The Global Partnering and Integration Summit’s early bird registration ends July 31, so Register Today to save up to $150.

The Summit is being held at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Chicago on October 13-14, 2008.

The HR Technology® Conference is located in Chicago immediately following HR-XML’s Global Partnering & Integration Summit. The two complementary conferences have partnered to make it easy for you.

1. Register for the Global Partnering & Integration Summit to save almost 30% off the regular rate.
2. Receive e-mail confirmation with promotional code.
3. Register for the HR Technology® conference using the promotional code to receive the $550 discount.
4. Book your room at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. Mention that you are attending the summit to receive the hotel discount.

The agenda covers critical business topics such as the panel “Partnership Essentials: The Principles of Strong Alliances”.

“The majority of strategic alliances end up being a press release, a logo swap, and no contribution to the bottom line. Yet, formal relationships between and among businesses have many benefits, including:

• Yielding a differentiated competitive advantage
• Completing an organization’s offering to fulfill an “end-to-end solution” as defined by buyer community
• Providing sales channel distribution (reseller relationships)
• Gaining intelligence on actions of competitors
• Increasing overall customer satisfaction
• Reducing operating costs

Join us for an industry ‘panel of peers’ where we will have a candid discussion of the underlying principles and activities that make alliances successful. We will explore a variety of topics, including types of alliances, stages of development/maturity, managing channel conflict, the contract negotiation process, and identification of common pitfalls/mistakes.”

For more session topics, visit our online program.

We would also like to thank the support of our 2008 Summit Sponsors:

Executive Industry Event Partner
Arbita provides recruitment technology, job advertising, analytics and training solutions to many of the world’s leading employers. Their unique tools and services empower organizations to customize, launch, and manage effective online talent acquisition programs.

Gold Sponsors
Sovren Group provides global enterprise-class multi-lingual parsing and semantic matching solutions (Resumes/CVs/Job Descriptions).

Talent Technology Corporation - provider of HireDesk® and Resume Mirror™ solutions for recruiting industry and corporate HR departments.

Ultimate Software designs and markets UltiPro - an integrated, strategic HR, payroll, and talent management solution.

Silver Sponsors
Applicant Insight is a leading provider of employment background screening and substance abuse testing programs.

milch & zucker AG specializes in HR marketing consulting and HR software development.

Peopleclick provides software and services that help global companies find, attract and hire quality people - in less time, with less risk.

Keynote Sponsor
Lawson Strategic HCM delivers transformational tools designed to help link together people, strategy, and execution.

To register or for more information on sponsoring, exhibiting, or advertising, visit www.partneringsummit.org.

In our next webinar, we are going to be taking a look at a platform and methodologies for interoperability testing. If you’ve followed HR-XML this past year, you know that our current work more than ever before incorporates best practices of peer standards organizations. For example, readers of this blog know that HR-XML’s 3.0 release is substantially aligned with the Open Applications Group architecture.

The testing platform that is the subject of this webinar is something we learned of through liaison with our colleagues at Acord, the insurance standards organization. Register for the webinar to learn more. However, a good introduction is provided in this video available on the Acord website.

Streamlining Testing, Trading Partner Integration, and Certification: A Look at PilotFish Technology’s XCS eiPlatform and HR-XML

2008 July 23, 1:00 pm - 2:15 PM EDT; 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM PDT

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/297314148

A growing number of enterprises are looking to vertical and horizontal standards organizations as sources for the canonical data models and message schemas necessary to support service oriented architectures (SOAs) and to enable agile integration with trading partners. The good news is that there is increasing maturity and even convergence among a variety of XML standards. Nevertheless, challenges remain. While libraries such as HR-XML’s forthcoming Version 3.0 release are informed by almost 10 years of industry contributions and are architecturally more consistent and robust than ever before, the breadth of these libraries and the options available therein pose their own challenges to implementers.

This webinar will examine the value of a flexible validation server to support testing against industry standards — and against profiles of those standards that particular enterprises and their trading partners may implement. The HR-XML Consortium is among several industry standards groups evaluating the Pilotfish XCS eiPlatform as a tool to assist its community with testing and conformance.

