Steal Like An Artist

I went to the Books Inc book shop in downtown Mountain View today and bought  the book "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon. Austin talks about the 10 things you could do to unlock your creativity. I highly recommend this book to every product person who is trying to build a new product, feature or a company. This book is also good career advice for all of us in the technology business.

HR Generalists Have A Friend In Employee Central

In the upcoming SuccessFactors Seminar series, there is a session on SuccessFactors Solution Overview. For that session, I have invited my colleagues Darrell Lew and Joe Chance to tell the Employee Central Story from the HR Generalist's point of view. Since I am a big fan of putting the person in the middle for all stories, we decided to tell the Employee Central Administration story from the point of view of a person. We will tell the story from the point of view of an HR Generalist, who sometimes plays the role of an administrator.

The HR Generalist gets requests to help on strategic projects as well as tactical tasks. He or she needs to juggle the tactical tasks while keeping an eye on strategic priorities. The designers of Employee Central and the SuccessFactors Talent Solutions Suite understand this and have built the system to meet these needs.

I sketched the trailer for the story today. Plan to build the scenes in the story in the coming days. I have seen Darrell tell the Employee Central story to HR Generalists. They usually like the product very much.

SAP HCM Functional Consultants Will Benefit From The Metadata Framework

My colleague and friend Darrell Lew and I are delivering a SuccessFactors product overview session as part of the SuccessFactors Seminar series. I called him yesterday to discuss part of the story. He was in Chicago attending a training session on Advanced Employee Central Configuration and the Metadata Framework, which is used to extend Employee Central. Employee Central is SAP's Core HR product in the cloud.

Darrell is an expert in SAP HCM and is also well trained in Employee Central. I respect his opinion a lot because he meets several current and potential Employee Central customers every week and has a good handle on the problems customers and partners are facing.

We were discussing how the metadata framework can be used by SuccessFactors consultants and SAP HCM Functional consultants. Since the MDF is user interface driven, SAP HCM functional consultants who are used to configuring SAP HCM using IMG will feel at home using the meta data framework to extend SuccessFactors Employee Central. The skill to extend Employee Central is a very crucial one for SAP ERP HCM customers who are moving human capital management to the cloud.

While I am excited about the metadata framework, I am even more excited about the fact that thousands of HCM domain experts from SAP and other software providers who are acquiring SuccessFactors knowledge and skills will be able to utilize their deep HCM domain expertise and do some hand-on work to help current SAP ERP HCM customers move their people management software to the cloud.

Where can you learn more about the meta data framework?
1. Read the blog post by my friend and fellow SAP Mentor Luke Marson.
2. Register for an Employee Central Advanced Configuration training program provided by SuccessFactors.
3. Attend the SuccessFactors Seminar series where Venki Krishnamoorthy will talk about and demo MDF
4. If you are the SAP TechEd 2013, there are sessions about Extensibility, covering MDF.

Those Who Like The Flexibility Of Infotypes Will Like the Metadata Framework

At a customer conversation recently, a colleague from a partner organization said that using the Metadata Framework, anyone can customize supported SuccessFactors applications the same way ABAP programmers customized Infotypes. It was nice to see his enthusiasm for the metadata framework. There is a small difference. You do not need to know programming of any sort to use the meta data framework and customize SuccessFactors applications.

Metadata framework provides the much needed flexibility that customers, particularly those who are used to SAP, want from cloud solutions.

Luke Marson wrote a detailed post on this topic recently. The Meta Data Framework will be covered in sessions at SAP TechEd 2013 and at the SuccessFactors Seminar series later this year.

Start Anywhere And Go Everywhere In The Cloud

I recently met a customer who wanted to move their human capital management software to the cloud. My normal recommendation for any such customer is that they move one or more talent management applications such as goals management and performance management to the cloud first and then move core HR and payroll to the cloud. However, this customer was keen on moving their Core HR to the cloud first because their current Core HR processes were not serving their needs well.

At the end of the work session with them we recommended that they start with Core HR in the cloud first and then add talent management solutions when they are ready to do so. It was nice to see the "Start Anywhere and Go Everywhere in the cloud" approach work for this customer.

I think this flexibility is important for customers because conditions are never ideal.