The New York Times
...Software can be deployed and updated faster in cloud systems because of the central control. If you make changes to a calendar function, for example, or patch a potential security flaw, it can show up on everyone’s machines the next time they log in.
You can also change the way that other programmers and consultants approach work. Appirio, based in New York, is attempting to build a crowdsourced method of writing custom business software applications. Called CloudSpokes , it involves companies submitting “challenges” in exchange for cash rewards. Programmers from around the world can compete to write the best software, possibly winning jobs as well as money.
“Companies pay for the top one or two submissions, but they get to look at multiple versions of the work,” said Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Appirio. His company often gets a commission for managing the work, and can more easily spot talent around the globe. “You aren’t paying for labor before you have a sense of the person’s skills,” he said. The system also works for designers, he said. Much the way Cloud Sherpas sells Salesforce as well as Google, Appirio is increasingly selling more software from Workday, another cloud-based software company.
The new approaches to consulting underline how much collaboration figures in cloud technology. Google is gaining traction partly because its products have better features; even more important, traditional enterprises have come to accept cloud-based systems, and workers are used to communicating constantly, thanks in part to the habits of “sharing” information over Facebook and Twitter...
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Appirio in the News
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
HR In The Cloud: Allowing For A Connected Workplace
Forbes
Guest post written by Jason Averbook. Jason Averbook is chief business inovation officer of Knowledge Infusion, a unit of Appirio.
Many of us would describe ourselves as digitally connected to our personal lives. We know what our friends are up to (and what they had for lunch) in near real time. Often the books we read, music we listen to, products we buy and even relationships we enter into are fed to us from the cloud, based on our habits and preferences. As a culture, for better or worse, we are becoming "plugged into" or connected to our own lives.
Yet as employees, many of us can't say the same about our workplaces. Without question, organizations are improving when it comes to accommodating a virtual workforce, as most have accepted the idea that employees can work efficiently from anywhere. However, the impetus for employees working from home or a remote office is often rooted in company-centric benefits like cost savings, productivity gains, or access to global talent.
To support these virtual factions of workers, HR is compelled to provide ways for remote employees to connect with headquarters. What's often still missing is giving thought to connecting employees with one another. The notion that "face time" equals being "plugged in" at work is still prevalent, but cloud technology is changing that. And let's face it: even those who work in a physical office daily would probably claim that their manager and co-workers don't know exactly what they're working on, past/current project contributions, newly acquired skills, or career interests. Likewise, most employees would tell you they aren't really sure how their day-to-day activities are contributing to the organization's mission or business goals. Being connected isn't necessarily a matter of proximity...
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Guest post written by Jason Averbook. Jason Averbook is chief business inovation officer of Knowledge Infusion, a unit of Appirio.
Many of us would describe ourselves as digitally connected to our personal lives. We know what our friends are up to (and what they had for lunch) in near real time. Often the books we read, music we listen to, products we buy and even relationships we enter into are fed to us from the cloud, based on our habits and preferences. As a culture, for better or worse, we are becoming "plugged into" or connected to our own lives.
Yet as employees, many of us can't say the same about our workplaces. Without question, organizations are improving when it comes to accommodating a virtual workforce, as most have accepted the idea that employees can work efficiently from anywhere. However, the impetus for employees working from home or a remote office is often rooted in company-centric benefits like cost savings, productivity gains, or access to global talent.
To support these virtual factions of workers, HR is compelled to provide ways for remote employees to connect with headquarters. What's often still missing is giving thought to connecting employees with one another. The notion that "face time" equals being "plugged in" at work is still prevalent, but cloud technology is changing that. And let's face it: even those who work in a physical office daily would probably claim that their manager and co-workers don't know exactly what they're working on, past/current project contributions, newly acquired skills, or career interests. Likewise, most employees would tell you they aren't really sure how their day-to-day activities are contributing to the organization's mission or business goals. Being connected isn't necessarily a matter of proximity...
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Cloud Service Brokerages Emerge As New Integrators
CIO
When the Museum of Modern Art in New York took on two cloud projects, it decided to reach outside the organization for some extra help.
MoMA sought to migrate from its on-premises email system to a Google-hosted environment and adopt Salesforce.com's CRM offering to gain more insight into donors and members. MoMA CTO Juan Montes read up on Appirio, a San Francisco-based services provider, after receiving a tip that the company was "a vendor with cloud chops." A meeting with Appirio's CEO sealed the deal: The museum tapped Appirio for guidance on both the Gmail and Salesforce deployments.
Montes cited Appirio's cloud expertise and specialized tooling as factors in its selection. "In the case of Gmail, they had the tools and methods to take information as it was in the on-premise context and port it to a cloud context," he says. "It would have been very difficult for us to develop those tools in a timely way. It would have been very costly to us. They had the tools and the know-how and were ready to go and we could do the implementation in a very short period of time."..
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When the Museum of Modern Art in New York took on two cloud projects, it decided to reach outside the organization for some extra help.
MoMA sought to migrate from its on-premises email system to a Google-hosted environment and adopt Salesforce.com's CRM offering to gain more insight into donors and members. MoMA CTO Juan Montes read up on Appirio, a San Francisco-based services provider, after receiving a tip that the company was "a vendor with cloud chops." A meeting with Appirio's CEO sealed the deal: The museum tapped Appirio for guidance on both the Gmail and Salesforce deployments.
Montes cited Appirio's cloud expertise and specialized tooling as factors in its selection. "In the case of Gmail, they had the tools and methods to take information as it was in the on-premise context and port it to a cloud context," he says. "It would have been very difficult for us to develop those tools in a timely way. It would have been very costly to us. They had the tools and the know-how and were ready to go and we could do the implementation in a very short period of time."..
