HROA World Europe Brussels 2008
The HROA World Europe, now in its 5th year, is the largest and most comprehensive HR Transformation conference in Europe. Held in Brussels with sponsorship from the likes of Accenture, and ADP, and attended by HR Transformation buyers, suppliers and consultants/advisors.
The big news this year was the number of delegates – with only about 130 compared to about 350 last year. The economic slowdown has kicked in and hit the HRO industry directly with travel bans and budget cuts for all.
Always of interest is the “Buyer : Supplier : Consultant” ratio which was about “30:40:30”. Half the buyers were presenting their sponsor’s case studies, which left only a small number of genuine HRO buyers (about 20 people) who must have felt pretty special!
The conference picked up on the themes of (1) the economic slowdown (2) changes in the HRO industry, and (3) Economic Protectionism.
There were some interesting presentations – from one of Barack Obama’s economic advisors and the resident “HRO academic”, Dr. Anthony Hesketh, from the Centre for Performance Led HR, School of Management, Lancaster University, who presented a new method of assessing ROI from HRO.
For those too busy managing large change programmes (or suffering a travel ban), here are my notes:-
•HRO vendors are suddenly getting very busy with 3 or 4 big RfPs out there…..watch this space….
•Economic protectionism could rear its ugly head and make life difficult for industries that rely on globalisation such as HRO
•For those in HR who like measuring things, a new method for measuring ROI in HRO is proposed, called ROIT (where T=Talent). This will be of interest to academics – but less so to HR Execs who will want stronger levers to get their HR transformation plans approved. The research also struggles with causality – i.e. do companies show better results because of outsourcing or because they are the type of company to use innovative business techniques such as outsourcing?
• “Single” process outsourcing is moving from strength to strength, particularly RPO. IBM have ramped up their Learning and RPO capability. Will their competitors put their hands in their pockets for acquisitions or has the money run out for the industry?
•There were very few new ideas at the conference. To hear the leading Global technology companies talk about old ideas such “improving work-life balance”, “the war for talent”, “the paperless office” and informing us that Generation Y use Facebook was disappointing.
•When there is a void of ideas in an industry then bring in McKinsey to ask the difficult questions. They shared findings from a recent study and presented practical approaches to reaching operational excllence in Shared Services. The study was not HR specific, but highlighted the importance of talent management on performance. Some interested anomalies emerged from their study including the efficacy of “round tables” in offshore centres – but not too much to get HR Execs excited.
In general, a little too many sponsor friendly case-studies and not enough content to appeal directly to the HR Execs’ current agenda :-
“How do I reduce my costs, improve my service and support my organisation through the biggest downturn in living memory?”
The question for next years conference is – were the delegate numbers low because of Travel cuts or is the content of the HROA conference not particularly relevant to the key group of people who fund the industry, namely the HR Executives ?
4j2fhik9mq
Related posts:
- HR Transformer Blog – Most Popular Posts of 2010 Here are the most popular HR Transformer Blog articles from...
- Will HR Outsourcing ride the Third Wave? Will HR Outsourcing ride the Third Wave?...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
