorld 2020 - How to create content your audience wants to consume.

Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here’s my three top choices from our vendor coverage:

16 questions SAP needs to answer for its American audience - On the heels of a fascinating/problematic earnings call, SAP CEO Christian Klein will sit in the live chair with ASUG CEO Geoff Scott this coming Thursday (open to all). North American SAP customers have oodles of questions - and uncle Den, your inveterate SAP watcher, has a definitive preview. Dropbox delivers strong Q3 results - it’s now a “distributed team building for distributed teams” - As Derek reports, this ain’t your grandpappy’s Dropbox. Rimini Street crushes Q3 FY2020, demonstrates need for 3PM - Some vendors might be slogging through the pandemic, but Rimini Street ain’t one of them. Does this have implications for big ERP beyond the pandemic? I’d say so.

A few more vendor picks, without the quips:

conXion 2020 - Nordex on their push towards real world IoT at scale, a Software AG use case - Jon FinancialForce appoints Scott Brown as CEO to drive customer growth - Phil GoodData founder and CEO Roman Stanek on DataOps, radical openness, and how Snowflake changed the data value chain - Jerry

Jon’s grab bag - Phil keeps the tech-for-good storylines going with this nifty piece: How observability helps Quill in its mission to help kids write better. (Yes, observability buzzword overdose gets a hall pass when it’s for a good cause). Keeper line: “Observability is better than Slack.” Though I’ve missed the astronaut age cutoff by five startups and 500 Southwest flights a mile, Cath has me covered in NASA’s mission to map the future of work and discover new talent. Derek gleans buying lessons from a high stakes year in Enterprise technology buyers and COVID-19 - what have we learned? Finally, Den and Josh, who have been known to spar on occasion, had a podcast meeting of the minds instead. Den writes it up in Josh Greenbaum on enterprise software pricing, commodity software, productivity and value add. Best of the enterprise web

My top six

Uber, Lyft Escape California’s Crackdown - but Law Will Continue to Devastate Gig Economy - Uber and Lyft escaped a pending drivers-as-employees classification in California at the ballot box, but the pursuit of regulation/fairness in the gig economy is far from over. Biden, for example, cited his support for the law (and: this law was flawed, putting independent contractors across professions in a tough position). Canada crawling toward AI regulatory regime, but experts say reform is urgent - debates on over-reaching algorithms are cropping up everywhere. And these aren’t theoretical, but deployed “AI” in action, helping - and, too often, hurting. Who am I to decide when algorithms should make important decisions? - See what I mean? Six ways to shake the cobwebs out of legacy technologies and processes - Joe McKendrick with some timely/provocative tips: “Rewriting code to keep the same functionality is the worst strategic mistake that an organization can make.” Digital Transformation Means Security Must Also Transform - “The best cybersecurity talent is creative, curious, and hungry to learn. Being remote doesn’t have to change this.” Five ways to design a better mental-health future for a stressed-out workforce - Let’s keep this topic on the front burner, shall we?

Whiffs Tough call for headine-of-the-week. I’ve narrowed it down to:

You can now legally compost dead bodies in Washington state, or Yoga pants are now allowed at the commissary, and there was much rejoicing

I don’t do political whiffs; I think we all need a break from that circus, but if you get a chance, Google “Four Seasons Total Landscaping” sometime… Then there was this:

can’t think of too many worse phrases to lead of a PR pitch with me than “The dawn of Kubernetes…” unless you make a full poem out of it — Jon Reed (@jonerp) November 4, 2020

Special kudos to Ron Miller for giving the poem a go…

‘‘Twas the night before containerization at the dawn of Kubernetes, the day after Docker and the fleeting moment of Mesos. — Ron Miller (@ron_miller) November 4, 2020

Meanwhile, Brian Sommer called us out collectively for lacking the leadership he is accustomed to seeing. For good measure, he provided a bit of his own:

Leadership in @Covid times #16: Going an entire Zoom call without using the words #resilient #agile #scalable or #flexible #TYFYL#EnSW @jonerp @fscavo — Brian Sommer (@BrianSSommer) November 2, 2020

I fired back:

timing your UPS delivery right when the 50 slide deck gets underway. “Someone’s at the door, keep running through the slides (PLEASE!!) while I am gone..” — Jon Reed (@jonerp) November 2, 2020

To see the full satirical onslaught, with plenty of others chiming in, check the Thank You For Your Leadership hashtag. See you next time… If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. ‘myPOV’ is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.

Image credit - Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Loser and Winner © ispstock - all from Fotolia.com.

Disclosure - Oracle, Workday, Rimini Street, ASUG, FinancialForce, Software AG and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing.

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HCM and the digital future of work Hits and misses

Author: Jon Reed

Date: 2020-11-10

URL: https://diginomica.com/enterprise-hits-and-misses-hr-tech-gets-hard-look-uber-and-lyft-get-election-day-reprieve-and

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