This Webinar will give a quick overview of HR-XML forthcoming 3.0 release and discuss new requirements and possible new directions in standards certification.

PilotFish Technology’s XCS eiPlatform will be introduced and near real-time response to messages submitted for validation demonstrated. The webinar will also review how trading-partner profiles and extensions might be accommodated.

Presenter Panel
Chuck Allen, HR-XML Consortium, will moderate the panel:

Neil Schappert – President

Neil is the founder of PilotFish Technology. Neil has over 30 years experience in the computer software and services industry. Before founding PilotFish, Neil held positions as: Chief Operating Officer for Sherwood International, President of Alliance-One, a wholly owned business process outsourcing subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation, and Executive Vice President of Computer Sciences Corporation in charge of the Life & Annuity division. Neil is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Boston College where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a concentration in finance.

Alex Valys - Research

Alex has over 6 years experience with PilotFish Technology. He has been instrumental in defining the architecture and design of our flagship products, the XCS eiPlatform, XCS eiConsole, and Dashboard. Alex is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Jamie Mazur – Client Services

Jamie has over 6 years experience with PilotFish Technology. Jamie has worked closely with the Research and Development groups within PilotFish to identify and respond to customer requirements and requested enhancements. He has overseen dozens of implementations of the PilotFish software and is considered an expert relative to the implementation of the XML standards. Jamie is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Trinity College where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

Dear Colleague,

Great news. It’s now going to be easy to attend the HR Technology Conference on October 15-16, right after the HR-XML Summit, October 13-14, in Chicago. Easy enough even for me! And with special discounts for attending both.

The two events have finally co-located in time and space so that you can stay in the same room in the Hyatt McCormick all week and attend both, one right after the other. The Summit is in the Hyatt, and HR Technology is across the street in McCormick Place.

You know I’ve been urging you to attend HR Technology for several years because I think it’s the best possible use of *my* precious professional development time — and yours.

Chuck Allen of HR-XML calls it “THE show for those in the HR tech community,” and I agree. After 11 years, it is undisputedly at the top of the heap — worldwide.

I’ve attended every one since 1998 as a charter member of its original Analyst Panel, the only public gathering where leading industry analysts give straight answers to the toughest questions in our field.

And don’t miss “The Industry’s First Talent Management Shootout” this year, your only chance to see leading Talent Management suite vendors competing head-to-head with custom demos against some tough, scripted scenarios.

Please look over the full agenda at www.HRTechnologyConference.com and join me there. I’ll be doing the Analyst Panel again (of course) was well as a special Expert Discussion on Thursday afternoon. I hope I’ll see you there.

Now here’s how you can save the most money on both events:

Start at www.partneringsummit.com and register for the Summit, being careful to choose the 30 percent discounted price just for HR Technology attendees.

After your e-mail confirmation, you’ll get a special discount code for the second event, good only for double attendees. I’m keynoting the Summit, with many thanks to Lawson Software for their sponsorship, and look forward to seeing you there.

Then go to http://www.hrtechnologyconference.com/register.html and type the case sensitive code from your e-mail confirmation into the Promotion Code field on the online registration form. You’ll save $550, a discount the HR-XML Consortium personally negotiated for you, the deepest they offer so you pay only $995.

Then call the Hyatt McCormick at 312-567-1234, tell them you’re with HR-XML, and book for as many days as need to cover both events at the discounted conference rate.

Why can’t all the meetings in our professional lives be this easy, complementary and close together?

Block the dates on your calendar, get purchase orders in process, bring a colleague and plan to join me for a truly valuable learning experience.

I’ll look forward to seeing you at both conferences.

Best regards,

Naomi

David Connelly, CEO, Open Application Group has announced the availability of the OAGIS 9.3 Release Candidate (9.3 RC1). Take a look.

One of the items David mentions below is the “OAGIS Business Integration Platform for
standards developers.” What is that about? It is an platform architecture into which horizontal standards like HR-XML and vertical standards groups like Starstandards.org, AIAG.org, and other groups with OAGIS-based architectures can plug-in. If you are an HR-XML implementer that wants to use a bit of OAGIS, or if you are a STAR or OAGIS implementer that wants to mix in some HR-XML, this will be a great convenience. My personal hope would be that some of the learning and education standards will buy into the platform concept.

