What Is Your Future Vision? | SAP Innovation Forum 2017

To me Innovation Forum is the place where you can loosen up a bit and let your imagination fly free to explore what if scenarios. For this purpose, I would like to use this blog on short introduction to the latest Technology Vision publication from Accenture and reflect how the themes match on HR domain and SAP SuccessFactors offering.

Technology Vision 2017 has a theme “Technology for People”. This aligns very well with the HR domain and the five main themes of the vision also cover areas interesting to HR community:

AI IS THE NEW UI, Experience Above All. Today it is nearly impossible to work within technology and not to hear the chatter of the advances in Artificial Intelligence. Even if future HR related AI topics like artificial assistants or managers feel distant in your situation there are still small steps you can take towards that direction. Instead of aiming for huge leaps your organization could leverage automation of activities (e.g. through SAP SuccessFactors Intelligent Services) or Machine Learning enabled functionalities in smaller areas (e.g. reduction of unconscious bias in talent acquisition). Common for these steps towards intelligence and future AI is the need of connected landscapes and reliable data sources.

ECOSYSTEMS AS MACROCOSMS, Unleash the Power of Us. As HR aims to enable higher performance for business functions the ecosystem thinking becomes very central. HR should think how and where they could leverage partnerships and provide complimentary services. To be able to leverage this vision the connectivity capabilities of the HR platform become an important factor. From SAP perspective ecosystem theme has been very strong and in addition to robust application programming interfaces (API’s) for integrations SuccessFactors has Hana Cloud Platform offering where partners and customers can innovate and monetize with their own custom applications.

WORKFORCE MARKETPLACE, Invent Your Future. Unlike AI and its effects on the work life this theme is quite easy to grasp. On-demand labor has been common on many industries and as technology platforms keep developing the boundary between salaried and contingent workforce keeps getting more and more blurred. SAP has been active on this area with the acquisition of Fieldglass and the amount of standard functionality for contingent workforce in Employee Central.

DESIGN FOR HUMANS, Inspire New Behaviours. User experience is on the top of nearly every client discussion. Expectations are high when it comes to the usability of new products as it should be as according to studies people just plainly stop using the tools. Simple starting point to fixing this issue is to start listening your customers and adapting the technology into their needs. To get more insight on this topic I would recommend Accenture’s Global SuccessFactors lead Arvind Mathur’s recent blog about consumerization of HR and how Accenture has been innovating around SuccessFactors to make it easier to achieve results.

THE UNCHARTED, Invent New Industries, Set New Standards. Legal compliance and data privacy has always been an important topic for HR community and the rise of Cloud HR systems has not changed this situation. On the contrary they along with increased mobile service consumption have brought out new dimensions for these requirements. One of the most recent demonstrations of this has been by the Russian regulation that required data centers holding Russian employee data to be located in Russia. This of course lead to a technology innovation on being able to host data on multiple data centers while still being able to sync reliably. Currently organizations are preparing for GDPR and in this occasion it seems that technology is already there to help to achieve the requirements.

Although this text was just a very brief introduction on the Innovation visions, I hope it was able to give you some fuel for thought. I would also like to welcome you to visit us at the Accenture stand at Innovation Forum for a chance to discuss how we could together take your organization into NEW.

Jyrki Häyrynen

Jyrki works at the Accenture’s Nordic SAP Talent & HR domain as the Country lead for Finland. In his daily work he provides advisory on organizations why they should consider Cloud HCM, how the transition could be done and what comes after the first step. 

Accenture is one of the evet partners in SAP Innovation Forum 2017. #SAPFORUM

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