This year’s user conference was a resounding success, with nearly 200 customers in attendance from around the world. A big thank you to each of you who made the trip to Ottawa.

Having that many customers in one place was a true testament to the company’s growing popularity.

Coming out of the conference are a few things I wanted to share that we heard time and time again from customers:

• That more executives are “getting it” and [...]

The knowHR blog has a great post on why pay for performance programs fail. Some of the reasons include a lack of true performance differentiation, and weak manager feedback. The blog correctly states, “If everyone’s performance is the same, then just pay them all the same and don’t waste your time with all that planning and agonizing.”

But we know that in most organizations top performers should be incented by pay merits – it benefits [...]

Industry friend Bersin & Associates recently published a report on best practices for high impact talent management. The report covers 22 talent management processes that drive the highest levels of business impact.

This research program studied more than 760 organizations business, talent, and HR processes and includes in-depth analysis of 62 best-practice processes, in eight functional areas:

• Workforce planning
• Performance management
• Competency management
• Leadership development
• Succession planning
• Learning and development
• Compensation management
• Talent Management software systems.

We [...]

The Human Capitalist is weighing in on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Jason Corsello highlights the opinions of fellow blogger Phil Wainewright, who asserts that although SaaS has largely become a preferred delivery model, it’s not the only one that works, and often is predicated in unfounded fear from vendors. As Corsello points out, there are still many companies who prefer to run their applications themselves. The short story is that this is a market in flux [...]

Everyday we hear from prospects and customers about how important it is to their organizations that the software they use is flexible, intuitive and profoundly easy to use. Last week, we launched Halogen Employee Performance and Talent Management Suite 8.1 in response to this ever growing need in the market.

If HR can’t effectively implement, roll-out and then control their new systems, they are settling for second best. And second best doesn’t enable anyone to [...]