Vendor SuccessFactors

[Doug Heywood]

SuccessFactors aims to align individual effort with corporate goals

iTWire by Stephen Withers
Friday, 11 September 2009

SaaS provider SuccessFactors believes it has found a way of encouraging employees to pull in the direction set by senior management.

SuccessFactors has been delivering SaaS for performance reviews and other HR-related processes, but a study conducted for the company by a leading management consultancy revealed that large companies wanted workforce performance tools that linked to business execution.

SuccessFactors' new Strategy Deployment software is intended to fill that need.

Murray Sargant, vice president Asia Pacific at SuccessFactors, told iTWire that linking goals and performance can affect people's behaviour and should lead to improved productivity.

Although business intelligence (BI) vendors claim to address business execution, they generally rely on ERP and other legacy data which lags too much. Executives know this is important, but they also need leading indicators, he said.

Strategy Deployment - part of SuccessFactors' Business Execution (BizX) suite - allows senior executives to turn long-term goals and high-level strategies into specific goals for individual managers, which are then linked to compensation packages.

This cascades down the organisation, and even where employees aren't on performance-based compensation the system can link to other forms of recognition.

The result is said to be that employees are helped to understand what they should be working on, and how it fits into the overall corporate direction.

All this is done with a Facebook-style web application, that includes search and collaboration tools to help employees find each other.

Sargant doesn't claim Strategy Deployment fixes all the issues, but says a 1 to 2% productivity improvement is typical.

SuccessFactors also announced its SuccessCloud program to promote integration between its tools and those from other vendors. Existing integrations include IBM Lotus Connections, IBM WebSphere Portal, Ping Identity, GeoLearning and SkillSoft.

"The next era of enterprise software is about collaboration and shared data among many applications," said Scott McMullan, Google Apps partner lead with Google Enterprise.

"Google and SuccessFactors worked together to make our joint customers more productive through the integration of Google Apps with SuccessFactors' Business Execution Software Suite. Continued momentum around open web APIs reinforces the value of the web as the underlying platform."

According to country manager Tim Holloway, SuccessFactors is also partnering with LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce.com and other popular services.