#HRTechChat Episode Five Recap: For HR Enlightenment, Go to the Oracle

Alternate headline: For HR Technology Alignment, Can You Big It?
 
Thursday morning, a big company announced that it had become the newly acquired asset of a really big company. The HR chattering class took to the airwaves, blogging and tweeting back and forth with observation and analysis. The conventional wisdom, already in the mail, assured us: Oracle acquired Taleo because it had to. And that's true. Just a couple short months ago, SAP completed its purchase of SuccessFactors. One of the next heavy-hitting HCM providers in the cloud was bound to find a suitor sooner or later, Oracle needed to make a move to remain competitive against SAP, and tweeters and bloggers began to think beyond Taleo. Names like Kenexa came up. Actually, the name Kenexa came up.
 
But let's wait. Let's look at all this integration, first. Oracle and SAP face a tall order. They're probably up to it, but let's acknowledge that they indeed face an order, and let's not ignore this order's height. OK?
 
There's a whole lot of integration going on….right now, we hope. Ostensibly, all that integrative activity will lead to HR technology alignment: the alignment of technology with technology. The caliber of integration and resulting alignment of Taleo's technology with Oracle's and of SuccessFactors' with SAP's, and of those solutions' with non–HCM-related technologies, will determine Oracle's and SAP's ability to provide a unified, usable technological experience to their customers—to provide aligned HR tech. Then, and only then, will they have arrived….halfway there.
 
Can You Big It?
 
Well, can you? A large company buys another in order to say the solution now features the purchased company's technology's functionality. Eventually, and ideally, all analytics will talk the same language throughout the suite, the employee assessment tool will work in concert with the performance management component, and both will have a technologically seamless way of informing the allocation of worldwide resources (derived from use of the workforce optimization part of the suite). When all parts of the suite work together in ways like this, practitioners across the enterprise will then dig it, and the enterprise itself will then big it, i.e. perform optimally across a broad geography and spectrum of departments.
 
The drive is to offer one suite. Most people get that, and the efficiencies an all-in-one HCM tech solution offers are desirable. But don't forget that many of the large players offering this approach, at organizations' request, nevertheless cobbled together these offerings through the acquisition of disparate offerings. This isn't to say some of those large players aren't doing a very good job of integrating it all, but most continue to toil away at sorting out backend compatibility of once disparate solutions now branded as the same solution.
 
That scenario is not exactly analogous to Oracle's and SAP's acquisitions, but with theirs, there's another issue at play: cloud-to-cloud integration and the evolution of on-premise technologies, along with their on-premise cultures, to embrace off-premise solutions. Again, the order is tall. It's also big.
 
Technology Needs to Be a People Person
 
For the sake of this #HRTechChat recap, assume that all that integration is complete, and the HR technology is all aligned. Maybe it's even aligned with other business processes. HR is now halfway there. Pondering today's acquisition, a new tweeter in the #HRTechChat stream tweeted, "…effective integration, both with technology AND people!" Yes, @IanGertler mentioned people. You know: those sentient beings who deal with the other sentient beings in an organization and with yet more sentient beings trying to become a part of the organization. Technology helps people do their jobs, but it doesn't replace the people. That might seem trite. It might sound like a cheesy moral to the story, the kind of cliché ending seen on a television sitcom from a generation ago. But it's trite, cheesy and cliché because it's true: Alignment of the organization's people brings HR the other half of the way to enlightenment, HR alignment.
 
The TMT #HRTechChat Poll Results
 
The voting was unanimous—yes, unanimous. Everyone who took the poll agreed: "Performance management technology is not chief among all alternatives to help HR align with the rest of the organization." Frankly, the poll's wording was misleading. This being an HR technology–focused chat, we meant "among all technological alternatives," but hey, maybe the mistake was meant to be. In human resources, after all, we can't forget the humans.
 
Stay Tuned for the Next Episode
 
See? You've just finished reading an entire blog entry about a cloud-related market acquisition, and barely a word about the cloud appeared. We wanted to spare you. You're welcome.
 
On this blog, stay tuned early next week for the #HRTechChat Episode Six Preview, topic TBD, and for an Episode Five Coda, which will feature select examples of our many wise tweeters' thoughts on HR alignment.