Navigo tweets this week
Posted by Rod Bishop in Navigo
- Australian HR Tech Report. Free intel on HR technology in AU. Take the survey to get your copy, already 130+ responses! http://ow.ly/JHNG #
- OrgPlus Enterprise 4.0 release in Australia scheduled for January. Learn more at http://support.navigo.com.au #
- We now have over 170 responses in the great Australian HR Tech survey. Contribute and get a free copy of the report. http://ow.ly/KN9Y #
HR Technology Special Report
Posted by Navigo in Navigo, Organisational charting
After the chaotic cutting of the latest recession, many employers are looking at workforce planning software to provide more stability in meeting both their short and long-term talent needs.
Read more in this great whitepaper, re-published with permission from Workforce Management.
Tags: HR technology, HumanConcepts, Organisational charting, OrgPlus, workforce modelling, workforce planning
Navigo tweets this week
Posted by Rod Bishop in Navigo
- We're getting excited about the Australian HR Tech Report 2010… If you don't know what that is, go here to find out! http://ow.ly/FM5d #
Oracle Application Server Timezone Changes – No time like the present
Posted by Matt Barker in Oracle
Have you ever had trouble with daylight savings? No, I’m not talking about sleeping in and being an hour late for work.
Have you ever had your system show the wrong time, scheduled jobs in Alesco or Oracle not run when they’re meant to, or seen conflicting reports of what the current time is in different applications on the one system?
Well, I did recently while administering one of our client’s Alesco environments. The trace outputs for their Alesco reports were showing conflicting runtimes. Surprise, surprise there was an hour difference, and daylight savings was to blame.
Off the top of my head, there were only two places the times could be incorrect:
- on the database, and
- on the application server
So, I logged in and checked the database time. All good on that front.
Next, I logged into the application server and checked the system time. That was correct as well.
It seemed that my assumption was incorrect, there was a third place the time could be incorrect, in the Oracle Application Server software. A quick visit to the Oracle Application Server Control Console confirmed this. It turns out the Oracle Application Server software doesn’t use the underlying system’s timezone settings.
Metalink, the Oracle forums and Google were the next ports of call. After a lot of digging (the majority of timezone information I came across dealt with Oracle Databases, not Oracle Application Servers), I discovered that the problem was not specifically with Oracle. Both the Oracle Application Server Control Console and the Oracle Reports Server are Java apps, and it was the Java Runtimes they were using that were causing the timezone issue.
Java (along with Unix/Linux) measures time in milliseconds from January 1st 1970. Once this number has been converted into a human readable time, the timezone adjustments are applied. In Unix/Linux, these timezone settings can be found under /usr/share/zoneinfo (or /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo on some systems). However Java won’t use this system timezone database, it uses it’s own.
Inside your Oracle home, there are a number of java executables. Executing java -version told me I was on 1.4.2_12. A quick comparison with the Java Timezone Data Versions showed this release did not include the Australian 2008 timezone changes. Luckily Sun provides the Timezone Updater Tool to bring us up to speed.
Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped the tool, you can update a single JRE/JDK with the following command:
> java -jar tupdater.jar -U -v
This assumes the java executable is in the home you want to update (type which java to check)
As I said, there’s multiple JRE/JDK homes in the Oracle Application Server homes, so why not update them all at the one time:
> /usr/bin/find DIRPATH -fstype nfs -prune -o -fstype autofs -prune
-o -name java -print -exec {} -jar /ABSOLUTEPATH/tzupdater.jar -u \;
Then it was just a matter of bouncing the Oracle processes again.
Ta-da, the times are now correct.
Note
I did receive a number of warnings when updating the timezone. It turns out they were Solaris specific and could be ignored, eg:
Q.
I get the following message after running the TZ Updater Tool v1.1.0 on Solaris, what does it mean?
/jre/bin/java not directly found in contents file, no package resolution performed.
(May not be in PKG form, not an absolute path, or is a symlink.)
A.
This message indicates that the JDK/JRE software just updated was not part of a Solaris package. No step was necessary to update the OS with the fact that files under package management have changed, that is, jre/lib/zi directory contents. The update of the timezone data has been successful in this case.
Tags: Alesco, java, Oracle, server, technology
Navigo tweets this week
Posted by Rod Bishop in Navigo
- Social media V HR, a case from down under: rugby players tweet their selections ahead of time http://ow.ly/DuUl #
- Coach: "I had to find out what bloody Twitter was. I thought it was a new guy playing five-eighth for England." #
Navigo tweets this week
Posted by Rod Bishop in Navigo
- Belinda delivered our new advanced OrgPlus training in Adelaide today. She says it went really well! Join us in your city: http://ow.ly/zL4k #
- Three of our consultants heading to AUSOUG next week. Any exhibitors there have something excellent to share? #
Break the Speed Limitation at Mastering SAP HR/Payroll 2010
Posted by Rod Bishop in Events, Navigo
It’s confirmed!
Peter Forbes, technical director of Australian HR tech experts, Navigo, will be presenting new solutions and methodologies for succession planning in his presentation:
Break the Speed Limitation – How to Drive Faster Succession Planning Through Visualisation.
at Mastering SAP HR/Payroll 2010.
