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Technological Culture Change
Harris Corp.'s HR leader shares how streamlining succession planning brought on a whole new approach to talent management, and a whole new corporate culture.
Two years ago, succession-planning information at the international communications and information technology company Harris Corp. was hardly a streamlined, electronic process, but rather a collection of 32 large binders stuffed with pages and pages of information about its employees. "They were filled with all kinds of paper -- people's internal resumes, succession plans and candidate slates," says Jeffrey Shuman, the Melbourne, Fla.-based company's vice president of human resources and corporate relations. Harris provides information systems for the Department of Defense, homeland security, U.S. federal agencies and civil customers. Back then, finding information about an employee took some serious digging, Shuman recalls. Worst of all, the information became obsolete shortly after it was filed since there was no effective system for making continual updates as employees progressed. "Information was only as good as that moment in time," says Shuman, who became the company's HR chief in 2005 after serving as vice president of human resources and administration for Northrop Grumman's information-technology business. That all changed when he turned those overstuffed binders for succession -- and many of Harris' other HR processes -- into an integrated, Web-based talent management system by using a technology suite from Authoria. "Harris, like many large companies, had a very fragmented HR infrastructure, systems that had been silos that didn't communicate well and there was great difficulty doing anything strategic with its HR systems infrastructure," says Tod Loofbourrow, CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based Authoria. To use the new system, Harris employees log on to www.harris.com, and once inside, there is a home page showing the day's news as well as time cards, expense reports and talent-management information. Workers create talent profiles, similar to those used on social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook, in which they describe their talents and career aspirations. Managers can align the right employees with future needs and keep track of the employees' performance. Shuman and Loofbourrow will discuss the changes to Harris' HR policies and practices in a session at the 11th Annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition,® to be held at McCormick Place in Chicago Oct. 15 through 17. (See www.hrtechnologyconference.com for more details.)
Changing a Culture At the conference, Shuman says he plans to discuss how software alone will not solve a company's problems. Making sure his own company was ready for such a sweeping change had to come first. "It's about changing a culture," he says. "It's about the capability of an organization and, lastly, it's about the expectations of management and leadership, and what we intend to do." The culture at Harris when Shuman came on board was one that "certainly understood the importance of talent management but looked at it as an isolated, non-integrated process," he says. After deciding to make that cultural shift, Harris company leaders, along with a consultant, attempted to select a vendor that could supply an integrated suite of products, rather than try to piece together a best-of-breed approach using the company's resources. "What we wanted was the capability of having things talk," says Shuman, referring to all systems within the program being able to connect and work with one another. That narrowed the field quickly, says Andrea Bortner, vice president of talent management at Harris, who noted that just two companies provided such an approach. Another requirement was that the system be intuitive and easy for employees to use. "We did not want people to be stumbling," says Bortner. "We wanted them to intuitively be able to use it." Harris officials often told Authoria representatives to err on the side of "vanilla," cautioning against sweeping customizations, in an effort to keep things simple and more user-friendly. Another requirement was adaptability, since Harris wanted to link the system with various processes that were already in place. In the United States, for example, the Authoria system needed to link up with an existing one from PeopleSoft, while in other parts of the world, the new technology needed to work in conjunction with a payroll system run by ADP. Harris also required that it have the global capabilities of translating into different languages and working with different types of currency. "The two top vendors were very close, both very intuitive products," says Bortner, "but the other one that we were looking at, they were just introducing their applicant-tracking and compensation modules. They had not been fully tested and we felt, if those were two areas we wanted at the forefront, we wanted somebody with a little more experience." With 7,000 engineers and scientists on staff, Harris picked a few to "test drive" the prospective new system and meet with representatives from Authoria, says Shuman. After that came meetings between C-suite employees, then a series of focus groups. Shuman wanted to make sure his people knew that "this is something that really made sense and is going to enhance the business, rather than, 'Here is another HR program-of-the-month or flavor-of-the-day.' " "In my experience, the best long-term partners are the ones who look thoroughly at the company they're going to do business with beforehand," says Loofbourrow, "so they collaborated with us on everything." Once the decision had finally been reached, Shuman and the leaders at Harris did not implement the Authoria technology all at once, preferring instead to gradually go digital. After assessing Harris' most pressing needs, they first implemented the applicant-tracking portion of the suite, then subsequently added pieces for succession planning, executive compensation and salary planning. The system will be fully installed by January 2009. One product that is not included in the Authoria suite is learning management, meaning that Harris will attempt to link its own learning-management system to the Authoria suite by this fall, according to Bortner. After working with the aspects of the suite that are currently available, Shuman is thrilled. "It allows you to look at where your gaps are in an organization so you know where you need to have your learning and development focus and where you need to have your recruiting focus," he says. Another system feature that has proven useful is its ability to let Shuman locate employees with specific skills. "If I want to know who has X skill sets and who can do X kind of job, in a matter of minutes I can get it," says Shuman. "The old way, you're sending e-mails to your HR leaders or your business leaders: 'Do you know somebody who happens to speak XYZ language?' " For many companies, when it comes to performance management, Shuman says, that process proves to be an "administrative, bureaucratic nightmare." "Now I can make a decision on [an employee's] compensation rather than me candy-coating a performance appraisal, me not wanting to be honest about giving somebody an average increase versus an above-average or a below-average increase," he says. "Now I have all these tools right in front of me that I can make that judgment call right there. All too often, companies do performance planning at a different time than compensation planning, which doesn't allow that particular linkage to take place."
Zero-Training Footprint Once implemented, the focus turned to educating Harris employees on how to use technology. Education did not prove to be too difficult, says Bortner, because the system was so user-friendly and employees who attended the tutorials -- many of them engineers and scientists -- seemed to pick it up quickly. "It's extremely intuitive and we have a very technically focused, scientific group of people," she says, Loofbourrow says the Authoria tools have a "zero-training footprint," meaning they designed the products for a turnkey experience. "It's more like an Apple iPod than an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system," he says. "I never saw anybody reading their iPod manual." In training, however, Harris took significantly longer with the HR staff. "We spent more time with that group in understanding what integrated talent management is," says Shuman, "because this is now changing things that many people in the group created and we're breaking it or changing it." The training also consisted of helping HR understand how the integrated capability adds value to the business. "This was not about making life for HR easier; it was not change for the sake of change," he says. "It was about enhancing our capability and our organization's effectiveness." If he could do it all over again, Shuman says, he would like to get a second chance at helping to create the change-management component. "I think we did it well, it probably took more time than we expected, getting people to truly understand this paradigm shift," he says. And although Harris was thorough in implementing the system, Shuman would have liked to see more testing. "I don't think, whenever you're putting in a system, you could ever test it enough, testing each of the integration capabilities and where it's drawing data," he says. "I think we learned some valuable lessons along the way there." Shuman hopes HR executives understand that implementing a new software suite is not a magic potion that fixes all of an organization's problems, changes its culture or aligns processes with business goals. "All too often, people think you can buy a system but you don't change your processes; well, the system's not going to help you if your processes are broken or wrong or don't align with the system," says Shuman. "Those things have to take place before it can be effective."
July 1, 2008 Copyright 2008© LRP Publications |
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