Insights on Corporate Talent, Learning, and HR Technology
Today SuccessFactors announced plans to acquire InfoHRM (renamed Inform Business Impact) – a small but very well established leader in the area of HR and Talent Analytics and Workforce Planning. We believe this acquisition is very significant for the talent and HR systems marketplace: it now establishes SuccessFactors as the emerging leader in the ... Read more»
There are many demographic changes taking place in the US workforce today. Perhaps one of the most profound and personal is the rapid growth of women in the working population. This month “The Shriver Report” is being released – a comprehensive look at the growing role of women in the world of work. ... Read more»
Once each year we travel to Chicago to gather with Bill Kutik and dozens of HR vendors to see the latest and greatest technologies applied to human resources.
This year’s conference was as exciting as ever, with many product announcements and exciting innovations to see. Madeline Laurano, our principal analyst in talent acquisition, is ... Read more»
The LMS market continues to heat up as two private equity firms bid for SumTotal Systems. 
This week Vista Equity Partners upped its bid to $4.75 a share (up from $3.80 several weeks ago), bringing SumTotal’s market capitalization to over $150 Million. (This is nearly twice the market cap of Saba, who’s revenues are ... Read more»
A 
very important partnership was announced today: IBM announced a major commitment to Saba as its primary learning management technology partner.
Background on IBM’s Learning Platform Business:
IBM has been in the corporate learning market for many years. In the 1980’s, the company offered a wide range of corporate training tools and systems, including PC ... Read more»
For those of us who have been in the software industry for a while, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun represents a big
milestone in the evolution of the the computing industry. Why did the IBM-Sun merger fail? Why was Oracle willing to pay so much more for the company than IBM?
While there are many business ... Read more»
One of the themes of our exciting new Succession Management research is what we call “transparent talent mobility.” It’s an important new concept in talent management, and one which came to us after more than a year of research into various succession management programs.
Let me start with the underlying issue: today, and on into ... Read more»
Times are tough. Today we learned of another 590,000 jobs lost and that US unemployment rose to 7.6%. We seem to be getting several emails each week from high powered HR or L&D professionals who have lost their positions at their favorite employers.
I also speak regularly with top HR and L&D managers about their ... Read more»
This week we introduced some important and groundbreaking research on a new, important category of enterprise software: the market for corporate Social Software platforms. Traditionally our research has focused on identifying the strategies, processes, and systems which help corporate HR and L&D drive effectiveness and business value. But as we continued to study the ... Read more»
Whew. Earlier this year we embarked on a major research effort to understand the growing role of social networking in enterprise learning and talent management. The results are amazing. Let me give you a brief preview of some of our initial findings:
As we continue to study best practices in the implementation of corporate learning and talent management, we find that high performing organizations fall into two categories: those who endure and prosper over long periods of time (decades), and those who rapidly rise to prominence, then falter during a major business challenge, and often become acquired ... Read more»
We are clearly entering some form of economic slowdown. Our most recent index of talent management executives (January of 2008) showed some significant changes from May of 2007: 21% greater interest in cost-reduction, 18% lower focus on product introductions, and a significant increase in focus on building new leadership (18% increase). So let’s assume your ... Read more»
Leighanne Levensaler and I just finished a week at the HR Technology show in Chicago. This conference represents one of the biggest meetings of HR technologists and HR software vendors each year. As always, this conference was an opportunity for most of the HR and learning technology providers to announce new products and offerings.
Here ... Read more»
