Heath Brownsworth

The 15th Annual HRTechnology Conference was held earlier this week in Chicago, Illinois. With records being broken for both attendance and exhibitors, the atmosphere was full of energy and excitement over improving the management of the human side of business.  As a vendor at the show [Infor], I spent a considerable amount of time both speaking with attendees and observing the pitches/messages from other vendors.  By the end of the first day a clear trend had emerged.  Vendors from the largest to the smallest were speaking cloud, mobile and social while attendees from both the full spectrum of private and public sector wanted to hear about solutions.

It was very easy to find an iPad demo for almost any HR function you might want to perform. However, it much less easy to find a coherent explanation of how the new slick iPad functionality would fit in with a given attendee’s HRIS platform and existing functionality.  When the question was asked, more than once the response was some variation of “it is in the cloud”.  As two attendees walked away from one such exchange, one turned to the other and said, “I am no rocket scientist, but that just doesn’t sound right to me.”

There will undoubtedly be numerous write-ups on every aspect of HRTechnology Conference 2012, but if we try and net it out, I think to comes down to this – customers want solutions that our focused on business outcomes, period. For vendors, the key insight and take way, and certainly the one that I will bring back to my organization, is that customers are looking for business outcomes that are tied to entire solutions, not specific pieces of functionality. So if you are going to pitch cloud, mobile, or social it must be in the broader context of an entire solution that produces specific identifiable business results.

Heath-