I always like it when I get to see product. While I often do as part of my normal job, I don’t overlap meaning I won’t write about things I see when consulting for a client. In the upcoming months however, quite a few vendors are scheduling demos for me privately, and giving me a chance to write about it for you. The first of these is Workstream, fresh off their launch of 7.0.
This product will be was live in November 2007, although I saw a live and working release candidate (beta). My only disclaimer is that I only had time to see the front splash page (portal) so I’m simply assuming the deep functionality that has always been there has now just been integrated with a series of widgets/portlets. My first reaction is that this will be an excruciatingly sellable product.
Really WorkStream has seemed to focus in a couple of areas: the manager dashboard and the C-level dashboard. I’ll be very interested in seeing the adoption rates of the C-level dashboards as I’m honestly not sure that C-level people care yet. As I’ve written about before, the C-suite wants to hear about the final numbers, and not the detail. Workstream presents a number of mid/high level widgets that include graphs, drilldowns and drill throughs, and are highly configurable. Many of the dirll-throughs pop-up with a new graph or table so you don’t have to deal with an entire screen refresh. The manager dashboards are also available and obviously much more tactical in nature. Security exists behind the scenes to personalize and configure the portlets by both role and person.
My only initial complaint was that recruiting was not integrated yet. There are some portlets that will display information, but process integration isn’t there. This is probably much less critical than integrating the components of talent management where the lack of integration means manual workarounds. For WorkStream, it could just be another log-in. One reason I don’t care too much about recruiting integration at this point is simply that most people are not ready to integrate talent acquisition to immediate growth plans, 90 day reviews and quality of hire metrics. Simple manager access can be handled with a quick hyperlink and LDAP or other SSO technology.
As mentioned, this is going to be a very sellable product. Their use of Web 2.0 is well executed, and WorkStream has always been good functionally and technically. They have the product, and now they have some additional cash to go to market with. Once again, I’ll be watching WorkStream closely this year to track their progress.
