Month: October 2017

Customers, colleagues, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and my writing day.

I have been spending the last few months deep in accessibility law, testing, standards, universal design, GDPR, the early history of business computing and of course my old friend, Sarbanes Oxley. I am an expert on Heidelberg and Sandton coffee shops, and I have spent far too long debating the value of one font over the other, and merits of footnote or in-text citations.  This week I have finally felt the adrenaline kick that comes from writing several competent pages and seeing a couple of pieces start to fit together. Long way to go though.

By the way, if you do any kind of research work, get hold of the tool called Mendeley. It is genius.

While I’m no longer in hurly burly of product management at SuccessFactors – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn keep me abreast of what’s up back at the farm.

It was cool to read that Employee Central had hit the 2000 customer mark. Whenever I see those milestones I think back to the early customers without whom EC would not have 100 customers, never mind 2000.  Earlier this week, Liezl’s Facebook gave me a detailed account of  her visit with a South African customer to Timken, one of those early adopters.

But what prompted me to write this was a new connection today on LinkedIn.  Tim Gregory, the Director of HR Ops at Corning sent me a connection invite. While I had been involved in the early stages of the Corning project, I’d not actually met Tim.  We had a nice online chat, and he was cool with me quoting him about their go live.

I’m the Director of HR Operations here at Corning Inc – we went live with SF in July (23 countries, 12 languages, 70 integrations, all modules – except learning).

Not to over state it… but yet we’re pretty euphoric over here.

While 2000 is a cool number. Corning as happy campers is even better. Thanks Tim, you made my day.  I’m going to be following up with you on the blockchain thing.

Now, time to get back to this pile.

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EMEA. A little rant.

Dear  US software vendor,

Thanks for your market survey publication about trends in HR, helpfully categorised into an EMEA / US comparison of time/cost to hire and so on.

However, there is no such thing as a country called EMEA. It has no President, Queen, King or parliament. There is no language called EMEA. There is no EMEA currency. There is no EMEA culture. There is no EMEA compliance, or EMEA payroll. There are no EMEA business practices. No one who lives east of Cape Cod but West of India would describe themselves as from EMEA. There are no EMEAns or EMEAese. There is no EMEA flag. There is no EMEA anthem to stand or kneel to.

EMEA stands for Europe, Middle East and Africa. It is a vaguely useful construct for accounting and sales region organisational purposes, let’s leave it that way.