For those of you who don't know, Jen Dole has joined the team at 3Sixty Insights as director and principal analyst to dive deep into talent management. Jen and I go back a little bit. The week before last, at HR Technology Conference & Expo, was the first time we saw each other face to face since the first time she and I met. When was that? It was when we were both at Cornerstone. Working in different divisions, we ran into each other at LAX on our way to the company's 20th anniversary celebration in Palm Springs, Calif., and got to chatting. Later, Jen and I began to talk shop a bit more after she joined Fuel50, which is where she was most recently. Before pivoting to working for vendors of technology for human capital management, where she focused on client success, Jen was a practitioner in HR — at Fortune 500 firms, no less. And she was there in the bad old days, when technology for HCM was relatively new, especially for talent management. She tells the story of running succession planning on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets at Liberty Mutual Insurance. It was a slow, tedious exercise in administration, and her job changed profoundly once her team finally got ahold of technology purpose-built for this. "I went from being an administrator to being a strategic adviser, because I wasn't focused on collecting data anymore. The technology was doing that." It's an idea taking hold. More than once earlier this month, at the event, Jen and I heard various renditions of the the idea: access to readily available, current data on the workforce is key to HR's transforming itself into a strategic advisor to organizational leadership. As the focus, data can orientate even the most administratively hampered HR departments in the direction of the future of work. And what is the fast-developing, primary dynamic going to be in the future of work? The focus has shifted fundamentally, already, to the employee experience. All anyone had to do was look at the themes of the booths in the expo hall and speak with the vendors and HR professionals in attendance: this train has left the station. As Jen likes to say, and I'm paraphrasing, "People's definition of success has changed, and employers need to align their definition with this if they want to succeed, too." Agreed. And this isn't just an aspirational HR-centric phenomenon anymore. We see C-suite executives, boards, line managers and just about everyone else clamoring to move in this direction, too. It's almost as if the wake-up call of a worldwide pandemic jolted everyone into acknowledging that organizations are made up of people. Who knew? I'm thinking about calling it the rise of the sentient organization. The state of the art in technology for HCM is helping us to listen. We heard plenty of other terms and phrases uttered often at the event: artificial intelligence, intelligent enterprise, FOMO (fear of missing out), empathy, and more. And, in contrast with HR Tech events of years' past, there were some terms and phrases we didn't hear all that much. Automation is one. What are some others? Watch the podcast. It is a real pleasure to have Jen on our team. We cannot wait to speak with as many of you as humanly possible and learn as much as we can about your thoughts about and experiences in HCM.