The SAP SuccessFactors 1H 2023 release has arrived! There’s a lot of buzz about SAP SuccessFactors’ newest solution: Talent Intelligence Hub. In this blog, we will dig deep into Talent Intelligence Hub, and I will share some important links to stay updated on this new feature.

Learn more about Talent Management First Half 2023 Release: First Half 2023 Release: What’s new for Talent Management? | SAP Blogs. And for those who learn visually, access the recorded demo and roadmap presentation through this Community page.

Find more information and keep up with Talent Intelligence Hub in our Community Blog Posts dedicated to the product: Announcing Talent Intelligence Hub for Early Enthusiasts.

I have used a few acronyms in this blog:

JDM- Job Description Manager

JPB- Job Profile Builder

MDF- Meta Data Framework

CoC- Center of Capabilities

What is Talent Intelligence Hub?

Talent Intelligence Hub enables organizations to maintain Skills and other People Attributes critical for success. These skills and attributes are stored and managed in a centralized library known as the Attributes Library. People in the organization can access these attributes and add them to their unique repository of attributes known as the Growth Portfolio. The same attributes are also linked to job profiles, Opportunity Marketplace Assignments, hiring requisitions, learning courses, and more throughout the suite.

Growth Portfolio data consists of skills, competencies, and any other Whole Self Model (strengths & styles, expressive preferences) attributes that customers choose to configure.

With the 1H 2023 release, Talent Intelligence Hub is available for Early Enthusiasts in Upgrade Center, and will be Generally Available in the second half of 2023.

Talent Intelligence Hub is included as part of the SAP SuccessFactors Platform, and there is no additional license cost to purchase this solution.

The Emergence of Talent Intelligence Hub

This section will discuss the chronology of solutions and the emergence of the SAP SuccessFactors Talent Intelligence Hub.

Pic 1: Path to Talent Intelligence Hub

*Skills Portlet under Employee Profile is in End of Maintenance and will be deprecated soon, so it shouldn’t be configured any more.

With Job Profile Builder and Job Description Manager, the competencies, skills, and other contents were directly associated with the Job Role/ Job Profile and not with the individual. Employees inherited those features via the Job Code assignment to Job Role. However, in Growth Portfolio, all skills and attributes are directly associated with the person.

***Important***

1. For detailed information about Talent Intelligence Hub, refer to the Customer FAQ document.

2.Further support / Work Zone group / Office Hours calls: 

Early enthusiast customers can now exchange experiences with each other and ask questions of our migration and adoption experts in a new Work Zone group. In order to be admitted into the group, please send an email to SAP_SF_Product_Advisory@sap.com. All group members will also be invited to Office Hours calls, that will take place from time to time, and according to necessity.

You will need a valid S user id to access the FAQ & join the Work Zone group.

There have been many inquiries from customers about the Center of Capabilities and how it will be affected by the introduction of the Talent Intelligence Hub.

! The Center of Capabilities is being replaced with Talent Intelligence Hub. The Capabilities Portfolio is replaced with the Growth Portfolio, and the Capabilities Library with the Attributes Library.

! Job Profile Builder isn’t going away; it will co-exist with Talent Intelligence Hub. However, some of its components are now under Talent Intelligence Hub. Refer to the following pictures.

Now that you are familiar with the emergence and evolution of the SAP SuccessFactors Talent Intelligence Hub solution, let’s look into how the underlying ‘Data’ is changing course from where its housed today to its new home! To understand the evolution of various data blocks (what’s changed, what’s added), let’s start with Job Profile Builder and work our way through to Talent Intelligence Hub.

Job Profile Builder

Picture 2 represents the components of Job Profile Builder until 1H 2021 before the Center of Capabilities (CoC) was released. Until Center of Capabilities was introduced in 2021, Job Profile Builder was the solution to manage both Job Attributes and person-specific attributes. Skills Portlet under Employee Profile was the only place to hold person-specific attributes during this time.

Pic 2: Job Profile Builder until 1H 2021

Center of Capabilities

The Center of Capabilities (CoC) was introduced in 1H 2021. Competency Library moved under the Capabilities Library for customers who upgraded to CoC. Other person-specific attributes, including Skills Library, continue to exist under Job Profile Builder during this time, as depicted in Pic 3.

Pic 3: Center of Capabilities (1H 2021 – 2H 2023)

Talent Intelligence Hub

With the introduction of Talent Intelligence Hub, Job Profile Builder found an alliance with a few new entrants: Growth Portfolio, Attributes Library, and Skills Ontology, with each solution having its defined responsibilities in the big house of ‘Talent Intelligence Hub.’

In the target end state of Talent Intelligence Hub, Job Profile Builder would manage only Job attributes and Growth Portfolio for Skills and People attributes, as depicted in Picture 4.

Pic 4: Talent Intelligence Hub

Let’s dive deep into Talent Intelligence Hub, learn about its key components, and how they integrate with other modules in the SAP SuccessFactors suite. For detailed information, please refer to the customer FAQ published in the SuccessFactors customer community. This blog only provides a high-level overview.

Components of Talent Intelligence Hub

In this section, we will learn about Talent Intelligence Hub and its 3 key components :

• Growth Portfolio
• Attributes Library
• Skills Ontology

The term ‘Attributes’ has an essential significance within this new solution. Let’s understand ‘Skills & Attributes’ and what data type constitutes an attribute.

