So you’re ready to refine, or perhaps overhaul, your HR department. Maybe you’ve already got the IT element in place and feel ready to start entering data and organizing your division. Stop. Read this first.

At Saba’s 2012 Global Summit, held on March 19-22, we listened to the insights of two of the HR world’s greatest minds—Naomi Bloom of Bloom & Wallace and Jim Holincheck of Gartner Research—on how best to start an HR makeover. I share with you their steps to make your project a success:

1)     Take inventory. Make sure you have solid knowledge of the current state of your department. Are your personnel data up to date? You don’t want to plug outdated or irrelevant data into a new HR management system. Also, take stock of the systems you use for email, training, and other employee communication.

2)     Assess mobile. Whether approved or not, your business is mobile. Between company-issued and personal mobile devices, employees in all likelihood conduct some (or a lot of) office-related work through mobile technology. It’s important to know the device profile of your employee population for data security reasons, but also for opportunities for innovation and differentiation in areas such as remote training and telework.

3)     Go social. If your organization doesn’t allow access to social networks, it’s time for a change. Evaluate safe and secure ways you can use social networking to your business’s advantage. The beneficial outreach possibilities offered by these networks outweigh the risks posed by irresponsible employee behavior on public sites—behavior HR departments can control with sound policies.

4)     Integrate. The need for integration applies to data organization, user interface, business process and work flow. People, processes, and solutions need built-in means of communication with each other to ensure consistency, efficiency, and cost effectiveness.

With these topics in mind, an organization can more effectively take advantage of new technologies that enable rapid transformation. And we’re here to help along the way, as you navigate your HR landscape.

To listen to Naomi and Jim’s complete discussion, please visit our video archive of the 2012 Global Summit.

Filed under: talent management by Emily He
No Comments »

In the new world of work, businesses need solutions to help them create a more transparent, better connected and highly collaborative way of working. If they want to become more agile and competitive – and more responsive to changing market demands – evolving and becoming a transformative organization is a must.

Today, we’ve unveiled a number of new offerings designed to support (and help hasten) the essential transformation to the social enterprise. One of these new offerings, Saba People Cloud, is the first social enterprise platform to provide a unified enterprise people profile. It allows organizations to engage, develop and inspire all the people they work with – coworkers, partners, suppliers and customers.

The Saba People Cloud combines the formal profile from a system of record such as a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) and Learning Management System (LMS) with a social profile and analytics. The result: complete visibility into an organization’s entire people network. Additionally, every employee in the organization earns a People Quotient (pQ) score. The pQ measurement allows employees to monitor their influence, reputation and overall impact on the organization in real time and proactively make improvements. The core purpose of the pQ is to empower workers to create positive change for themselves – while making the business stronger… And we’re not surprised to see that it’s already raising some eyebrows.

Saba Meeting, which we also announced today, is our unified social, mobile and video unified collaboration platform – another industry first. It allows users to view high-definition video across webinars, virtual meetings or classrooms on any device – without dragging down the organization’s bandwidth. Capabilities such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and IM chat help to deepen or extend real-time collaboration around virtual meetings.

Our other big news: Not only have we made significant enhancements to our Talent Management Suite – including succession planning capabilities that allow managers to effectively identify future leaders in the organization and build bench strength in critical positions – we’ve announced our intention to acquire HumanConcepts. This will greatly increase our presence in the talent management market, and help us extend the capabilities of our Talent Management Suite even further.

Lastly, we have also continued to innovate and lead the market in learning, announcing the industry’s most Advanced Learning Suite. This unifies Learning Management System (LMS), social learning, virtual classroom, content authoring and management; testing and assessment, and mobile learning. It is accessible anywhere, anytime on mobile devices and not only supports employees but also the entire extended global enterprise, such as partners, suppliers and customers.

We believe that these offerings will help today’s organizations take the next critical step toward becoming innovative, more competitive and more social enterprises – putting people, and not information, at the center of the organization.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, learning applications, Online Collaboration, Social Business, talent management by Emily He
No Comments »

With our People 2012 Global Summit a mere 48 hours away, we’re putting the final details in place!

Amidst the preparation bustle, I wanted to take minute to share with you some of the great content the conference has to offer this year. It’s a critical time to visit the issues we’re discussing in Miami—including connecting the people in your value chain, streamlining and unifying learning and talent management, and incorporating social and collaboration solutions —all crucial components for success in the modern world of work.

We address these issues at a turning point in workplace management. After all, this new workplace is more than just an updated version of the past; you can’t just upgrade technology and expect to keep pace with change anymore. Today’s world of work requires an entire transformation of management mentality and approach:  Information is no longer at the center of the workplace, people are.

