Just a couple years ago, we always seemed to talk about outsourcing activities, processes and tasks that were administrative in nature.\u00a0 Part of the boom in Software as a Service (SaaS) was a re-visioning of outsourcing in a way that provided the scalability and cost efficiencies of traditional outsourcing to other services.\u00a0 (yes, broad generalizations here)\u00a0 Today, we\u2019ve now seen this re-visioning of outsourcing as SaaS overtake traditional outsourcing.\u00a0 Let me explain.<\/p>\n
Traditional outsourcing such as for payroll and benefits has always been tactical and transactional in nature.\u00a0 There have been very few outsourcing organizations for example, that provide true benefits consulting around the transactions.\u00a0 Instead, organizations have often had to hire their benefits consultant for the strategy, and then hire a separate vendor to manage the transactions.\u00a0 Similarly, payroll processing is almost purely transactional.\u00a0 Any strategic analysis is probably being handled on the back end by financial cost accountants that payroll has nothing to do with.<\/p>\n
Enter talent management.\u00a0 Talent in a SaaS world started as just a simple hosting of an application in a specific model that facilitated scalability and service.\u00a0 However, beyond simply transacting processes for performance reviews and executing the associated workflows, talent providers have not begun to move further into the strategy space.\u00a0 By engineering their applications to maximize user adoption and user experience, vendors can influence an organization\u2019s ability to create impact to the business.\u00a0 While I\u2019d still go to a consulting firm for strategy around performance process and compensation linkages and such, talent vendors seem to be stepping up to the plate.\u00a0 They realize that flashy UI is not just for selling, but that properly targeting certain functions and good deployment of that UI will be more effective for their customers in the long run.<\/p>\n
Talent suites are also getting much more integrated.\u00a0 Take Workstream\u2019s newest release that brings their entire suite together through a single reporting tool.\u00a0 The ability to report cross functionally used to be the domain of the ERP world, but developments like this in the SaaS talent marketplace provide more strategic viewing of the organization by allowing more detailed cuts of data than previously possible.<\/p>\n
A few years ago at the start of systematicHR, I was greatly excited about talent management systems.\u00a0 I then grew bored by them and moved onto other topics.\u00a0 As we close 2007 and enter 2008, I think I\u2019m getting pretty excited about them once again.\u00a0 Talent is going to be a cool place to be, and if the vendors continue to advance their applications, not from a functionality and technology perspective, but targeting HR strategy, they will make HR a cool place to be as well.<\/p>\n
Thanks to Gary Damiano from Workstream whose comment to me on September 25 inspired this post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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