With the release of Talent Intelligence Hub (TIH), SAP has introduced the core component of its future-ready workforce vision. Think of it as the SuccessFactors “brain” for talent management that centralizes organizational and individual talent intelligence, together with data from third parties, to build individualized talent development paths.
TIH allows customers to understand and manage their workforce holistically by giving them the ability to capture capabilities like skills and competencies, as well as expressive preferences and strengths and styles of their employees.
As with any new technology, there are a lot of questions, myths, and misconceptions at the beginning of its introduction. This blog is the first of a three-part series that aims to highlight the most common misunderstandings that I encountered while working with customers and partners and provide the necessary insights to debunk those myths.
The focus of Part 1 is misconceptions regarding the prerequisites for using Talent Intelligence Hub. Getting started and figuring out the correct first steps can be a hurdle for organizations and so I’d like to tackle the most common myths about what’s required to activate and successfully use TIH.
Myth #1 - You have to build an entire skills library before you can get started with TIH
One of the things that makes using Talent Intelligence Hub attractive is its ability to manage skills. Skill data in TIH can be used across the entire suite and embedded in talent processes like talent acquisition, performance reviews or career development. In addition, employees can benefit from intelligent skill recommendations within their Growth Portfolio, as well as Growth Portfolio data-based recommendations within Opportunity Marketplace.
However, do you really need a full-blown skill library before you can get started with Talent Intelligence Hub? The simple answer is no, you don’t. The more complex answer is that it depends on your organization’s maturity in terms of using skills. If your company uses competencies but doesn’t have a definition of all relevant skills yet, there are several ways to approach this:
a) Start without skills
In this case, you can still leverage features like the Growth Portfolio for showing and assessing competencies and benefit from the Attributes Library with its great flexibility for managing attributes while taking the time to work on your skills definitions. Using skills is great, but we do not force anyone to use them.
b) Start with the most critical skills only
If you want to start using skills as soon as possible, but you can’t wait until you have built an entire skills library, start with the most critical skills first. I recommend looking at the key positions within your organization and assessing which skills are most important for fulfilling the requirements of those jobs. Put those skills into TIH first and start building from there. If your organization is large and this approach would still lead to a very large number of critical skills, consider starting with a pilot group, such as a division or department, that is suitable for starting your journey towards becoming a skills-based organization.
c) Purchase a skills library
If you need to start working with skills as quickly as possible, buying a skills library from an established vendor is the fastest way to get started. I won’t be making any recommendations for a specific vendor in this blog, though, as the decision is based on factors like cost, quality, and fit, all of which I can’t assess.
d) Leverage the SAP SuccessFactors SkillsPlex library
In addition, you can import the SkillsPlex library, which was used for the legacy skills functionality that sits in Job Profile Builder (JPB), if you are not on TIH yet.
Please note:
- Do not use or import this to JPB before your migration to TIH, as it will make migrating impossible at this stage.
- The SkillsPlex library contains more than 15,000 skills, so you should properly filter and select what your company truly needs and never import the entire library.
- To get the SkillsPlex library import files, search for “SkillsPlex” on the SAP Business Exelarator Hub
e) Let us surprise you with the 1H 2024 release
I am not at liberty to disclose any details yet but suggest you keep an eye out for the release information for the upcoming 1H 2024 release. 😉
Myth #2 - You need a job architecture to use TIH
When you enable Talent Intelligence Hub and Job Profile Builder, you gain the ability to attach competencies and skills to job roles. This way, you can capture which competencies and skills are required to be successful in a certain role. In addition, it enables you to include information about required competencies and skills in job profiles.
While this is a great feature to leverage for talent processes and, conceptually, JPB is now part of Talent Intelligence Hub, there is no technical requirement to have a job architecture in place before you get started with TIH. In fact, you can enjoy the benefits of Talent Intelligence Hub without any job roles in your system.
If your organization doesn’t want to use job roles or isn’t ready to use them yet, you can still work with competencies and skills in many talent processes. Here are a few examples:
- Growth Portfolio: Allow employees to manually add and assess competencies and skills.
- Performance Management: You can manually add competencies and skills to a form or pull them into the form automatically by hard coding them into the form template or tagging them as core competencies / skills.
- Learning: Attach competencies and skills to learning items to help employees learn new skills or close skill gaps
All of these don’t require a job architecture.
Myth #3 - You need AI policies in place before you can start using TIH
This is another common case of all-or-nothing thinking. I understand the need to have a set of rules, guidelines, and procedures that an organization establishes to govern how Artificial Intelligence will be used, and I am in no way saying that this isn’t important or should be skipped.
What I would like to convey is that you can use Talent Intelligence Hub even when your company hasn’t finalized policies for AI yet. Artificial Intelligence is a key component of TIH as it provides intelligent skill recommendations to employees within the Growth Portfolio. However, consider starting your journey with TIH without the AI part enabled. The artificial intelligence within TIH isn’t automatically active in your instance. You need to set up the ingestion of external data (MS Graph) or internal data (Continuous Performance Management) to get intelligent skill recommendations in Growth Portfolio. If you want to enjoy the benefits of TIH like the manager view in Growth Portfolio or the flexible tagging model in the Attributes Library, you can do so without any of the AI functionality enabled.
This way, you can ensure that your company is on the latest and greatest framework for competencies and skills, benefit from all the innovations, and start using AI-powered skill recommendations whenever your company is ready.
In my next blog, I am covering myths and misconceptions around the migration to Talent Intelligence hub. You can find it here.
In addition, I highly recommend taking a look at the fantastic blogs written by @RinkyKarthik and start with her latest blog Talent intelligence hub - 2024 updates and behind the scenes. Also, many thanks to @Rebecca Reagan-Thieme for the support on this blog.
I’m curious to hear what myths and misconceptions you have encountered thus far! Please write it in the comments section.
- SAP Managed Tags:
3 Comments
| User | Count |
|---|---|
| 12 | |
| 3 | |
| 3 | |
| 3 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 | |
| 2 |
