We did it! We achieved our goal! My friends managed to keep me company until km 25 and I finished the marathon alongside 10,162 runners.

What’s more we had fun doing it, enjoying Madrid all around the race course. My friends finished so well that they commented, over well-deserved beers after the race, that next year they’d do the whole thing with me. They were euphoric and hyper motivated; the marathon spirit had invaded them and even some dared to propose to cover the distance in another marathon closer in time.

Photograph by Nacho Jiménez

Now I’d like to analyze with you the motivating factors that can drive all these people, including myself, and the analogy between these motivating factors and employee motivation within companies. Runners who on average spend four to five months training and prepping for a one-day race, going out to run in any climatic conditions, more often alone, paying to run, knowing that they may be among the 30% who won’t finish or the 15% who abandon on the wayside because of injuries sustained during the preparation, and knowing they will not win… Running is one of the most accessible and comfortable sports to practice; all it takes is to put on the right shoes, a t-shirt and sweat pants, then go. Investment is minimal and it doesn’t require any fixed timetable and it can be done any time of the day. That’s why it is one of the easiest sports to adapt to your other personal and professional activities. The latter was the main reason why I started to run, my numerous business trips blocked me from other team sports or taking up an activity that required a fixed time or place.

If we extrapolate to the business world, can we put in measures to make an employee’s working life more comfortable and easier, reconciling personal and professional lives and yet achieving increased productivity? If we manage to apply the technology we have at hand today, it’s possible. Technology allows us to create more intuitive and configurable work tools with completely automated and intelligent processes, with faster access from anywhere anytime and any device, allowing employees to telework part-time or full time.

Ever since I started to run, I have quite independently set myself personal objectives as an amateur long distance runner. Form my first ever goal to run more than half an hour continuously, to the last one I set last year to finish a marathon under 4 hours while maintaining a constant rhythm, enjoying the entire race course and finishing with the energy to celebrate.

Over the first five years, my evolution was very fast because I ran races accompanied by friends who had been running for longer and they had already achieved every one of the goals I had set myself. Their experience, advice and my own personal motivation to achieve what they had done beforehand helped me to achieve whatever I was setting myself.

The following three years I stagnated and even began to do worse times, and I stopped running classic races due to a lack of motivation. I trained and ran alone and didn’t enjoy it in the same way as before or like now.

Over the last two years, friends have been joining me while training and in races—friends with less experience than I who wanted to progress and grow with me. Their desire to achieve the objectives I had surpassed has motivated me to train better, above all to go out and train more in a group. They have also proposed some changes in training sessions and they have proposed to run new races which have made me improve my times in shorter and mid-distance races and they have helped me to finish the marathon in the time I had planned in good conditions.

I am telling you all this because other motivating factors I think can be mapped onto the work environment are autonomy and team work. If we can engage employees to set their own objectives, with the same independence as a runner, based on some overall goals aligned with the company’s strategy, and we give them autonomy to achieve them, we will give the employee a sense of being in charge, responsibility and commitment over the daily tasks and goals set. We all like to learn and surpass ourselves, and more so, when this has been of our own initiative. In addition, this freedom makes something flow that brings much value to companies in these difficult times—our creativity, our ideas for improving the business, engagement, and commitment to the company. What’s more, if we manage to make this individual form part of a team and we detect that they want or propose the same goals and motivations, this spurs a multiplying effect in efficiency and productivity on the job individually—just like I did, by getting involved with my friends in the marathon as a shared project. And what if we gave any employee the chance to participate in an on-going project, or to propose a project, and we assess whether to provide the tools and let this individual pick the team of choice?

Let’s dig in further into the issue of an employee’s individual growth. What if we open up the development plans of a company, and we make it possible for any employee to opt for any position even if it is not in their personal career path? Does it make sense to review the career path of each employee every once in a while, taking into consideration the expertise and competencies acquired in this period of time? What about publishing and offering the option to allow any employee to sign up for a course he or she may be interested in even though it’s targeted to staff from another department? And what of giving the option to employees to propose other kinds of training courses they may be interested in receiving?