David Connelly writes:

I am very pleased to announce that OAGIS 9.3 Release Candidate One is
now available for Public Review. This process is done to ensure the
highest quality possible standards available to our users.

This phase is expected to last 30 days after which time we will take the
Release Candidate off the web site, review all feedback, and make the
changes deemed necessary by our member driven quality assurance team.
We will then prepare the final version of OAGIS 9.2 and post it for
general availability.

This is a very exciting release of OAGIS with some never before features
including:

1) High Tech Order To Cash and Procure to Pay support
2) Mid Market version of OAGIS for Order to Cash
3) The first release of the new OAGIS Business Integration Platform for
standards developers

We encourage people to download and review this Release Candidate and to
give us your feedback.

You can learn more and download the standard here.

An overdue thanks to Susan Malaika, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, for terrific webinar on XML databases earlier this month. Susan’s slide deck is available for download. You can find a recording of the event below.

Even if your applications are bound to the world of relational databases, I think there is a nugget or two you can take away from this webinar. Each implementer needs to assess the costs and benefits of design choices within their own contexts, but there are definitely patterns to avoid as well as patterns to follow.

Database design is an early and continuing concern for HR-XML implementers. Regarding “continuing concerns” — these tend to be along the lines of what will new versions of a schema will do to my application and underlying database? Or what if my trading partner supports HR-XML elements that I don’t yet support in my database? While XML databases aren’t magic, they certainly are more adaptable to these types of changes than pure relational databases. I’m sure Susan’s presentation will motivate a few currently working with XML within relational databases to take a new look at XML native databases.

What Susan calls “shredding” — relying completely on fixed mapping of XML to relational databases — is certainly something to avoid. Yet this is where a lot of people tend to start. I don’t know how many people have asked me over the years for a relational database schema for HR-XML’s Resume or Candidate XML schema. While there are tools that can auto-generate SQL for database tables from an XML schema, I think in most cases you’d wind up with a real mess trying this with an HR-XML schema. If you are tied to relational databases and fixed mapping, the likely place to start isn’t with the XML schema, but with a survey of the representative XML instances you’ll need to handle. In the webinar, Susan makes the distinction between “master data” and “transactional data” and shows how the IBM pureXML provides some slick solutions for both (no endorsement here, I’m sure our friends at Oracle and other database vendors could show us similar capabilities). Even if you are stuck in the pure relational world, it is advisable to make the distinction between the master data that drive core business applications and the less-persistent transactional data that you occasionally need to retrieve. So the idea is to start with an analysis of representative instance data and then do your analysis of what is master data and what is less than master data. You then go to the trouble of “shredding” (fixed mapping) of the master data to relational database fields and then perhaps you store the entire XML doc as a CLOB for later retrieval.

Among the compelling features Susan demonstrated that should be of interest to the HR community were the pureXML DB’s capabilities with XQuery and Atom. Setting up flexible reporting mechanisms with arms-length trading partners usually is quite challenging. With the approach Susan demonstrated, setting up custom, real-time feeds is quite trivial. Just about any status or state you can express with HR-XML (e.g., open staffing requisitions placed since last week by major client X) could be converted to an Atom feed with very little effort.

See for yourself.

[ Slides ]

This is a deck I’ve mentioned in previous posts. If you are an HR-XML implementer and haven’t already taken a look, take some time to review and to understand some of the foundation behind HR-XML 3.0. You can view in full-screen or download by following the “view” link.

| View | Upload your own

There are quite a few items I’d like to report from this week’s ePortfolio & Digital Identity Conference. For now, let me just get my slides out, which I’ve promised to post here. You can also download the deck (follow “view” link back to the slideshare.net site and download).

