Cornerstone OnDemnad has been providing an integrated online talent management solution for ten years. They now have over 3.7 million subscribers giving them one of the largest subscriber bases. The most recent addition to their integrated suite is social networking through the Cornerstone Connect module which was launched in October 2008. I recently spoke with Charles Coy, Director of Product Marketing at Cornerstone, about their offerings.

Charles said that Cornerstone has been in both the learning management and talent management market for some time. Now the providers in both spaces are tending to merge toward integrated offerings that address both issues.  This makes sense since, as Charles noted, the learning component makes the talent management actionable.  In Cornerstone’s instance their competency assessment capabilities help set up the learning agenda for individuals.

Cornerstone has extended the range of integrated products by adding social networking to create a five-part suite. Each of these components is available separately but now over 70% of their clients are using more than one module.  The five components are: learning management, enterprise social networking, performance management, succession planning, and support for engaging the extended enterprise. Here is a sample screen from the talent management system.

The learning component includes collaborative learning, instructor-led classes, e-learning, and virtual classrooms. Some of the content comes from the SkillSoft library (see my post on their extensive offering: SaaS enters e-learning Through SkillSoft). The performance management system has a fully integrated workflow from competency assessment to performance reviews and development plans and on to such components as goal management, certification tracking and compensation modeling. Succession planning links talent pooling with career pathing to support development plans. The extended enterprise capability supports customer and partner training and certification.

We spent more time on Cornerstone Connect, the social networking component. Here they have brought in such enterprise 2.0 capabilities as blogs, wikis, forums, RSS, and microblogging to support collaborative learning.  I think this is a great move as I have seen the many benefits of using social software in the learning space. Below is a sample main page for Cornerstone Connect.  It fits within the overall framework of your career, profile, team, resources and reports.

Rather than simply providing generic social software, Cornerstone is adapting these tools to focused learning use cases and Charles went over a few.  The first is employee on-boarding. The Connect module helps new hires engage with communities such as their work team and/or other new hires. This is an ideal use case for the conversations and introductions that can occur through social tools. Below is a sample screen where you can see authors, community members, topics, and postings.

Another use case is social learning. They have seen an increase in demand for social learning. I can understand this as peer learning has generally been one of the strongest forms of education and the transparency of social media can inspire even greater performance in peer learning activities. I have seen this in situations where the outcomes became significantly better once a social learning tool was introduced.

Cornerstone clients have also used Connect to support business partner on-boarding and customer enablement.  Like with employee on-boarding, anytime you want to create greater connections as part of the learning efforts, a social networking tool can provide useful benefits.  Employee alumni networks is a related use case as organizations have increasingly wanted to stay connected to former employees to tap into their experience and, in some cases, to create new sales channels.

Cornerstone has used Connect itself to set up a Suggestion City to crowd-source new product ideas and receive feedback on existing ones. They also use it for their own new product training.  I am sure that new use cases will continue to emerge.  Their future product plans include enhanced metrics on the connections and communication that occurs through Connect. I think this is a smart move as part of the value of using transparent tools is taping into the content that emerges through these conversations to look for trends and better understanding the pulse of an organization.

I like what Cornerstone is doing with the integrated approach and the increasingly social nature of their talent management suite. They now have plans to make versions available for the small to midsize market that is largely underserved with these types of comprehensive capabilities.