Daniel Pink, writer, lecturer and work dynamics specialist states that if we learn to help employees to grow individually, as they attain their goals, the work environment will improve significantly. They will work more efficiently and there will be a virtuous circle created. I completely agree. My individual growth as a runner has improved the atmosphere in the group of runners we created and this has also resulted in an exponential growth of the entire group. At the same time, the growth of my group fed the individual and group growth of all other runners in each race, spiraling in such a way that each runner independently and autonomously set his or her own limits.

I would also like to talk about personal recognition and that from others as a motivational factor. When I run and achieve the goals I set myself, I have an indescribable sense of wellbeing. All efforts have borne fruit. I feel good because I have achieved the goals I set myself—goals I thought were unattainable a while back. I am still savoring this wellbeing from running the marathon a few days ago. There’s also is recognition from others, the unconditional support from the people out on the streets cheering me at each race. In the last one, I was overwhelmed to see a man begging at the doors of a supermarket, forget about his condition for a few hours, and instead, relentlessly cheer runners and enjoy the party. Likewise the recognition stemming from the congratulations from your friends, loved ones, work colleagues and acquaintances on reaching goals. All this makes my self-esteem and capacity to surpass myself rise to other challenges in life.

In the working world, recognition for work well done is very important. We have to value the efforts taken and compensate as far as possible. A simple private or public congratulations or gesture of appreciation may be enough to reinforce the trust of our employees and boost their motivations to achieve new goals.

Here I leave you, I have to prepare a presentation for the inauguration of a training plan targeted at young graduates who are currently doing an HR masters degree and want to enter the labor force—future HR professionals, who are increasingly better prepared, by the looks of their resumes. I shall start as always, focusing on the person, and the rest we will build together. The most important thing is the individual people above companies, organizations, governments, countries and the famous venture capital funds. And as always, it’s people who will ensure through their efforts that everything improves over time, and we can motivate many more employees who do not currently have even the chance to work.

For people who believe in people, reporting from the Retiro Park in Madrid whilst enjoying the ambience as I write this article, your humble servant who continues to believe in you.

Pedro A. Dávila

Services Manager at Meta4

To ensure the project success my experience tells me that it is necessary to guarantee the work effectiveness of each person and empower their good skills and abilities not only individually but also collectively. Furthermore, the key to start the project is BUILDING A TEAM.

The first step in building a team is to identify the team members together with the client. In principle, most of the tasks will be undertaken by the HR department, our usual partner, although the professionals of this area will work in a collaborative way with other areas: IT, finance, external consultants, sponsors, etc.

Therefore, it is very important that the various representatives of these areas feel as true members of the team and HR  should also recognize them as team members. They should be able to achieve the project goals working together.

Once team members have been identified,   team building activities should be performed before starting the project. We can’t take for granted that a group of people form a team per se, moreover when they have never worked together before.

Some project managers have the wrong idea that team building activities are a waste of time, but these sessions   conducted at the right time have been proven to be effective for cost reduction and time saving. During these sessions, the team develops various skills in a different environment to the workplace and they will  facilitate the work to be done during the project. Some of these skills are the following:

• Flexible thinking: respect others’ ideas/opinions
• Improve team communication
• Ability to solve problems inside the team
• Recognition of team member contributions
• Develop trust in the group
• Develop motivation and commitment in the group

The best team-building experience I have gone through was during the phase prior to the start of a new Global HR Project with a North European customer. The activities took place in Sweden and representatives from 6 different countries attended the meeting.

Given the global scope of the project, team building techniques had to address additional challenges such as having members of different countries within the team,  with cultural differences, speaking different languages and different ways of working or a different notion of the key concepts for the project success such as deadlines dates or punctuality.

The learning process for these aspects was really smooth during the team building activities. It  allowed us to avoid a lot of barriers that often are detected too late: normally, when the project is already up and running.

After a city treasure hunting, cooking sessions and other team building techniques, together we were able to create a real team and we were all motivated to start working together regardless of our geographical, cultural and professional differences. The result… the project was a complete success!

