What is the most important advantage of Saba Enterprise 2005?

Ghezi: The real power of Saba Enterprise 2005 is its being the first platform on Earth to have integrated performance, competency, learning, and talent management, the power of having this fully integrated. And it's not merely applications that we have connected - it's one single platform sharing the same data and the same business objects.

The platform opens a new world. There is a moving to Human Capital Management (HCM). The breadth of the application is much bigger. Now we have virtually the whole value chain, starting with the goals of the organisation, tracking the performance towards these goals, tracking the gaps in performance, and looking at the competencies as a factor that you can influence to reinforce the performance positively.

When you want to improve the ability, then you come to learning - it can be eLearning, coaching, any form of learning, even informal learning. Document sharing and knowledge management is something that we have introduced as well, so the whole value chain in there. It's much more linked to the business goals.

So the HR director clicks and has all the goals, all the competencies, all the gaps at her or his fingertips / disposal?


Ghezi: Not only the HR director, but also the people in the business. Even if all the Human Capital initiatives are owned by the HR directors, what they want to do is to speak the business language. The way to do that is to give tools to the business: to the marketing manager, and the sales manager to empower them to act and manage all their key goals. Saba gives tools to the people in the field that will enable them to make the right decisions.

Which tools are this?

Ghezi: The competency framework is part of the core data you manage with Saba. There are plenty of tools to feed this data, to update the data. You can test online, you can do 360-degree assessment, etc. Then you have tools to display the competencies, to accumulate the gaps, and on a higher level, you have tools to analyze. How are divisions doing? How are we doing globally? Where are the weak elements?

During the three years it took to rewrite the platform, you have also worked on usability. The result is a services-on-demand solution with a service-oriented architecture. What has changed?

Ghezi: We moved to a new J2EE-platform. It uses web services that are independent bits of programming. You can integrate those bits wherever you want. Most of the computer users spend a lot of time using Outlook or Lotus Notes. People don't want to leave Outlook, they want to have everything in there.

We use web services technology to implement more self service here. It's no longer necessary to close Outlook, launch Saba, sign in, and go to the requested page. It's more than a single sign in: you have extra buttons in Outlook like "Find an Expert", "Search Catalogue", "Check my Competencies", etc.


These self services can also be integrated within your Intranet, company portal, your SAP. This facilitates the user experience and increases adoption of the application. These services can be implemented very quickly because they are pretty independent of the rest of the application. Even if you upgrade your Outlook, it doesn't affect the services.

The new architecture has also better configuration and personalization features. Is it true that 80% of customer changes can be made with configuration versus customization?

Ghezi: It's probably even more than 80%. We are live with several customers. Allianz is an example of a very complex customer group with several subsidiaries, each of which has its with own processes and uses with all different entities and different ways of managing things - we have gone live with one single system, one single installation with zero customization, not even one! It's all parameters that we have entered into the system.

So customers can do everything on their own - that is incredible! But managing peoples' processes is not only a question of technology. There has to be a lot of process reengineering beforehand.

Ghezi: Customers still need consulting. You need to implement it. You don't know from day one that to achieve this you need to change that parameter. So you need consulting to help you to find your own processes, what you want to implement. Technically you can rely on Saba in a couple of weeks, but in reality most of the time it takes longer. Why?

There are two main factors. The first is system integration. People want to connect SABA with their SAP, to Peoplesoft, to other applications. That takes time; you need to develop interfaces. Not that we have never developed an interface with SAP - we do it every day. But SAP within company A is totally different from SAP at company B. There are different versions, they have customized it, they use extensive data.

The second thing is definitely related to processes. What we sell is not only software: we sell, in a way, best practice because we have all this experience with all of our customers all over the world. It takes time to go through these processes and to challenge them.

Recently Saba customers gathered at the Saba Innovations conference. Which challenges were discussed? Were there any new trends? How was the spirit?


Ghezi: Many organizations face the problem of succession management. For some, even in the government area, it has been estimated that 50% of their skills and competencies will disappear. People feel this, but they don't know how to measure that. Saba can help identify which competencies are vital for the organization, how to do the knowledge transfer between the aged workforce and the new one.

The second challenge centers around compliance. Ten years ago the job of the compliance officer didn't exist at all. Now this person reports directly to the CEO. It's at a point where it-˜s the regulation that will drive companies capacity to sell. If a sales employee hasn't sold a product for a specific period, he or she has to be recertified or just can't do business. Saba helps to identify which certification is needed for which job. It will identify schedules and the path, and it measures the certification itself. Within Saba you can search by competency and by certification to find the right person and one who's available.

Another trend is the notion of the extended enterprise. All the global companies are the center of their own ecosystem. You have to look at your dealers, your suppliers, your customers. You need a management system that allows you to manage more than your people. You cannot open your SAP to a dealer. And extended enterprise includes the huge trend of customer education. Customers don't buy just the product anymore, they buy a global service. You don't buy a car that is not maintained, even if it's the best car on Earth. More and more customers are asking for training on the products.

What about the role and the mission of HR?


Ghezi: Thee is a shift from traditional HR to strategic HR. Five years ago HR directors were spending eighty to ninety percent of their time with the payrolls, the unions, etc. They spend a fair amount of time in implementing HR modules of SAP or Oracle or Peoplesoft to manage the repository of the organization. This consumed a lot of energy and money to get to a situation where all companies were at parity. If you do your payroll right, it doesn't give you a competitive advantage. You use your payroll and that's it. It's vital but it just gives you parity.

This non-strategic HR is being outsourced more and more. Now HR is much more involved in the business, and the CEO is also a force of this trend. Organizations care about their people, their skills, because they know that this is where they can make the difference. They can make it around such things as certification and compliance, around sales efficiency and productivity.

The CEO doesn't necessarily retranslate this into learning; the keyword is performance. I need my company to reach a higher level of performance than my competitor. Therefore I want my HR to launch initiatives around performance tracking, reviews, and management. I want to identify my best talents and pamper them to keep them on board; I don't want them jumping to the competition. The role of HR is to translate that into processes, into action, into systems that manage people and not only information like payroll and other basic tasks that the HR department performs.