IHRIM Eye

“Going Global” at the IHRIM 2013 Conference

IHRIM Eye Guest Blogger - Lexy Martin, CedarCrestone

The IHRIM 2013 HRMS Strategies Conference will be in Orlando this year from June 2-5 at Disney’s Contemporary Resort. The kid in me loves going to Orlando and experiencing Disney’s Magic Kingdom. I grew up in Southern California and spent a lot of time in my teens at Disneyland. But the Florida Magic Kingdom is Disneyland on steroids. So much so, that I decided to take my grandkids to the park once the conference is over!

But I’m very much looking forward to the conference. I end up going to a number of conferences each year as a speaker and over the years I’ve come to appreciate the IHRIM Conference for the substantive sessions. I hear very little marketing fluff and lots of actionable advice for practitioners. The speakers have truly “been there, done that.” Now, I’m not a practitioner, so maybe I shouldn’t make that judgment, but as I listen at sessions, I see a lot of heads nodding and a lot of audience engagement, so something is going right at IHRIM!

My role in our community is that I manage the CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey, now going into the 16th year. And while the major trends we cover are cloud, analytics, social, and mobile, there’s another trend we see that is specific to organizations that operate in multiple countries. I call this trend, “Going Global.” What I see is an increase in the percentage of organizations that operate globally to consolidate systems across the globe, whether that is an HRMS or a payroll system or even talent management solutions.

So, I’m going to be attending several sessions that speak to that experience and to the advice of those that have succeeded as they “go global.”

1. Pre-Conference Course 7: Understanding Global Companies, HR and Systems – A Practical Workshop. On June 2nd, one of the pre-conference sessions will be done by Cathy Veinbach, Wipro and John Hinojos, HRchitect. This eight hour session will help attendees understand the nuances of working with a global team and system such as variations of language and dialects, social network, corporate structures, pay practices, and work habits from various multi-cultural groups along with governmental regulations that can make an action legal in one country and illegal in another.

2. Session #144: Going Global with Your SaaS HCM. In this session, Jim Pettit and Janae Johnson from CareFusion will share the lessons they have learned from their global deployment of a SaaS HCM which converted employees and contingent workers from local legacy systems in 28 countries onto the corporate SaaS HCM. This will be about best practices and avoiding potholes during a SaaS HCM deployment. They will talk about data conversion while in production, manager and employee adoption across numerous time zones, cultures and languages, and managing a diverse global project team.

3. Session #168: Untangling Metrics – How Citrix Used Design Thinking to Create an Exciting Metrics Environment. There’s an intriguing series, called “Design Thinking Comes to HRIS” that actually starts on Sunday but then is held throughout the conference. During the series, you can learn what Design Thinking is and why it’s important in HRIS and how it can benefit both IT and HR. You will also learn interviewing techniques to get to the root cause needed to create requirements, synthesize feedback, and develop a point of view. So, it’s a methodology that you can later apply. But the session that intrigues me is the one in the series on metrics. It’s because Rich Berger, one of the speakers is the Senior Director, Global HRIS and Metrics. He’s spoken before and I think he’s taken a really good approach to metrics and analytics at Citrix. For this session, he will be using the Design Thinking approach to explain how at Citrix, he and Keith Erickson, also at Citrix, turned the metrics experience 180 degrees and got great acceptance from HR and managers across the global enterprise.

4. Session #197: Inspect What You Expect: Building a Global Framework for Business Success. As I’ve had the fortune to collaborate with Karen Beaman, one of the speakers for this session, I think she’s likely the most knowledgeable consultant in the world helping organizations “go global.” In this session she does with her colleague, Felipe Carneiro also from Jeitosa Group International, they will provide a model to help organizations evaluate different levels of software globalization and how to evaluate if a vendor is truly global. They will share various strategies to global systems deployment from pilots, to phases, to big bang and provide a leading practice approach to supporting HCM in a production environment, ensuring all country legislative and regulatory requirements are met.

Now, there are lots of other great sessions that you can see in the program, available here: http://bit.ly/IHRIM2013_EducationSessions but the above ones are the ones I plan to attend.

There is one other part of the conference that I’ve enjoyed over the years. It’s the HRIM Foundation party, this year called “Party for a Purpose.” The proceeds from the event benefit the programs and educational initiatives supported by the HRIM Foundation. These parties blend good food, wine, and really fun discussions among the attendees. This year it will be at the Porte-Cochere with views of the fireworks over the Magic Kingdom that start at 10:00 pm. Definitely will awe the kid in all of us!

So, I’m looking forward to the conference, these sessions, the party and reconnecting with exhibitors and attendees on the Expo floor. And, then I’m going to go be a kid with my grandkids!

The IHRIM 2013 Conference and Technology Expo will be held June 2-5 at Disney's Contemporary Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida.  For more information, go to http://bit.ly/IHRIM2013.