Is Cloud Computing effectively calling the bluff of the HR director? For years HR people have longed for a seat on the board, complaining that they are unable to make their true contribution to adding business value to their organisations because they’re bogged down in traditional processes and paperwork.
Cloud Computing potentially changes all that. “We are revolutionaries and revolutionaries need to huddle together to learn how to revolutionise,” said Lars Dalgaard, CEO of Cloud firm SuccessFactors at the Success Connect user gathering in New York. “We’re all building on one another. We’re telling people something new.”
Dalgaard said that the type of Cloud offering that SuccessFactors provides alters the nature of the HR role for the better. “We have HR executives who have become very successful inside their own companies,” he said. “There is a bunch of HR people who have already taken the chance with us and we have rewarded them. I often hear HR people saying ‘I put my career at risk by going with you. But it worked’".
This also means that HR people are finding themselves sitting on the frontline of business in a whole new way. “We are galvanising a whole new industry,” argued Dalgaard. “I asked earlier [at the Success Connect event in New York] how many people had been here at this event last year and it was only around half. We have a whole new bunch of people here. We have some CFOs, some CEOs. It’s very strange sometimes to see the mix of people at our executive roundtables. There can be CFOs sitting beside HR and so on. Sometimes they use different language for the same thing. I asked someone if she was using our succession planning. She said no, she was using a high potential application. It was the same thing of course."
HR is a challenging business, Dalgaard acknowledged, citing examples of how difficult it can be spot true potential by showing pictures of famous celebrities and historical figures who had one thing in common: they’d all been sacked at some point. “Do you know what they said to Walt Disney when he was sacked? That he lacked imagination,” laughed Dalgaard. “They said that Edison was too stupid to learn and that Oprah Winfrey was unfit to be on television. The point is clear. You can easily make mistakes if you don’t see everything in context. We change that.”
What happens to those who don’t get with the Cloud? “They are not going to have a job in two years,” says Dalgaard simply. Is it really that harsh a reality. The Dane frowns and seems to struggle to find another way of phrasing it, so he gives up. “I can’t think of another answer. It would be like suggesting that instead of flying to New York from London, you chose to take a ferry-boat. Why the hell would you do that? In five years time, why the hell would you do that. Literally, that is the difference between traditional software and SaaS.
“It’s true that people don’t always want to embrace change,” he conceded, but added that the potential for Cloud Computing to enable organisations to leverage new potential from their staff is genuine. “Think about being a company of around five people and think about the efficiency and the energy that those five people demonstrated as a team of people working together. That can get lost once you’re a bigger company with hundreds of people. You lose sight of people’s performance. When you have a great sports team, you can see who is not playing at well or at their best. So, Manchester City has an incredible player who doesn’t get to play because he’s not performing at his best. That’s what we need to do in business: take out the ones who are not performing and get the best out of those who are.
“Being able to do this enables HR to get out of its role and into business. We’ve had a lot of HR people who have said that what they now do is Business Execution. People have often talked about how HR goes about getting a seat at the boardroom table. I think that’s now history. Now that question should be: what are they going to do in that seat to contribute to the business?”
