SuccessFactors Sings For Stanford University Medical Center — VI
[Continued from OD Experiments at Stanford University Medical Center: The Mirror Effect — V…]
Todd had a number of responsibilities as part of his Organizational Development portfolio. One of them was the design and management of the performance management system across Stanford Hospital & Clinics (SHC) and Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH). LPCH had already implemented a vanilla version of SuccessFactors and Todd asked me to manage the design, implementation, roll-out, and support of the performance management system at SHC, and the second phase enhancements at LPCH. This was a huge project and was to span the next 2–3 years.
The resources who had worked on the existing SuccessFactors version of LPCH were no longer with the organization and so one of the first things I did was to ‘reverse engineer’ the process used to build our system using some files I found on our server. I figured out what to do with little help from SuccessFactors (SF) and in those pre-SAP days (5 years ago), when SF was still nimble and hungry, their engineers having decided that I had successfully gone through initiation rites offered their full support to me on any further queries that I had. They also asked me if I wanted to be one of the first users on their Beta-SuccessFactory system that basically allowed the client to build forms quickly and independently for a number of the modules they offered.
I jumped on this opening, and pretty soon we really made SuccessFactors sing for SHC. SuccessFactory allowed us to engage in very rapid prototyping and allowed us to exercise agile and lean thinking even before it had become a big thing across the US Healthcare System. We spawned 30 project-teams involving 150 people across the organization and in about 1.5 years had built 250 competency models, 30 customized forms (pretty much one for each department), and had a lot of very satisfied customers.
Net-net, I ended up representing Stanford University Medical Center at the annual SuccessFactors conference with a presentation on our system. This is how I met Lars Daalgard, the CEO of SuccessFactors.
Subsequently I gave Lars a copy of my book, Connecting Inner Power with Global Change, and we entered into a dialog. In the course of things I presented him with my approach to fractal-modeling and the work I had already done at Stanford related to that. He introduced me to his Executive team. The concept that I wanted SuccessFactors to adopt was to build a layer of software underlying their existing modules (particularly Performance Management, Succession Planning, 360-Feedback, Employee Central) that would allow individuals and teams to recognize the fractal-patterns they were creating by who they were being. After all, even success in Strategy Execution — the stated thrust of the SF system, would be enabled by overcoming many habitual patterns at the individual, team, and leader levels.
We went back and forth but the SF Executive Team chose not to engage in this idea. I am not surprised since they were prepping to be acquired by SAP and my ideas were simply too radical. They offered me a consolation prize by interviewing me (#42) and including some of my thoughts in their annals. In the meanwhile they got acquired for US$ 4B or so.
I have continued to enhance this vision and earlier this year created a presentation for the 2015 Marketing & Sales Analytics Summit that encapsulates my vision of Next Generation Human Capital Enterprise Systems.
[To be continued…]
