Reflections on SuccessConnect 2023

This week I had the pleasure of attending my 13th SuccessConnect conference.? The following are insights and observations from the conference.?

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Conferences change but company challenges remain constant.

The conference motto was “Ignite your potential”, a phrase that, with apologies to my marketing colleagues, sounds like advising someone to “burn your future”. This somewhat sarcastic reaction is a result of having been in this field for a long time. The challenges faced by HR organizations never really change, although priority given to challenges does change due to things like pandemics and economic crashes. Ten years ago, SuccessConnect focused on how to attract and retain talent, maximize the potential of employees, increase HR operational excellence, and help employees and companies deal with the pressures of a fast-moving world. This year’s conference was about these same things.? Most HR challenges are perennial because they are about people, and people do not evolve that quickly[i] .? What does change are the issues affecting these challenges and solutions available to address them.? And that is where the conference got really interesting.? ?

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Solutions worth investigating.

A more descriptive conference motto might have been “Ignite your discussions of generative AI”. AI came up in most sessions in terms of its ability to solve and in some cases create problems. But the conference showed technology innovation involves a lot more than AI. The following struck me as particularly “game changing” solutions in terms of their impact on the field of HR and the nature of work.

?Joule . This is SAP’s new generative AI tool. AI has been incorporated into a variety of SuccessFactors applications to enable natural language-based user interactions supporting staffing, talent management, learning and analytics. It is a powerful feature that I suspect will quickly go from being an innovation to becoming a basic user expectation, much like development of mobile applications did ten years ago.

?Talent Intelligence Hub . When I was interviewed before joining SuccessFactors back in 2007, the hiring manager had me identify ways the current solution could be improved.?One of my suggestions was to expand the employee profile to include information about employee skills, attributes, and interests. This is what Talent Intelligence Hub does, but in an intelligent manner enabling the ability to import content from 3rd party sources, refine content over time, and apply this content to support a range of activities including dynamic team assignments, learning suggestions, and mentoring. This allows companies to support workforce management and development based on a much deeper understanding of the individual differences that make each employee unique.

?New Learning Experience .? This enhancement was somewhat overshadowed by the discussions of other more AI-centric solutions, but it did not escape the attention of SuccessFactors customers. Rather than try to describe it in text, I suggest you seek out a demo.?The benefits of this new interface are immediately apparent to anyone with experience using the previous version of SuccessFactors Learning.

?Skills Management.? There were at least five solutions at the conference that use AI to identify, assess and utilize skills to guide workforce planning, staffing, and development (Beamery , Eightfold , iMocha , Opportunity Marketplace , Phenom ).?These solutions have different strengths, but all have impressive capabilities that provide insight into people’s existing capabilities and future potential based on past experiences, qualifications, and accomplishments. The development of technology to create large language model skills ontologies has changed skills management from something companies use to see as “wishful thinking” given its complexity to something with immediate widespread application across the organization. This shift reminds me of the transition that happened a few years ago around employee experience solutions when companies leveraged newly developed pulse survey technology to move from annual to ongoing employee listening methods. In both cases, the technology enabled companies to do something they were already doing at one level, but to do it in a far more effective and efficient manner. If your company struggles to get people in the right jobs with the right skills, then you should definitely be exploring skills management solutions.

Business Technology Platform (BTP) .? I have joked that because SAP is a global company, we give our solutions names that do not mean anything to anyone in any language.? BTP suffers from this problem. Few HR professionals understand what it actually does. Nevertheless, it is arguably the most transformational of all the HR technology solutions shown at the conference. This is because it addresses the age-old problem of HR being “disconnected from the business”.? BTP enables customers to create data and process links within and between HR and non-HR systems , which strengthens the tie between HR actions and data and business operations and outcomes. Customers shared how they used BTP to create solutions focused on the unique needs of their frontline workers, created stronger links between financial and HR data, and reduced data errors and saved employees time by automating processes across multiple technology platforms. If your company uses multiple SAP solutions and you want to create stronger connections between HR actions and business outcomes, then take time to learn more about the capabilities provided BTP.? ?

?Sales Performance Management (SPM) .? This is another SAP solution whose name does not clearly convey what it actually does. SPM allows companies to maximize the value of commission and incentive-based compensation methods. It does this through supporting pay plan administration and by enabling transparency, understanding and communication between employees, managers, and leaders about relationships between pay decisions and employee accomplishments. Although money is not the only thing that affects motivation, pay has a massive impact on employee productivity and retention. SPM enables more effective and agile use of monetary rewards, including extending pay for performance to jobs where compensation was historically based solely on hours worked or tenure levels. This makes it possible to more fully value the contributions made by individual employees in frontline roles. If your company believes in rewarding performance, then take a look at SPM. It is a very mature and robust solution and might be the “best kept secret” in the SuccessFactors product portfolio.

