Talent Management and Google

This announcement from August got by me, but I think it is interesting and worth noting.  SuccessFactors markets a suite of Talent Management applications ranging from Performance Management, to Compensation Management, to Employee Development.  They announced a new integration with Google Talk to enable real-time chat via the Google platform as well as Google Calendar to leverage a centralized scheduler as well as Google docs and Google Maps. See a screen print below of a Google Chat dialog embedded in a SuccessFactors dashboard.

The interesting thing to me is how a mainstream, entrenched Talent Management platform is opening up to the Google platform, recognizing that many employees are either already using these Google services, or that organizations are starting to encourage the blurring of the internal vs. cloud services.

Another benefit of a platform like SuccessFactors opening up to Google, is the relative ease embedding these Google services in other applications like wikis and blogs.  So a workgroup or organization could set up a shared Google calendar once, and leverage the same calendar in their talent system (SuccessFactors), their internal wiki and perhaps their blogs or other web sites. 

I love to use wiki technology (especially PbWiki) for this ability, and I think it is likely that more and more internally focused applciations will begin to support this simple interoperabiltiy.

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