New modules and features in SAP SuccessFactors
Companies need the right people with the right skills and expertise in order to succeed. 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 to address this. The Talent Intelligence Hub and other innovations that form part of the suite are intended to make it possible to target individual potential, interests and specific preferences. Find out more about these innovative new facilities offered by your SAP SuccessFactors suite in this blog.
Organisations today face a variety of challenges. Skills shortages, a new generation of demanding employees, transformational megatrends and a difficult macroeconomic situation challenge HR departments to find new solutions. One strategic approach to address these is known as "people sustainability". In this, organisations want to support not only the professional but also the personal development of their employees, and in so doing implement an appreciative and sustainable way of dealing with their employees.
This paradigm shift towards people-centric, bottom-up talent management is currently a hot topic for strategy consulting firms, major software manufacturers and institutions such as the WEF. SAP is also incorporating this "people sustainability" approach into the strategic vision of SuccessFactors. With its "Whole Self Model", SAP focuses on the importance of individual well-being and personal development. Organisations’ IT landscapes should help them identify 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 human resources sector and help companies tread the path of "people sustainability". The upcoming release this autumn promises to make these innovations now fully available to all SuccessFactors customers.
The "Whole Self-model" of SAP
SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace was already introduced in 2021. This module allows your employees to search for internal opportunities for professional development. The platform suggests relevant positions, projects, mentoring and learning opportunities based on an employee’s skills and interests. By doing so, the module aims to act as an internal marketplace to provide employees with a one-stop shop for all of the opportunities that are available in the existing talent modules. However, a technological foundation is required in order 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 of this year on. The Hub uses artificial intelligence to support 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 together using published job advertisements. Based on this, organisations can define their own attributes library, which employees can access in their personal Growth Portfolio. There, they receive personal recommendations for attributes, which again serve as a basis for proposals in the Opportunity Marketplace. Data from third-party sources such as MS Graph is also used for the intelligent networking of talents and opportunities.
Overview of the SuccessFactors functionalities with zoom-in to the Talent Intelligence Hub
Imagine the following situation: You are putting together an agile team in order to develop a new product. The project leader needs a team of experts from different departments, such as sales, marketing and other product areas. The Opportunity Marketplace lets you advertise this project internally. People with the appropriate skills and interests in their Growth Portfolio receive this advertisement as a proposal and can respond to it. The system can then map and manage this agile and temporary project team as a Dynamic Team, independently 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 universe and was released this year for all SF customers.
"SAP SuccessFactors is rolling out its biggest release in a decade". This is how Josh Bersin, global HR industry analyst, describes the innovations that SAP SuccessFactors has been rolling out continuously since September 2022. And we can only agree. SAP's vision of the future is innovative and interesting, although it also raises technical and professional questions. It is important to note that the implementation of these functionalities by SAP has not yet been completed, and as a result, no comprehensive empirical values are available yet for these innovations. HR Campus is following the development by SAP closely, and we will keep our customers informed about the implementation and share our assessment. In particular, the upcoming H2 2023 release should shed more light, and we are looking forward to this journey into modern and people-centric talent management.
SAP SuccessFactors Consultant, responsible for innovations around the SuccessFactors Suite
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Published: 23. October 2023
