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Sunday 14 September 2014

Exciting Use Cases - Successfactors tools to Attract, Engage & Retain

Recently had the opportunity to talk to one of the Successfactors’ product Engineering teams on product philosophy and I was gladdened by some of the things Successfactors is working on.

We all are aware that Successfactors provides one of the best User Experiences as an Enterprise Cloud HCM system. But what is interesting is the direction Successfactors is working towards which is actually enabling organizations to have necessary tools in their philosophy to Attract, Engage & Retain.

On-Boarding is no more about checklists and routing of forms to be filled. Successfactors is trying to make On-Boarding as an experience for HR, New Employees, Managers. Now organizations can have a bonding exercise via personalized Welcome Video from Managers to the New Recruits.

What’s more, candidates can have the list of people they need to meet on First Day and maps on how to reach them, all delivered to their devices.


Some of us may argue that compared to other business processes in organizations, these are "NICE TO HAVEs" when it comes to HR. However, in the context of War for Talent, these are the use cases that provide the means when HR talks about Attract, Engage and Retain.



The way in which scenarios and use cases are being rolled out in the world of Human Resources augurs well for the road map to move beyond “Consumer Grade” to “Consumerization of HR-IT”.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

HCM Technology - Are we Duplicating On-Premise onto Cloud?

Recently I had attended a series of HCM Technology Appreciation programs sitting through presentations and product demos of multiple HCM products like Oracle Cloud HCM, Successfactors, and WorkDay

After all the presentations and demos, I was not 100% convinced that at their current level, the products enable an organization to fundamentally change HR or have technology enablement at a different level.

Yes, we have fantastic User Experience (UEx) and we expect that this will enable organizations to engage better with their workforce and users. I could appreciate the kind of innovations, improvements that have been brought in HCM Technology through these products. 

One product seems to be focusing on 'depth" of application, while another seems to be focusing on the "breadth" of their suite.

"Customizable" has given way to "Configurable". Fine. How has that changed ways-of-working for HCM?

I could not stop feeling the current race is more about changing the delivery mechanism of HCM software applications than fundamentally changing the way HR works /or enabling HR at a much deeper level.

To a large extent my disappointment comes from the fact that we still see quite a bit of record keeping in the products. There has been tremendous improvements with a conscious effort to reduce the number of 'clicks' or 'user entries', but still I couldn't help getting the nagging feeling of duplicating On-Premise HCM into Cloud.

Take any of the Talent Management areas: Succession Planning - this was available in On-Premise as well; Performance Management - was available in On-Premise as well. Yes, the UEx probably was not as great as these products, but the functionalities existed. 

And that's where I couldn't stop wondering are we just duplicating the functionalities of On-Premise into Cloud layer with a vastly improved UEx and are we hailing the removal of coding as the next messiah? 

Probably there is still a lot more to come as Cloud HCM technology and that's the next wave that will start once the shift from On-Premise to Cloud domination / hype cycle is over. 

I believe we have still not "consumerized" HR-IT.

Would be great to get opinions from the HCM Technology experts across the world.

Thanks

Venkat