I\u2019ll admit.\u00a0 It caught me completely off guard to find out that the major learning vendors (Saba and Sum Total) have been offering talent management systems for the better part of a year (or longer).\u00a0 I\u2019ve been advocating this for some time as I\u2019ll explain below, but they have been flying under the radar for a while.<\/p>\n
In late 2006, Sum Total acquired a talent vendor named Mind Solve.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never heard of them either, but this is one of the reasons Sum Total bought them.\u00a0 Because they were and unknown, they were purchased for a decent bargain.\u00a0 Also, Mind Solve apparently was decent at developing a product, but didn\u2019t have an effective sales are to market.\u00a0 Thus, the combination of Mind Solve\u2019s product with Sum Total\u2019s LMS and marketing arm seemed to be the right move to make.\u00a0 As stated by Sum Total, they acquired good technology under financially advantageous terms.<\/p>\n
Before continuing with a conversation around product and sales, we should talk about the value proposition that I\u2019m really excited about.\u00a0 Let\u2019s face it, performance management should be directly integrated with learning opportunities.\u00a0 Sum Total has this capability now that the performance app and the LMS are \u201cunder one roof.\u201d\u00a0 Other talent vendors have perhaps spent too much time getting their talent management and talent acquisition systems together, but I\u2019m not sure what the value of having integrated acquisition with management.\u00a0 Certainly there is some power in having workforce plans integrated with acquisition, integrated with management, and back to workforce plans, but I think it\u2019s more powerful and more realistic to offer an organization a direct link from their performance management to their learning management.<\/p>\n
The truth of the matter is that the market is asking for talent acquisition and management to sit together as talent acquisition is of a higher profile than learning management.\u00a0 To me, the market is not always right.\u00a0 So while having talent management linked to LMS might make more sense to me, Sum Total may be in the less profitable scenario compared to guys like Taleo who have really done the same thing:\u00a0 specialize in something else and get into talent management later.<\/p>\n
Back to product:\u00a0 A couple of interesting notes.\u00a0 I also had not realized that Sum Total was going to a SaaS model.\u00a0 In fact, this has been implemented and most new sales are in the SaaS model.\u00a0 It appears that they are going in the right direction even though (from the few screen shots I saw) I was not excited about the look and feel of the product.\u00a0 It\u2019s possible that all performance apps do the same thing, and we\u2019re just talking about the \u201cwrapping\u201d, but in my opinion, the wrapping can do wonders for manager adoption.\u00a0 Sum Total assures me that they are definitely focusing on the look and feel, knowing that this is important to the market even if the functionality is just fine.\u00a0 Another thing that intrigued me (and I\u2019ll need to see this in a demo) is Sum Total\u2019s patented drag and drop performance management module.\u00a0 This just sounds interesting, and even if I didn\u2019t like the UI, this sounds like it has some potential for a re-visioning of how managers interact with the application.<\/p>\n
As far as I\u2019m concerned, learning management vendors getting into the talent management space is the right move.\u00a0 I think that this is more important than all the talent management and talent acquisition vendors getting together for a single reason.\u00a0 It just makes sense.\u00a0 What\u2019s bad for the talent vendors is that LMS is generally not as accessible.\u00a0 It\u2019s highly complex, and it\u2019s hard to buy someone else (there just are not that many out there).\u00a0 Sum Total should have a good time selling this integrated package, but they need to get the word out a bit better.\u00a0 At any rate, I think it\u2019s an exciting value proposition and it will be interesting to see if they get some better market traction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ll admit.\u00a0 It caught me completely off guard to find out that the major learning vendors (Saba and Sum Total) have been offering talent management systems for the better part of a year (or longer).\u00a0 I\u2019ve been advocating this for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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":[2,12,20,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hr-technology","category-learning-management","category-talent-management","category-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854","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=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}