Industry insiders share their thoughts on the evolving nature of HR technology and where it might be headed.
by Ladan Nikravan
August 27, 2012
Cecile Leroux
Vice president, product strategy and development, Ultimate Software
“We are moving beyond just giving employees access to data from wherever and whenever to a new era of “consumerization” in HR technology. This means that employees today want the capability to collaborate and get work done using technology like they do outside of the office — in ways that traditional HR technology has not allowed. Expectations are that business applications should work more like consumer apps — think Facebook, Amazon, etc. Employees want simple-to-use, easily adoptable applications that will allow them to interact with co-workers, bosses, even executives.”
Jason Corsello
Vice president of corporate development and strategy, Cornerstone OnDemand
“Technology strategies are no longer being driven by IT departments; rather, they are being driven by what employees need, want and expect in order to get their jobs done using technology from their everyday lives. This includes social, mobile and cloud technologies. While social and mobile are the channels through which employees, managers and business leaders engage with learning and talent management tools, the cloud is the catalyst that brings it all to life. You can’t realize the promise of these other technologies without it. As a result, HR is becoming more real-time, with traditional processes evolving into living, breathing, ongoing interactions.”
Eric Lochner
President, global talent management, Kenexa
“Technological advances in systems are enabling HR professionals to link informed workforce decisions to positive business outcomes. Workforce data centered on employee profiles, hiring needs, competencies, goals, performance, succession, compensation and other areas is now easily available, and can be harvested and analyzed to provide greater insights and actions needed for HR professionals to do their jobs better. These tools allow companies to fill voids in the workforce, reduce risk and plan for the future.”
Chris Leone
Senior vice president, applications development, Oracle
“Technology trends such as social, mobile, big data and the cloud are creating a fundamental change in how employees and HR create value and relationships within the networked organization. Each of these individually affects work, the employee and work culture — collectively they are a formidable force of change within the HR landscape. Technology today can provide deep workforce insight with benchmarks that can help HR and business leaders make intelligent hiring and talent decisions all linked to business metrics.”
Andrew “Flip” Filipowski
CEO, SilkRoad Technology
“Companies need better insight into how employees and trends drive business. Social talent management allows just that by mapping and measuring relationships, influence and knowledge across the organization. It changes the way employees communicate with each other by mirroring the way they’ve become accustomed to social networks. It changes the way employees learn by leveraging both traditional and informal learning gleaned from a shared knowledge catalog of employees. It removes HR from its traditional siloed-employee approach to talent management to one that fully engages and understands employees and everything around them.”