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Dovetail Blog

The HR Carnival is Rolling Into Town!

March 14, 2013 If you've been around HR for any amount of time, you've surely seen or heard of the HR Carnival, run by friend of the show Shauna Moerke.  Well the train is rolling this way, and we at Dovetail are thrilled to be hosting an upcoming version.   On March 27th, the new carnival can be found right here.  Some of you may know that I like to have a theme when I host, and this turn is no different.   We at Dovetail are all about sharing.  Aside from sharing the workload and the knowledge in our software, we like to share what we know and what we love about the HR community.  So we are making sharing part of our theme.   When you get your submissions ready to send, we'd like you to include a link to someone else's blog…

Mitigating Legal Risk with Dovetail Software and XpertHR

March 13, 2013 What an A-Team we are creating here at Dovetail.  We’ve just announced a strategic partnership between Dovetail and XpertHR.  XpertHR is the market leader for HR professionals looking for compliance tools and guidance on employment law issues, they have a huge following in the UK (where I’m from) and they are turning heads in the US too!   Linking XpertHR’s first class attorney backed legal knowledge and HR content into a delivery platform such as Dovetails HR Case Management and Knowledge Management solutions just makes perfect sense.   With XpertHR knowledge and Dovetail Software, HR professionals responsible for managing employee grievances, drafting company policies and ensuring regulatory compliance can further mitigate legal risk and maintain compliance.   I love it when a plan comes together!   Read the full press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/3/prweb10525422.htm  

Dovetail Support Suite for HR 6 Debuts at LEHRN

March 6, 2013 The Leading Edge HR Network (LEHRN) HR Tech Expo in Minneapolis, MN tomorrow will be the first conference we've attended since the release of Dovetail Support Suite for HR 6 (released on Monday).   The new release of our Case Management and Help Desk solution boasts over 40 new features and improvements designed to improve user experience, provide more detailed and insightful reporting, and better handle employees’ and managers’ local needs across the globe.   We are thrilled to show it off to some HR Techies tomorrow and are offering a 20-minute demo from 9:45 - 10:05am on the Expo Southwest Stage during LEHRN's Shoppertrack Series.   New features, including point-in-time data display, employee-viewed solution tracking and auto-populated data fields, give users the ability to create more accurate and in-depth reports. Context-sensitive solution search capabilities improve the HR team’s ability to meet employees’ and managers’ local needs.…

Buzzword Bingo and HR Tech Conferences

February 27, 2013   We all know the game.  We usually play it, at least in our heads.  But there would be something very refreshing about one of the big shows making it part of the scene.  How much fun would it be to have buzzword bingo as part of a big HR technology conference?   Silly?  Maybe.  But the intent shouldn’t be to take away from a presentation or display by making a game out of searching for keywords.  I’d suggest instead it should be done to discourage their use, forcing marketing teams to describe their product in meaningful terms rather than joining the nearly indiscernible mob migrating toward the hottest topics of the day.   No more buzz.  No more gamification, big data, cloud computing, or social technology.  Forget about seats at tables or employee engagement as abstract terms.  Move past…

What you’ll Learn about HR Technology Implementations at LEHRN

February 26, 2013 The Leading Edge HR Network (LEHRN) is hosting Minnesota’s annual HR Tech Expo and Conference, the region’s largest showcase of knowledge and products for HR and Human Capital Management, on Thursday, March 7, 2013 in Minneapolis, MN. Dovetail is excited to sponsor this year’s show for the first time.  This is one of the few regional shows that focuses specifically on implementing and optimizing HR technology.   The LEHRN HR Tech Expo offers morning and afternoon “EduTrack”  presentations, which offer case studies and strategies to understand and optimize HR software and services (and earn 4 CEU's). And this year, Dovetail’s resident business process and HR technology implementation expert Dwane Lay and Dovetail customer David Lindberg, Director of Human Resources at St. Francis Independent School District 15, will be co-presenting The Black Hole of Adoption: Why HR Tech Implementations Fail at 2:15pm on Thursday.…

Customers now Expect Continuous Improvements from Vendors (as they should)

February 20, 2013 For a Dovetail customer, change is good, in fact change is great!  That’s because our changes are constant innovations to our product.   Change doesn’t happen in a big bang approach for Dovetail customers, no! We pride ourselves on our agile and lean approach to the speed of innovation we deliver.  We don’t stop there.  We deliver change to our customers multiple times per year, in fact at a rate of 5 per year.   Dovetail Customers are able to take advantage of constant updates because Dovetail’s architecture is true SaaS.  I personally like Naomi's 'Saas InFullBloom' article, andGartner's Reference Model for Multitenancy provides a great visual aid to true SaaS.   To some, perhaps our “legacy” competitors, 5 updates per year may seem high, since people and businesses are naturally change averse, although that could now become a thing of the past. …

Clarify Infrastructure Upgrade Services for MS SQL and Oracle Customers

February 14, 2013 Are you running a Clarify version prior to Clarify 12.5? Is your Clarify database running on a version earlier than MS SQL Server 2005 or Oracle 10?   With the news that MS SQL 2000 will no longer be supported by Microsoft in March, we’ve been receiving a lot of inquiries this month about our Clarify Infrastructure Upgrade Services. While we haven't marketed it as a service in the past, our team has extensive experience upgrading RDBMS Infrastructures for Clarify clients.   It’s very common for organizations that have implemented Clarify over the last 20 years to lag behind on the Clarify version they are running and for good reason. Clarify upgrades are costly, time-consuming and the new features are often not the best fit for their business model. If you’re running an older version of Clarify and need to…

The Art of Employee Self Service

January 28, 2013 I've been lucky enough to work with organizations that have employee self-service to varying degrees.  Some push every piece of work back to the crowd, some only make it look like the employee can do anything on their own.  Not all self-service systems are created equal, and if they were the implementation plan and functional design would make sure there are winners and losers in each instance.  Because this tool is so easy to put into place and, if done right, so valuable to the organization, we thought it a worthwhile endeavor to share some thoughts on the fine art of building a great self service tool.   There are ways of ensuring employee self service is well define and well executed, and they start, as most projects do, with an understanding of who the customers really are.   So, for whom is employee…

Being Awesome at HR Service Delivery

January 23, 2013 Last week, my colleague Dwane Lay, who is pretty awesome, shared Scott Stratten’s The Book of Business Awesome and The Book of Business UnAwesome – a two-in-one entertaining and informative read – with me. The Awesome side of the book covered two concepts:  1) It discussed and offered several examples of how one employee (most of the time a front-line, customer-facing worker) became or changed the brand perception of an entire organization. 2) It highlighted ways that organizations used social technology to be awesome. In a nutshell, they used it how it’s designed to be used – to have a conversation, which involves listening and responding to people. Pretty simple right?   Enter the UnAwesome side of the book: a highly entertaining collection of cautionary tales – many of them from enterprise organizations – of companies or employees that screwed up big time…

Keys to great HR Shared Services

January 14, 2013 I’ve been lucky enough to work with two different organizations during the formation of their HR Shared Services team.  I’ve gotten to see what works and what doesn’t.  Since we at Dovetail are nothing if not sharing individuals, I though it worth reflecting on those lessons.   What Works   The biggest key to a successful implementation, not to mention ongoing operation, is to build the HR Shared Services team out of existing HR personnel wherever possible.  This serves a couple of purposes.  First, it keeps your organizational knowledge and experience on the team.  Unless you have found a way to translate your tribal knowledge into a robust, searchable knowledge base, all that information could walk out the door.  Second, it helps you avoid the perception that the only reason to move to an HR shared services model is to cut headcount…