
The Great Technology Debate: Naomi Lee Bloom and Jim Holincheck
Naomi Lee Bloom, Managing Partner, Bloom & Wallace
Jim Holincheck, Managing VP, Finance, HCM and Procurement, Gartner
Thursday, September 30 • 8:45 - 10 a.m.
Yes, the world’s two leading experts on HR technology – and the longest veterans of our renowned former Analyst Panel – will face off on the hottest issues of the day. If held today, it might include such issues as how PeopleSoft Enterprise and Oracle EBS customers should think about their application strategy – especially after seeing Oracle’s demo of its next generation HCM the afternoon before. What is “true” SaaS and does it matter? Will it be the only form of service delivery in the future? Have organizations been implementing Talent Management the right or the wrong way? What is the real deal with Workforce Analytics and Planning? But who can really say what the questions will be in September? Come find out and even ask one yourself!

Talent Management System Vendors:
Leaders and Laggards in Customer Satisfaction
Josh Bersin, CEO, Bersin & Associates
Barb Arth, Principal Analyst, Bersin & Associates
Thursday, September 30 • 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
For the second year in a row, Bersin & Associates has surveyed hundreds of organizations to determine their level of satisfaction with their Talent Management systems. The study, which again debuts at the conference, focuses on specific product, vendor and implementation factors that drive customer satisfaction. Last year, most users were only moderately satisfied and one-third were outright dissatisfied with their vendors. Find out which vendors are up and down this year in customer satisfaction across a range of measures including: functionality, performance, usability, implementation, integration and support. But beware: Names will be named.

Bobcat Constructs Competency Models
Brian Formato, Global Director, Communications and Capability, Bobcat Company
Paul R. Daoust, Interim President and CEO, Salary.com
Thursday, September 30 • 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
HR has been hearing about the desirability of competency models for more than 20 years, and the necessity of them for Talent Management for the last seven. Do you imagine smokestack industries are laggards? Not Bobcat, the famous maker of compact construction equipment for home-owners and landscapers. Now part of parent company Doosan and its Infracore Construction Equipment division, Bobcat shrank in the recession but still has 8,500 employees — white and blue collar — around the world and is growing again. Brian Formato will tell you how he developed and rolled out critical competency models (yes, several) to improve development and performance coaching throughout the year.

Blogger Insights
Moderator: Kris Dunn, VP HR, DAXKO, blogger for The HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent
Panelists to be announced
Thursday, September 30 • 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
There must be 200 HR bloggers, and people have a mistaken notion about some of them: That they are simply self-appointed experts, many too young and lacking any real-world HR experience to back up their often vociferous opinions. While that may be true of many of them, others are VPs of HR (like moderator Kris Dunn) or run HR systems for major organizations or even direct their own HR consulting firms. What is true about all of them is they bring a “next-generation” perspective to HR – and some to technology – that is important to hear. So we’ll be gathering some of the best of the bloggers to talk with you about Social Media, which is their favorite topic because they live it!

Getting the Most Out of Workforce Planning
Moderator: Brian Kelly, President, Inform Business Impact – North America
Rupert Bader, Director, Workforce Planning, Microsoft
Penny Meier, VP, Workforce Strategy & Planning, Ameriprise Financial
Prasad Setty, Director, People Analytics & Compensation, Google
Thursday, September 30 • 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
HR’s chattering classes – analysts, academics, vendor marketers and even practitioners – agree that Workforce Planning is the next hot item on the strategic HR agenda. Perhaps even the new first application of the Talent Management suite. The fact that many have been saying this for so many years without a large increase in adoption indicates some of its problems: defining what Workforce Planning is, creating long-term plans and communicating the results to senior management. But these leading-edge practitioners have managed all that and will tell you how to launch, manage and derive value from a Workforce Planning system and make it integral to your organization’s success. And they certainly won’t all have the same answers.

Novartis Takes the Clicks Out of Recruiting
Maureen C. Solero, SPHR, Head of Global Staffing, Novartis Pharma
Rudy Karsan, CEO, Kenexa
Thursday, September 30 • 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Pharma giant Novartis, based in Switzerland with almost 100,000 employees around the world, recruits diverse talent globally, from scientists to marketing employees. When Novartis was required to deliver a significant increase in its hiring results, the team developed some innovative ways to source and hire talent – especially within the firm’s high growth markets of Asia and Latin America. Maureen will tell you how she and the global team re-designed the navigation of the Novartis career website, created an award-winning employee branding program and implemented a recruitment scorecard to measure results. She will also tell you how they improved the candidate experience, including a focus on sourcing through social media and eliminating half the clicks needed to use their career website – a great example of less really being more.

Participants to be announced
Thursday, September 30 • 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
There will be up to four breakout sessions over two days, each featuring only two vendors, demoing their live software to another scripted scenario. Judges will still keep everyone honest, and you can still vote for a winner. Come save yourself months of research and sales pitches and learn. The final contestants will be chosen in August.

Fourth Annual Talent Management Panel:
How Talent Management Failed and How to Fix It!
Moderator: Jason Averbook, Co-Founder & CEO, Knowledge Infusion
James Dwyer, VP, HR Operations & Service Delivery, MetLife
David Klein, Manager, Coworker Services Technology, CDW
Veronica Newton, VP, HR Information Solutions, The McGraw-Hill Companies
Michael Peterman, Director, HR Administration, Four Seasons
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
Too often other conferences highlight the bright, shiny successes of practitioners, smoothing out every road bump and ignoring all the wrong turns. This panel is different: Every member believes their Talent Management initiative has in some fashion failed – either in what has been delivered to the business, including decision support and a truly unified approach, or some other way. Some have recovered; others are on that road; and maybe one will admit to you why it’s still stuck. After seven years of talking about integrated Talent Management as the best thing since sliced bread, it’s about time for a reality check. Come get a dose of reality and lessons on how to avoid real mistakes.