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'Workforce Technology' Combines Tech, HR Strategies
Enterprise Conversation
...Though he continues to be listed as the CEO of Knowledge Infusion, the company he co-founded is being acquired by Appirio, a cloud applications provider for IT, finance, and HR. Now Averbook, one of the most outspoken advocates of maintaining human initiative, human capital, and human decision making in an organization, is being retitled chief business innovation officer for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.
How does Averbook reconcile his vision of human capital management with the rising tide of cloud-based services automation?
He said his vision is based on an evolving concept he calls "workforce technology." For the past two decades, organizations have developed a "people strategy" and then searched for whatever packaged software fit that vision. (Averbook speaks as a PeopleSoft veteran.)
Somewhere between the time when they sit for the demo -- and ooh and aah and drool over the robotic nature of this artificially intelligent software -- and when it gets implemented and "goes live," when they have their big party, that chasm between the two becomes gigantic.
These people strategies tend to deteriorate over this widening interval. HR departments sacrifice elements of their vision in the interest of implementing what they can, cutting their losses, and expediting their go-live time. "If that's the approach, pure implementation, you almost never get to the strategic level," Averbook said.
Most HR departments in the past [thought] of everything as a science. The big reason HR departments came into existence was a) for compliance purposes, and b) to be able to do compensation and payroll, which had to be done to the penny. Talent management is never going to be a science. Talent management is an art. Art is a combination of data and a strategy of where the organization is trying to go....
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...Though he continues to be listed as the CEO of Knowledge Infusion, the company he co-founded is being acquired by Appirio, a cloud applications provider for IT, finance, and HR. Now Averbook, one of the most outspoken advocates of maintaining human initiative, human capital, and human decision making in an organization, is being retitled chief business innovation officer for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.
How does Averbook reconcile his vision of human capital management with the rising tide of cloud-based services automation?
He said his vision is based on an evolving concept he calls "workforce technology." For the past two decades, organizations have developed a "people strategy" and then searched for whatever packaged software fit that vision. (Averbook speaks as a PeopleSoft veteran.)
Somewhere between the time when they sit for the demo -- and ooh and aah and drool over the robotic nature of this artificially intelligent software -- and when it gets implemented and "goes live," when they have their big party, that chasm between the two becomes gigantic.
These people strategies tend to deteriorate over this widening interval. HR departments sacrifice elements of their vision in the interest of implementing what they can, cutting their losses, and expediting their go-live time. "If that's the approach, pure implementation, you almost never get to the strategic level," Averbook said.
Most HR departments in the past [thought] of everything as a science. The big reason HR departments came into existence was a) for compliance purposes, and b) to be able to do compensation and payroll, which had to be done to the penny. Talent management is never going to be a science. Talent management is an art. Art is a combination of data and a strategy of where the organization is trying to go....
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Advisory services: Businesses turn to brokers to get more from the cloud
The Financial Times
...Companies want brokers to help them get more out of their disparate cloud software programmes. Mr Nucci says: "To do any analysis on these services you need to integrate them. Let's say you want to analyse whether your hiring strategy is working. You need to touch at least three or four different systems, including human resources and payroll."
The trouble is, the cloud-based human resources system will not necessarily talk to your in-house payroll programme, without either some complex internal engineering or the help of an external expert.
Such help is not cheap. Appirio says companies can pay between $10,000 and single-digit millions for help in making the transition and in running the cloud system subsequently.
However, Chris Barbin, chief executive at Appirio, says this is less than companies would have spent in the past on IT contractors who would spend three to five years designing an IT transformation project that would often fail. The results of transferring IT to the cloud are quicker and come in increments that can be tested along the way. Changes, even at big companies, can be made in four to six weeks or less...
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...Companies want brokers to help them get more out of their disparate cloud software programmes. Mr Nucci says: "To do any analysis on these services you need to integrate them. Let's say you want to analyse whether your hiring strategy is working. You need to touch at least three or four different systems, including human resources and payroll."
The trouble is, the cloud-based human resources system will not necessarily talk to your in-house payroll programme, without either some complex internal engineering or the help of an external expert.
Such help is not cheap. Appirio says companies can pay between $10,000 and single-digit millions for help in making the transition and in running the cloud system subsequently.
However, Chris Barbin, chief executive at Appirio, says this is less than companies would have spent in the past on IT contractors who would spend three to five years designing an IT transformation project that would often fail. The results of transferring IT to the cloud are quicker and come in increments that can be tested along the way. Changes, even at big companies, can be made in four to six weeks or less...
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Management: Caution needed over decision to migrate
The Financial Times
...Indeed, some companies, particularly those most recently founded, already do everything on the cloud.
"We don't own a single server and we never plan to," says Chris Barbin, the chief executive of Appirio, based in San Francisco.
Given that Appirio is a company that offers other businesses help in moving to the cloud, this stance is perhaps not surprising. But the cloud does give the 600-person business an enviable agility.
Mr Barbin says: "We acquired a company and, on the day the acquisition was announced, we had all the staff from the acquired company already up on our internal social networking system. In the old days you couldn't even requisition a server in less than a few weeks."...
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...Indeed, some companies, particularly those most recently founded, already do everything on the cloud.
"We don't own a single server and we never plan to," says Chris Barbin, the chief executive of Appirio, based in San Francisco.
Given that Appirio is a company that offers other businesses help in moving to the cloud, this stance is perhaps not surprising. But the cloud does give the 600-person business an enviable agility.
Mr Barbin says: "We acquired a company and, on the day the acquisition was announced, we had all the staff from the acquired company already up on our internal social networking system. In the old days you couldn't even requisition a server in less than a few weeks."...
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