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Thursday, February 28th was a really good day. Bilot met a large number of its dear customers, partners, prospects and other important constituents in the housewarming of our new facilities we now call BilotCity. Our address is still the same, but we doubled our office space to accommodate our growth. We are now also able to comfortably host solution breakfast events, innovation brunches and of course exciting parties. Many have praised the relaxed and modern style of our old office and the new part follows this same genre of urban interior design. It is functional, colorful, and albeit a biased opinion, I’d say it’s one of the ‘coolest’ offices I’ve seen.

A housewarming party was the perfect excuse to invite people over for a casual after-work occasion and it gave us also the opportunity to show our gratitude of continued collaboration. Our success is the solution of an equation which has many parts - Customers who rely on our expertise and our services, partners who help complement our promise and other business partners who support us in running our daily operations. We were altogether about 130 people and it was great to see how like-minded people were and actively mingling and exchanging thoughts and business cards and having a good time.

We also had the opportunity to take a short walk down memory lane, show the latest proceedings of Bilot and to indicate the direction in which we are heading. We explained our strategy, summarized our market environment and elaborated on what makes us a success. We tried to keep our message simple and sincere. We are true to our mission and we play an open hand with our customers and business partners. It is important for us to keep this proximity to people and organizations around us. We are not “’just another SAP and Microsoft vendor”, but a company with a personality, a company with a story to tell and a truly relevant player in this very dynamic market.

Bilot is expecting to continue strong and steady growth. Our target might seem over ambitious – we believe in our ability to reach it but we need talented people to help us. Attracting talent is not easy – retaining talent is even harder. In times of talentism, we as an employer have to bend backwards to satisfy the talents’ high expectations and provide challenges, interesting cases, good customers and an attractive career path. And an inspiring work environment. We hope to have achieved this with BilotCity.

We were happy to notice the press noticed us and we received rather wide coverage in the leading journals. And why not… A positive message is not very common these days. We are proud to take this role of letting good things go around.

Fresh thoughts from a really interesting morning discussion this week… Aida Consulting arranged a people-centric seminar where the opening context was management & leadership and what kind of trends and tensions impact them. This was narrowed down to leadership and how to best lead “Z” and “Y” generations - with a deep dive into was talent or more precisely a phenomenon dubbed talentism – as an ism, how to manage it, how to deal with it and how to coach it. Having been in professional services almost my entire career, I welcomed this choice of focus. I won’t review the whole agenda, instead I’ll carve out the bits I felt personally most relevant.

There are several macro trends amplifying talentism; demographic change, structural changes and turbulence in the economy, technological change, activity of talents themselves and internationalization.  My loose interpretation of talentism is associated with the phenomenon where talented people become the pivotal element in human resource decision making and investment – and the talented know this. The labor market, at least for the most-talented-segment has become a sellers’ market. Which underlying macro-drivers impact the talent market – the majority of the participants voted for economic and structural factors, I cast my vote more for the dynamics of the talented themselves – their aspirations and choices that affect their career moves and choice of employer. Previous experience suggests these are more prone to personal ambition, which admittedly are influenced by global trends.

Instead of these macro drivers, I would suggest that at least in professional services and in specialized companies like Bilot, who need to attract the best-of-the-best (in addition to young unpolished gems). Of course my observations are filtered through a different lens than compared to peers e.g. from entities 100x the size of Bilot or from an entirely different industry. We see some other drivers perhaps more relevant. By this I mean their continuous drive and strive for seeking new challenges that match the talents’ potential. The talents attracted to us are those who feel we can provide an environment of continuous learning and development. These puts pressure on the company as we need to stay ahead of the game at all times. We also see the need to manage talent outside of the company – this coincidently was also mentioned in the seminar as an arising trend. There is a true need to collaborate with potential recruits, students and those still wondering what they want to do “as grown-ups”.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in my view - also explains talentism. It helps us understand, that greed and self-centricity are not factors that explain the phenomenon. It is only natural that one’s appetite gets bigger when lower grade of need is satisfied. The key is that it in this case we should not see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs only as a vertical ladder – there is also a horizontal dimension. Companies who are able to understand the mind of the talented are able to attract them. Retention is then more about successful long-term career planning and in smaller companies, especially those following an aggressive growth trajectory,  organizational design and provision of suitable career paths are important.