Tenet Healthcare Uses New Assessments to Reduce Nursing Turnover
Joe Gage, VP, HR Hospital Operations, Tenet Healthcare
Gabriel Goncalves, CEO, PeopleAnswers
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
As a company, Tenet Healthcare has had its own unique share of problems since the ’80s. But as the owner of 50 hospitals with 60,000 employees, it shares the challenge of every entity providing healthcare: finding, attracting, assessing and retaining nurses. Joe Gage targeted reducing nursing turnover as a major goal that would benefit both patients and doctors. Obviously that starts with hiring the right applicants. Unlike some other assessment methods, Tenet generated its test by administering it to incumbents and correlating results with medical outcome data. Not all industrial/organizational psychologists agree with that method, so see for yourself how it worked for Tenet and if it might work for you.

Twitterversity
Professor: Laurie Ruettimann, SPHR, Punk Rock HR blogger and columnist for
The Conference Board
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
Twitterversity is a training class, not a demonstration, led by famous Punk Rock HR blogger Laurie Ruettimann and assisted by Gen Y and Gen X HR practitioners and consultants. They will teach you everything you’ve always wanted to know (but may have been afraid to ask) about the amazing micro-blogging and communication channel Twitter. Bring your fully charged, WiFi-equipped laptop (we may even provide some), and you will sign up as a member, learn tricks to find and follow the best HR technology people “tweeting,” create your own “tweets” and control who reads them (if you like), “re-tweet” worthy messages…the whole shebang. Walk in a newbie and step out a pro, perhaps with some new “tweeps.” You’ll even learn what that word means, too, and how to turn them into “peeps” right at the conference!

Comcast Does HCM the Traditional Way
Michael V. Molinaro, VP, HR Operations, Comcast
David Ludlow, VP, Suite Solutions Management, SAP
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
Stories of small, even mid-size companies, handling all their HR processes on Word docs and Excel spreadsheets are commonplace. But the idea of Comcast – the country’s largest cable provider, owner of eight cable networks or channels and two professional sports teams – doing it that way until 2007 for 97,000 employees boggles the mind. A traditional and privately owned company, Comcast didn’t like the idea of anyone else owning its data (after using a hosted Recruiting vendor) and went with an ERP and on-premises installation. After looking over the Talent Management suite vendors, it decided SAP’s HRMS and the integration the ERP offered among all those apps was too powerful a combination to pass up. In a world dominated by talk of SaaS, come hear how one giant did it the traditional way.

Expert Discussions
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
Five experts, all previous members of our famous Analyst Panels, will host separate, group discussions and Q&A sessions focused on their favorite topics and hopefully yours, too. Gather your team, create your most burning questions and take part. One of your fellow attendees may have a question you should have thought of or even an answer that our experts don’t! Naomi Lee Bloom will talk the convergence of HRMS and Talent Management systems. Workforce Planning will be Jim Holincheck’s topic. IDC’s Lisa Rowan will focus on Benefits Administration. Josh Bersin will discuss Performance Management. Jason Corsello, VP of Knowledge Infusion, will outline his research project on what makes companies great at managing talent.

HR BPO Lives On With Kraft and IBM
Brenda Sural, Director, HR Portal and Contact Center, Kraft Foods
Guy Heiser, HR CTO, Managed Business Process Services, IBM
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
HR has signed fewer and fewer comprehensive Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) deals for the last two years, and IBM is one of the few providers still doing them. Brenda Sural will focus on one aspect of Kraft Foods’ multi-process contract, which will eventually cover almost 100,000 employees; half in North America, plus the new ones to be acquired with Cadbury. IBM will transform Kraft’s use of the SAP portal, allowing for more Manager Self-Service plus adding a new knowledgebase of policy and procedures. It also will take over Kraft’s call center, moving it to a facility in Manila. As with so many new model BPO deals, Sural will tell you how the business drivers for deciding on BPO were to transform HR, reduce costs and allow the remaining HR department to have a more strategic focus. Plus she’ll share how it’s all working out.

Participants to be announced
Thursday, September 30 • 1:45 - 3 p.m.
There will be up to four breakout sessions over two days, each featuring only two vendors, demoing their live software to another scripted scenario. Judges will still keep everyone honest, and you can still vote for a winner. Come save yourself months of research and sales pitches and learn. The final contestants will be chosen in August.

Awesome New Technologies for HR
Thursday, September 30 • 4 - 5:15 p.m.
It had to happen. Our most popular breakout session for the past three years has grown into a general session and been renamed: abandoning the baby boomers’ favorite adjective “Cool” to take on the cloak of the millennial’s “Awesome.” But its purpose remains the same: To blow your mind (ah, boomer talk again) with live demos of the most awesome new HR software products we can find in all categories. HR software vendors from around the world are sending us their launch announcements weekly and giving us WebEx demonstrations. But we don’t end the search until early September, when the Final Four (or five) products will be announced. Some may be bleeding edge, but others will be available immediately to help you get the job done in ways you might never have imagined. |