I needed to get out of my office for a bit. For a small town, Bozeman, Montana has an incredible library. It is often my place to hide when I need to get a bunch of uninterrupted work done.
I got up for a stretch and there it was in front of me in big bold letters:
“The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass” By Bill Maher.
With a title like that I really needed to give this book a once over. I dug into it and had a good laugh for quite a while.
Now you are probably asking yourself at this point “Why is this software Skills Management, Training Management, Competency Management, computer programming nerd writing about a book by Bill Maher?”
Simple, there are New New Rules about how best to engage your employees, yet most companies are still in the 1970’s in how they go about it. I could go on a diatribe about how many aspects of HR software are still in the dark ages.
So many of the HR tool sets cost in the six to seven figure area, and when installed create more confusion for the first year than they solve. When you add in the time of the poor soles in HR who are left stuck implementing these monstrous systems, the cost goes much higher.
There are a few good HR systems that work well, and believe it or not they are not necessarily the most expensive.
My area of expertise is in employee knowledge management. I really wrap that up to three distinct areas, an employee’s skill set, employee knowledge gaps, and employee training.
Simply put, if you ask most companies of any size how many people in your company are really great at XYZ and who could be trained to be great at it, they can’t answer this simple question.
To me, in today’s modern age, this should be a simple question to answer. Yet very few companies can. Even if a company starts out with a spreadsheet, at least it is a start. The problem with a spreadsheet is it quickly become cumbersome as you need to have hundreds or thousands of employees all input their skills into it.
Thus, as I started our software company to attack this small part of the HR software dilemma, I looked at the tools available by most of the other HR software vendors and had to ask the question: Does Everybody But Me in HR Software Have Their Head Up Their Ass? My conclusion was, for the most part, yes.