Go get a cup of coffee. This blog is more long winded than I intended.

Will my colleagues and I have jobs five years from now, and will we be doing something completely different is an entirely different question. Of course we'll have jobs, but they may be very different. My guesses on the future may be right, but timelines are usually wrong. Instead of five years, think two to ten.

To think what we as HR IT professionals will be doing, we have to look at the products that organizations will be using, and the expectations and needs our clients will have. 

The on premise software market is shrinking. The first solution areas in this seismic shift are CRM and HR. The leading area of Software as a Service (Saas) has been recruiting. People have been using hosted recruiting since the late 90s so it's no surprise. The rest of talent management is following suit.

This trend will continue and will accelerate as 1) SaaS talent management suite vendors such as Taleo and Success Factors focus on using a core domain and a data model that represents the core enterprise, rather than being an afterthought. 2) The same vendors add core HR administrative functions, and 3) Core HR moves to the cloud - e.g. Workday.

Though the pace of talent management innovation in the SaaS market has accelerated, the suite talent management vendors have slowed in the recruiting space so they can broaden into other areas. 

My prediction is that SAP will move to SaaS in all areas of Talent Management, leaving traditional on premise SAP to 1) The existing customer base 2) Complex organizations who cannot make their processes meet the SaaS technology and 3) Niche industries that SaaS vendors don't support and that have to extend SAP to meet their needs. Recruiting seems to be the area in need of heavy integration with third parties (job boards, background checks, assessments, niche sourcing technology providers) and would benefit from a hosted open API solution. In the short term, anything with standardized processes, the need for heavy web integration, such as social media and mobile, benefit from a cloud-based solution.

Business ByDesign will extend into all of Talent Management unless SAP have some magical secret new platform. SAP hasn't shown a track record of rapid innovation in this area. Acquisitions of suite vendors or standalone vendors may be an option but is not the SAP way. In some ways SAP is better at building strong enterprise platforms than actual solutions that end-users love. I think the best thing for SAP would be to build a super strong core in the area of Talent Management, driven by a strong business knowledge domain model (i.e. not a developer data model) with every piece of it supported by open web services. This is nothing without a couple of things: 1) A strong community that is supported by SAP (already have that) and 2) A model for partner development that is open (think Apple) with a low barrier to entry. When an industry of HR enablers and home office tinkerers can support you, you can take on the world. To continue the Apple example, Apple itself isn't known to create be-all-end-all applications, but the range of applications supported on iOS is second to none.

In a worse case scenario SAP will repeat the mistakes of E-Recruiting and try to re-invent the wheel (though they did it in a turbocharged highly scalable and flexible way) and fall behind. In a world where SaaS integration to core HR becomes the norm, enterprise integration itself will not be a selling point that can counteract lack of innovation.

So what will HR IT professionals be doing in a few years. I think the market will have a greater need for HR practitioners that also have the analytical skills to support implementations. I hope that clients end up using consultants that combine deep process expertise with a knowledge of technology solutions, rather than those with deep vendor technical expertise but an inability to push for better practices. Customers will more frequently save money and support implementations themselves in a shorter timeframe. There may for a while be a greater need for technical middleware specialists to support the clients who still have on premise core HR and want to integrate it. 

There are still a huge number of benefits of E-Recruiting over SaaS vendors. I'd like to see SAP step in the direction of a hybrid approach: supporting extensible solutions and innovation while lowering the cost of implementation and ownership. I myself am looking at ways I can reach into other recruiting process areas while staying true to the SAP roots that have brought me here. It will be interesting to read this blog post in five years. 

The forecast is "Cloudy with a Strong Chance of Disruption".

Here's to the future. It looks bright, just different.

Cheers, Mark