In a world of work that revolves around human capital, organizations need to engage their people, break down barriers and silos based on expertise or experience, and create flexible collaboration models that can move and shift to best meet customer demands. It’s about the people on the inside of the business and how they use networked social communication tools to develop their skills and team with their colleagues. And, it’s about the people on the outside—the customers and partners—that benefit from working with an organization that loops them in, maximizing social, mobile, and cloud-based collaboration capabilities to optimize real-time communication.

We’re bringing some of the best minds in the field to Miami to share with you their thoughts on how to thrive in this new work paradigm. Insights shared by authors Jim Collins and Gary Hamel, HR technology expert Naomi Lee Bloom, Gartner’s James Holincheck, and the American Red Cross’s CIO John Crary will provide invaluable guidance on how to transition smoothly to a modern workplace.

Members of the Saba team will round out the discussion by explaining the vision we have to change the way people work and the new platform we’ve developed to dynamically engage people—the lifeblood of any business operation.

If you’re meeting us in Miami, I look forward to exploring this new frontier of people-centric work. It promises to be a thought provoking, informative and inspiring conference!

Filed under: learning applications, Online Collaboration, Social Business, talent management by Bobby Yazdani
No Comments »

In less than two weeks, we will welcome customers, partners and prospects to beautiful Miami, Florida to kick off our annual user conference, People 2012. This years’ event is going to be the most inspiring, engaging and dynamic event yet. At People 2012, attendees will have the exciting opportunity to learn about the latest trends in enterprise learning, enterprise talent management, collaboration and workforce transformation, and hear in-depth about Saba’s latest innovations in the space.

We are making the experience better for our 600+ attendees by sharing best practices, tips and tricks and innovative uses of Saba. Our expert keynote speakers, comprehensive breakout sessions, informative and interactive hands-on training, and extensive networking activities will help attendees prepare their organization for today’s modern workplace.

The line-up of industry-leading visionary speakers at People 2012 will share their vision and insights on the new world of work. Keynote speakers include:

• Bobby Yazdani, Founder and CEO, Saba
• Jeff Carr, President, Global Field Operations, Saba
• Amar Dhaliwal, Senior Vice President, Product Operations Group, Saba
• Jim Collins, Author of Great by Choice, Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall
• Professor Gary Hamel, Author of Leading the Revolution and Competing for the Future, Professor at London Business School
• James Holincheck, Research VP, Gartner Research
• Naomi Lee Bloom, Managing Partner, Bloom & Wallace
• John R. Crary, Chief Information Officer, American Red Cross

Following each day’s highly educational sessions, we will be hosting unforgettable evening events that will give our customers and partners alike an opportunity to network with one another, meet with industry leaders, and just as importantly, have a great time at some of Miami’s landmark establishments. These will be experiences our attendees won’t want to miss.

All in all, with more than 70 interactive sessions across three days, hands-on training, and numerous networking opportunities to participate in, we’re sure that our customers’ and partners’ time will be well spent at People 2012, and we cannot wait to see them all in beautiful Miami, Florida on March 19-22, 2012.

Finally, to register for People 2012, please follow this link: https://www.sabasummit.com/selfenroll.aspx.

Filed under: Customer News, learning applications, Social Business, talent management by Karen Steele
No Comments »

As you’re probably aware, today Oracle announced its intent to buy cloud-based talent management vendor Taleo for $1.9 billion in cash, an 18 percent premium over Taleo’s closing price on Wednesday.

We view the acquisition as very positive for Saba and for our customers. It validates that Talent Management is a strategic business application area, and a critical part of every company’s success.  It also reaffirms the demand for the Cloud, as evidenced by the series of recent acquisitions by large enterprise vendors.  While Oracle and Taleo focus on a complex integration process, Saba remains committed to providing our customers with the highest level of customer service available in the industry.

We are very encouraged by the opportunities this represents for Saba.  By providing a unified talent management system, built organically on a single architecture, Saba can continue to provide organizations of all sizes with innovative cloud solutions dedicated to helping our customers thrive in a changing world of work.  It is our assertion that talent-facing applications must be decoupled from ERP systems to ensure the highest level of innovation.  As such, Saba’s solutions work with all HRIS systems including Oracle, SAP, Workday, Lawson (Infor) and others.

