'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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