HRMS Happenings
Big HRMS players -- such as Oracle and SAP -- and emerging ones -- such as Workday -- keep moving forward, some faster than others.
By Bill Kutik, Technology Columnist
The HRMS industry may be a "mature" one (says Gartner analyst Jim Holincheck), but that doesn't mean innovation has stopped.
Recent full-day briefings at the San Francisco Bay area offices of Oracle, SAP and Workday found them all enhancing their products and building new ones. The two older companies exhibited a laser focus on integrating their existing talent-management applications in the face of growing competition from suite providers and intense practitioner interest. At the same time, they're all looking to the future -- call it Web 2.0 or whatever -- for the expected merger of elements from the consumer Internet and their own enterprise applications.
With these three, "mature" certainly doesn't mean old and tired. (You can see for yourself what Oracle and Workday -- plus Lawson -- have been doing during "The First HCM Battle" of competitive software demonstrations at the
HR Technology Conference
®, which runs Oct. 10 through 12 in Chicago.)
Oracle Delivers on "Apps Unlimited" Promise
Like SAP and others, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle is moving away from big product releases every few years and is, instead, using what it calls Family Packs (and SAP calls Enhancement Packs) to release new functionality in smaller pieces more frequently.
So Oracle's newest Release 12 of its HRMS E-Business Suite (EBS) in January is actually a roll-up of the last five Family Packs issued. The user interface has been given a facelift, especially in salary, absence and talent management, with salary administration getting major surgery.
Performance management has cascading objectives and better appraisals, iRecruitment has offer letters, HR Checklists have been added for life events, a total compensation statement added for retention and global transfers have been made much easier.
On the former PeopleSoft side, Enterprise 9.0 went out the door on Dec. 15 and the requirements for 9.1, targeted for the end of 2008, are already written (but not fully announced). That begins to make good Oracle's promise in its "Apps Unlimited" campaign to continue enhancing its own and acquired products while simultaneously developing its next-generation Fusion applications.
Enterprise 9.0 added extensive use of XML Publisher, templates for hourly and mass hiring (called SmartHire) to speed new employees into Core HR and online processing for W-2 (T4 in Canada) and I-9 forms, among other enhancements. (Talent-management initiatives are detailed below.)
To facilitate those upgrades, Oracle has created separate teams for its four major HR product lines. Gretchen Alarcon, once vice president of strategy for all of them, is now heading Fusion and dealing with major HCM issues affecting all the products. Tracy Martin runs strategy for PeopleSoft's Enterprise, Jeannie Lowell for EBS and long-time JD Edwards veteran Kim Butler for that HRMS.
Obsessed with Talent Management
With new suite providers coming after their customers from every direction and the term on every HR person's lips, Oracle is furiously enhancing talent management in both product lines, integrating existing stovepipe products.
For Enterprise (and soon to be adopted for Fusion) the key is Profile Management, which includes Job Profile and Person Profile. Both use the same data fields, so searching and ranking is straightforward, either for an employee or a manager.
The configurable Person Profile can include an employee's competencies, accomplishments, skills, whatever. Employees can add their own data through self-service, with some categories needing manager approval. The Person Profile becomes a persistent object, which all the talent-management applications can act on.
Eventually, the fields in the Job Profile will be used to create job requisitions, now only in a limited way. For the traditional talent-management applications, Enterprise executives are still toying with ways to create Workforce Planning; Talent Acquisition Manager (recruiting) has good integration with ePerformance, which still has only limited integration with Career Planning.
No integration exists yet between ePerformance and Succession Planning, which will be built out in 9.1. Enterprise Learning Management still runs on a separate database, but is integrated through Person Profile and Job Profile. eCompensation and its Manager Desktop are still stand-alone and will be built out in 9.1.
EBS has a central Competency Profile integrated through many of the talent-management applications, which can be attached to a person, a job or an organization. Though content is limited to competencies, some Oracle customers also use it to track experience, skills, etc. EBS application integration seems less far along than Enterprise, but Oracle has an extensive road map on how to connect all the pieces.
The Latest on Fusion -- Not Much
Fusion HCM applications are still targeted for the end of 2008; all the requirements are written and some are now being officially announced (most were first reported last December in my online column, "
What the Big Boys are Doing
," at www.HREOnline.com). The following are new since then:
* To minimize expensive system customizations, Fusion will use "Flexfields," a feature Oracle has had for years, allowing users to configure and define them among jobs, positions, assignments, etc. EBS DateTrack will be used as the foundation for Fusion's date-effectiveness.