1. What are Skills & Attributes?

Attributes are anything an organization may want to track about their People, including :

• Skills
• Competencies (behavior-based)
• Certifications
• Education
• Aspirations
• Mindsets
• Preferences
• *Custom Attributes etc.

2. What is Growth Portfolio?

Growth Portfolio is a UI and a new drop-down transaction to select from ‘home’ that displays all the skills, competencies, and other attributes the system knows about a person. In 2023, employees can use the Growth Portfolio to:

• View their skills and attributes based on their current Job Profile, which is pre-populated
• Add or reject skills that are recommended by the system based on AI (requires configuration by customers for Microsoft Graph)
• Assign a proficiency level for every Skill & Attribute in the portfolio
• Set a “Passion” flag for Attributes vital to them

Skills, Competencies, and other Attributes will be grouped together with a header specifying the attribute type. For, e.g., all Skills will be under the title ‘Skill.’ The top portion of the Growth Portfolio UI will display the recommendations the machine learning algorithms generated as ‘Recommended for You’ followed by the blocks for attribute types, as shown in Pic 5.

Pic 5: Growth Portfolio

3. What is the Attributes Library?

The Attributes Library is a repository of all the attribute types an organization would like to collect and expect in their people. Standard attributes will include:

• Skills
• Competencies
• Certifications
• Education
• Aspirations
• Mindsets.

The attributes in the library are grouped into individual sections on the Growth Portfolio based on the attribute type. For example, all attributes of the type Skill will be displayed with a Skills header, as shown in Picture 5.

Import/ Export for Attributes Library & Portfolio data via Integration Center and API to sync growth portfolio data from outside vendors will be available in 2H 2023.

4. What is Skills Ontology

The SAP SuccessFactors Skills Ontology is a dynamic collection of Skills sourced from leading industry and government organizations.

An ontology is more than just a database, however. We are creating our baseline skills ontology by processing the skills collection with over a hundred million global job postings. Our baseline Ontology covers over 30,000 Skills and has a sense of how they are related to each other in the global job market.
We use skills and their relationships from our skills ontology to extract new skills. More features and capabilities will be added to the ontology in future releases. E.g., the ability to automatically import from the Ontology to the Attributes Library.

How can I get ready for Talent Intelligence Hub?

The features in Talent Intelligence Hub are most effective if a customer has Job Profile Builder configured with job families and roles. Mapping competencies, skills, and other attributes to job profiles will make talent management, recruiting, and learning processes more personalized and enhance recommendations throughout the system. That said, customers without a complete job architecture in SuccessFactors would still be able to gain significant transparency into skills and other attributes of their people, and the Growth Portfolio data would still drive recommendations in Opportunity Marketplace, Learning, and Recruiting.

Process of enabling Talent Intelligence Hub

We have provided official documentation on the SAP Help site Link. These steps are relevant as of the 1H 2023 Release.

! Important- Points to Consider

• Only Competencies will be migrated to the Talent Intelligence Hub framework.
• Skills data in Job Profile Builder cannot be migrated to Talent Intelligence Hub. Maintain Skills under ‘Attributes Library’ after upgrading to Talent Intelligence Hub.
  • For customers with Skills Data stored in Job Profile Builder, please use our Early Enthusiast Work Zone group to discuss with Product Management.
  • Please refer to the customer community, for additional information.
• You will continue to manage Job Profiles, Families, Roles, etc. the following transactions –
  • ‘Manage Job Profile’ and ‘Manage Job Profile Content’ for Job Profile Builder Customers
  • ‘Manage Families and Roles’ for Job Description Manager customers.
• Category, Group, and Library in legacy systems will be converted (during upgrade) to Tags in Talent Intelligence Hub.
• It is advisable to look for duplicate competencies and rename those. The character limitation for Competency Name is 236 characters. Check Took checks will help identify any issues.
• Talent Intelligence Hub does not support any text formatting. Therefore Competency descriptions with HTML tags will need to be edited after the upgrade.
• With the 2H 2023 release, export and import can be used to remove/re-associate tag mappings with competencies via Integration Center. Until then, tags can be updated in the Admin Tool -Manage Talent Intelligence Hub.

Recommended Talent Intelligence Hub Upgrade Strategy

Please refer to Picture 6 for a recommended upgrade strategy to Talent Intelligence Hub. This is a high-level overview; please work with your implementation partner/consultants for additional support.

 After completing the migration process and upgrading to Talent Intelligence Hub, Please refer to the SAP Help portal for additional configuration details, e.g., configuring proficiency level scale, creating an attribute, creating a behavior, etc.

Pic 6: Building Blocks for Talent Intelligence Hub

Talent Intelligence Hub & SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite

Picture 7 represents critical current and planned 2023 Talent Intelligence Hub interactions with other SAP SuccessFactors modules. Please refer to the Road Map Explorer for detailed information. You can also refer to What’s New Viewer & the SAP Help Release documentation.

Pic 7: Talent Intelligence Hub with SuccessFactors HXM Suite

Talent Intelligence Hub is evolving rapidly, and new features will be released periodically throughout 2023 and beyond. Please stay updated on the Innovations and Roadmap on the community page: SAP SuccessFactors Customer Corner | SAP Community. Please save the  SAP Road Map Explorer link for more information regarding upcoming enhancements.

Thank you, Rebecca Reagan-Thieme, Robert Wood, Christina Russo, and Julie Bartholic, for your collaboration, review, and support in writing this blog.

Update Aug 11, 2023 – Learn more about Talent Intelligence Hub and the new Integrated Learning Experience integration in this new blog.