Ok, so I don’t have much credibility in the world of linguistics, but my product strategist, Cecile Alper-Leroux used the word ‘integrally’ to describe our talent management system. What does it mean? Building integrally means to create an integrated solution with integrity. I kinda like it — provided that I can figure out how to use it in a way that is gramatically correct — an obsession of mine. We’ll see.
But I wanted to write about it because of what Josh Bersin said in his recent blog post about his assessment of the state of the economy as it relates to talent management technology. He made an astute observation: that “integration” is more important than “functionality.” It got me thinking about what Cecile said, and I liked the connection.
The integrity part is about delivering the technology that can enable the rapidly evolving talent management business process — and the integration part speaks for itself.
I’m not sure I love it so much that I’m willing to try to coin a new term (the narcissist in me likes the idea), but I thought I’d put it out there — what do you think?
Perceptive HR Technology 
I 100% disagree. Integration is nice but it is overrated as an end-all-be-all focus. Functionality MUST come first. If the product doesn’t work or can’t be configured to meet the business need, than all the integration in the world doesn’t mean squat. The focus should be building systems that are inherently configurable to meet the variety of business needs out in the world. Integration is a by-product of configurable software that meets the customer’s needs…not the other way around.
Functionality is always comes first.
Exactly why I proposed the term integrally, Kori — because it aligns the significance of both. Let’s not fool ourselves as well — without integration between talent modules, there are MANY functional goals that cannot be met. Whether that integration (of data) is achieved through interfacing of disparate systems or a single platform, they are core functional requirements nonetheless. It’s my belief that to deliver mature talent functionality to HR executives, integration is going to be the way to get there. Without it, you’ll lower operations cost and improve some service delivery to business users, but not much else.
I appreciate the clarification. I don’t argue the fact that integration is important. I’m just challenging the underlying statement that integration is MORE important than functionality. In an ideal world a particular software would do both perfectly. The reality is that I find most HR software products difficult to use and terribly inflexible (plus traditionally they don’t do integration very well). I like that integration is a consideration, but if I had to choose functionality versus integration I would choose functionality every time. I would rather have a product do one thing exceptionally well and to worry about integrating it than to have a bunch of products that work together exceptionally well and have marginal functionality. In think in the long term you are right that integration is important…but not before better and more flexible functional systems exist.
To be completely honest, one of the reasons for a new way to describe Lawson’s Talent Management system is that most of us out here in the cloud have a preconceived notion of what “integration” means – and it generally refers to interfacing a fixed set of data from a core HRMS system to a Talent Management suite, and maybe back into the HRMS. Not true with Lawson. We have developed the system “integrally” – core HR and Talent Management developed as a whole, without integration. And it is developed with careful consideration of the business processes and drivers that ARE the functionality that businesses need to operate with excellence.
I think there is a missing word in this. Usability. Sure a system that it is integrated is useless if it is missing the right functionality… but all the functionality in the world is also useless if the product is not usable. And by not usable, I mean quite specifically not usable for the managers and employees that make up 95% of the users of most HR systems. I’m not talking about HR superusers. Our research at Sonar6 suggests more HR system implementations fail to get uptake due to usability problems, than functionality or integration issues.
You couldn’t be more right — and that’s all about integrity. At the end of the day, we have to enable collaboration between employees and managers for talent management — and only a great UI will do that. Part of the reason we’ve invested heavily with products like Lawson Smart Office.