Debt Proof Living by Mary Hunt

The book Debt Proof Living by Mary Hunt is a classic which has been revised multiple times. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter alone is worth the $15 you will spend on this book. Here are a  few samples.

• The only thing worse than investing in things that depreciate is paying interest on things that depreciate...Blaine Harris.
• Invest in yourself, your education. There's nothing better...Sylvia Porter.
• Your net worth does not depend on what you earn. It depends on what you save.
• Credit is a good thing. Debt is not.

Some things caught my eye in this book. First, A 25 year old worker stands a 3 in 10 chance of being disabled before age 65. Yet, many people do not have disability insurance. Net time you consider working for an employer, check if they provide one for you.

Second, going to a community college for two years and then transferring to a university will reduce your tuition fees to half without compromising quality of education significantly. 

She discusses unsecured debt such as credit card debt and secured debt such as mortgages and explains the pros and cons very well. A good book to have in your library.

SAP SuccessFactors Integration Story

I recently put together a short story explaining the SAP SuccessFactors integration strategy with a lot of inputs from my colleagues in the field, product management and engineering.   It talks about our approach and broad investment areas. It is not meant to have a technical or road map conversation.

It is now posted in the internal integration Jam group for SAP and SuccessFactors colleagues to see. If you are a partner and would like to test drive it with your customers, email me. I might be able to share a draft version with you.

Employee Central Integration with SAP Identity Management

There are many interesting integration features in the May 2015 release of SAP SuccessFactors HCM products. I will write a post about it on SCN in a few days. I want to mention one feature in the release that I am particularly enthused about. It is Employee Central integration with SAP Identity Management. It was on beta for a while and is now generally available. You can read about it in this blog post on SCN

A colleague told me that when he mentioned this to a customer in the UK, the security experts in the room jumped out of their chairs in joy. I can understand why. This is a big deal for those who have responsibility for identity management.

Another reason I am pleased with this integration is because our cloud HCM competitors cannot build this as a productized integration no matter how hard they try. This sets SAP apart from other cloud-only HCM providers. This is only the start. We have plans build more productized integrations with business systems and continue to make life easy for our customers while making life difficult for our competitors.

Searching For Content Is Work. Not Waste

A 2012 McKinsey study found that 35% of an employee's time is wasted in searching and organizing content. The study went on to say that social technologies can address this problem. I believe there are two flaws in that argument.

First, searching and organizing information for oneself and others is work, not waste in todays information economy. In fact, those who have the skills to search, organize and synthesize information will do better than others who do not have such skills. Bruce Greenwald, my competitive strategy professor at Columbia business school in New York told me that students who had to search for and organize class notes do better in his class than those students who got well organized course content printed and delivered to them by the professor.

Second, social technologies are exacerbating the problem. Not solving them. While social technologies have many advantages reducing the time we search for information is not one of them. I have a ring side view of this problem at SAP. We use multiple social technologies at SAP and we are spending more time than before searching for information using those tools. That is not a bad thing. Since search is part of everyday work, searching using social technologies have become a central part of work.