Possibly not the end, but configurability is reaching new levels of innovation and market demand. The growing demand to keep HRMS applications “vanilla” to limit upgrade expense, and the continued growth in HR functionality have really allowed employers to realize a configurable HR technology world.
If you’ve been using a system such as PeopleSoft, this is nothing new. PeopleSoft forms, routings, etc have been configurable since version 8. This was a masive departure from when every workflow was a fairly significant customization. Similarly if you look at a system like Taleo (talent acquisition), you’ll notice that customization is all but impossible. The configuration flexibility allows you to do pretty much anything you want. Now, this technology has migrated to mid-market point solutions as SoftScape released their configuration engine last month.
While I’m not sure how SoftScape’s configuration engine actually works, basically what this means is that these types of rules elements are now housed in the database table structure allowing them to simply be data elements. So instead of customizing a workflow and designing it in the application, you would now simply add data elements to a table. This reduces upgrade costs since migrating data to a new version costs nothing (other than the ime it takes for you to test and audit).
So basically I’m quite pleased to see the configuration philosophy migrating down-market. point solutions. I know that large organizations have SoftScape too, but they also sell a bit lower than that. If there’s a need anywhere in the HR technology market for “vanilla” apps, it’s down-market where the HRIT staffs are smaller and budgets are leaner.