That solution that fixes that thing that’s bothering you . Someone once told me the most valuable technology is the one that addresses the problem you want to solve right now. I was inspired by the range of solutions on the show floor being demoed by my SuccessFactors colleagues and our partner technology providers. If there is a specific problem that’s bothering you, chances are there is an existing solution to address it. Several conversations I had with customers at the conference resulted in introducing them to an SAP partner who had a solution that directly addressed their needs. And the pace of innovation in the SAP partner network has reached a point where if you do not visit the partner community every 6 months then you do not know all that it contains.

?These solutions are just a fraction of the cool stuff found at the conference. But I can only cover so much in a single article!

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Conversations worth pondering.?

Seeing new solutions is a big part of SuccessConnect, but it is conversations with customers, colleagues, and partners that make the conference a truly great event.? Listed below are a few of these conversation topics that I have found myself reflecting upon since leaving Las Vegas.

?AI is only as good as the data it uses. Companies with experience using generative AI solutions emphasized the importance of training these tools on company-specific data. This raises important questions about who “owns” skills data. In my view, skills data can be thought of similarly to how we think of compensation or job description data. The company owns the data, but the data is shared with vendors who are tasked with improving its quality and helping use it to solve business problems. Vendors develop skills databases that they leverage to improve the value of company skills databases. In return, companies share skills data with vendors so they can more effectively support the organization in return. As one partner put it, what customers want is for technology companies to share data with each other. Unless two vendors are direct competitors, it doesn't help their customers if they fight over who gets to "own skills". We should be focused on creating tools to collect better data or to use existing data in better ways.

There is such a thing as too much automation. The current wave of thinking around generative AI seems to be “whenever possible, have computers do the writing instead of people”. ?This approach makes sense if one views writing solely as a transactional task. However, one of the values of writing is it forces people to think about what they are writing about. If we rely on AI to do all our writing, we may also rely on AI to do all our thinking. Even if people review text generated by AI, they are still likely to “check the box” without critically challenging whether the text truly captures what is needed.?An example is the use of AI to write job descriptions. One of the reasons writing a job description is difficult is also why it is important. It forces hiring managers to define the factors that will determine success in the job. There is probably a happy medium where people write with coaching from AI instead of having AI just write for them. We should take care to find that medium and not cede complete control to the machines.

Skills management is still more of an evolution than a revolution.? AI based skills management solutions are not changing work so much as enabling large companies to do what small companies have always done; utilize people based on their capabilities instead of their job title. You do not need complex skills management technology in a 20-person company where everyone knows everyone else at a meaningful level. But you do need it in companies employing thousands of people. The main benefit of skills management solutions is the ability to match people to career opportunities who might otherwise have gone undiscovered because others in the organization did not know what they were capable of. Skills management solutions also enable organizations to visualize workforces based on people’s capabilities instead of job hierarchies and cost centers. Both of these allow organizations to manage their workforce more effectively. But skills management solutions by themselves are not going to revolutionize work.? What will revolutionize work is using skills data to change how people are paid and how jobs are designed.?Shifting from making pay decisions based on jobs to compensating people for skills, allowing employees to split work across teams and cost centers to maximize skills utilization and development, and designing jobs that make it possible to hire people who are not currently qualified to perform the work but who have the skills to learn. ?Achieving this sort of revolutionary change will require new forms of operational HR technology, not just skills management technology.

HR cost savings is still important. SuccessConnect put a lot of attention on technology solutions that enable employee growth and wellbeing. I call this the “power-to-the-people” HR technology value proposition. But there is another important value proposition that is about cost reduction and operational efficiency. I call this the “manage-this-mess” side of HR technology. HR budgets tend to be highly constrained. One of the ways HR departments fund power-to-the-people projects is through cost savings generated by manage-this-mess initiatives. A lot of SAP solutions help companies manage-this-mess, but they were not talked about much in general sessions.?Customers shared that they would like to see more attention at SuccessConnect given to this critical but less glamorous side of HR technology.?

When it comes to generative AI, act now, or fall behind. SuccessConnect showed rapid adoption of generative AI across the entire HR technology landscape.? The explosive growth in these solutions can be partially traced to the release of Chat GPT a little under 12 months ago.?However, the speed at which generative AI is being deployed suggests we already had the technological capability to build these tools but were not aggressively using it. In this sense, it is reminiscent to the rapid adoption of remote work technology during the pandemic. The lesson from comparing generative AI technology to remote work technology is this: once these solutions gain widespread use employees will quickly shift from wanting them to expecting them.? And the amount of time needed for this shift to occur is likely to be measured in months, not years. If your company is not already actively exploring adoption of generative AI solutions, then you are already falling behind. This is particularly true in the area of staffing technology and manager and employee self-service solutions.

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SuccessConnect is a technology conference about people.

We have come a long way from the first SuccessConnect events I attended in San Francisco that ended with customers and colleagues singing karaoke until the wee hours in the hotel bar. The 2023 event was bigger, way more expensive and far more orchestrated than those early events. Nevertheless, what made it SuccessConnect was still the same: the joy of hanging out with a bunch of people who share a passion for using technology to improve the world of work. Hopefully you can join me next year in Lisbon, Portuga l!

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[i] For a deeper discussion of this concept, check out chapters 1, 2 and 3 in my book Talent Tectonics .