Talent Management Vendors Get Social

Quite a lot is already said on the power of social networks to promote employee collaboration in a enterprise. As employee life cycle in a enterprise starts with on-boarding, the employee social network process has a natural fit in HRIS/Talent Management context. On corollary most of these vendor offerings are built around employee profile application. It would be quite interesting to see what some of big Talent Management players are doing in this area.

1. SAP
Motivated by the internal success of social networks from Harmony, SAP is expected to soon rollout these capabilities into it's portal and HCM/Talent Management customer offerings, per Dan Farber.

SAP internalizes social networking for business “SAP doesn't yet offer Web 2.0-style social networking capabilities in its solutions that tap into the wisdom of employees, partners and customers, but it has an internal service, called Harmony. Dennis Moore, general manager of emerging systems, called it a "MySpace for the enterprise," speaking at SAP Sapphire in Atlanta. It starts with SAP employee profiles in the HR system, which serve as a foundation for connecting employees professional and personal interests. It started out as a a network for the top talent group of employees. Now it is expanded to all employees. We are getting better as drinking our own champagne"

Courtesy: Craig & Nicole

2. Oracle
After getting the gist of internal social networks with AppsLab, I believe Oracle has enough reasons to integrate this value into their next generation of Fusion HCM offerings.

Oracle Gets Social “So we set out on this path to understand social networking behind the firewall. Last Friday we launched our first social application. It was a basic directory application with employee names, titles, emails and phone numbers. That’s about it. Rich built it in just a few weeks. The only differentiating feature from our current corporate directory, was that we allowed employees to request other employees to “join their network”. To “launch” our Alpha, I sent an email to a group of a few hundred people inside Oracle. In the first hour of operation we went from 3 users (Jake, Rich, and I) to over 270 users. After 10hrs we were nearing 2,000 users and today we hit 10,000, just over 1/7th of the entire organization”

Courtesy: Justin Kestelyn

3. SuccessFactors
SuccessFactors Unveils Employee Profile
“ By combining the interactivity, ease of use and connectedness of a social network with highly valuable, contextual performance data, Employee Profile delivers an addictive, highly valuable solution that takes the concept of an employee directory to a far more meaningful and strategic level. For managers and executives, Employee Profile provides a powerful new way to understand and gain insight into the talents, interests and potential of employees throughout an organization. Armed with greater visibility into a company's talent pool, managers are able to make smarter decisions in how they recruit, form teams to solve business problems and tackle new challenges.”

4. Taleo
Performance 2.0: Empowering the Next Level of Business Results claims the use of social networks for mentoring, coaching and learning.

With the internal social success of Oracle and SAP providing enough motivation for customers to go social, we can expect to see other niche Talent Management players to get on to the social wagon soon.

Mashup Business and IT teams to bridge Business Intelligence gaps

If you are thinking why your business teams are losing confidence in your Business Intelligence technology team, take a look at sizable backlog of analytics requests in your IT queue and you are sure to find the answer! In addition, given today’s recessions concerns it is increasingly becoming important for organizations to understand the spend trends and bend the cost trend by increasing efficiencies and reducing cost. These emerging business requirements continue to intensify business hunger for more data to only exacerbate your IT backlog issue. Can your team ever catch up with the ever-growing data needs of your business users? Relax, Enterprise Mashups are on the way for your rescue.

IBM Mashup Server: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/screenshots/0SN/imsk04.html?opendocument&techid=0SN

Clearly, the real beauty of Enterprise 2.0 solutions like Mashups is in their ability to maximize overall business value by empowering each team member, including your business and IT specialists, to co-create and add incremental value towards the end solution. Especially, with IBM’s Secure Mashup Technology (Smash) announcement last month and continued investments in Mashup Hub technologies form big players, IBM and Oracle, I see a excellent opportunity for IT managers to create rapid business value in Business Intelligence area. In a nut-shell, Mashup hub technologies enable business users to create a new meaning by assembling information from two or more data feeds, created and exposed by your IT team, using drag and drop style tools. Embedded capabilities to define data feeds from popular ERP systems and legacy data sources should further enable IT teams to rapidly expose security encapsulated data feeds to the business users. So, Mashup technologies can effectively address IT backlog, capacity and requirements gaps issues in Enterprise Business Intelligence context by making your business users part of the solution instead of problem.

For example, in a enterprise context financial analysis is one area that drives the need to assemble the data from the disparate enterprise systems. To understand the cost drivers, business analysts often need to drilldown from summary cost reported in Journal to the actual transaction level data such as items, invoices, purchase orders, expenses and employee pay checks that actually originated the summary Journal entry in General Ledger system. In large organizations it’s not uncommon to have more than 50 enterprise systems feeding Journal entries into the GL system. While this cost analysis can be accommodated by building a complex data warehouse with normalized detail data from these 50+ enterprise systems and sophisticated analytical capabilities, this often require considerable amount of time and resources. In contrast, IT leads can solve the immediate needs of business users by quickly creating and exposing granular data feeds from GL and other subsystems using Mashup hub technologies. Business users can then assemble Journal summary data feed with the required subsystem feeds using the drag and drop style tools to create new meaning in a context and format that is relevant to them. Nonetheless this rapid assembly framework also relieves IT resources from the complex task of creating a model that can accommodate all the permutations of data joins that business users are requesting.

Moreover, building strategic business intelligence solution for solving complex business problems is often a multi-year large initiative that require significant amount of time and resources. In addition, the requirements in business intelligence area tend to evolve over the time as the business and IT teams continue to experiment with the data. Mashups can effectively address these challenges by providing a rapid assembly framework to address the urgent analytical needs of business users today and at the same time empowering IT and business managers with a powerful feedback mechanism to craft the long term BI strategy. On corollary, the group usage and Mashup patterns provide valuable insight into the real data and analytical needs of business users to further drive the direction, scope and road map for the strategic BI solution. So, this may the perfect time to drive operational efficiencies, co-creation and collaboration across your business and IT teams using Mashup technologies, a well tested concept in social networks.