* Oracle is making a big push for "Predictive Analytics," also known as data-mining. The idea is to sift automatically through a data warehouse to find hidden patterns and make new discoveries and predictions. The Holy Grail here is not just identifying top performers but predicting which ones are at the greatest risk of leaving. Naturally, it requires adding a lot of data about the outside world to the enterprise data.
Of course, Profile Management, adopted from Enterprise, will be the centerpiece of talent management in Fusion.
SAP Pushes Forward -- With Partners, Too
Within the last year, SAP Vice President David Ludlow gave away his HCM product-management duties to focus exclusively on product strategy, after doing both for years. That's good news for every user or prospect of SAP, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, but with a large campus in Palo Alto.
Mark Lange, a long-time HR industry executive with BrassRing and PeopleSoft, left SAP as national head of HCM sales. That's bad news for the company, where he had reportedly doubled sales. But SAP has finally killed its dot-bomb vestige of a product name "mySAP ERP 2005" for the simpler SAP ERP 6.0, which includes HCM and Financials. That's good for common sense.
Without the diversion of Fusion and multiple product lines, Ludlow has remained focused for the last two years on integrating his talent-management-suite applications. For instance, last December's Enhancement Pack (No. 1) delivered a new role and portal for a "Talent Development Specialist," allowing new views of the workface and jobs.
It also completed the integration of performance and succession management (except for development plans), with performance evaluations searchable from within succession. Performance and compensation are already integrated.
July's pack (No. 2) focused on SAP Enterprise Learning with a new integration to Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro (a WebEx-like product), which is used to create a virtual classroom, available today. November's pack (No. 3) will finally have conceptual search for eRecruiting and will provide a new user interface for performance and new features for global employment.
Learning will be integrated next July (pack No. 4), when a gap analysis will finally offer courses to correct them. Performance will also get cascading goals at that time.
SAP has never done a lot of functional partnering, but lately, Ludlow is doing more. Last year, it was VitalSpring for medical cost control, and now he is using Aspire HR, a Dallas-based SAP specialist formerly known as ERPSolutions, to fill the long-recognized gaps in SAP's recruiting.
That company's "Talent Scout" will offer SAP customers integrated resume parsing from Sovrengroup (CareerBuilder's vendor); job-board posting and sourcing analytics from eQuest, an employee-referral program; job alerts for the company Web site; and several other add-on solutions not in eRecruiting -- including offer management (integrated with comp and payroll), interview scheduling through Outlook and integrated background checking and assessment. Various Web 2.0 gadgets have also been built.
In addition, a four-year partnership with Nakisa in Montreal, once known only as an expensive org-charting product, has resulted in better visualization for a variety of data from SAP's HCM. The Enterprise folks are also considering using it for 9.1.
Workday Changing the Game
Workday is writing its own payroll! The world's oldest commercial computer application -- perfect for mainframe-batch processing -- is being recreated by a company using the world's most leading-edge technologies?!? What's wrong with this picture?
Actually, Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Workday always planned to do payroll as part of its strategic plan to deliver core HR -- HR, benefits and payroll -- allowing it to compete for the largest clients and displace Oracle and SAP as their customers' "system of record." Just not this soon.
Remember, founder Dave Duffield may be a rich guy, but Workday is still a small software start-up, with 18 clients as of July. And the needs of early clients always change development priorities of start-ups, which for Workday was to use ADP for payroll.
But when McKee Foods with 7,000 employees and two other clients insisted on running payroll in-house, Workday changed its schedule. McKee also happens to be running PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.3, making it Workday's first client take-away from Oracle.
By July, Workday had signed its largest client to date, Life Time Fitness with 17,000 employees.
Workday issued HCM Release 2.0 in June, which included the planned integration with ADP's Payforce for clients with more than 1,000 employees and even with PC Payroll for Windows for smaller ones. Naturally, Workday has hired the two former PeopleSoft employees who did that payroll.
Workday's new global payroll engine is slated for the end of this year, and the U.S. product release six months later. Avoiding PeopleSoft's earlier mistake of writing a payroll just for North America, every country -- including the United States -- will be a localization of the same Workday payroll.
