How to Find Out What Parents Think About Educational Technology: Ask Them

An online survey is a great tool for finding out what parents know about how technology is being used in schools and how districts might improve.

Read my entire blog on the topic on EducationalIT.com
http://www.educationalit.com/author.asp?section_id=2180&doc_id=248141&

WAN Managers See New Opportunities in ‘Hybrid IT’

WAN managers already have many of the skills to enable them to succeed in a field that might seem very different at first: social media marketing.

See my complete blog on the topic on IntelligentWAN.com
http://www.intelligentwan.com/author.asp?section_id=2240&doc_id=247821&

Demand, Salaries Rising for Networking Pros

Despite continued lackluster labor reports from the federal government, nearly all job forecasts still expect increased hiring demand for networking professionals over the next decade. That comes as great news for those in the ranks now, as salaries will also increase with that rising tide.

Read my complete blog on the topic on IntelligentWAN.com
http://www.intelligentwan.com/author.asp?section_id=2240&doc_id=247398&

How Network Managers Can Make Themselves Less Scary

I read with some amusement recently that the most feared person in the IT ranks is the network administrator.

See my complete blog on the topic at IntelligentWAN.com
http://www.intelligentwan.com/author.asp?section_id=2240&doc_id=246218

White House Budget for Educational Technology Flounders

With the recent crushing defeat of President Obama's 2013 budget proposals, it remains to be seen how much will survive of initiatives to increase spending on educational technology for the coming fiscal year.

See my complete blog on EducationalIT.com
http://www.educationalit.com/author.asp?section_id=2180&doc_id=245503

Determining the ROI for wellness programs

Health insurance continues to rise at an unaffordable rate for just about every organization. That is forcing most employers to rethink the levels of coverage they can afford to offer as a benefit, and to look for ways to reduce the need for employee medical care.

The result is a focus on wellness programs, as a means of keeping employees more healthy in the first place. In some cases, the insurance providers are mandating that their client organizations put wellness programs front and center.

There is good news in this for the bean counters: according to compensation expert Robert Buckley, an executive coach and consultant in Bernardsville, NJ. Buckley says that ROI can be easily determined for investing in wellness programs, and he cites two leading employers in his area.

"Forward thinking companies like Johnson & Johnson (New Brunswick, NJ) and Verizon (Basking Ridge, NJ) have been offering fully-staffed on-site gyms or memberships at outside clubs for a long time," Buckley says. "The recent change however -- and what I find cool -- is the approach being taken by wellness providers. The new economic realities of our economy are behind a new corporate/non-for-profit partnership to bring wellness to the workplace."

Buckley points out that no CFO argues the benefits of wellness programs. But they often balk at cost. 

"It is here that organizations like the Somerset Hills YMCA (www.somersethillsymca.org) are tailoring their approach," Buckley explains. "SSHYMCA has retained professionals in the areas of HR and finance to analyze the internal costs of a company interested in starting a wellness initiative. By applying HR metrics with bench marked data, projections can be made against a company’s financial statements to reduce healthcare risk, lower insurance premiums and reduce absenteeism and/or 'presenteeism' -- which are those employees who report to work but under perform due to diminished health."

Buckley says "corporations -- using their actual internal cost data and industry benchmarks (that they contribute to) -- find it easier to navigate the cost obstacle. Wellness initiatives can now be expressed in project management terms, which is easy to do. This elevates wellness from an expense that lowers net income (dividends or reinvestment) available to shareholders, to an investment in human assets expressed in terms of Net Present Value that creates wealth for shareholders."

Workday 14 puts HCM data in easier context

Workday, Inc. has already generated a lot of excitement around its software-as-a-service HR and financials application, but the recent release of Workday 14 should earn the company even more fans. With the upgrade, Workday 14 offers embedded intelligence, and enhancements to its human capital management, financial management, and spend management features – all of which make decision-making and data-slicing easier and based on broader context.

Impressive enough, but Workday says there are no fewer than 140 new features with the Workday upgrade, all of which are available to existing customers as part of a normal upgrade at no extra charge.

The most exciting aspect of Workday 14 is definitely the embedded intelligence, and it is that feature that has grabbed most of the early attention. As a devoted advocate of “context,” I see where this will really wow a lot of HR execs and line managers.

There is no need to navigate to another part of the application to access this information. This quick at-your-fingertips approach to getting at all sorts of related data should really propel Workday in this space.

Embedded intelligence actually made its debut in Workday 12, which included a landing page and a series of Worklet reports which uses could pick and choose. Workday 13 enabled users to begin building their own Worklets. With Workday 14, users can now embed Worklets in the context of business processes.

Users can open windows at any time that offer related information to a task they are attempting or forecast they are calculating. The application enables managers to adjust compensation rates -- or a variety of other HCM measures, --for any individual while putting them in context with related workers. The associated Worklet will automatically recalculate all context data for any changes you make.

Workday is taking a very aggressive approach to rethinking a lot of traditional talent management systems. And it is targeting some very large customers. With the announcement of the Workday 14 release, the company also announced it had acquired Thomson Reuters as a customer. Thomson Reuters has more than 55,000 employees in 100 countries. It will now use Workday’s HCM and payroll tools to manage compensation, performance and related HCM activities.