Today, more than 1,600 customers, and 51% of the Fortune 100 trust Saba for unified talent management solutions, with proven scalability to serve the needs of millions of users around the globe.  We have been executing against our roadmap for the Saba Enterprise Cloud and are gearing up to launch the most innovative product in the market – Saba People Cloud, a unified, people-centric and social platform designed to transform the way people work. As a result, we are looking forward to the exciting opportunities that lie ahead for our market.

Filed under: learning applications, talent management by Bobby Yazdani
No Comments »

The announcement of Jive’s IPO is an extremely exciting event for everyone in the social business space. It further validates the use of social networking in business and brings us closer to realizing our vision – improving our ability to innovate, collaborate and accelerate business outcomes through social media.

For those of us who believe that social business will soon play an important role in any size company, the announcement is confirmatory rather than surprising. In other words, this is recognition that more and more companies understand the transformative impact social media can have on the way we work and engage. And those that don’t come to this understanding risk putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Our customers who are embracing social business are finding that it’s dramatically changing the way they interact with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Through our social software, they’re creating significantly more transparency, increasing the speed of their business, and generating and sharing more ideas and knowledge across their entire value chain.

The Jive IPO will likely heighten the awareness of social business but what companies need to consider is how we then take this vision to the next level. The single most disruptive change brought about by social media is that people have replaced information as the centerpiece of the workplace. What this means is that we need to put people first, as it’s not just about the software but the right management tools and processes that unlocks the true benefits of social business. That’s why we are committed to initiatives such as The Management 2.0 Hackathon, a bold new social business initiative intended to generate fresh and practical answers to today’s management challenges. As I noted previously, this initiative will open the door to new thought leaders who can collectively help to shape management practices for the 21st century and organize people and processes more effectively.

This is critical as social business is all about people – not just within the enterprise, but the entire People Network, which includes customers, suppliers and partners. In short, we’re talking about more effectively organizing people and processes at every level in the value chain – in whatever language, for whatever purpose necessary – by removing every barrier to connection. And, by starting with people the Saba People Cloud creating a more fluid model that truly optimizes social business technology to increase the rate of innovation and enable more intimate interaction and sharing of ideas and initiatives.

We believe you need to reengineer people processes and integrate social business technology into every single facet of the business and those who do this will be the companies that will win.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, People Productivity, Social Business by Shawn Farshchi
No Comments »

Valued Customer,

As you probably have heard, SAP announced its intent to buy SuccessFactors on December 3rd. While this news is clear validation of our view that cloud computing is challenging the traditional enterprise applications, it is unclear how this transaction will be beneficial for SAP or SuccessFactors customers.

Our Observations about the Acquisition

Clearly SAP is looking at this transaction as a way to enter the cloud market and become the single provider of all business applications. There has already been extensive coverage by the press and industry analysts, but here are a few of our thoughts on the SAP acquisition of SuccessFactors:

• SuccessFactors’ current platform is not a single platform, but a collection of applications from the myriad of acquisitions – Plateau, YouCalc, Jambok, Cubetree, Inform, and others. SuccessFactors will need to integrate with SAP’s existing ERP and talent management systems, which are quite complex and lack the depth of functionality. But the integration efforts will likely be slow-going given that the purpose of the acquisition is not necessarily to create the next-generation, unified talent management solutions, but rather to help SAP gain a presence in the cloud market.
• A key decision criteria for any customer is a vendor’s product roadmap, which includes functional depth, user experience, and product innovation. With SAP’s investment in its own LMS, talent management, HCM, and HRIS, it’ll take quite some time to integrate and rationalize SuccessFactors’ products with SAP’s. Most likely, SuccessFactors will get mired with endless integration decisions, making it impossible for it to keep pace with the innovation market demands.
• Customers have long embraced the benefits of deploying neutral and open talent management platforms that are interoperable with HRIS, financial, and ERP systems. With a unified platform and an open platform strategy with other back-office systems, Saba People Cloud provides the smart alternative to high integration costs and cumbersome and expensive upgrade of the back-end systems.

Saba’s Commitment to Your Success

At Saba, we believe that one company cannot provide every innovative, industry leading solution. Instead, our mission is to be the single, best solution for helping our customers transform the way work is done in their organizations and to bring the most innovative solutions to market through an open ecosystem on the Saba People Cloud platform.

For the last two years, Saba has been working diligently to reinvent the talent management industry and create this type of innovation, open platform and broad partner ecosystem. This is why we have begun signing strategic partnerships with market leading companies whose services and offerings are complementary to Saba’s. In early 2012, we will launch an entirely new type of solution called the Saba People Cloud, a unified, people-centric and social platform designed to transform the way people work.

