A while back, I was an SC for a large vendor organization.\u00a0 It was a lot of fun highlighting the great stuff in my applications (actually \u2013 those were the fun parts).\u00a0 But our jobs were to help find solutions as well as workarounds to things that could simply not be done.\u00a0 Given this is a decade ago when functionality had not really arrived yet, Still, the differentiation between applications back then was about who had more functionality.\u00a0 The depth of any HR application varied widely between vendors.\u00a0 Today\u2019s world is vastly different.<\/p>\n
Is there really any differentiation in between SaaS vendors\/\u00a0 I mean, they all seem to say the same thing.\u00a0 Everyone talks about great service, they all like to say how you don\u2019t have to customize anything anymore, and every SaaS application is \u201cversionless.\u201d\u00a0 The core things taht many of the SaaS vendors sell no longer really apply \u2013 SaaS vendors are so often competing against other SaaS vendors rather than legacy server based technologies where these were indeed valid arguments and true differentiators.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve also argued that the days of functionality are pretty much over.\u00a0 Vendors simply can\u2019t compete on feature-functionality anymore.\u00a0 Once again, there was a time when it was important, but today\u2019s reality says that every vendor is going to have 98% of what you need, and the other 2% are probably nice to have\u2019s that you can live without.\u00a0 The truth of the matter is, feature functionality ruled in the days of long ago (what, all of 5 years?) when HR was the center of the HR universe.\u00a0 We needed better transactions, more efficient processes, better storage spaces for more and more data.\u00a0 That\u2019s not true anymore.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s center of the HR universe has transformed into employee\u2019s and managers.\u00a0 Those groups don\u2019t need feature functionality.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s a Google and Apple world where minimalism and ease of use reign supreme.<\/p>\n
The true differentiators for vendors is also evolving.\u00a0 No longer is it feature-functionality, great service, or being versionless.\u00a0 Today\u2019s differentiation comes in the form of the analytics framework and how capable HR can be at delivering data to managers.\u00a0 it\u2019s about what I have called \u201centerprise digital interactions\u201d\u00a0 (social media) to help employees connect, collaborate and learn, it\u2019s about how well you can use technology to create the simplicity that end users crave.<\/p>\n
The problem is that feature functionality is easy to demo.\u00a0 Whether analytics are really easy to create and consume, if end users will adopt digital interactions, or if the usability was hiding under a layer of slick demo style is sometimes hard to discover.\u00a0 At the end of the day, these are the features that are differentiators today.\u00a0 Feature functionality does not prove much anymore.\u00a0 It\u2019s about pushing your future vendor partners during demos, inviting end users (employees and managers) for a full court press during demos, and figuring out how to ensure that all the flash that your future partners are trained to demo is not all that you see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A while back, I was an SC for a large vendor organization.\u00a0 It was a lot of fun highlighting the great stuff in my applications (actually \u2013 those were the fun parts).\u00a0 But our jobs were to help find solutions…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1776,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,36,3],"tags":[275,274,193,174],"class_list":["post-1759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hr-technology","category-vendor-management","category-vendors","tag-demo","tag-differentiation","tag-functionality","tag-saas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1771,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759\/revisions\/1771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}