Marta Moreno

HR Consultant at Meta4

I’ve been feeling quite optimistic lately about the state of HR technology, which is quite a good feeling.  For most of my career, I’ve been frustrated by less than great software and less than great adoption of the best available software, but now there are multiple reasons for optimism on both fronts…

Intro to Talent Management Software, by Sarah White, HR Tech Blog

Talent management software according to a recent Forbes Magazine article by Josh Bersin, “has now become a mandatory part of corporate HR infrastructure.”  In just a few years technology that was seen as a ‘nice to have’ or  even ‘unnecessary’ addition to corporate human resources have become indispensable to Fortune 500 in today’s highly connected talent marketplace…

The HR Department of 2020: 6 Bold Predictions, by Erin Osterhaus, The New Talent Times

Without a doubt, software is changing how HR functions. But rather than spell the end of the human resources function, the nine experts I interviewed predict these changes will provide growth opportunities for HR professionals. This article lays out what will change and why, as well as how HR professionals can prepare…

Harness the Power of Visioning to Be a Better Leader, by Dr. Robert Hewes, Training Mag

How to become a better leader? There are many ways to go about it. A good place to start is a specific leadership competency focused on the big picture of what you do. Start at the beginning with visioning—where are you going? Great leaders are able to paint a compelling vision. They know where they are going and then they work to get there. They motivate others to do the same. And, finally, they use it to guide work and make choices about activity. Sounds simple, but in practice, it is anything but that….

Game on for Employee Gamification, by Jody Ordioni, Ere.Net

While within the HR community gamification is still catching on (I find a number of my clients don’t even know recognize the word) gaming, in all forms, is incredibly popular. When the latest Call of Duty video game was released in November, one in four workers planned to call in sick. Look at it from a productivity standpoint: The amount of hours it took to create all of Wikipedia’s content in 12 years … is spent every three weeks playing Angry Birds…

3 Cutting Edge Talent Management Practices From Silicon Valley , by Dr. John Sullivan, TNLT.com

Anyone who tracks advanced trends in talent management knows that many of them originated in the Silicon Valley. However, you probably also know that many of the publicized practices that start in the Silicon Valley are so unique and outrageous (like the free Sweets Shop that is part ice cream parlor and bakery at Facebook), that no firm outside of the Valley ever copies them. The three Silicon Valley practices that I am highlighting probably won’t require immediate action at your firm simply because they are so bold and outrageous that conservative talent managers will not even consider them. As a result, I am labeling them “leading edge practices that you should simply be aware of.”

Selection by Fernando Juste and Carolina Reynoso 

Not so long ago, companies brought in niche software that covered a medley of requirements. Initially these applications just managed Personnel Administration and little else. Then others came along to address more specific requirements. But neither of these satisfied the needs of a company wanting to grow, particularly if they wanted to expand beyond their borders.

Today, we have reached a level of complexity in both companies and the business world that makes it increasingly difficult to successfully manage people. Currently companies are demanding integrated solutions or software packages that support human capital strategies. It is no longer sufficient for managers to come up with a strategic plan to achieve the corporate objectives, nor that this be implemented across all departments, except that of Human Resources, the typical scenario today. Now it is absolutely vital that strategic planning permeates through to Human Resources departments, so that they can analyze and detect areas of improvements and identify the future needs to be covered.

This does not stop here. It would seem that a software package managed solely by the HR department, is not enough either, however powerful it may be. More and more managers need to proactively control their assigned human resources or team players. Research has now been redirected towards a software line that lets managers supervise their teams through an intelligent application. By intelligent, I mean the capacity the software has for generating, analyzing and most importantly interpreting information to come up with valuable suggestions for next actions and tasks, not considered previously to ensure that the best possible decisions are made.

 The current software, even the most powerful packages are weak, when it comes to interpreting all the information produced. They are capable of generating thousands of tables, graphics, and analytics, but quite unable to interpret this information meaningfully to guide their users through effective decision making processes.

Just where the capacity of these software packages fall short, is right where the need for intelligent processes to support decision making comes to the fore. Offering managers the possible paths to investigate, not just taking into consideration the challenges for the company but also other mission critical variables for the business, such as the macroeconomic situation. In other words, we are talking of software that helps us pre-empt our future needs to make the best decisions thanks to this ability to anticipate ahead of time.