More than 1,600 customers, 23 million users, and 51% of the Fortune 100 today trust the Saba People Cloud platform, with its proven scalability and performance to meet the requirements of organizations of all sizes. We remained committed to continuous product and technology innovation to ensure that Saba People Cloud platform will deliver to the promise of transforming the way you work.

You are a valued Saba customer and we appreciate our continued partnership. Please feel free to reach out to your Saba Client Executive with any questions you might have. We look forward to our continued partnership in making your talent management initiatives a great success!

Sincerely,

Bobby Yazdani

Founder and CEO, Saba

Filed under: People Productivity by Bobby Yazdani
No Comments »

As you’re probably aware, over the weekend, SAP announced its intent to buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in cash, which represents a 10.5x multiple of consensus 2011 revenue and an 8.4x 2012 revenue.  The acquisition is particularly interesting given that it happened on the heels of Oracle’s $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow Technologies.

Both of these transactions are driven by the demand for cloud-based services, which is growing rapidly as enterprise customer adoption accelerates.  As a result many technology vendors are seeking to add cloud-computing services and required talent to support their businesses, in some cases through acquisitions with price premium.

Not coincidentally, the business strategy Saba has been pursuing in the last two years also reflect these trends.  We’re focused on innovation and on the path to delivering to the market the best product roadmap, the best global operational capabilities, with the best customer roster in the industry.  While our customers’ adoption to the cloud has been the fastest in the industry, we have been taking steps to prepare the entire company – financially, technologically, operationally, and organizationally – to transition to the next-generation cloud business model and support critical-mass cloud deployment on a global basis.  And we are positioned to succeed with an organically-grown, unified, open platform that is highly scalable and interoperable with HRIS, financial, and ERP systems.

We have been executing against the Saba People Cloud roadmap and are gearing up to launch the next release of the most innovative product in the market – Saba People Cloud, a unified, people-centric and social platform designed to transform the way people work.

With that as a backdrop, I look forward to the exciting opportunities for Saba’s growth that lie ahead.

Filed under: talent management by Bobby Yazdani
No Comments »

Last week, Saba was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, California, contributing to the discussions and activities behind building social businesses. Throughout the course of the show we saw all kinds of exciting and innovative tools and heard some quite visionary theories for what a true social business looks like, but if there has been one underlying theme to the conference, it’s that a fundamental change needs to happen within organizations to become a social business. In other words, an organization won’t suddenly become a social business by implementing the latest, hot technology alone, but by taking a look in the mirror and enacting change throughout the entire business. And how is this achieved? By reinventing the very concept of management.

If you were involved with E2.0 last week or have been following our blog, you’ll know that Saba, along with the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX) recognized early on that the reinvention of management is the key to adapting to the “new world of work” in our midst, and the shift towards the social business that coincides with it. This led to the launch of the “Management 2.0 Hackathon” on the second day of the conference, a partnership between Saba, Enterprise 2.0 and the MIX which aims to generate innovative ideas that illustrate how the principles and tools of the Web can be used to make organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and accountable.

To aid to the collaborative nature of the project, community and social guides have been added to engage participants and make the hackathon experience as smooth as possible. The community guides will interact with participants on a daily basis, providing updates, introducing new activities, and ensuring an engaging hacking experience, while the social guides will help participants with questions about the Saba Social collaboration platform.

Community and social guides are:

• Chis Grams, MIX and New Kind

• Jonathan Opp, MIX and New Kind
• Michele Zanini, MIX
• Ben Willis, Saba
• Milind Pansare, Saba

The MIX and Saba team have also added a group of coaches to the hackathon who will provide thought-provoking perspectives and practical advice to participants.

These coaches are:

• Gary Hamel, The MIX
• Polly LaBarre, The MIX
• Andrew McAfee, MIT
• Dion Hinchcliffe, DachisGroup
• Rachel Happe, The Community Roundtable
• Mark McDonald, Research Director, Gartner Executive Programs

The brains behind the MIX, industry expert Gary Hamel, commented earlier this week, “Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering.”

Saba’s own Bobby Yazdani sees the new way of work, which heavily emphasizes and depends on social and mobile technologies and relies on people networks and the right processes, with technology serving as the vital means to an end. And the voices emanating out of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference agree, with CMSWire claiming that employees crave the need to feel relevant and to be truly empowered within an organization – and this is precisely what “Management 2.0” is designed to do. The BrainYard’s David Carr highlighted how the reinvention of management served as the overarching theme of the conference’s keynotes, and referring to the Management 2.0 Hackathon and its goal of collaboration leading to the new management model, commented, “By joining with the members of the MIX community, Enterprise 2.0 conference goers will have a chance to turn that next step into a giant leap.”

