Imagine you're shopping for a new car. If you're like most people, it's the beautiful, shiny exterior that first catches your eye. You might take it for a test drive, and admire the handling and the sleek dashboard controls. It's only when you are serious about the purchase that you pop the hood and check out the engine underneath.
Shopping for HR cloud solutions follows a similar pattern. And HR cloud solution providers, like car companies, tend to spend their marketing efforts emphasizing the “whiz-bang” features and attractiveness of their products. Certainly, solutions need to perform specific functions to meet your organization's objectives. And they should engage your workforce with beautiful, intuitive user interfaces. But what you can see – the features and the user interface – is only part of the solution. The things you can't see – the technology platform and the operation, infrastructure, and security services, for example – contribute just as much to your experience of a solution.
In HR cloud solutions, the applications make users more productive and lower the cost of ownership. However, the underlying technology – delivering continuous innovation, creating robust security and platform services, for example – is what makes business agility possible. HR cloud providers need to balance their investment in applications with the underlying infrastructure, platform, and technology that supports them throughout the application life cycle. And, speaking for SuccessFactors, we've done a great job at achieving that balance. We just haven't been very vocal in telling you about it.
That's about to change. Because you asked, we're starting to tell you in more detail about the powerful, reliable engines that support SuccessFactors solution suite. The “under the hood” questions we receive from HR LoB managers and IT staff fall into two broad categories:
- How will SuccessFactors reduce our business risk? Many of these questions concern data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance. But you also have questions about how we maintain application and data availability; how well we integrate with your existing applications, data, and business processes; and how we and our partners execute your migration to cloud applications.
- How will SuccessFactors increase our agility? Improving organizational agility is one of the biggest reasons for moving HR applications to the cloud. Accessing applications from anywhere in the world, scaling solutions up or down as needed, and being able to deploy new services quickly are typical examples of agility that HR cloud solutions should deliver. It's the underlying infrastructure, which enables much of that agility.
We've developed some materials that will introduce these concepts in more detail, and help answer those “under the hood” questions. Our video “How is an HR cloud solution like a car” gives a quick overview of the key attributes “under the hood” of SuccessFactors solutions, and how they contribute to a superior customer experience. If you're ready for a deeper dive, read our white paper "Looking under the hood: Answers to top questions CIOs ask cloud-based HR vendors." This white paper explores the top seven questions and concerns CIOs and HR Information Systems leaders have about HR cloud solutions, and explains how SuccessFactors addresses those concerns.
Stay tuned for my next blog post where I'll introduce a new idea that will help you find the answers you need about SuccessFactors cloud technology – fast!
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