SuccessFactors began in 2001 as one of the first on-demand Strategic HR software providers. They did this to allow companies of all sizes to quick start their performance & talent management support and bypass the some times lengthy implementation of enterprise products. It also took them out of the dump and run service mode as they, like other SaaS suppliers, depend on ongoing renewals for their revenue stream. The company now serves organizations from less than 10 to over 100,000 employees. They have 1,750 customers and over 3,000,000 on demand users. Some of these include Toyota, British Telecom, Fed Ex, AARP, Yahoo, NASDAQ, and Hilton.

Earlier this week I spoke with David Karel, Director of Product Marketing, to discuss their release of ULTRA, a significant overhaul of the SuccessFactors Performance and Talent Management Suite that incorporates a number of Web 2.0 features. I have had various forays into the HR space over the years so I am familiar with many of the issues but not an expert. David shared with me some interesting statistics about the need for better alignment of the enterprise workforce.

- 95% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategic goals (Norton & Kaplan)
- 50% of the average employee’s time is spend on non-productive work (Corporate Strategy Board Research; Measures that Matter)
- 86% of the workforce is disengaged (Towers Perrin)

These numbers are very believable to me as they are similar to what we found in the 80s when I was more involvement with learning and performance management. It is concerning that more progress has not been made. The numbers certainly point to the need for better implementations of tools like SuccessFactors. One of their major goals is to better align employee’s actions with companies’ objectives. I think that enterprise 2.0 features can help with this connection and am pleased to see a firm extending their product in this direction. As a SaaS supplier they are constantly upgrading their software but the recent ULTRA release was a major overhaul. David walked me through a demo of the new features. They included:

- the ability for employees to interact with each other through social media and networking-type communities

- employee profile features than encourage and facilitate user generated content such as an interactive seating chart, seamless integration with Facebook, and enhanced tagging capabilities

- the ability to obtain a 360-view of an employee from anywhere in the performance and talent management process. This is done through Quickcards that provide links to the employee’s essential information such as performance reviews, goal plans, development plans and career worksheets among others;

- integration between succession planning and recruiting to allow managers to create targeted new hire requisitions directly from their Succession Org Chart based on an understanding of the high performers on their teams;

– a more interactive Succession Org Chart with new features such as highlighting key positions and retirement eligibility flags to increase talent visibility so the organization and its managers can make better decisions about the strengths, weaknesses and gaps of the talent base – this comes with good security to protect confidential employee performance information from those who do not need to know

– recruiting management reports that plot the performance rating of employees against the recruiting cost of their hiring source to so managers know where they get their best talent and better information on their return on recruiting investment

They also provided increased visualization and other UI upgrades to better align with what employees are seeing on the consumer web. I really liked the search results for specific employees that come back as pictures, rather than names. Often, I will remember a face before a name. It is also more personal. As mentioned above, they also provide seating diagrams where you can drag and drop pictures and names of the occupants to get a physical location directory. Their open APIs also allow for Google and Yahoo Map integration and many other possibilities.

They also have a blog, the Performance and Talent Management Blog, written by Max Goldman, Group Product Marketing Manager. It does a nice job of covering their market, as well as their products

The addition of web 2.0 features helps enterprise software better keep up with the consumer web. David also showed me their old interface that looked like many enterprise software screens. The new one adds tags, tag clouds, social networking, increased visualization with drag and drop manipulations, and increased opportunities for employee input. Most importantly, it allows greater participation by employees in their own career management process. It is nice to see enterprise 2.0 continue spread through more enterprise software functions and tool sets.