IHRIM's Annual Town Meeting Reveals More than Gossip
The annual national conference of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management has been the gathering of the tribe for decades. Last month in Houston, the drums sounded again -- to a slightly different beat.
By Bill Kutik
Every industry is really like a small town: where everyone knows one another, has worked with or competed against everyone, hired and fired one another, flirted and whatever. Unlike a real small town, however, an industry town is virtual: so geographically spread across the country that its inhabitants physically come together in one place only a couple of times a year.
IHRIM's annual conference has for decades been that place for the practitioners, vendors and consultants in the HR technology industry. And, after a mere 10 years, I like to think the HR Technology® Conference, held annually in October, has become another one.
I've long considered IHRIM -- a nonprofit professional association -- to be the equivalent of our small town's high school football team or local newspaper. You may be the only grocery store in town and everybody knows where you are but you still buy advertising to support the newspaper because it's a vital local institution. Or buy jerseys for the football team for the same reason.
And you attend this conference not just to see old friends (and make new ones) but to find out what's hot, like this:
Meta4 is back! The Spanish HCM vendor, which first came to the United States in 1998 looking (and failing) to find its first American customer, now is implementing one (Exide Technologies) and has signed 10 American subsidiaries of foreign companies, as well.
After withdrawing from the U.S. market, Meta4 now has 1,200 customers worldwide, according to Carlos Diaz, the company's Pan-American Operations Director (which includes from the Canadian Arctic to Patagonia). It is already well established as the Spanish language (and Latin American rules-based) HCM for several major HR-BPO providers, including Hewitt, EDS and Deloitte. Meta4's new Miami and Atlanta offices have been open for nearly two years, so now with its first customer, the beachhead finally seems secure.
Nine years ago, its HCM seemed ahead of its time with its competencies and talent-management perspective (a point of view assisted by HR systems guru Naomi Lee Bloom), and now seems completely up to date, if not maybe slightly ahead of the HCM pack.
It runs on an advanced technology platform similar to Dave Duffield's Workday. And has an advanced analytical function I've never seen before, called Active Processes. Most analytics end when the final graph gets generated. Meta4 takes it a step further by using Artificial Intelligence to recommend actions for you to take to solve the problem just revealed. Nifty, at the very least, if not a competitive discriminator. Its knowledge-management module has been de-emphasized, but is still in the product.
Speaking of Workday, it had a major presence at IHRIM, with its HCM sporting a new interface, additional HR functionality and Adobe's "Floating Pane," which is like having another window accessible off the edge of your screen. Duffield himself will personally demonstrate his product against Oracle's and Lawson's at the HR Technology® Conference's "First HCM Battle" on October 11 in Chicago.
In other IHRIM news, Halogen Software announced a new version of its performance-management vertical for health-care organizations, available this summer. Larry Dunivan, vice president of Global HCM at Lawson, confirmed a previous report that IBM is now hosting his application for clients. SilkRoad Technologies and Enwisen both showed impressive onboarding products.
While the small-town moments were many, my favorite happened at a Houston restaurant on the second night. One long table included the top executives and staff of Knowledge Infusion; across the room was a round table crowded with The Newman Group and upstairs was Workday in a private dining room. When the Workday folks came down, you couldn't count the air kisses and chaste hugs. I hope someone repeats the PeopleSoft reunion that was held on the second night at HR Technology last year.
But please don't ask about the interconnections among members of all three companies. It would take a book.
HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is also co-chairman of the 10th Anniversary HR Technology® Conference & Exposition in Chicago, Oct. 10-12, 2007. The full program is now available at
www.HRTechnologyConference.com
. He can be reached at
bkutik@earthlink.net
June 4, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications
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