A bit about me.

A bit about what I do, that will hopefully provide a background for some of the issues and ideas I will talk about in this blog.
I have worked in Human Resources for the past ten years for the huge not-for-profit company Kaiser Permanente. I started in 2000 working for the newly built IT arm of KP (~ 6k employees). We were just implementing People Soft, but had no other major HRIS system. After I had been working there a year – I built a base little .mdb to track hires and recruiter productivity. I built it from paper files from 1 year’s worth of hires. Since then, I have been interested in HRIS systems. Metrics appealed to me; I liked the way you could prove certain points and see trends with the hire data, although this new power did not make me popular with the recruiters. Before too long, we implemented an Icarian recruiting system and I was the regional IT admin. It automated a whole slew of functions: from job posting to hire letter generation. It allowed us to focus on recruiting quality hires in a tough market.
It was also in this position that I learned the maxim – “what gets measured, gets managed”. The length of the hiring/start process had been a major pain point with managers. We tracked a time-to-fill metric that began with the job posting and ended with an offer letter acceptance. It was not long before recruiters were gaming the system to get ever shorter time-to-fill measurements that had nothing to do with the real process. As well – fast hires were tracked – quality hires were not- so fast hires ruled the priority of the recruiters.
After a while and many other projects (including one to handle RIF benefits and documentation) I moved from recruiting to workforce development and began to focus more on performance management, competencies and proficiencies. We did not yet have a PM tool , so I built - again- a small base .mdb to house the hierarchical, job family, compensation and performance data. This was very fun and rewarding– but it did require about 5,000 records being entered in by hand from paper evaluations. This allowed us to do our first set of performance curves and calibration (ensuring – one manager’s 3 rating was the same as another manager’s 3 rating).
I began to work on workforce metrics, blending data from separate systems to create dashboards and scorecards. This project was the most interesting but also the trickiest. You have to challenge every assumption and trend you thought you saw to make certain you were drawing the right pictures from the right data. I began working with an old LMS (Pathlore) to assist with the employee career development aspect of workforce development.
As everything was humming along a large layoff occurred in our department, whittling 24 employees to 2. The two of us left had to pick up every discarded role and responsibility; which led me to become the system admin for the LMS. In 2003, KP rolled out an enterprise wide (180k+ learners) Saba based LMS and I migrated our data from the small crippled LMS to a larger, stronger LMS. It automated a whole new level of tasks that had to be previously performed by hand. I still worked on workforce metrics – but now they focused on ROI for training, cost per learner and behavioral changes. These metrics were the hardest to get to – for hundreds of reasons, and were not always able to be tied to actual training effectiveness.
A position opened up in the team that managed the Saba LMS at the enterprise level and I moved over to become part trainer, part reports person, part system super user. We are in the middle of a long delayed upgrade, of both hardware and software. I have learned a great deal around roles and privileges and client based reporting. I developed (but not built) 20 new crystal reports for our new environment – whenever that arrives.

Anyhow – this is a long rambling introduction post. Hopefully it helps you to understand where my challenges are and what experiences I am pulling from.