Payroll Assets Are Among the Most Popular Downloads in HCM Exchange

When my colleagues and I set up the SAP HCM Exchange community we spent a lot of time collecting sales assets on SAP SuccessFactors Integration, Talent Management and so on. But I found out that the most sought after assets are SAP Payroll and HCM Personnel Administration, Processes and Forms. It is not surprising. There are thousands of customers who use these products.

Here is one of our customers talking about SAP Payroll, SAP Enterprise Learning and how they are planning to integrate with SuccessFactors.

Concur on SalesForce

I have great respect for Concur. I have used it.

The Social Organization

These are interesting times at SAP. We have product releases every four months on tens of products. An army of account executives are meeting tens of customers every week and funneling their desire, business problems and specific requirements to the product teams. We realized that traditional methods of enablement alone is not going to cut it. So apart from the regular enablement sessions, we decided to build a peer to peer learning model where any one in the team can learn from anyone else in real time.

One of my jobs now-a-days at SAP is to build a community for SAP HCM product teams, marketing teams and sales teams with the specific purpose of rapidly and continuously enabling all colleagues with the product knowledge that is generated within the product teams and customer knowledge that is generated by our pursuit teams.

One of the account executives while talking to a Fortune 500 customer spoke very proudly about this rapid and peer-to-peer learning model. He made my day.

I watch and learn by looking at what my SuccessFactors colleagues have been doing to enable their field colleagues and solution consultants with knowledge about new releases and competition.

I also look for guidance from other practitioners and from analysts who have observed other practitioners. I recently referred to the book  The Social Organization by Anthony J. Bradley, Mark P. McDonald. It comes highly rated.

Content, Consumption and Conversation

SAP HCM Exchange is a community powered by SuccessFactors Jam. This is the community of products and sales colleagues where all sales assets are shared, consumed and discussed. It has been working well for us so far. My colleague Michael Sven Kandziora, tracks three things in the HCM Exchange every week. The content created, the level of consumption and the number of conversations. SuccessFactors Jam gives community administrators detailed data about content, consumption and conversation. Michael and Enric Gili Fort designed the reports that give us clear insight into the week that was in the community. These reports then determine our action plan for the following week. 


Thanks to the reports provided by SuccessFactors Jam, at any given time, we can determine the exact impact our work is having on the capabilities of our HCM Field colleagues.

Michael, Enric and I also wanted a single number to determine the capability of the community. So we came up with an index called the Community Capability Index which is a product of Content, Consumption and Conversations in the community. We believe that this single index will help us track the overall value generated by the contributors and participants.

Here is a sample Impact report that Michael sends out every week. This is in effect, tracking the informal learning that happens in the community on a weekly basis. SuccessFactors Jam has been a phenomenal success to promote informal learning within SAP teams. I believe that this is going to impact HCM revenue this year to the tune to tens of millions of dollars. What I like about it is the precision with which we can take action based on the data we get.

We also get data at about every participant in the community. Such data gives us insight into the participation of every product and field colleague in every topic area. We can target content creation or focus attention on a particular topic area on a weekly basis, based on the real time data we get. This is some of the best insight I have derived from a system in a long long time.

Michael is going back to Germany in a month after completing his stint here in Palo Alto. If you are an SAP hiring manager in Europe, you should give him a call. He is going to be hot property.

Social Media Admirals

In his book, "The Next Decade", author George Friedman talks about the rising power of China in the Pacific ocean. He makes an interesting observation about China's ability to build a strong navy in the Pacific. He notes that technology and resources are not the bottleneck for China. The bottleneck to building a great navy is experienced admirals who can conduct a naval battle with aircraft carriers and destroyers. This is not something that China can import, from another country or develop overnight. Creating such admirals requires long term policy decisions, investment and execution direction from the highest levels of leadership.

Building strong online communities inside large corporations has some parallels to building a blue water navy.  Today, most large organizations  have the resources to buy community software for the entire workforce, because online community or social networking software costs only a few dollars per user per month. 

However, developing social media admirals who can guide communities of experts to execute towards a business goal is key to the success of community software inside any organization. Such leaders cannot be bought for a few dollars. Developing such leaders requires long term talent management investments and policy decisions. For this reason, employee social media implementation projects implemented by IT teams will have very little chance of success. From what I have seen so far, employee social media projects led by business teams assisted by talent management professionals have a higher degree of success. I suggest that you make your social media initiatives part of your business and talent management initiatives, where you have a better chance to identify social media admirals who can lead communities of experts to accomplish business goals.

Original image from http://www.sonofthesouth.net