So, what should intelligent software do? Several elements are absolutely fundamental—generate information on the degree of talent loss, the state of the available talent pool, the degree of workforce motivation, the risk of future talent leaks, succession management, and so on. It is crucial that these applications generate the required analyses for making the right correlations and comparisons. Other external factors outside companies should also be accounted for, such as the talent gap or the economical turn downs.

What is even more important is to do what has hitherto been unfathomable until now. To be able to anticipate the future before it comes through the ability to come up with decision-making paths for us to explore, helps us better evaluate the situation. Putting it in another way, generating suggestions for possible actions to take provides managers with the capacity to make the best possible decisions without either requiring prior knowledge of human resources management or undertaking complementary training. The future lies in leveraging the business knowledge a manager possesses together with this pre-emptive functionality made available through this sort of software.

Workforce planning plays a key role in human resources management. The success of companies of the future depends to a large extent, if not entirely, on the capacity these have for evaluating their talent needs and building a plan of action to cover these in the most efficient way possible. Intelligent software is a crucial cornerstone to help us achieve these objectives.

Juan Armada

Global SaaS HR Sales Director at Meta4

 

Just like all other years, this Sunday I will run the Madrid marathon. I am going to tell you what happened to me five years ago on a day like this….

27 April 2008, 7.15 a.m. The alarm clock went off like all working days, except today was Sunday: Nonetheless I still get up at the same time, the reason being I am going to run part of the Madrid marathon like I did last year.

This year I have decided to withdraw from the race after 28 kilometers, close to the Lago metro station. It never occurred to me to finish the marathon—although I run once or twice a week and play team sports that round out my practice—I think it’s crazy to run a little over 42 kilometers without stopping mentally or physically.

8.20 a.m. I exit the metro and walk towards the start line of the race. As this time I am unaccompanied I begin to take in my surroundings. Thousands of runners of all ages, Spanish cities, countries and cultures all intermingle. I notice that the runner profile is different from the usual one of other shorter races. The average age is higher, and judging from their clothes and behavior, I reckon they have been running for years. The atmosphere is very relaxed, as if all runners were on their way to a party. Many greet one another; they must know each other from other races. A Brazilian starts to talk to me and soon a Mexican, an Andalucian, a Canadian and a Madrileño join in. Time passes and before I know it, the gun goes off and the race commences.

9.00 a.m. The marathon is in full swing. The first 10 kilometers go by quickly for me. The good vibes other runners transmit make me feel an indescribable sense of wellbeing. There are runners who even talk while running, these first kilometers are about warming up and getting into it. There’s still a long way to go in the race and it must be taken in stride. I go at my pace but I begin to feel that 4,000 people running and others cheering all keep me company.

Photograph by Nacho Jiménez

10.15 a.m. Km 15. I am on the street called Guzmán el Bueno. I start to feel tired and my right knee hurts a little, but for now it is just a mild pain. Km 17. The pain disappears when I hook up with what I call the magical stretch, the one that covers the Fuencarral, Gran Vía, Preciados, Mayor and Bailén streets. Here everything changes, beautiful buildings, the shops, the bustle of the neighboring streets, cheering crowds of intermingling locals and foreigners, a totally blue sky. All in all, the life MADRID exudes bumps up my adrenaline, spiking my emotions and making me fly. 

From this moment onwards, several events turn around my initial race goal: I look to my side, feel the fatigued pant of a runner, someone around 60 years of age. I notice he is going to trip over a bollard and I grab him so he doesn’t stumble. He gives me a look of thanks that I shall never forget. A trio of runners overtakes me and I notice that the one in the middle has a missing arm; I see that the other runners are on either side of him to make sure he doesn’t lose his balance. I catch up with a blind person who is tied to the hand of another runner who guides him; surprisingly the blind person is egging on the guide because he is having a hard time. The heat makes itself felt, I need more Vaseline to make sure I don’t get sores from chaffing clothes and I don’t know how to get it. Suddenly an “angel” on rollerblades appears with Reflex muscle spray and Vaseline. I am given a little and in passing, sprayed on the knee, this angel was none other than one of the volunteers who help during the race.

