In this week's Three To See: the CHRO/CIO connexion, incentives for all and social graphs.

The clip below of Tim Ringo, Global Human Capital Management Leader for IBM, featured in The Man behind crowdsourcing IBM's workforce on the Crowd Source Capital blog.

Ringo makes some interesting comments on the interplay between the CHRO and CIO, the role of HR and the increasing use of specialist solutions for talent acquisition and management.

My next pick is Paul Hebert's post to Incentive Intelligence: Incentives Aren't Just For Sales.

Hebert shares the chart below as a primer for achieving particular business outcomes by inciting the desired behaviours of people in a range of roles - not solely through sales people hitting sales targets.

In the post he says:

"Your expertise in understanding your company and the costs and revenues that drive your profitability aligned with an understanding of how to influence behavior correctly (that’s a key word – don’t skip over it) can have a huge impact on your business bottom line.

Don’t assume that sales is the only place where incentives can have an impact.  Review the chart and ask yourself – “Are you doing anything in any of the areas other than sales to positively impact behavior?”"

My final pick is from the Fistful of Talent blogging community.  Social Graphs - Soon-to-be Breakthrough Coming to a Recruiting Team Near You by Josh Letourneau is a superb exploration of social mapping as a way of identifying and then soliciting talent.

The post contains links to some great reference material and insightful comment - such as this statement that I think helps to describe the difference between social media and social networking:

"it's not the person or where they 'hang out', congregate, or lurk on the web that matters - rather, it's their pattern of connections, and more importantly, how and who they connect with online."

Letourneau ends on the point below:

"Now, I'm not suggesting that passive identification of other A-players through the strength of their ties is a fool-proof magic-bullet to solve all of Recruiting's woes.  However, I will go on record to say that this technique is much more offensively aggressive than hoping A-players make employee referrals on their own."

What do you think?

This week's Three To Read has an unashamedly techie bias with a look at how HR is using technology to tackle its Service Delivery priorities, a post on Enterprise 2.0 - the buzzword for institutional use of social media - and a timely guide to technology jargon past and present.

According to research by Towers Perrin, more than 60% of organisations are intending to maintain, or increase spending on HR technology in 2009.  In the post Has the Financial Crisis Shifted HR's Priorities, Towers Perrin go on to assert that Talent and Performance management systems are the number one priority, with a number of other service delivery issues following closely behind, as illustrated in the chart below:

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet shared his views on why social networking tools will go enterprise: All your employees are using them.  The post draws on Forrester's Third Annual Social Technographics Profile which indicates that more than 80% of US internet users are now active in social media.  Dignan points to the table below showing the social activities of users and suggests that we're close to the tipping point where the use of social tools in the workplace becomes inevitable.

What I find interesting when looking at these studies side by side is that the use of social tools is not featured in HR's current list of priorities, despite the hype surrounding them.  Perhaps Gartners forecast that mainstream adoption of 'social' in Human Capital Management (HCM) is 5 to 10 years away helps to explain this?

To finish off this week I've found something for those of us feeling overwhelmed by talk of virtual desktops, VoIP and 'the cloud'.  Carolyn Duffy Marsan's post 12 words you can never say in the office is a helpful way of 'joining the dots' on technologies old and new.

I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more please browse my bookmarks.

I was at Enhance Media's '2009 - The Year Ahead' conference last week.  It was another good day attended by around 300 delegates from Search & Selection firms, online media and job boards and a few employers listening to talks by representatives from the likes of You Tube, Work Circle, Revenue Science and Tim Forster from PWC who talked about PWC People  and their experience of using blogs as part of the attraction and self-selection process.

Some of the presentations were mind blowing and others an easy entry point into a much more complicated world.  Indeed one of the latter dealt with cloud computing - hailed by the digerati as the next big thing but baffling to most.  So what is it?

At the most basic level, the cloud is the internet.  Cloud computing is the ability to carry out functions or processes over the internet using applications (apps) that are hosted remotely and data that is stored remotely.

In the  next level up, cloud computing gives individuals the ability to build a customised tool to support a process or experience by stitching together a series of applications where data is shared and presenting them through a browser.  A great example of this would be the use of mini apps such as gadgets or widgets on Facebook or iGoogle or, on a grander scale, Google Apps or Salesforce App Exchange.  

One of the speakers at the conference talked about the ability to use cloud computing techniques to quickly pull together elements of a recruitment website from different applications to provide a content and feature rich microsite for potential candidates.

The other aspect of the cloud then, is the way that people use it.  The internet has evolved into a much more interactive space - the rise of social media like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr means that its not just the way that applications and data are accessed or presented that has changed, the way that people use them or repurpose the outputs has changed too.     

The social element is important.  As each individual has the opportunity to draw on multiple sources of content and to generate their own by contributing their thoughts the cloud becomes a fragmented place with infinite possibilities.

It seems therefore, that referring to this opaque environment as the cloud is suitably descriptive for the consumer, user and boffin alike.