Poll: Who Are You?
This week I received a nice email from Matt, a Kronos Sales Executive:
Leo,
As a Kronos sales rep I wanted you to know how much I enjoy reading your blogs. I save them in Evernote with tags and retrieve them when I need to remember something you referenced or if I need to send a customer information on a specific topic you mentioned.
Thanks for the hard work!
Thanks, Matt. I love that Matt is sharing my content with our prospects and customers, and I’d love to see more people share my stuff by using these buttons below my posts.
You know, I really have no idea who you people are. Well, I know you, you, and you, but most of you are a mystery to me. So, though the magic of WordPress and PollDaddy, here’s a poll… It’ll be fun. Let me know who you are, and I’ll share the results in an upcoming post. Oh, and if you don’t fit any of the 12 categories, leave a pithy comment.
Thanks, and have a safe, long weekend.
Quiz: What is SEGL?
I did a quick search to grab links, and found a few choices, but which one is our post topic today?
A. School for Ethics and Global Leadership
B. Summer Experiences in Greater Lowell
C. Science Experimental Grid Laboratory
D. American action film star, producer, writer, martial artist, guitarist and reserve deputy sheriff
E. All of the above except D
The answer is E, because if you spell Steven Seagal’s name wrong and he finds out, there could be a beating involved… Anyway, today I’m blogging about B, Summer Experiences in Greater Lowell and their Martini Spring Fling fundraiser that’s three weeks from tonight, Thursday, June 13, 2013 from 5:30 – 8:30 pm at the Vesper Country Club in Tyngsboro, MA. Why am I shilling blogging about this?
A. My friend and fellow Kronos employee Barb Vlacich is a co-chair of SEGL
B. Kronos is an “Emerald” sponsor of the event
C. (Work)Joyce donated an iPad mini for the wonderful silent auction
D. (Play)Joyce is a co-chair of SEGL
E. In 2012, SEGL raised more than $100,000 to fund 12 Greater Lowell summer programs and touched the lives of more than 1,700 kids…
Of course the answer is E, but A-D are true, too. It’s a fun event and a great cause. If you’re local to the Boston area, I hope to see you three weeks from tonight at SEGL’s Martini Spring Fling!
Need Kronos Training? “It’s in there.”
Let me admit right up front, I use pasta sauce, or “gravy” as my mother calls it from a jar. I can make it from scratch, but why bother? Anyway, the title of this post is from an 80’s commercial for a national brand of sauce in a jar. Can you name it?
Yesterday I heard the tale of a customer looking for Workforce Record Manager training. Record Manager™ is a “comprehensive, powerful promote-to-production and data retention application that helps IT organizations meet their database management objectives.” Translated into non-marketing speak, it’s data archiving software for Workforce Central. Upon further review, we determined our customer was a subscriber to KnowledgePass, and the training… It’s in there:
Workforce Record Manager 6.x
- Tutorial WRM 6.x Copying Set Up Data Resource
- Tutorial WRM 6.x Archiving Production Data Resource
- Tutorial WRM 6.x Configuring Record Retention Policies SCORM/AICC
It occurred to me that there’s quite a bit of content “in there” that customers and Klingons Kronites alike are unaware of, so I did some digging. There is a TON of great content in KnowledgePass. Here’s a raw report example of what’s available just for Workforce Scheduler 6.3, and most of the concepts are presented in easy to consume “3 Minute How-To’s.”
If you’re planning an upgrade, are on-boarding new hires, or just need some refresher training, check out KnowledgePass. It’s in there.
No Klingons on Kronos!
I’m really upset. Saturday night I was at the movies, obliterating a 32 gallon popcorn with my son when my company is smeared all over the big screen in Star Trek Into Darkness! So, without revealing any spoilers, since when is Kronos, or Qo’noS as they cleverly try to disguise it, “a place we just can’t go” for the Starfleet Command? Hell, they use Workforce Central in our cloud! And what’s up with the “Kronos is full of Klingons” reference? (As a side note, I prefer “Klingon” to “Kronite.” Kronite sounds like some kind of dense rock.) Anyway … When the Starfleet Command “archive” gets blown up by the bad guy, do you recall any discussion of lost data? No! Of course not, because all that data was backed up in the Kronos cloud. It’s just a coincidence that Klingons are known for redundancy.
Let me be blunt: There are no Klingons here, and Kronos is not some dark, unsavory place. Our halls are bright and colorful, and Kronos was just recognized as a “Best Place to Work” by the Boston Business Journal. See? The movie references are all LIES!!! And one other thing… SPOILER ALERT: Shortly after Bones spits the best line of the movie, “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a torpedo mechanic,” 72 ultra advanced photon torpedoes are detonated on the bad guy’s ship, yet later he’s able to crash it into futuristic San Francisco??? How “advanced” could those things have been? There. I feel better.
In other news, here’s my new corporate “head shot.” I think it came out great!
Fredo, I know it was you… at KronosWorks!
