If you’ve been in this business any length of time, you’ve become accustomed to disruptive innovation. More than anywhere else you can name, the front office has been a hotbed for introducing game-changing new technologies since the mid-1990s, when CRM applications began coming on line. But what’s next?
We’ve had our share of net new ideas over the last couple of years, including cloud computing, an expansion on the SaaS model; mobility, which was reignited by the iPad’s disruptive introduction; and, obviously, the social revolution, which imported social ideas from popular tools like Twitter and Facebook.
However, each of these is not what I think of when I think “disruptive.” They are more adaptations of some other technology or phenomenon already in market.
What Is Disruptive?
It’s not that I am complaining, but these are horizontal ideas, and I’m thinking about vertical. A good rule of thumb for me is to look at what people are using paper or spreadsheets for and to ask if those crude tools are helping or hurting, given the pace of business today. Fifteen years ago if you asked that question you might have zeroed in on the sales process, and that would have been a lot of fun.
Helping or hurting given the pace of business is the key. Many of the manual processes we’ve disrupted in the last two decades have been with us for a very long time. But with the acceleration imparted by the high-tech revolution, those processes were suddenly lacking. That’s the sweet spot when I look for disruption.
Today, the area that has all of these things — manual processes trying to cope with the speed of change — is human resources, and that’s especially true in the hiring process. You might find that hard to believe, given the high unemployment rate, but you might also recall a piece I wrote a few weeks ago saying that in Silicon Valley, at least, there is a shortage of qualified people to hire. That also means there’s a hiring war going on too, and in such a situation, having systems that can quickly enable you to sift through all the resumes and applications to find the few that meet your needs can be a competitive advantage.
Building the HR Suite
Companies like PeopleSoft and now Workday of course have wonderful HR products, and there is a host of smaller companies with HR products as well. But keep in mind that CRM is composed of a few essential stovepipes with many best-of-breed solutions clustered around them, and HR has the same kind of needs.
What CRM has done well and HR is still getting started doing is to consolidate the pieces into a coherent solution. So there are hiring solutions, e-learning or training systems and employee management/benefits systems, and even messaging systems. Companies often have to cobble together these solutions into a working system that is necessarily costly and brittle.
Also, like most other areas of enterprise computing, HR is dealing with the on-premise vs. on-demand or SaaS, aka “cloud discussion.” Throw in a little social and mobile for good measure, and I think HR is ripe for disruption. But all these things need to be or become part of the standard HR suite. The suite doesn’t exist yet, but it ought to.
The Rise of TRM
Then there’s the issue of cost. HR systems address a relatively small part of the market because many of them are still on-premise solutions requiring major investments. That means they are not appropriate for smaller companies with tight budgets, and that is the opportunity that a cloud-based HR suite could address.
To date, the number of such suites is small, but I noticed that recently Jobscience announced its winter release of TalentCloud. Just to prove the disruptive point, the company calls what it does “Talent Relationship Management,” or TRM, which accords a certain amount of respect to people and acknowledges the importance of skills in a knowledge economy.
The product is built on the Force.com platform, which gives it immediate access to the Salesforce customer base and gives it scalability that few can match, especially at the price point of a cloud solution. There’s a lot of compliance record-keeping that needs to happen in HR, and having an automated system to help with all that is a great productivity boost.
In the not-too-distant future, everyone will need something like this to help them compete in the talent wars and save time and cost in compliance. Right now, this looks like an important next disruption and, as usual, early adopters will gain the most.
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Great Article! Truly, the HR field is ripe for some serious disruptive technology! In this connection, I cannot help but think of Accolo’s Cloud Recruiting Solution as a pretty good example of that. It combines technology, people and a data-driven process that allows you to find highly qualified candidates. They also use a Saas model-an on-demand capacity to hire. Intriguing yet effective, especially in a field like recruiting,which is traditionally considered an art.