And that’s how I reached l Km 28, the point I was going to withdraw from the race, but I find myself with some reserves and I begin to see nearby many more people worse off than me who continue onwards. After what I have been through on the race course so far, I feel I can’t abandon them and I decide to continue…

12.00 noon. Km 30. I am beginning to feel I don’t have any energy left, here comes the so called marathon “barrier or wall”, the moment when energy bottoms out and the psychological preparation must kick in. I then start to think of the runners I encountered and their challenges, and this spurs me sufficiently to carry on from beverage to beverage without weakening until the finish line. On either side, the crowds are cheering, my emotions begin to surface again and I can’t hold back the tears as I cross the finish line….I did it! Other runners and I spontaneously hug one another—runners I don’t know except for one, the veteran I had helped, came up and effusively hugged me…

28 April 2008, 11.00 a.m. I’m back on the job. To get here, I had to take the lift. Yes, this time the stairs were an insurmountable barrier in the aftermath of the marathon. A colleague who heard I had done the marathon comes up to me and asks, “I’ve been told you did the marathon. What time did you do? How did you rank?” At that point I realize that I never once looked at my watch during the race, not even at the finish line. And I can’t check my position because I didn’t wear a number as I hadn’t planned on finishing, and that’s why I didn’t even sign up for the race. I have always been very competitive in any sport and yet on this occasion I didn’t care about time or rank. This is the marathon, so as the war cry of a basketball fan declares, “We’re only here to have fun and we don’t care about results.”

And that is how I ran my first ever marathon. Since then I never miss the annual event. This Sunday I will try to run it again. This time, four friends will join me, and like me five years ago, they don’t plan on finishing it. What none realize is that perhaps some will one day run the complete course.

This experience made me reflect upon what can motivate all these people to train for the marathon and the analogy that can be drawn between these motivating factors and employee motivation within companies.

Values like team work, autonomy, objectives fixed by the individual, the atmosphere, commitment, the capacity to surpass oneself, lateral thinking or recognition are what make this miracle happen. In the next article, I’ll tell you how I think these values can be extrapolated to employee motivation.

I’ll leave you now, I have to go and do my last training session before the race, just thinking about it makes my hairs stand on end, and more so, knowing that I will be emotional right at the start during the one minute of silence we will observe for our fellow Boston marathonians.

Cheers,

Pedro A. Dávila

Services Manager at Meta4

She is not the only one who is incredulous at the mention of those seemingly prehistoric objects. When I started at Meta4 – 15 years ago, one of my managers always started his presales speeches talking about the evolution of technology. From punchcards, mainfraime, client–server to the World Wide Web. “Do you remember when many if not most computer programmers created, edited and stored their programs line by line on punched cards? He used to ask.

Punch card. Source: http://www.eui.upm.es/

As much as I wanted to know how those curious cards worked, I never really understood what he was talking about, and to be honest, I never really cared. For what reason should I? There was already something much more advanced when I started my professional career. Something that was more productive and usable. Since then, things have changed a lot and now I find myself trying to explain to the newer generations that back then I couldn’t do a remote demo, I had to travel to the client’s office to demonstrate the products capabilities. Obviously this did not help when it came to multinational clients. Today an internet connection is enough, saving time and money, and I would find it difficult to explain to the younger consultants of the company, what life was like without web conferencing tools, web e-mail communication or social networks.

The change for HR departments has also been astonishing. Back then in many businesses self-service was just at its initial state, when asking for holidays, still was a paper based process and you were given a printed payslip at the end of the month. Today, everything is automated: you can manage absences, view your remaining entitlement and bank holidays or review and approve pending tasks from anywhere in the world via your mobile device. Not to mention when you are searching for a job, recruitment has gone a long way: where have those orange “job offer” pages in a Newspaper gone? Now everything is done online with the information available in social networks and directly integrated into the HCM application.

Evidently, the Social – Web born generations have not known the process that has taken place to get to where we are today, and it will be hard for them to understand when we refer to a cassette a floppy disk or a diskette… and won’t care.

Nobody will accept more complexity. This is the reason why for the innovation processes it is so important not to be tied to the past. In the technology sectors and in our business, the real evolutionary and creative capacity can only happen if we make an effort to forget what we knew and always develop things from the perspective of the latest generation, or thinking about the next one. Then we will be one step ahead of the market.

