Advantages of Software as a Service over ASP

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A Sweet Spot: Competencies and Learning

Published March 2008
Influencing Competency Management
Brian Summerfield


Recent research from the Aberdeen Group showed that best-in-class performers are up to 86 percent more likely than “laggard” companies to know which skills and traits make top performers. This statistic points to a relationship between understanding what core competencies are for the various roles within the workforce and how bringing in those skills and enhancing them contributes to the overall success of the business.

Obviously, having the right competencies in the right part of the enterprise is critical for aligning its personnel to its goals. Equally obvious is the fact that corporate learning can help ensure employees have the specific skills and knowledge they need to succeed in a particular role from both an individual and organizational perspective. But chief learning officers should be doing more than just developing training in reaction to a perceived need for this or that competency. To make themselves and their function more strategic, they should be deeply involved in the competency conversation from the outset.

This likely isn’t a profound revelation for learning executives, most of whom have been aware of how employee development relates to competency management for some time now. However, many of them probably aren’t where they need to be in terms of influencing this other aspect of talent. For the good of their organizations, this must change.

Effecting this change is not terribly complicated, either. Recognizing that learning and competency management share the same “people” rubric with many other related functions, learning leaders should involve themselves in other associated aspects of talent. These include:

1. Hiring: By creating hiring profiles with detailed and standardized competencies for various positions, organizations can bring on employees who will be more likely to hit the ground running. CLOs might want to participate in the creation and maintenance of hiring profile programs or simply voice support for them. In any event, these will make efforts around onboarding easier from the perspective of the learning department.

2. Technical infrastructure: CLOs should make sure their learning management system can track employee competencies somehow. There are essentially two ways to do this: Get a comprehensive LMS that includes some sort of application around competencies or attach the LMS to a separate but connected competency management system. This decision probably will rest largely on the resources and proficiency of the organization’s IT department.

3. Performance management: Once learning executives have some technical means of aligning competencies to learning, they can assess employees to make sure the knowledge actually has been absorbed and retained. It’s even better if there’s a feedback loop in place that can show employee performance well after the fact to make sure learning programs are having the right impact. For example, if several workers are evaluated as competent in certain areas but don’t achieve the desired job performance, learning professionals can revisit their programs to see if something is wrong with the content or delivery, the competency baseline needs to be raised or they need to teach altogether new skills.

4. Succession planning: Learning programs shouldn’t only familiarize employees with the competencies they need to know for their current jobs. They also should identify high potentials (via assessment methodologies) and eventually instruct them on the competencies they need to know for higher-level positions within a logical career progression. This will help prepare a talent pipeline for key positions within the enterprise, ones the organization might otherwise have trouble filling.
Brian Summerfield is a managing editor for Chief Learning Officer magazine.

Let's be strategic and integrate our systems

published February 2008
Integrating Talent Management Systems Strategically by Leighanne Levensaler


With the increased emphasis on talent management, companies are looking to integrate at least some of these systems, while adding solutions for other processes, such as workforce planning, succession planning, recruiting and competency management. In response to the interest, software vendors of all types are scrambling to pull supporting modules into integrated suites.

When it comes to HR-related systems, most companies have a tapestry — or crazy quilt — of systems that have been built, bought and implemented over many years. HR technology infrastructures can include payroll, HRMSs, LMSs, applicant tracking, compensation and benefits, and performance management systems — all of which have different levels of maturity and are commonly owned by different parts of an organization.

Talent managers involved in setting their company's integrated talent management systems strategy have many good reasons not to leap into purchasing decisions. The market offers many options, with different strengths, maturity and levels of integration. Purchases should fit the company's IT architecture with an acceptable range for risk tolerance. How the organization governs talent management also comes into play.

There are major considerations involved in developing this critical system strategy. If skipped, absence of these important and often soul-searching steps will lead to confusion with the wide variety of systems, architectures, delivery models and approaches available.

Start With Business Problems

The first step is to identify business problems the organization wants to solve with an integrated talent management system. Problems typically fall into one of three hierarchical categories:

1. Automation. By implementing these systems, the organization will reduce the cost of errors, save time, reduce paper and better meet compliance requirements.
2. Process improvement. The company's goal is to better implement existing processes and perhaps even improve them because the software will facilitate a more integrated and complete, data-rich approach to a given process.
3. Business and talent breakthroughs: These systems will empower the organization to execute new tasks.

Focus on Talent Processes First

Recent research shows the greatest business results come not from HR systems, but the underlying processes. In fact, Bersin & Associates has identified the Top 22 processes (out of 62 studied) that drive highest levels of business impact. These include coaching; development-based performance management; the use of strategic competencies in recruiting, performance management and leadership development; implementation of skills and competency-based workforce planning; and creating personnel and organizational goals that align with current and strategic business goals.

These processes are not dependent on software solutions. Most are more dependent on company culture, business and organizational maturity. If the investment in talent management systems is to drive dramatic business impact (and positive change), examine and prioritize talent management processes first.

