The Turn: What Can HR Learn From the World's Biggest HR Tech Transformation?
There are lessons already emerging from the U.S.government's system consolidation
Welcome back U.S. readers from the long holiday weekend. While you were busy celebrating the big 250 with food invented in Germany and fireworks invented in China, the federal government was gearing up to consolidate the 100+ HR systems that they are responsible for.
Hopefully it won’t take 250 years.
The Office of Personnel Management awarded a contract to Oracle to the tune of 400 or so million freedom dollars to overhaul and consolidate the HR tech mess at the federal level into one unified system. The ten-year project could eventually hit $1 billion, and I’d guess that might be very conservative.
I wrote about it all on Reworked last week.
There is, of course, drama about the award itself. Initially, Workday was picked more than a year ago via a no-bid contract. That seemed just a little suspect. Of course, Oracle is as suspect of choice with co-founder Larry Ellison on the president’s tech advisory council.
But let’s put all of that aside for a second. As hard as it may be, let’s also put aside the severe doubts I have that the OPM and Oracle can do this as well as promised. Time will tell but bringing together these systems will be painful and will have to not be torpedoed by multiple presidential administrations.
Instead, I played it straight and I offer four universal truths for HR leaders. The first one is whether a consolidation-only software thesis can truly work. Consolidation is great for system admins and government budget hawks but if the consolidation doesn’t deliver better results for agencies, it seems destined for politicized failure before it truly gets launched.
The other truths are in the post and if you’re an enterprise HR or IT leader, it’s worth a look.
And look, it is easy to clown on Oracle here for having the audacity to take on this huge task. It’s easy to clown on Oracle for being Oracle these days. They’ve let go of 20k+ people this year and blamed AI for it. They seem to not be getting hammered the same way their ERP peers are while still struggling in the same sort of ways. A project like this seems like a minefield unless you’re well connected politically on both sides of the aisle.
But I feel like that’s a cheap argument and as a U.S. taxpayer, I also feel obligated to hope that it comes in on time and under budget. Regardless of the outcome though, we’ll all get a front row seat to the show. And we can see how off the rails a consolidation of this level can really get.
What else is happening this week?
The People Analytics Tech Market Just Hit $12.2 Billion. The market’s maturing, and Stacia Garr finds vendors unbundling consulting from the price tag as growth slows. They’re also quietly gutting the ethics guidance they used to give away free.
Why Has Cost of Living Become The #1 Issue In The US? It’s More Complex Than Inflation.. Josh Bersin traces four decades of wage stagnation to one choice: pay productivity gains to shareholders instead of workers. Now everyone’s acting surprised nobody can afford groceries.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Employee Wellbeing. AI wrecks employee wellbeing in seven distinct ways, Steven Hunt argues, from co-dependence to algorithmic anxiety to plain old isolation. His prescription is simple: no person should ever feel like they’re working for a machine.
The Machine Is Only as Exponential as You. Jason Averbook digs into workslop, AI output that looks finished but isn’t, and pegs the cleanup cost at $9 million a year for a 10,000-person company. Everyone has the same AI model now, so what separates good work from garbage was never the tech.
On Entrepreneurship, Panic Attacks, and Lightning Bolts. A fired client, a team revolt, and a panic attack in a cornfield make up Jason Seiden‘s real founder story, resolved only by a stranger’s voicemail offering to invest.
It’s Not ‘Will AI Take Your Job.’ It’s Which Choice Your Company Already Made. Entry-level employment is down 16% in the most AI-exposed jobs, per Erik Brynjolfsson‘s research. Jess Von Bank‘s point: the question was never whether AI takes jobs, it’s which side of that choice your CFO already picked without telling anyone.
The Hallucination of Competence. AI is a Dunning-Kruger accelerator, John Sumser argues: prose so polished we assume the thinking was ours, when a ten-word prompt did 99% of the work. His fix isn’t banning the tool, it’s reintroducing the friction that builds real expertise.
It’s Hard To Be Principled And Employed. Laurie Ruettimann breaks down how CBS’s new owners fired a 37-year anchor for saying out loud that they were destroying 60 Minutes. Being pivotal to the most decorated show in America didn’t make him untouchable, and neither will your work.
Introducing the Fraud Squad. “Candidate fraud is organized. Now we are too,” reads the tagline for Fraud Squad, the free community Stacy Zapar just launched for recruiters swapping notes on fake candidates.
The Best HR & People Analytics Articles Of June 2026. The throughline of David Green‘s monthly roundup has moved from whether you’re using AI to whether anyone can prove it’s worth anything.
The Traditional Career Ladder Doesn’t Really Exist Anymore. JD Peterson of Perceptyx breaks down the shift from change management to change capacity in this Matt Tatum interview. Really, it’s just leaders admitting employees can smell a training course from a real answer.
I Came To This Country From Ukraine At 15. George Elfond writes about arriving in the US too scared to spend $4 on a hot dog, and the question that’s followed him since: how do you hand your kids opportunity without handing away the hunger that built it?
Stories And People Are Everything. Brandon Giella pulled the actual data most of us are just guessing at: stories beat everything, LinkedIn beats every other channel for B2B, and reach without engagement is just noise.
Someone Is Paying For This AI Summer. Humans training their own $2-an-hour replacements, Teradata funding its AI budget out of employee raises: Kristy McCann tallies who’s actually covering the AI bill. Her dare to CHROs: be the most human person left in the building.
U.S. Economy Added 57,000 Jobs In June, Less Than Expected; Unemployment Rate At 4.2%. The headline unemployment rate dropped only because 507,000 people left the labor force entirely, which is a strange kind of bad good news.
Trump Can Fire Federal Agency Heads At Will, SCOTUS Rules. The Supreme Court overturned a 90-year-old precedent 6-3, so independent agencies like the NLRB and EEOC are independent right up until whoever’s in the Oval Office decides otherwise.
Have a great rest of your week!