Take this with a grain of salt as this is a Genesys press release and these “trends” may just be application areas they are strong in.
http://www.genesyshcm.com/Docs/news/trends_survey_results-pr.html
I’ve never paid too much attention to Genesys until recently as I’ve considered them a legacy play. They seem to have revamped their software to compete however, and their presence has been increasing in the marketplace again. I was them in a benefits and compensation magazine the other day where they were interviewed regarding outsourcing payroll along with Ceridian and ADP. That was a little strange.
“According to respondents of the survey sponsored by Genesys, the top HCM priorities for 2005 include
Talent acquisition and retention – 57%
Performance management – 54%
Streamlining processes – 52%
Talent and leadership development -50%”
Fist of all, let’s group both of the talent categories into a larger “Talent Management” category. Let’s then break it out again into staffing/talent acquisition, talent management (with performance, training as subsets) and succession planning/leadership development. Basically what they are saying is that Talent is the big trend. Well this really is no surprise as “Talent” has been one of the big buzz word for the last several years. It is however very true that talent, a more proactive, directed and strategic way to manage your human capital, seems to be a great umbrella category. I say this because you look at talent and every other HR practice really wraps in. As always, individual HR practice groups need to be very collaborative in order to achieve their mission.
The streamline processes priority is a great general operational efficiency goal. I don’t want to discount this because everyone can benefit from better process efficiency. I want to note that when you change your processes, there’s a good chance you are implementing or modifying your software practices with new technology (HRMS, self service or portal) or workflow, all of which may be expensive to implement.
All in all, I think that the Genesys announcement does not contribute anything new. These have been priorities for quite some time now.