Once the talent manager determines which processes are most important to business success and how they should be prioritized, he or she will be better prepared to evaluate the available options and set expectations for future investments.

When examining current processes, also consider "breakthrough processes." Up to now, most of these processes have not been practical to achieve. But now, new, integrated technology options put them in reach. These include:

* Integrated performance and learning.
* Integrated performance management and
succession planning.
* Pay for performance.
* Integrated recruiting and performance
management.
* Career planning.

Why You Can Love An Integrated Talent Management System...

You need a Great Services & Support Team

Get a vendor where each person, each department is devoted to providing the highest level of service. Service and support for customers is the highest priority to ensure continuous subscription renewals and helps to ensure subscription renewals.

On-demand, Software as a Service (SaaS)

There is no hardware, software, middleware, databases, or business intelligence tools to buy, install, maintain, and upgrade. The multi-tenancy model means that customers securely share one physical instance of software without ever seeing each other’s data.

Seamless No Pain Upgrades

With traditional on-premise applications, many customers often fall drastically behind the latest technology & feature releases. With SaaS, all software updates and upgrades are seamless delivered each month to all customers at one time.

Best Available Technology

Make sure your product is built on a next-generation architecture (using .NET 2.0 and AJAX) that enables the deliver of services faster – deliver implementations & integrations through the use of Web services - so they can easily interact with other applications

Systems Integration

Get a solution built to transparently integrate with your existing solutions (ERP, HRMS, ATS, and Financials) whether they are on-premise or on-demand. Make sure services have been designed at the core to support and utilize today’s standard for integration – web services

Configurable Not Customizable

Get a system’ designed so that workflow, forms and processes can be configured to meet the needs of your individual group, business unit, department, or country – or simply, by organizational unit

Global Reach and Scale

Have a multi-tenant architecture that is maintained by a Tier 1 hosting facility with redundancy and failover capabilities, making the best use of content acceleration technology to move the most frequent content out to the edges of the Internet to service global locations. Having access to multiple languages (with more coming) and global date and currency formats allows for a decentralized and extensible environment.

Flexibility In Approach

Whether you are a centralized or decentralized organization, or a hybrid, your system should allow for total flexibility in establishing how you use it. Each organizational unit should be allowed to fully decentralize capabilities to configure their process, workflow and forms. Centralized control can be managed through the use of role-based permission groups. These tools provide the flexibility needed to manage organizations with 10's of thousands of users.

Usability & EngagementA single user-friendly interface should be as easy and intuitive to navigate as today’s consumer web sites. Having a unique roles-based user experience for executives, managers, employees, and administrators will allow for a single integrated portal, building engagement and adoption, no matter how few or how many modules have been rolled out

A Single Point of Ownership

Make sure you have a single point of contact, one vendor who designed it, built it, and supports it.

How Does AJAX help our web experience?

A reprint

As Web applications become more sophisticated, users can easily develop Web pages, create a blog, and upload their audios and videos easily. Today web users are becoming the news by reporting current events faster then the professional news media and with more insight. AJAX software implementations make interacting with the web interfaces faster, and can allow for widget type mini-applications to live within HTML hypertext pages comfortably. We’re entering a golden age period of friendly user interface with unbelievable innovation, as web 2.0 developpers are finally able to build web applications as good or better then the PC-based desktop applications of yesterday. This shows that the developper community is embracing open, standards-based solutions and Ajax software.

Ajax, abreviation for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is the web 2.0 development software of choice for creating interactive web applications. It makes web pages feel more responsive by exchanging smaller amounts of data with the server in the background. This way the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes change. Their ease of use makes it simpler for users to compose blogs and assemble mashups. Because mashups average data and services from public domain websites and free web applications, they’re simple to implement and hey are built with a minimal amount of code. Their obvious business benefit is that they can be quickly implemented at very little development cost and the will improve your user satisfaction. The richer user-experience afforded by Ajax software application has given birth to web 2.0 websites that act as PC- desktop applications, such as word processing or spreadsheet. The next step in this web 2.0 evolution will transform Ajax applications into new communications tools like the iPhone or iPod Touch connecting users to each other through web server channels. The key to this transformation lies with Ajax Push, a technique that gives the server the ability to update any part of any page at any time during the user experience.

Technospeak: I have tried to figure out ASP vs SaaS, well here it is

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Broadly speaking, SaaS application maturity can be expressed using a model with four distinct levels. Each level is distinguished from the previous one by the addition of one of the three attributes listed above.

Level I: Ad Hoc/Custom (this is a typical ASP hosted model)

The first level of maturity is similar to the traditional application service provider (ASP) model of software delivery, dating back to the 1990s. At this level, each customer has its own customized version of the hosted application, and runs its own instance of the application on the host's servers. Architecturally, software at this maturity level is very similar to traditionally-sold line-of-business software, in that different clients within an organization connect to a single instance running on the server, but that instance is wholly independent of any other instances or processes that the host is running on behalf of its other customers.

