Does your CEO prefer cats or dogs? Why not give a unified experience a try?

Does your CEO prefer cats or dogs? Why not give a unified experience a try?

It's commonly claimed that people in the globe are either dog or cat lovers. After spending a significant amount of time working in both the HR and finance departments, I've come to the opinion that these two roles are similar to dogs and cats in a number of ways:

• In the animal kingdom, dogs and cats are our closest natural allies. They compete with one another for our attention and kindness, offering everything from food and shelter to emotional support—which can be as simple as giving a dog or cat a pat on the head for showing us how much we are appreciated while they look down on us. Dogs and cats typically view one another as "Frenemies" at best or as deadly enemies at worst. I happen to like horses, dogs, and cats. But my wife despises cats—with a vengeance!


• In the business world, it is the same. The CEO and other members of the C-suite compete for the attention of HR and Finance, or other business leaders. The CEO then gives a pet, or pets, a pat. Like the majority of people, CEOs are inclined to be "Dog lovers or Cat lovers," which means that they have a definite preference for one of the two animals, which is typically mutually exclusive.

Why does this occur? It might just come down to the language we use (engineers, for example, describe their world differently than marketers do), our own unique perspective on it, our work experience, or the people we naturally click with or have a mutually beneficial business relationship with. Furthermore, if the company is not running from a unified applications perspective, the CEO might be closer to the Cat or Dog who gives them the most comprehensive information from their individual business apps.

But having "dog lovers or cat lovers" in the C-suite can really harm a company's bottom line! Consider Finance and HR. Because of the profound interconnectedness between HR and Finance / ERP, the CEO's perspective of the world is constrained if they identify as a dog or cat lover. The same is true in the fields of HCM and ERP. Businesses are realizing more and more that they need to view the world through a mixed perspective, i.e., Less Dog versus Cats. -A more cohesive Cat Dog experience. The best of both scenarios.

I used the most recent CIPD HR Outlook - Winter 2015–16 report as an example. The report compares and contrasts the perspectives of senior decision makers outside of HR with those of HR leaders in the corporate world. The outcomes are instructive.

Where are the present and future strategic priorities aligned? It's interesting to note that there is just one priority—from the current and future Top 5 priorities—where leaders in HR and non-HR concur, albeit sporadically, by 1% to 2%. In this instance, cost comes first.

oversight: Only one other priority, both present and future, is almost matched.

inventiveness: There are large disparities in alignment between the three remaining Top-5 priorities, so it's back to Cat vs Dog.

The research paper then discusses the "How?" question, i.e., how corporate executives who are not in HR go about accomplishing the shared objective of cost management. Dogs and cats once more!

• HR executives' primary areas of concentration will be on performance management (49%) and organization design/restructure (49%) as well as improving HR service delivery (51%).

• The three areas of emphasis for non-HR leaders are reward management (37%), staff retention (38%) and performance management (44%).

Essentially, it is instructive to see that both parties prioritize cutting costs, with innovation coming in second. They approach and visualize such difficulties very differently, though.

Whether the Cats and Dogs are using a single ERP and HCM Cloud platform is a major enabler—or barrier, depending on the situation—in how these goals are achieved. Fast expanding businesses of all kinds are calling for a single, integrated ERP and HCM cloud more and more. Immediately adopting an integrated ERP and HCM cloud offers several significant advantages, including:

• One Data Model: Standardization is facilitated by a common architecture and master data across finance and HR, which allows apps to identify individuals and adjust workflows accordingly.                                                                                         
• Security and Governance: Using same sign-on (SSO) across applications is advantageous for the business when ERP and HCM are hosted on a same cloud. Your implementation expenses will rise in the absence of unity, which eventually raises your ownership costs.

• Consistent Workflows and Business Processes: By utilizing a single enterprise approach, the workflows are able to deliver a smooth business process by utilizing the necessary ERP and HCM data-fields. Consider an approval flow that requires the location, inventory item, business unit and cost center of the employees, as well as permission limitations. Now, everything might originate from a single, integrated cloud.

• Imagine the advantages of having an integrated single source of truth for all of your data, consolidated into one location to power your reporting and analytics. That's what we mean when we talk about a single reporting and analytics solution.

• One User Experience: A single sign-on, integrated user experience, clarity over what users can see throughout the organization, and the ability to offer a consistent experience when navigating across cloud services are all made possible by unified cloud.

In the end, it's easy to see that adding up all of these advantages has the combined effect of lowering your total cost of ownership and producing a considerably faster return on your application investment.

To put it another way, it is astounding how many different processes HR data fields intersect throughout the entire organization. Every employee in your company will have a single, distinct set of identifiers, such as name, location, roles, etc., if your ERP and HCM clouds are integrated. As a result, all person-related data is kept up to date in one location using standard data collecting procedures. After that, these can be implemented throughout all ERP apps to provide a precise single source of truth.

In conclusion, and going back to the CIPD paper, it seems that cost-cutting and innovation are the paths that we are all taking. But perhaps they should assess the business applications they use right away and seriously consider the application world's equivalent of the unified DogCat experience or #BeMoreDog campaign in order to prevent the situation where HR leaders and other business leaders disagree on how to get to the destination. I have unapologetically taken pictures from the amazing O2 / Telefonica #bemoredog advertising campaign, which exhorts cats to "Be more Dog". Look it over!