Dive Brief:
- HR technology vendors offering pure play cloud-based products are, by many estimates, years ahead of many large ERP vendors in their knowledge and utilization of cloud software, according to an article at Diginomica.
- Yet, according to author Brian Sommer, a former head of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture's) Global Software Intelligence unit, while their "technology chops are outstanding," those cloud-based vendors are missing the big picture concerning consequences of what Sommers calls the "end of the Industrial Age and the beginning of the Digital Age."
- Instead, Sommers writes, leading edge businesses are going beyond the standard "cloud/mobile/social" solutions and are creating "sensor-enabled, Internet of things (IoT)"-driven solutions. "They've gone digital," he writes.
Dive Insight:
Sommers posits that "digital age" businesses in search of solutions might find some of the technology on display at the recent HR Tech show in Las Vegas, for example, not up to snuff for collecting and mining data.
HR products were not really designed for the digital age and certainly not for the data volumes that will go with it, he writes, though there are some "fringe application" solutions in HR that were designed with big data in mind. These technologies utilize in-memory database technology and other products to handle the massive data stores. But most HR tech products do not.
He concludes that many of the HR technologies offered and used today were designed for the Industrial Age, not the Digital Age, which means those existing solutions may require "a spectrum of enhancements" to be relevant for the digital era. "Some may simply need additions to their performance management system’s competency and capability maps. Some may need enhanced salary data. But others may face changes we have yet to imagine," he writes.
