Reality sinks in for Authoria and its customers

An "I told you so" is in order here, as Authoria last Friday announced the replacement of longtime CEO Tod Loofburrow, with former GEAC alumnus (like his Bedford brethren) James McDevitt. If one takes a moment to review my post on 3 October (http://techsphinx.blogspot.com/2008/10/holincheck-and-corsello-are-nuts-re.html), you'll see that I was disagreeing with at least a couple of industry analysts about the true nature and effect of the Bedford Authoria acquisition. As the Authoria press release states, Mr. McDevitt has "...a proven track record of developing corporate strategies that have significantly enhanced efficiency, profitability..." and so forth.

Now that reality is setting in for Authoria and its customers, it is time to have another look at what this really means for customers. My opinions are contained in my previous post, but I am sure there are other ways of looking at it.

The HCM community is full of bullshit

Sorry everyone, but it's true. I am the type of person that rarely throws away old magazines. As I was flipping through a few new issues of a couple of well known HCM periodicals, it just struck me that all of the editorial columns aren't saying anything interesting at all. It's just the same old bullshit. To verify, I started looking through various old issues over 10-years in age. You know what? You could lift almost every editorial column from 10 years ago, drop it in today's periodicals, and you'd never know the difference. If you looked closely you might notice a dearth of the terms "SaaS" and "Web 2.0", but other than that it's same old shit.

Now to be fair, some very fine columnists recognize this phenomenon and actively note that certain territory has been well covered before - HRE columnist Bill Kutik being a great example. But the "soft language" sorts, you know who I am talking about - consultants, ex-CLO's, industry pundits, etc. just drone on about the same "enlightening" ideas that have been around for years. Go check this for yourselves, you already know it, you just need to admit it.

And because these ideas are so recycled, so devoid of useful information, they must be considered bullshit. I encourage everyone to read the wikipedia entry on the term "bullshit" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit. It's actually a very useful term, and from a linguistic and philosophical point of view, it has some unique application.

So this is my plea to our HCM community, of which I am a part, that is full of bullshit - please use plain language, please say what you mean, please tell us something we probably don't already know, please tell us things that we can actually use, and if all of that fails, please entertain us. If we can laugh, or just manage a chuckle, at least we got something out of it.