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
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
Interesting blog Venkat and thanks for writing. PMS and CSP cannot be taken out from Talent Management and that is the crux of Talent Identification to Talent Retention. Recently, I have also seen many demo's and practice of such applications and are very interesting to hear that none can use transactions, rather navigations, which was painful for end user to remember always, though they get expertise after few times. Definitely we are repeating some of the concepts of On-Premise to Cloud, but Cloud is robust and it can be expanded, the architecture has a clear definition for flexibility and scalable, which was missing in On-Premise. Cloud is just a beginning, it has long roadmap which I see. Innovation paths like collaboration, learning, compensation, etc have improved a vast which was not the case earlier.
ReplyDeleteTo add to Saravana's points, remember that cloud/Saas applications noted in the blog can address the pain of maintenance and upgrades that has been associated with on-premise applications.
ReplyDelete