If it seems as if a leading tech conference, tech vendor and tech-based collaboration platform are focusing too heavily on people rather than the technology itself, it should be noted that E2.0, Saba and the MIX are placing their bets behind the collaboration that organizations will need to foster between people through technology – and those companies that do this best will be the most successful in the new world of work. In this equation, it’s a case of organizations understanding how to have their people leverage the latest technology to make their businesses reach their true potential. And all it takes is a new approach.

Interested in the Management 2.0 Hackathon? Join the excitement at mix.sabapeoplecloud.com.

Filed under: Collaboration Trends, Customer News, People Productivity, Social Business by Emily He
No Comments »

A guest post by Gary Hamel

Over the last decade, the Internet has had a profound impact on busi­ness.  It has spawned a slew of new business models and has helped make operating models vastly more efficient.  By contrast, the Web’s impact on management models has been relatively modest.

While blogs, Wikis, and online communities have made manage­ment more efficient (by reducing the costs of communication and coordina­tion), the Web hasn’t yet dramatically changed the way in which organizations are managed and led.  (See Table 1.)  Nevertheless, over the next few years the emerging “social technologies” of Web 2.0 are likely to transform the work of management root and branch.

Why? Because organizations face a set of challenges that lie outside the performance envelope of management-as-usual.  These include a rapidly accelerating pace of change, a growing swarm of uncon­ventional rivals, crumbling entry barriers, a rapid transi­tion from the “knowledge economy” to the “creative economy,” intensifying compe­tition for talent and a profusion of new stakeholder demands.

To tackle these challenges, organizations will need to become far more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and accountable than they are right now.  This will require a fundamental re-tooling of traditional manage­ment practices—around Web-derived principles.

Unlike most businesses, the Internet is already adaptable, innova­tive and inspiring.  It is also a powerful tool for holding organizations accountable for their social impact. While the typical corporation is based on a center-to-end architecture, in which decision-making authority is heavily concentrated at the top, the Web is built on an end-to-end architecture, where power is highly distributed.

The management model that predominates in most organizations has its roots in the early 20^th century.  At that time, management innova­tors were focused on the challenge of achieving efficiency at scale.  Their solution was the bureaucratic organization, with its emphasis on standardiza­tion, specialization, hierarchy, conformance and control.  These principles comprise the philosophical foundations of Management 1.0, and are deeply baked into management mindsets and processes.  In virtually every organization, one finds that power cascades down, that strate­gies get set at the top, that tasks are assigned and not chosen, that supervi­sors review subordinates rather than the other way around, that control is imposed, and that senior executives allocate resources.

Before the Web, it was hard to imagine alternatives to manage­ment orthodoxy.  But the Internet has spawned a Cambrian explosion of new organizational life forms–where coordination occurs without centraliza­tion, where power is the product of contribution rather than posi­tion, where the wisdom of the many trumps the authority of the few, where novel viewpoints get amplified rather than squelched, where commu­nities form spontane­ously around shared interests, where opportuni­ties to “opt-in” blur the line between vocation and hobby, where titles and credentials count for less than value-added, where perfor­mance is judged by your peers, and where influence comes from sharing information, not from hoarding it.

Of course, the Web has its limits.  Online collaboration, in its current state, is not a very good substitute for the sort of unscripted, face-to-face interac­tions that are critical to producing genuine break­throughs.   And complex coordi­nation tasks, like those involved in the design of a new aircraft, still require a dense matrix of “strong ties” among critical contributors, rather than the “weak ties” that are typical of web-based communities.

Nevertheless, for the first time in a century, we have a viable alterna­tive to the status quo.   Thanks to the Web, we can imagine organiza­tions that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering.  Without doubt, we have cause to be hopeful. If we can find ways of trans­planting the Internet’s DNA into our organizations—the interwo­ven values of transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, open­ness, commu­nity and self-determination—we may have the chance, at last, to over­come the design limits of Management 1.0

To that end we are launching the Management 2.0 Hackthon in partner­ship with Saba and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. We are seeking to generate innovative ideas that illustrate how the principles and tools of the Web can be used to make our organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring and account­able.

Now it’s up to you.  By joining the hackathon, you can help to reinvent management for a new age.  The ultimate prize?  Organizations that are as fully human as the people who work within them.

For more on the Management 2.0 Hackathon, see Bobby Yazdani’s blog post.

Filed under: Online Collaboration, People Productivity by Gary Hamel
No Comments »