Let’s not put ourselves barriers based on what we know today and we know is safe, the future of intelligent technology will go far beyond mobility, Big Data or Cloud Computing. To innovate we must have the perspective of our children in mind. This video shared some time ago in YouTube may give you some food for thought. Enjoy what the technology can do for us!

Bettina Rodríguez

Corporate Marketing Manager at Meta4

When we speak of “social recruiting”, we are referring to two processes: the active search of “employability” profiles in social networks and the use of social platforms to post job openings in the company. But there is another aspect of “Social Recruiting” that is less talked about, but that it is also quite relevant: the “social networking”. This means asking the employees to help disseminate new job opportunities in the company in their social networks. Actually, personal contacts have always been the first way to spread a vacancy. The gradual evolution of companies like social networking and true shared knowledge communities promises a significant development of the “social networking HR world”.

Besides the obvious practical benefits, employees who find their jobs through their connections-including social networks-, are more satisfied with their jobs than those who do it through Job Boards, as shown by a study conducted by ” The A-List “(a 60% satisfaction of the first compared to the 40% of the latter). The same study also showed that the former were less likely to leave their current job (12.8% vs. 19.3% among 136 companies studied.).

Here you have an infographic showing the “social networking” applied to HR high capacity of diffusion:

Infographic by Clientelica

Carolina Reynoso

Social Media Strategist at Meta4

Recently while I was documenting the phenomenon of gamification to use it to reduce an employee’s learning curve for a given tool, I came across a book titled “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers” by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.

The book proposes that as we gradually change from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy, workers also need to change the way they do their tasks: it is no longer enough to cover the needs of a perfectly defined job with some clear and concise responsabilities. The knowledge worker must be creative, innovate, surprise—we cannot defend ourselves with the classic excuse, “Oh, I am not a creative person” any more.

To tackle this, the authors took on the task of gathering methods and practices that imaginative people in top organizations use in their creative process and package them into a meaningful way for those of us who do not feel as creative, so we can put them into practice. The result was 83 games designed to stimulate creativity (the number of games continue to grow on the web page created for that purpose: Gogamestorm).Using these games to help our creative process requires three phases that are clearly differentiated during the game:

• Opening, where the conditions of the game and the goal are set out.
• Exploring, during which the game really takes place, developing and evolving the different questions that have emerged from the opening phase.
• Closing, which must serve to pull together all the elements covered. Possibly the conclusion leads us to decide that this is not the route we wanted to take, but it is important to always close.

One of the key arguments for activiating the creative process during the game must be the goal itself. This must be sufficiently nebulous to ensure players do not see a clear path to resolution based on their work experience, but sufficiently specfic to lead to an outcome which improves the current situation with a new solution.

The goal confers us the vision that the game driver and organizer has in mind, but it doesn’t give much information on the players’ impressions. Having participated in many badly carried out brainstorming sessions where shared ideas are openly criticized, I see gamestorming as an option that gives me more ways to engage people and to avoid falling into the trap of yet another kind of unstructured sessions.

I’ll tell you more, once I manage to put into practice some of the games suggested in the book, and also the results achieved.

Alfonso Mazariegos

HRIS consultant at Meta4

<< Demystifying multitenancy I: The technology behind a multitenant system

When the simplicity became complex

After more than 15 years developing multitenant technologies I’ve come across many situations where developing new technological features became complex due to the dependency of external technologies that lack a multitenant design. I think I can provide a good example that illustrates this situation. Some years ago I faced the problem of extending the Java runtime to support multitenant features.

Isolating collisions between different client instances

Java is a powerful language and comes with a rich runtime library and a vast internet support. Nevertheless if you try to use java in a multitenant environment you’ll face quickly some hard problems. One   is the way   Java handles the object instances. If you load an object (or a class) this object will be in the RAM memory forever. Now, let’s imagine that a customer of the multitenant environment loads a class called “A” that conflict with the class “A” used by another customer. A good multitenant technology should isolate such collisions in a way that any resource defined or used by a client (Java or not) never conflict with that of another customer. So we’ve had to expand the core loader of the Java runtime to support many classes loaded at a time, even with different versions of the same class. It was hard work, but the result has been very important to support many other new features based on Java technology.  From the end user perspective, it seems very simple and we can implement many other new technologies based on the new multitenant Java runtime environment. The complexity was absorbed by the multitenant technology, working behind the scenes to  simplify the end user tasks.

