Talent Management SaaS to Survive and Sparkle in Slump?

As I browse through analyst predications for 2008, here is what I think businesses can expect this year and beyond.
· As we witnessed huge volatility in stock market this week, more and more analysts predict continued economic slump. Thoughtful business leaders are preparing for this slump with creative operational strategies to increase operational margins by reducing cost, contingency plans and investments in R&D.
· Globally it is increasingly becoming difficult to find and retain skilled labor. To drive the bottom line, organizations need to attract, retain and motivate skilled labor globally with the innovative talent management and pay for performance strategies.
· To keep costs low and drive operational efficienies managers need to make data driven decisions. This is only possible if the data is captured and right tools are available to translate the data into information and insight needed for effective decision making.
· In addition, the hunt for global talent continue to drive the need for technology infrastructure that promotes collaboration and innovation, and at the same time reduce risk.

Here is how a integrated Talent Management SaaS can help to survive and sparkle in a slump.
1. SaaS solution can translate hefty infrastructure and software license & maintenance cost into a low monthly service fee, relieving your balance sheet for the other R&D investments that are most critical in slump times. Rapid deployment approaches that SaaS vendors mastered helps businesses to implement SaaS solutions in much less time and cost compared to the expensive upgrades to internal ERP systems.
2. Integrated Talent Management with Pay for Performance framework enables managers to attract, retain and motivate talent with internally consistent and externally competitive compensation strategies and high-performance cultures, and Internationalization and Globalization technologies to engage, attract and motivate global talent
3. Integrated controls and security to ensure regulatory compliance
4. Integrated analytics and dashboards to enable data driven decision making and drive incremental improvements
5. Integrated Talent Management with Web 2.0 style productivity tools and collaboration technologies - org chart, address books, Ajax style user interfaces, Workflows & Wikis, enable businesses to further drive the bottom line with the global talent and to sparkle in this economic slump.

Enterprise 2.0 Therapy for Healthcare Part 1

As key economic indicators continue to indicate recession, more and more companies are taking wait and see approach to their strategic IT investments. However, Healthcare is one of the few industries that continue to invest heavily in strategic IT projects. If you are a information technologist with a passion to build business driven technologies, then take a closer look at Healthcare. You are sure to be thrilled with the exciting technology opportunities driven by the business problems in this industry. Especially what makes a technologist job more interesting in this industry is a classic Enterprise 2.0 dilemma – to drive innovation and cost reduction using collaborative open technologies or build silo worlds with rigid controls. There is no easy answer to this dilemma and Healthcare organizations are aware of this. They know that the only solution to this problem is to work inside out with a systematic upgrade of IT systems to the next generation applications and technologies so that they can find a perfect mix of open collaboration and disciplined control that will enable them to promote innovation by successfully managing the risks. So are the exhilarating Enterprise 2.0 opportunities in this segment.

To further explore Healthcare balancing act of collaboration and control with Enterprise 2.0 style technologies, let us take a look at some business drivers in Human Capital Management space. In a Healthcare organization with geographically dispersed services facilities, it is critical for employee communities (nurse and physician communities for example) to share best practices and lessons learned in order to drive quality and productivity improvements. This business problem drives the need for collaborative websites and related technologies for knowledge sharing. If you are a technologist that knows the minimal cost and proven scalability value of social collaboration software for the enterprises then this is the perfect opportunity for Enterprise 2.0. In contrast, large workforce including union contracts in healthcare organization drives the need to prevent financial liabilities from lawsuits by securing the organization from internet-based threats such as inappropriate content. Together, these drivers bring a unique healthcare Enterprise 2.0 opportunity to create a technology-mix that is cost effective, promote sharing and reduce risk.

On the other side of Healthcare opportunity spectrum are HIPAA and SOX regulations that drive the need for tight controls to prevent and detect unauthorized access to systems and data. Related technology opportunities include automating IdM user provisioning/de-provisioning process with employee on-boarding, promotion, transfer and termination events in HRMS. For example, while employee termination deactivates employee’s user profile in IdM so that the employee can no longer access any enterprise system, employee promotion to a manager position may add an additional role in IdM to indicate additional authorities in enterprise-wide systems. Nonetheless all the enterprise applications need to be configured to honor the privileges (authentication and authorization rules) setup in Identity Management.

As the security nuts and bolts are tightened with the enterprise-wide authentication and authorization framework using IdM, it is the perfect time to further enhance workforce productivity by delivering personalized tools and applications to the employee desktops using Enterprise Portals and Single Signon technologies. In Enterprise Portal context there are opportunities again to combine Web 2.0 innovations such as Blogs and Wikis to promote collaboration and enterprise innovation. Furthermore, connecting internal communities to external vendor, supplier and consumer communities using a mix of collaboration and security technologies is another interesting Enterprise 2.0 opportunity in a Healthcare environment.