systematicHR

It’s probably time for me to get back on the phone with these guys and poke around a bit. After all, it has been a very long while since my last official conversation with them as the writer and publisher of systematicHR. Until then, Bill Kutik’s excellent analysis of his impressions from their user conference “Connect” will have to do.

Here are a few product directions you might find interesting. For the rest, go read Bill’s piece:

• In addition to the entire talent-management suite, Dalgaard plans for the company to write a full HRMS itself, at least for his small product “Professional Edition” customers (2 to 300 employees) and mid-market product “SuccessPractices” customers (301 to 1,500 employees).
• Three days before the conference started on June 5, he brought on Greg Thompson as a director of product management. Thompson ran the Learning Management System product for PeopleSoft, briefly did the same for Oracle, and then worked for LMS vendor Saba. Though Thompson wouldn’t say so, it certainly seems he is at SuccessFactors now to create their own LMS. The company already has a “Learning & Development” module that includes some pieces of an LMS.
• With the announcement that Workforce Planning would be available next year, an LMS would give SuccessFactors the entire talent-management suite, along with Softscape and HRsmart.

A year and a half ago, I called SuccessFactors one of my targets to keep an eye on. Based on their performance in the market, this has certainly proven to be true. Like HRsmart, it does make sense to code all of your applications from scratch – to some degree. You might sacrifice some time to market, but what you get back is a much better degree of integration and more thoughtful end to end processes. If SuccessFactors can indeed get products out to market quickly, they overcome the major obstacle in developing their own applications. It also goes a long way in alleviating client concerns that they can’t “customize” in a SaaS environment if changes that are desired by a healthy population of users come quickly.

In all actuality, “bolting on” HRMS should not be too big a deal. (although I struggle with the concept of bolting HRMS onto Talent rather than the other way around.) The total amount of base functionality in HRMS isn’t all that much. There’s the employee data, job, organization hierarchies, compliance stuff, and compensation. That’s a lot, but they probably have much of it already built. Security, web and workflow backbones already exist, there is a semblance of a hierarchy (although it’s for manager approval workflow) employee data and job data in their apps. Building out the functionality here is much less complex than in talent – the heavy lifting has already been done.

Bill brings up an excellent point though – will they be able to compete with the behemoths of the industry – ADP, Ceridian, ABRA…? My guess is that they’ll have a play at business that is not already integrated with payroll. For organizations that use (for example) ADP payroll, ABRA HR and SuccessFactors talent, why not move the HR to either ADP or SuccessFactors? It’s a logical move.

The argument that integration with payroll is more important than integration with talent does not hold water with me. I’d suggest that employee and manager self service is more strategically important than process and data integration with payroll – strictly from an engagement point of view. Then there’s security and workflow. Having these on a single engine will reduce application administration and setup significantly.

Is there a market for these ideas that SuccessFactors has? Possibly not, but it’s a great experiment and you’ll not find any arguments from me. For my part, I’m going to continue watching with keen interest.

Note: This was written before the IPO announcement.  Check out Jason’s SuccessFactors IPO announcement here.