2009 October | Talent Junction

What Web 2.0 and SaaS Software offer that Legacy ERPs do not provide?

October 27th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

In the last few years, Web 2.0 and SaaS have captured a significant portion of the market led by legacy ERP systems. Even large enterprises (which only showered their love on ERPs) are now accepting the value of SaaS application over legacy ERPs.

A survey about SaaS conducted in August 2009 by Business Week Research Services found that four out of five managers and senior executives in North America are either interested in, or in the process of, adopting the Software as a Service approach to information technology. In fact, roughly a third of the 326 respondents’ companies have already fully or partially adopted the SaaS approach for at least one application. Read more …

What is in SaaS that is enticing senior executives from all streams of management (IT, finance, HR or S&M), apart from cost benefits? Talent Junction explores eight key features of SaaS applications that are usually missing in traditional ERP software.

1. Usability: Web 2.0 SaaS software cares much more for usability than its older cousin ERP did. Vendors have understood the value of usability to end-users and are committing more budgets in analyzing the user behavior while working with the software.

Using this analysis, developers continually re-engineer the design to make it more usable. Menu structures, buttons, messages, user interface, and even application colors are chosen keeping web conventions in mind.

Read more about usability from expert Jacob Neilson.

2. Intuitive Graphic User Interface: SaaS and Web 2.0 applications are far more intuitive than legacy ERP systems. The actions, buttons, messages, etc. communicate to users in a way that most can understand what to do next. Graphics, images, and icons all are designed to convey meaningful and user-friendly messages.

The intuitive interface of SaaS application significantly reduces training needs. Thus, for large organizations, where training multiple teams requires big budgets, SaaS applications are a money-saver.

I would love to share a comment from a happy customer who uses SaaS application for Performance Management “We made the decision to roll this out without any training. Our employees took to it without any effort. We did so without any special training for employees. They all found it easy to manage and intuitive. We’re very happy with the end result.” Read the complete comment here…

3. Collaboration: With the advent of social media and its impact on businesses, collaboration is seen as a tool to develop social learning within the organization. Web 2.0 and SaaS software is significantly advanced in terms of facilitating collaboration among the user community. These applications allow users to share insights, comments, notes, references, and documents within the user groups. The use of such applications not only improves employee productivity but also enhances social learning within the organization. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in HR Best Practices, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS) | 4 Comments »

Post-Recession Challenges of Talent Management

October 12th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Recovering Economies

After a year or so the news on recession is taking a U-turn (not a V-turn though). Officially, analysts are reporting that recession is over, including Google CEO. While it will take some time for recession to pave the way for prosperity and growth for business in general, the prosperity is already on its way to certain economies such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

HR May be Caught Off Guard

Although this is good news for business operations, including marketing and sales, it poses new challenges for human capital. Businesses would no longer run on the old rules, but new out-of-the-box solutions, more comprehensive efforts, innovative thinking, and new skills and competencies would be required to grow and prosper. Needless to say, the demand for both the quantity and the quality of talented employees will grow worldwide. Companies that have fired employees in the past are already feeling the pinch, as they do not have enough bandwidth to execute.

Bloggers like Jon Ingham, who champion the cause of Human Capital Management, are being invited to speak on performance management. The need for performance management is pressing.

Talent Scenario During Recession

The law of demand and supply mercilessly applies to human resources, also. During the economic downturn, companies were able to downsize by getting rid of redundant work force and dead wood. They also restructured the employee compensation (mostly by decreasing) to stave off financial losses. Only those employees were retained who proved their worth. The employees had to accept all kinds of compensation-related compromises while maintaining the same or even higher level of efficiency and productivity. They could thus survive the financial tsunami.

These survivors got the opportunity to handle a variety of tasks that further sharpened their skills and made them multi-skilled. Thus, overall quality of talent has increased. At the same time, those who were out of job lost this opportunity to hone their skills in a new challenging environment. Adding to our woes, slashing of training and development budgets has led to a depletion of the number of skilled employees within the companies.

And a Difficult Road Ahead

Such steps from companies have created an altogether tricky scenario: The quality of talent within the companies has increased (raising the bar of the talent), while the quality of skills available in job market has dwindled. Now, recruiters can hire the required quality talent not from outside but from inside their competitors’ workplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Compensation Planning, Economy, Employee Appraisals, Employee Rewards, Performance Management | 9 Comments »

Difference between the SaaS and Perpetual License Structure

October 7th, 2009 Talent Junction

HR Managers and CTOs often ask us the benefits of SaaS over Perpetual license of EmpXtrack.

Here is a comparison chart:

	SAAS (Hosted) Licensing Structure	Perpetual Licensing Structure
Cost of Software	Lower Cost	Can go as high as 4 times the SAAS license cost
Payment Frequency	Annually	One time
Annual Maintenance Cost	Nil	To be incurred by the Client (can vary between 30% -50% of the cost of the software)
Hardware Costs	Nil	To be incurred by the client
Implementation Cost	Nil	To be incurred by the client (Can be 15% upwards of the total cost of the software)
Data Back Up	Data backup managed by us	To be managed by the client
Personnel Cost & requirement	We would maintain it for you.	To be managed by the client
Security	Our responsibility	Client has to manage data security, access etc.
Upgrades	Upgrades to servers, software, databases, application managed by us and provided automatically	Client has to manage all upgrades
Infrastructure	We manage the servers,networks, provide scalability and access, performance tuning and application management	Client has to manage the infrastructure, servers, networks, performance tuning etc.
Access	Clients can access the application on-demand from anywhere. Note this can be managed based on specific needs.	Typically access is limited to client intranet.