To be successful, companies need the right people with the right skills and competences. At the same time, the individual needs of employees are becoming increasingly important. The upcoming SAP SuccessFactors release promises to provide the right IT tool for this. The Talent Intelligence Hub and other innovations within the suite should make it possible to target individual potential, interests and specific preferences. Find out more about these innovative new possibilities within your SAP SuccessFactors Suite in this Specialist article.
Organisations are facing various challenges today: A shortage of skilled labour, a new generation of demanding employees, transformational megatrends and a difficult macroeconomic situation are presenting HR with the task of finding new solutions. One strategic approach to address this is "people sustainability". Organisations want to promote not only the professional but also the personal development of their employees and thus create an Appreciation and sustainable approach to employees.
This paradigm shift towards people-centred, bottom-up Talent Management is currently being addressed by strategy consultancies, large software manufacturers and institutions such as the WEF. SAP is also incorporating this "people sustainability" approach into the strategic vision of SuccessFactors. With the "Whole-Self Model", SAP emphasises the importance of individual well-being and personal development. With the help of their IT landscape, organisations should be enabled to recognise the specific potential, skills, preferences, interests and working styles of their employees in addition to traditional skills management.
In its last two releases, SAP SuccessFactors has introduced innovations that are designed to meet the challenges in the HR sector and help companies to take the path of "people sustainability". This autumn's upcoming release promises to make these innovations fully available to all SuccessFactors customers.
Innovative functionalities to promote people sustainability
The SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace has already been introduced in 2021. This module enables employees to search for internal opportunities for professional development. The platform suggests relevant positions, projects, mentoring and learning opportunities based on skills and interests. In this way, the module acts as an internal marketplace to provide employees with all the opportunities offered by the existing talent modules from a single source. However, a technological basis is required to generate intelligent suggestions.
This is where the Talent Intelligence Hub comes into play, which will be available to SuccessFactors customers from the autumn release this year. It uses artificial intelligence to promote the development of employees in a targeted manner. It is based on the Skills Ontology, a relational and dynamic database of skills from SAP. This database is based on public databases such as O-Net and Esco and links these skills with each other based on published job advertisements. Based on this, organisations can define their own library of attributes (Attributes Library), which employees can access in their personal Growth Portfolio. They receive personalised recommendations for attributes, which in turn serve as the basis for suggestions in the Opportunity Marketplace. In addition, data from third-party sources such as MS Graph is used for the intelligent networking of talents and opportunities.
Use Case
Let's imagine the following situation: An agile Team is put together to develop a new product. The project manager needs a team of experts from different departments, e.g. sales, marketing and other product areas. The Opportunity Marketplace offers the opportunity to advertise this project internally. People with the relevant skills and interests in their growth portfolio receive this tender as a proposal and can respond. This agile and temporary project team can then be mapped and managed in the system as a Dynamic Team, regardless of the hierarchical structure. This includes OKR-based (Objectives and Key Results) performance management, team composition and team coordination. The Dynamic Teams functionality is another innovation in the SuccessFactors cosmos and was released this year for all SF customers.
Our assessment
"SAP SuccessFactors is launching its biggest release in a decade" - Josh Bersin, global HR industry analyst, writes about the innovations that SAP SuccessFactors has been rolling out continuously since September 2022. And we couldn't agree more. SAP's vision for the future is innovative and interesting, but also raises technical and professional questions. It should be noted here that SAP has yet to finalise the implementation of these functionalities and therefore comprehensive empirical values on these innovations are still pending. HR Campus is following the realisation by SAP very closely and we will keep our customers informed about the implementation on an ongoing basis and share our assessment. The upcoming H2 2023 release in particular should shed more light on this and we look forward to this journey into modern and people-centred Talent Management.
Sources
- https://www.pwc.ch/en/insights/hr/people-sustainability-strategy.html
- https://www.mercer.com
- https://www.workday.com/en-us/solutions/role/enterprise-hr/skills-based-people-strategy.html
- https://www.oracle.com/ch-de/human-capital-management/employee-experience/oracle-me/
- https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/how-your-business-benefit-people-sustainability-davos2023/
- https://www.onetonline.org/skills/soft/
- https://esco.ec.europa.eu/de
- https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/graph/overview
- https://joshbersin.com/2022/09/sap-successfactors-launches-its-biggest-release-in-a-decade/
Innovative technologies for people-centred Talent Management
Innovative technologies for people-centred Talent Management