I also want to thank the EIfEL community for the opportunity to participate.

| View | Upload your own

Last year, I wrote a post and provided some links to a site where IBM had demonstrations of using industry standard XML schemas within “pureXML” databases. As mentioned below, how to work with HR-XML and databases is likely at the top of our all-time list of frequently asked questions. If you haven’t looked at the capabilities of XML native databases, you’ll want to register for this free webinar. What really makes this interesting is the combination of an XML-aware database, technologies such as XQuery and XPath, and Web 2.0 technologies such as Atom and related syndication technologies. From a business point of view, what all this technology can add up to is savings in database and application design and some very flexible and dynamic ways to extend your customer’s or trading partner’s view into transactional data.

Using HR-XML With a pureXML Database
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EDT
(10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT)

One of the questions most frequently asked by those implementing HR-XML is how do I map it into a database? While some may take on the task of mapping HR-XML to fields in their relational databases, there are alternatives.

This webinar describes how you can store, index, and query HR-XML easily without first mapping to relational structures. Compared to relational database storage, the pureXML database approach can offer considerable design and development savings. Schema evolution becomes much easier as there is no longer any need to re-structure the way data is stored in the face of HR-XML structure changes. For added flexibility, there is no need to associate exactly one schema with the stored XML, the appropriate version of the HR-XML schema can be used. New SOA, Web Services, Web 2.0, Mashup and Forms solutions for HR-XML become easier to build.

A pureXML HR-XML solution will be described and illustrations will be provided through interactive demonstrations and downloads that you can find through by typing Google pureXML alphaWorks.

Register today for this free webinar:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/268212569

About the Presenter

Susan Malaika is a Senior Technical Staff Member in IBM’s Information Management Group in the DB2 pureXML team. She has developed standards that support data for grid environments at the Global Grid Forum. Her specialties include XML, the Web and Web Services. In addition to working as an IBM product software developer, she has also been an Internet specialist, a data analyst, and an applications designer and developer. Susan has co-authored a book about Web tools, and published articles on transaction processing and XML. She is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

HR-XML’s 2nd annual Global Partnering & Integration Summit is months away (Oct. 13-14, Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Chicago), but I’m really pleased that the industry is stepping up to support the one event held by the HR services industry for the HR services industry. Below are some of our event sponsors. To learn more about the conference, sponsorship, exhibit opportunities, or attending, please visit www.partneringsummit.org. If you missed the 2007 inaugural Partnering & Integration Summit, here’s where you can get a look at presentations and pictures from last year’s event.

Gold Sponsor
	Talent Technology Corporation is a leading provider of on-demand applicant tracking and component recruiting technologies for the recruiting/staffing industry and corporate HR departments. Our award-winning HireDesk® and Resume Mirror products power the recruiting industry. For further information, visit: www.talenttech.com
Gold Sponsor
	Ultimate Software designs and markets UltiPro - an integrated, strategic HR, payroll, and talent management solution. For further information, visit www.ultimatesoftware.com or telephone 1-800-432-1729.
Keynote Sponsor
	Lawson Strategic HCM delivers transformational tools designed to help link together people, strategy, and execution. For further information, visit www.lawson.com
Partner
	The HR Technology® Conference & Expo is the world’s leading conference on technology for human resources. HR-XML’s Global Partnering & Integration Summit is co-located with the 11th annual HR Technology® Conference, October 15 - 17, 2008, McCormick Place, Chicago. For further information, visit: www.hrtechconference.com
Partner
	The Open Applications Group Inc. (the OAGi) promotes business process interoperability for both inter & intra enterprise business. OAGi was formed in late 1994 as the first post-EDI organization focused on improving application integration. OAGi’s unique, technology neutral approach to building the Open Application Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) ensures that both end-users and solution providers have the most robust, interoperable, and completely royalty-free XML standard in the world. For further information, visit: www.openapplications.org

A “holy grail” for some with respect to online recruiting would be data standards that would enable job postings to essentially serve as a query against any segment of the world-wide set of resumes or CVs on the Web. The vision is that this might evolve into a real electronic market where talent supply and demand could be matched in a precise, on-demand way. What stands in the way of this automagic, world-wide matching of talent supply and demand? This sometimes perplexes those coming at the question from the purely from technical side, but is almost immediately apparent to recruiting professionals.