At the same time, Workday has postponed writing its own recruiting applications, instead integrating with partners. Now that's exactly what PeopleSoft did for its first decade before writing its own modules, which suffered badly from the company's lack of domain expertise.
The current plan is functionally similar: Workday's software will manage the client's open position, create the requisition and then pass it to the partner's system for clients to do all the recruiting processes including selecting the successful candidate, whose data is sent to Workday for hiring and onboarding.
Payroll versus recruiting? While clearly a strategic decision, it flies in the face of current talent-management thinking that your "talent pool" includes all your employees, contingents and job candidates in one place. But presumably, clients can choose to bring full candidate data into their Workday system, even after picking the winner elsewhere.
Recruiting is one of the most critical talent-management applications, right behind performance, and postponing having them both fully integrated is swimming against the HR tide. But it looks to be a shorter-term solution than PeopleSoft's, since applicant tracking remains on Workday's product road map.
(The "Industry's First Integrated Performance & Recruiting Shootout" will be held at the HR Technology Conference® with Authoria, HRSmart, SuccessFactors and Vurv competing.)
The new release has lots of new HCM functionality. Two things are particularly cool. The new user interface is built entirely with Adobe's Flex. A new Actionable Org Chart allows all actions that can be taken on an employee to be done directly from the org chart (no longer OrgPlus).
The next release at the end of the year has a large global piece. It includes English-language versions for Canada, U.K., Australia, Ireland and Singapore.
Additional languages are slated for the first half of 2008. In the same year-end release, Workday will also have rolling reviews in performance, a worker/job matching facility similar to Profile Management and new partner integrations.
June's release also included the first pieces of Workday's other three systems: Financial, Resource and Revenue Management. Ironically, Financial Management may turn out to be a more radical breakthrough for Workday than HCM. Vice President of Financial Product Strategy Mark Nittler has truly rethought the application and blown it apart! Financial Management has general ledger but doesn't have accounts payable (in Resource) or accounts receivable (in Revenue), though they can be bought together.
"The financial accounting model is 500 years old," Nittler says, "and traditional systems are designed only to spit out reports on credits and debits, not help run your business." Nittler is building a system that he hopes can model the entire business and capture all relevant data -- not just the when and how much of traditional finance, but the who, what, where and why of every business event with its data fully in context.
To get there, he has taken the new Internet process of "tagging" (simply described as attaching searchable categories and descriptive labels to documents). His system will allow "Worktags" to be added to a company's every event with each department being able to add its own -- and search for events and associated data by whichever tags.
The details are far from being worked out. But the easy access to financial and business data this could offer HR holds out some hope of finally being able to value an individual's work! Put aside the enormous implications for talent management, just imagine if that finally killed off performance reviews jiggered to justify subjective raises.
Everybody's Talking 2.0
The idea of bringing the personal productivity, ease-of-use, outside data and sheer fun of the consumer Internet to enterprise applications is now so widespread that PowerPoint has a standard graphic entitled "Web 2.0," surrounded by such terms as chat, blogging, tagging, widgets, Wiki, RSS, mash-up, podcast and others. (Two Gen X executives from Knowledge Infusion will explain and demonstrate many of those elements on the final morning of the HR Technology Conference®.)
Oracle calls it "Employee 2.0"; SAP, "Enterprise 2.0"; Workday, just "Web 2.0." While none yet has an HR offering for customers, a lot of mock-ups, prototypes and ideas are circulating. Workday has integrated the RSS or Really Simple Syndication button into its HCM pages for information feeds and is using tagging in Financial Management. SAP's partner is using RSS and a Yahoo! widget for recruiting.
Oracle shows a slide of an expanded personal work environment including many of them. Alarcon says it can be done today with existing Oracle products.
In the future, Oracle may offer a "rich client" with code on your computer (instead of just a browser) facilitating composite applications, and may even create an Oracle Browser Bar (similar to those already available from Google and Yahoo!).
SAP is already using a prototype internally of its own social-networking product called Harmony. Some SAP partners and their customers are already using Wikis as a platform for community building, and SAP has a vision for blogs for knowledge sharing. Ludlow says customers are pushing to bring the last two into HCM, and SAP's middleware Netweaver will support them both. Stay tuned.
Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is also co-chairman of the
10th Anniversary HR Technology Conference & Exposition
® in Chicago, Oct. 10-12. Attendee discounts are available until Sept. 14. Kutik can be reached at bkutik@earthlink.net.
September 1, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications
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