Last week I was in a meeting on KronosWorks 2013 planning, and someone asked what the “big customer event” would be. The conference is in Orlando this year, so the theme parks are a draw. A fun “New York Street Party” we threw at Universal Studios came up, and guesses on the year began. “2004,” I said, deadly serious. “It was 2004.” “How can you be so sure,” I was asked. “I’ll tell you how.” It is seared in my memory that KronosWorks 2004 was in Orlando, and the big street party was right outside Finnegan’s Bar and Grill… It was October 26th to be exact. I was in Finnegan’s with my friend, Barb. It was a beautiful night outside, but Game 3 of the World Series was on inside. As a member of Red Sox Nation, I reeked of nervous energy. The Sox were up 2 games to none, but they could still blow it, right?
The St. Louis Cardinals had a runner in scoring position when Jim Edmonds cracked a hard single to left. Manny “Just Being Manny” Ramirez, not an elegant fielder, charged and scooped the ball, then threw a dart to home plate just in time for catcher Jason Varitek to tag out Larry Walker to end the first. “YES!!!” I yelped while pumping a fist of solidarity into the air. Then I saw him. The Godfather…
He wore a sports coat, and a menacing smile as he approached me from the bar. My joy receded to fear as he came close, very close, and cupped my face between his hands, Michael Corleone style. I knew he was still heartbroken over his Yankees coughing up a 3-0 ALCS lead to the Sox, so I braced for Luca Brasi with his piano wire from behind. Brasi never arrived. The Godfather looked into my eyes and tapped my cheek twice gently with his right hand. No words were spoken, but I still heard, “Fredo, I know it was you…” That’s how I’ll never forget it was 2004.
I’m not sure if we’ll have a “Godfather II” sequel to that “New York Street Party,” but KronosWorks2013 is sure to be bigger and better than ever. My team is responsible for managing content for over 30 technical sessions from report writing, to the very popular “Workforce Timekeeper Tips & Tricks,” to upgrading best practices, and Kronos cloud services. Plus we’ll have Kronos TechKnowledgy courses over the weekend, education workshops, product and industry best practice sessions, and the expo, where you can talk to experts, visit Kronos Global Support, and get your hands around all our latest products.
All these years later, every once in a while I find myself in the Godfather’s office. The framed Yankee pinstripes hang ominously from the wall like a horse head. He’s always very friendly, and loves talking cloud. Hell, it’s been nine years. Still, I’ll never accept an invitation from him to go fishing…
Won’t you let me in, integration man?
Last night I finished the sequel/prequel to the indie sci-fi novel, Wool by Hugh Howey. Wool, the dystopian story of a community living in a giant underground silo still grips me, and probably will until the movie comes out and ruins all the internal imagery data I’ve stored in my silo… In business, the term “silo” has bad connotations usually around concepts like separate and inaccessible, whether the silo contains data or people. Where there are silos, there’s usually a lack of connectivity between them. Oh, silos can be funny, too. During a presentation I attended by Jim Bampos, VP Total Customer Experience at EMC, he said don’t think of them as silos, but as “Cylinders of Excellence!”
Anyway, when silos contain people, improvement efforts are around “alignment…” Alignment between Marketing and Sales or between Sales and Service. When it’s data in silos, integration is often the solution, especially now with the proliferation of cloud computing. Here are some recent articles definitely worth reading:
- Cloud Computing and the Integration Quagmire
- Thanks to the cloud, integration is back — with a twist
- How to integrate with the cloud
For Kronos Workforce Central customers, Workforce Integration Manager is a tool for building integrations to and from their Kronos system, whether in our cloud or not. Two obvious examples are Kronos time data to Payroll and HR people data to Kronos. There are many others… If you’d like to know more, we’ve got a webinar coming up on May 21st at 2 p.m. ET.
Won’t you let me in, integration man? There’s always a song in my silo.
Silver Linings Cloud
When I saw the Wired article titled, Sunnier Days Ahead for Retailers that Use Cloud Computing, I snickered and thought, Sunnier Days Ahead for Retailers that get (Play)Joyce in their front door. One front door she loves swings in front of The Spotted Cod in Sandwich, MA. We were in Sandwich for an Arts and Crafts festival, but clouds (go figure) and rain dampened traffic and sales. The Wired article mentions how retailers can account for big (weather) data in their planning, but the lost sale I experienced had nothing to do with the weather.
As Joyce looked at silvercraft under a tent, I sniffed soy candles across the damp, very green grass. I picked a large “Green Tea” scent after learning how soy candles are well, green, compared to traditional petroleum-based candles. Anyway, “Do you take credit cards?” was met with an incredulous look, and a “no” from the candlemaker. Hmmm… With my personal society cashless, I moped over to the bustling commerce at the silver booth. In the midst of my girl’s small purchase becoming a Mother’s Day present, I watched as the woman ran my card through a little white square attached to her smartphone. I asked if it was the Intuit product, but it turns out her square was from um, Square.
Joyce and I love supporting local retailers, and the smaller the better, but as a customer I expect to pay with plastic, even if it is petroleum based. With cloud-based apps like Square, even small, local retailers can leverage the cloud to grow their businesses. Many of our retail customers leverage Kronos cloud services today for their workforce management applications. I wonder how many sales the soy guy has lost when he could have had my money (and many others) deposited in his bank account from a cloud right in the palm of his hand?