What do recruiters know that takes longer for the techies to grasp? — that recruiting is still predominantly a set of complex marketing communications with employers marketing themselves to candidates and visa versa. The big issue is not one of syntax or technology, but of reliable information and understanding. Job postings as well as resumes and CVs are designed as persuasive marketing pieces. Matching “marketing piece” to “marketing piece” has some value in the discovery phase of a search for a prospective candidate (or employer), but such discovery is just a first step in a search. The most obvious problem with the “holy grail” vision of the web itself functioning as an electronic market for directly matching talent supply and demand, is the lack of transparent, reliable, and comparable data with which to perform matches.

What is the state of job and candidate data on the web? I’m not sure whether the state of online job postings and resumes is getting any worse, but I don’t see evidence that it is getting any better. On the employer side of things, you still too often see a hodge-podge of skills strewn within job postings. Rather than being a solid attempt to describe a position coherently, I suspect these “skill laundry lists” often are related to a recruiter’s attempt to optimize postings for search engine discovery or a manager’s or the HR department’s attempt to try to cover all bases or to stay ahead of skill and technology trends. On the candidate side of things, outright resume fraud might be less common than it once was, but with regard to the gray area of claiming skills or experience on a resume, the “burden-of-proof” standard is very low or non-existent. Of course, one set of behavior — employers creating job postings with insane skill laundry lists — obviously encourages the other — candidates exaggerating their skills or experience in resumes.

The other current challenge (and opportunity) is that for a growing number of knowledge workers there can be more relevant and meaningful information about the individuals’ capabilities located within social media and Web 2.0 content than in conventional resume or CV content. The ePortfolio community has long championed the value of self-maintained collections of learning and professional history and plans. However, consider even something even very simple and informal like a person’s twitter time line or bookmarks on del.icio.us. What might you learn from such content? This is hit-or-miss. However, certainly in some cases, you might find a rather complete work history and even a record of milestones and deliverables (amongst details about life’s minutia) . Such content sometimes provides a way to reality check claimed interests and experience within a resume.

Of course, not everyone’s twitter time line will be illuminating. Social media by its very nature is pretty scrappy data and likely should never be used on its own to either qualify or disqualify a candidate. My point is that these bread crumbs of personal and professional experience in many cases are certainly as valuable or more valuable than the typical laundry list of asserted skills or experience within a resume. There are wide-ranging personal comfort levels (and discomfort levels) associated with living and working in a transparent way on the Web via blogging, social and professional networking, photo sharing, calendars sharing, social bookmarking, etc. However, clearly we already are well into a new era in which data from a person’s social graph and self-contributed web content can be as important as traditional resume or CV content. For that matter, resumes and job announcements are well on their way to simply becoming part of the fabric of social network profiles and news feed content.

So how do standards and data formats fit in? Standards and data formats increasingly provide a critical foundation for making social graph content usable for recruiting and job search or any other purpose. While standards and data formats by themselves do nothing, fortunately there is no shortage of commercial, community, and individual development efforts aimed at delivering new applications and new ways of working with social graph content.

As I’ve said in previous posts, Microformats fit the bill for adding light structure and intelligence to browser-consumable profile, job, and social graph content. In this regard, Microformats aid both the discovery of candidates/jobs and also provide key linkages to related content and contacts. However, discovery and sourcing data is just the start of a recruiting process.

A state-of-the-art approach to recruiting almost always involves follow-on, value-added processes aimed at normalizing such data for comparison, validating the data, and correlating data with other sources. It is among these follow-on processes where HR-XML will continue to be most important. HR-XML will continue to be the right fit for the system-to-system communication of candidate and job posting data as well as a principal output format for resume parsers. An area where you’ll growth in the use of HR-XML also is as an intermediate format that social networking applications use to pre-populate third-party job application forms with detailed profile data or otherwise share such profile data with employer or partner systems at the direction of the candidate. Changes planned within HR-XML 3.0’s recruiting specifications will be a topic for a future post, but broadly speaking I think you’ll see additional documents defined aimed at better supporting use cases involving the submission of formatted (even Microformatted) advertising content as well as additional structured representations of position and candidate data aimed at fulfilling what are mainly partner-to-partner interactions between HR service providers.