Overview:
Enterprise succession planning solutions call for detailed creation and maintenance of position competencies and skills, rendering highly comprehensive succession plans out of reach for many resource-strapped HR departments. In addition, plans with focus primarily on “boardroom bound” execs may miss opportunities to develop and motivate younger employees and mid-level managers. A method is needed that dramatically reduces the time and resource requirement associated with full-scale succession planning – We will show you how a new module attached to organisational charts can deliver this method.
- Learn the must-haves for successful succession planning
- Learn how visualisation directly reduces the burdens of succession planning
- Learn strategies to create and maintain succession plans in fast-moving environments
- Learn how analytics can deliver a more detailed, longer-term succession roadmap
- See a practical approach to add succession planning to your SAP-HR implementation
Designed for HR managers and technologists alike, this session will explore new approaches to practical succession planning, then look at the functional methods and new technologies needed to achieve it in your organisation.
Join us at Mastering SAP HR/Payroll, 1–3 March 2010 at the Novotel, Manly NSW, just down the road from our new Sydney office.
Learn more about Mastering SAP HR/Payroll online at masteringsap.com/hr
Tags: Events, Mastering SAP HR/Payroll, Navigo, succession planning
Navigo tweets this week
Posted by Rod Bishop in Navigo
- Human Capital is 70% of your Operating Expense. How do you manage that? http://ow.ly/xsZm #
The Australian HR Tech Report
Posted by Rod Bishop in Events, Navigo
- Learn how your HR technology compares with the rest of Australia
- Discover the penetration of different HR tech solutions and how well they meet HR goals
- Find how motivators and roadblocks for HR technology are influencing your peers
- Benchmark all this against organisations of like size, in your state
- Free
The Australian HR Tech Report 2010.
With the interest of shedding more light on the state of HR technology in Australia, Navigo are proud to commission the Australian HR Tech Report 2010. What is it?
- The latest, most comprehensive study on HR technology solutions in Australia
- An analysis of Australian companies with 500 employees and above
- A 5 minute phone survey to collect great HR intelligence
- To be distributed freely to hundreds of HR professionals around Australia
- Commencing 1st November 2009 to be completed 31st December 2009.
The result will be a report with unique intelligence on HR technology, that will allow you to benchmark against other organisations of your employee size, in your state. The focus will be on a variety of HR tech solutions, including the main drivers for, and roadblocks against solution improvement.
Anyone who contributes to making the report a reality – through a simple contribution to the survey – will receive the finished Australian HR Tech Report 2010 for free.
To learn more about the report, or sign up to be on the call list and receive a copy of the report for free, visit htrechreport.com.au
Tags: Events, HR Tech Report, HRIS, Navigo
Managing an Organisation’s Most Significant Cost – the Workforce
Posted by Navigo in Organisational charting
contributed by Jeff Higgins, CEO and Principal, and Grant Cooperstein, Sr. Consultant and Principal, Human Capital Management Institute
Today’s economy has finance professionals and CFOs in organisations large and small focused on efficiencies and costs. When revenue growth flattens or even declines, profit maintenance and increases must come from cost efficiencies. In most organisations, including large organisations such as the Fortune 500™, total human capital cost, also known as total cost of workforce, average nearly 70% of operating expenses (for source and definitions, see notes one and two below). While an organisation’s total cost of workforce percentage may vary, with few exceptions these costs remain the single biggest organisational expense. Given their fluid and rapidly changing nature, workforce costs are extremely difficult costs to manage and control, however organisational charts provide a surprisingly simple solution to the challenge.
Effectively controlling or managing the total cost of workforce often proves difficult because the tools for the job – budgets or approval processes when growing or layoffs when times are tough – lack the up-to-the-minute flexibility or detailed insight that companies need. Simply put, organisations lack tools with which to surgically manage, tune or optimise their workforce.
The net result is often a general inability to effectively control and manage workforce costs during growth periods. Over time, costs get out of control and management is forced to turn to their last (and not particularly attractive) line of defense – directives such as “hiring freeze”, “reduction in force” or “layoff.” The problem with layoffs it that is they are both expensive in the short term (termination costs), and potentially even more expensive in the long term if either the wrong amount of labor is cut or the wrong positions or individuals are cut.
Simply put, organisations lack tools with which to surgically manage, tune or optimise their workforce.
What seems missing from this picture is the capability of top management, finance and HR to systematically assess and surgically implement workforce cost management practices at a level below the company-wide mandate but above the individual manager level. If there were a simple way to review, evaluate and adjust workforce headcount and cost information frequently or on a near real-time basis, perhaps finance and HR could truly control workforce costs.
While there is justifiable reluctance to add yet another tool to the organisation, what if it were possible to use or expand the use of an existing tool that every organisation already has and which is specifically created to focus on and clearly illuminate workforce issues.
Organisation charts have aggregated headcount and clearly illustrated the formal supervisory structure for decades, but today’s digital technology means they can also be utilised to aggregate workforce costs and other metrics as well. With a new window into detailed workforce costs – finer than the traditional department/cost center structure – HR and finance can work together to analyse costs and proactively identify solutions to issues organisations face.
Continue to page 2…
Tags: cost management, hr reporting, metrics, Organisational charting, process improvement, workforce modelling
