Workstream Inc

Talent Management Without Borders

A new survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) helps to illustrate what many in the talent management industry have been saying for some time:  In a flat world, the ability to find and retain top talent is foremost among the challenges faced by global companies.

Indeed. Many of the world’s largest and most successful companies are working feverishly to update business processes and implement technology systems that support an economy where talent management has no borders.  Among the Global 2000 companies, there appears to be little doubt that the old methods of recruiting and retaining key staff are ill-suited to today’s global business environment. 

Steve Rimmer, PwC partner in the Human Resource Services practice, apparently agrees: "Almost one-third of these U.S. respondents also expect to use a language other than their own in the workplace. Employers seeking to attract and retain these highly capable employees will need to take these types of expectations into account."

Karen Vander Linde, a partner in the Advisory practice at PwC, drives the point home when she says, “The global economy is shaping expectations of the future workforce."

As if on cue, two Global 2000 companies this week signed long-term commitments to extend and expand their use of Workstream’s advanced talent management software systems, and a third Global 2000 company with significant operations in Southeast Asia signed a similar agreement.

These deals underscore the critical role technology is playing in helping growing companies manage talent on a global scale, and Workstream is a prime example of that trend.  Today, Workstream solutions are used by dozens of global businesses and hundreds of thousands of employees internationally, and its latest software release provides support for 10 languages and multiple currencies out-of-the-box.

In a flat world with many open markets, enhanced communications and an increasingly educated global workforce, leading companies will implement cutting-edge talent management systems first.  In the race for talent, now is the wrong time to be on the outside of this trend looking in.

Talent Management Tipping Point

As any marketing person can tell you, dramatic change in perception often requires a tipping point.  Whether it’s a new product or an emerging product category, the breakout finally happens when a critical mass is reached and everyone involved seems to understand there is no going back to the old way of thinking about that product or category.

The HR Technology show in Chicago last month was precisely that tipping point for talent management.  Press and pundits all seem to agree that talent management, once considered a nice-to-have set of tools for capturing employee data, has moved up the business value chain considerably, taking its place alongside other strategic application suites in the enterprise.

The shift has much to do with the availability of integrated talent management suites that incorporate advanced recruiting, compensation, performance and development solutions, which work together seamlessly and provide executives with previously unavailable visibility into the talent machinations of their businesses.  Cross-application business intelligence combined with global capabilities and a slick Web 2.0 interface are primary tenets of the new and strategic breed of unified talent management suites, and Workstream is proud to be leading this charge.

Kudos to SystematicHR for being among the first to recognize the talent management tipping point.  The future of talent management is indeed a very bright one.

One Size Does Not Fit All Customers

A recent blog from SaaS expert and ZDNet.com blogger Phil Wainwright regarding the launch of Workstream 7.0 has generated significant attention among technology pundits in the blogosphere.  SmoothSpan publisher Bob Warfield is one of many to comment on Workstream’s use of virtualization technology in its new 7.0 talent management suite.  Specifically, Bob raises issues around customization of enterprise applications within a single-tenant environment.  Bob’s case in support of multi-tenancy is a reasonable one, and while Workstream agrees with some of the thinking outlined in Bob’s post, the Workstream philosophy is and will continue to be to provide the best solution for each customer, whether that means delivering talent management solutions in a single-tenant or multi-tenant fashion.

Workstream 7.0 (and prior releases) has been architected in such a way that is highly configurable, and we have developed an extensive set of configuration tools to exploit this. If and when we experience an important functionality gap for a client that cannot be handled through existing configuration, our implementation and development model allows for incorporation of new client needs into the core code base.  As a result, today we do extremely little customization. Among other things, this addresses the historical problems faced by companies that manage many different, customized code bases (including upgrading and code support challenges).

We leverage multi-tenancy extensively where it is appropriate, and strong and rapid configuration is key to this model as well. But, even when a company addresses the configuration issue as Workstream has, there are other powerful drivers that argue for single-tenant, virtualized environment.  These include elegantly addressing thorny concerns over security and data partitioning. For some clients, these concerns are paramount. A very real example is the use of talent management solutions by government agencies involved in law enforcement or intelligence gathering.  For these enterprises, multi-tenancy simply is not an option.

SaaS is a relatively new phenomenon in the talent management arena.  While virtually all of our recently added clients have purchased Workstream solutions as a service, Workstream—and many other talent management vendors—continue to have clients that have deployed on-premise and have not yet taken advantage of the benefits of SaaS and virtualization. As these companies migrate to the new SaaS model, Workstream will continue to grow its ratio of software-to-services revenue.