Typically, traditional client–server applications can be moved to a SaaS model at the first level of maturity, with relatively little development effort, and without re-architecting the entire system from the ground up. Although this level offers few of the benefits of a fully mature SaaS solution, it does allow vendors to reduce costs by consolidating server hardware and administration.

Level II: Configurable (this is a typical on demand model)

At the second level of maturity, the vendor hosts a separate instance of the application for each customer (or tenant). Whereas in the first level each instance is individually customized for the tenant, at this level, all instances use the same code implementation, and the vendor meets customers' needs by providing detailed configuration options that allow the customer to change how the application looks and behaves to its users. Despite being identical to one another at the code level, each instance remains wholly isolated from all the others.

Moving to a single code base for all of a vendor's customers greatly reduces a SaaS application's service requirements, because any changes made to the code base can be easily provided to all of the vendor's customers at once, thereby eliminating the need to upgrade or slipstream individual customized instances. However, repositioning a traditional application as SaaS at the second maturity level can require significantly more re-architecting than at the first level, if the application has been designed for individual customization rather than configuration metadata.

Similarly to the first maturity level, the second level requires that the vendor provide sufficient hardware and storage to support a potentially large number of application instances running concurrently.

Level III: Configurable, Multi-Tenant Architecture (this is the 1st generation SaaS model)

At the third level of maturity, the vendor runs a single instance that serves every customer, with configurable metadata providing a unique user experience and feature set for each one. Authorization and security policies ensure that each customer's data is kept separate from that of other customers; and, from the end user's perspective, there is no indication that the application instance is being shared among multiple tenants.

This approach eliminates the need to provide server space for as many instances as the vendor has customers, allowing for much more efficient use of computing resources than the second level, which translates directly to lower costs. A significant disadvantage of this approach is that the scalability of the application is limited. Unless partitioning is used to manage database performance, the application can be scaled only by moving it to a more powerful server (scaling up), until diminishing returns make it impossible to add more power cost-effectively.

Level IV: Scalable, Configurable, Multi-Tenant Architecture (this is a highly scalable, mature SaaS model)

At the fourth and final level of maturity, the vendor hosts multiple customers on a load-balanced farm of identical instances, with each customer's data kept separate, and with configurable metadata providing a unique user experience and feature set for each customer. A SaaS system is scalable to an arbitrarily large number of customers, because the number of servers and instances on the back end can be increased or decreased as necessary to match demand, without requiring additional re-architecting of the application, and changes or fixes can be rolled out to thousands of tenants as easily as a single tenant.

Authors:

Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro
Microsoft Corporation

read it here at:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa479069.aspx

April 2006

Great Book: "Mobilizing Minds" the topic is Organizational Talent

Written by McKinsey principals Bryan and Joyce...So here is my synopsis or understanding of the subject matter presented...

Organizational design is today's key to unlocking the opportunities of the 21^s century…Why? It's all about mind power!

Companies can consciously design and build organizational interventions that can dramatically improve their ability to ‘mobilize mind power’ - to create greater wealth in the organization. The size of the potential opportunity (to build greater wealth and profits) justifies that the CEO and top-tier leadership devote a large % of their total capacity to this intervention. Today’s corporations are now under-performers as they struggle again to adopt to the new global business environment. Why is this? The authors discuss this further...

Most Organizations Still Operate Under Old Organizational Models-

The goal is to free talented people from the unproductive complexity that has been designed into today’s corporate organizational model.This unproductive complexity is a function of the organizational model being used today, but that was designed for the industrial revolution of the early 1920’s, not for today’s digital age or 21^st century technology.

So, what causes this unproductive complexity?

Vertical Hierarchies create a traffic jam or organizational gridlock...these result in organizational constraints Silos create impenetrable walls that block collaboration and the flow of individual intellectual property (IIP). Then, the idea of horizontal matrices was developed to circumvent the existing hierarchies, this resulted in more managers, more reporting, more agendas and convoluted relationships. Add to this, intermediate layers within an organization such that the front line and front office are so far apart they never engage, reducing opportunities to collaborate, demobilizing mind power.

Most People In The Workforce Today Want New Organizational Models -

Today, the majority of workers are ‘thinking-intensive’ people vs. labor intensive people. Look at how students come into the working world relying upon social networking sites for their life style. Here they define thinking intensive workers as those that apply the use of subjective judgment and problem solving (intangibles) techniques to produce greater efficiency, scale and wealth. Labor intensive workers rely upon the application of labor, capital, energy, materials (tangibles) to produce greater efficiency, scale. It is easy to understand how our workforce has changed!

Intangibles in the 21st Century are the source of wealth production since the production of tangibles is being constrained by the environment, resource restrictions, global competition, rising wages, lower standards of living, etc.

By enabling 'the liberation of talented people' from dysfunctional organizations, releasing the organizational complexity, it seems possible to harness the collective latent mind power. The authors go on to explore in detail 9 different means of attaining the goal.

Find it on Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Mobilizing-Minds-Creating-Century-Organization/dp/0071490825