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Globo Technicalities application, via a smartphone," says Jones. "We looked at ERP [enterprise resource planning] companies that sell into the HR and talent management space and found 19 out of 30 see mobile as their key differentiator. So, when it's more than half, it's not a differentiator, but mobile is clearly a trend." Trend 8: Unifying in the cloud—or elsewhere. Migration to the cloud continues apace, and at a fast clip. According to the CedarCrestone report, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment over all applications has increased even faster than forecasted in the 2009 survey (100 percent increase vs. 67 percent forecast in 2009). It is predicted that it will continue to increase by 50 percent over all applications tracked. For talent management application, SaaS deployment (28 percent) will essentially equal licensed, on-premise software (30 percent) within the next 12 months, according to the report. One factor driving this migration to the cloud is organisations' quest for a best-in-class suite of solutions from one provider. A new global survey from SumTotal Systems finds that 34 percent of all HR system buyers now seek a single vendor for their HR technology. For many, SaaS-based options appear to offer this solution. Even so, as noted by CedarCrestone, the best-performing organisations have ERP-based systems over SaaS-based HR technologies for their human resources management system (HRMS). "Another study we did, last year, found that organisations really, really want a suite approach, as opposed to an array of best-of- breed vendors," says Jones. "They found that integration is too difficult. They found that vendor management is hard; it's way too complex. Plus, the biggest issue with this nonintegrated data, which these users are facing, is that you can't reliably get analytics when you have apples and oranges. This is one of the key factors driving integration, and users are willing to sacrifice best-of-breed functionality in some areas in order to get integration right out of the box, in one vendor." Trend 9: Real meat from HR analytics. The industry should look for movement in HR analytics, too—existing technologies' ability to help aggregate and deliver data to HR decision-makers. Findings from IBM's report reveal that 50 percent of CHROs claim to lack the analytics that highlight the quantity and availability of specific skills among their organisation's workforce. Look for vendors to improve and tout their workforce optimisation applications' ability to do so. "Hot, of course, is analytics, getting better business analytics," says Jones. "In fact, in one study of ours, the top two areas of concern for HR pertained to analytics. One concern was that they didn't know how to articulate analytics in the language of finance. Second was just the inability to derive meaningful analytics—analytics that they knew were meaningful, from their often disparate product sets." What do the next 12 months hold? Whether or not organisations will continue to display bravery in the face of an economy that continues to lack stability is unclear. Nevertheless, the next 12 months will probably bring more of the same—but on an evolutionary scale. Globalisation will not stop, and the need for workforce optimisation will become more acute and evident. For example, CareerBuilder.com is working to launch a compensation–supply demand portal. This effort includes standardising data on the behaviors of jobseekers in the APAC and the Europe/Middle East/ Africa sector (EMEA). The goal is to provide customers a way to plan their global workforce strategy using information about the availability of jobseekers compared to the demand for job seekers. This is already happening in the U.S.— EMEA and Asia are next. Additionally, the influence of social media and mobile technology will continue to spread. For example, CareerBuilder's Work@ application is helping companies amplify their employee referral programs by making it easy for workers to identify which Facebook friends are a match for open positions within their company and share those opportunities. The company's CBMobile platform is a global, multilingual solution, which reformats corporate recruitment websites for mobile devices such as the iPhone. The cloud's profile and influence will increase, along the way presenting opportunities and challenges. And, in parallel, vendors will continue their acquisitions in an effort to assemble all-in- one suites. Look for providers to improve their cloud-to-cloud integration, notes Jones, for the same integration issues that plague users of ERP-based HR systems hailing from multiple vendors can beset companies that build HR systems out of components sourced from many clouds. [40] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | SUMMER 2011

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