The second keynote, was a truly inspiring and interesting living example of a leader-of-talents, Petteri Nykky, head coach of the Swiss floorball national team, decorated with two world-championships at the helm of the Finnish floorball team and bronze for the Swiss team in 2012. His approach to managing talent is clearly very humane but with a very firm grip on realities – there are no short-cuts and hard-work usually pays off. He underlined a couple of theses, which resonated well with Bilot’s mental landscape – commitment, passion, spirit and atmosphere.

At the end of the day, talented athletes are no different than talented consultants – they are not superhuman and need to set their targets high and need the support of coaching and fellow-team-mates and an appropriate psychological and mental climate to hit the targets.

Finally managed to read Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" - a best seller amongst the business books during past couple of years. If you have not read the book you might opt at least for checking out Simon's speech @ TED (www.ted.com)

For myself Bilot's "why" has been obvious already since before I joined the company - from the time when I actually used to be Bilot's customer and when Bilot was just a fresh from an owen start up that was being run by a couple of passionate guys who shared a common vision of Bilot's "why".

Traditionally many businesses use SAP and Microsoft tools to run and manage their business processes but - as we all know- too often especially SAP based solutions are blamed for being too expensive, not very usable etc. For example ask a sales guy whether he likes to use SAP and you are likely to get a no for an answer. We at Bilot believe in providing Better Business Solutions through providing our customers with Better usability, Better processes and Better information. And furthermore we believe that we can do that better than anyone else.

We believe that one actually can do things better, that it is possible for companies from small to large to enhace their businesses more efficiently and with better quality than what most of the companies are accustomed to.  Of course you need a foundation (an ERP system) to run your business processes but you can gain most benefit for your investment when implementing smart business solutions on top of your ERP processes such as business intelligence, mobility, workflows etc.

Bilot's "why" could be summarized as a passion how to help our customers to implement better business solutions. Let us show our passion and you might want us to hang around for a bit longer - that is what quite a number of companies are already doing!

In case you got interested please do contact us and why not to drop in for a cup of coffee and to talk with us how we could help you in your quest towards better business solutions!

Throughout our history, Bilot has succeeded in recruiting the best talent in the market. This year was no exception, we on-boarded both seasoned experts as well as young talents – a total of about 30 new ‘bilots’.

Part of our mission to locate new talent is also to meet future young professionals before they graduate and try to paint them a realistic picture of our changing industry which they are likely to join once they graduate. It is important for them to connect their academia to a true business context. This helps boost motivation, helps choose their areas of expertise and also assists them navigate the sea of countless potential employers.

We have had the privilege to having been regularly invited by various schools and universities to be spokespersons for this important cause. I have been doing this a couple of times back in the day and now again just recently at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Aalto University is up next in a month or so.

The key messages we convey relate to how ICT is an enabler of business, how ICT is often in the nucleus of business transformation and how this makes this industry a really exciting employer for a large variety of different skill-sets. In Bilot’s case, the true-life examples are often found really interesting because of their technological innovativeness and topical relevance. Depending on the audience, we either apply broader optics and discuss industry trends or emphasize a specific area of our own strategic focus areas e.g. BI & Analytics, Mobile solutions etc.

It is recent statistical fact (Federation of Finnish Technology Industries) that the software industry is doing well what comes to continued increase in job vacancies. But the industry is in the midst of massive transformation.

The Ministry of Employment and the Economy has set up a high-level expert committee chaired by Chairman of the Board Pekka Ala-Pietilä (ex-Nokia SVP) to evaluate structural change and growth potential of the ICT industry. The committee is expected to come up with innovative ideas on driving employment of surplus staff, drivers for entrepreneurship, and attracting foreign investment to Finland.

The students we meet are naturally part of this same equation and we are proud to be part of this transformation. It is largely about giving real-life examples and showing how the skills they learn can be applied. And we genuinely believe that sustainable competitiveness in the ICT industry and Finnish “innovation acumen” are one of the most important future assets we have - and it is the responsibility of us “veterans” to help those who are just starting their careers.