Managing evolution trough object inheritance

To understand how this complexity works, let’s imagine a global process implemented using an object called ‘ParentObject’. You can inherit this object and adjust it to create a slightly different, but new process. Let’s call this new object ‘ChildObject’. The multitenant technology will replace for a particular customer any instance of the parent object to the child one. So the developer doesn’t have to write a single line of code to replace and use the new behavior. It’s a simple configuration.

Inheritance, in this context, means that if you don’t change the new inherited or ChildObject it will behave exactly as the parent one. If you change a small piece in your new “ChildObject”, that small piece will be exclusive to the child but all the other features will be like the original one. This means that any change applied in a normal maintenance cycle will be merged into your child object in a transparent way. No manual merging, errors, etc. You could also think that you might have more than one level or inheritance. This mechanism saves time and money while maintaining the platform stability.

 You can also apply the same concept to other elements of the architecture like data or security.

Easy configuration and maintenance from the multitenant platform  

Now suppose we’d like to replace the ParentObjet with the new ChildObjet only for some of our customers, but we know that there are hundreds of other processes used by these customers that depend on the ParentObject. In theory, we should change all these processes to use the new ChildObject instead of pointing to the ParentObject. A first-class technology should come with a simple mechanism to handle this behaviour and be able of performing a rollback if required.

In a multitenant environment customers use processes to complete tasks. In our case we map one process to one ‘Object’. This has many advantages. Objects, from a computational point of view, aggregate several properties that are very convenient if applied in a multitenant environment. Maintenance is one.. If you use a standard process or object from the multitenant platform you know that any update from the core technology will be automatically available to you. But what if you have to ‘tune’ a bit this process to match a specific requirement in your company? You could, of course, copy & paste the object and overwrite it. The problem is obvious: you will be alone to maintain it. However, as it is an object, you could inherit it from the original one.

 Like I’ve said, multitenant technology + object orientation saves time and money.

 In the next article we will show all this working together from a HR System perspective and the direct impact it has in terms ofeffort and cost.

GLOSSARY

Multitenancy: Multitenancy refers to a principle in software architecture where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations (tenants). Multitenancy is contrasted with a multi-instance architecture where separate software instances (or hardware systems) are set up for different client organizations. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to virtually partition its data and configuration, and each client organization works with a customized virtual application instance. (Wikipedia)

Java: Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented computer programming language that is specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers “write once, run anywhere” (WORA), meaning that code that runs on one platform does not need to be recompiled to run on another. (Wikipedia)

Java Runtime Library: The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is a set of software tools for development of Java applications. It combines the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), platform core classes and supporting libraries. JRE is part of the Java Development Kit (JDK), but can be downloaded separately. JRE was originally developed by Sun Microsystems Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. (Technopedia)

Objects: Objects in “object-oriented programming” are essentially data structures together with their associated processing routines. For instance, a file is an object: a collection of data and the associated read and write routines. Objects are considered instances of classes. In common speech one refers to a file as a class, while the file is the object. A class defines properties and behaviour once, usually for multiple instantiations. This distinction has its counterparts in other disciplines, for example in biology and evolution ^[1] and is known as the genus/species dichotomy. (Wikipedia)

Classes: A class specifies the design of an object. It states what data an object can hold and the way it can behave when using the data. Java.about.com

Instance: An instance method defines behaviors of objects. A static method does not define object behavior, but is defined inside a class. (Wikipedia)

Parent Object: An object in which another object resides. For example, a folder is a parent object in which a file, or child object, resides. An object can be both a parent and a child object. For example, a subfolder that contains files is both the child of the parent folder and the parent folder of the files.

Child Object: An object than resides in a Parent Object, and inherits some of its characteristics.

Eduardo Fernandes

Technology Chief Architect at Meta4