Tom Fisher, VP of CLoud Computing at SuccessFactors, clears the fog surrounding the Cloud and gives his guide on how to move towards Cloud Computing as a HR leader.

So you’ve decided to go to the Cloud! Essentially, you, as the HR leader, are delegating the application and its critical service levels – uptime and availability, to the selected application provider. It’s important that you, as an industry professional, understand what technologies are being leveraged to protect the application, considerations for the applications use, achieve the key metrics including service levels and, last but not least, who are the people who make it happen. A few key points to help you in making the decision with an attempt to put the ‘techie’ issues into business terms:

1. For your own peace of mind – make sure the provider has a complete understanding of the quarterly, bi-annual and/or annual peak usage times.  As an HR Professional you should have the Cloud provider explain, in ‘non-techie’ terms how they accommodate these bursts of activity.  As a point of education – a common metric you should ask a provider for is ‘head room’.  Head room refers to the additional capacity a provider has or can quickly add to meet periods where there is a sudden increase in use.  Typical responses from a provider should be anywhere from 30 – 50% of their capacity is dedicated to head room.  At SuccessFactors, for example, we try to keep head room at 50% load balanced across our entire network.
    
2. Understand the basic things like the time-out settings in the application due to lack of activity.  As we all know, the performance review process is very mentally engaging.  The provider should allow your customers a reasonable period of time before automatically logging off the application due to lack of use.  This automatic log off capability is very important from a security perspective – so it must be done.  This is a unique usability challenge that you, as an HR professional, must balance.  The delicate balance of securing your application and insuring that your customer does not get frustrated with it may be one of the most challenging application usability issues you will face.  Typically, these timeouts occur anywhere from 5 – 10 minutes on enterprise applications like CRM or ERP.  In the world of HR – you need to enable a lengthier timeout or ask if the provider allows you to set that period of time. 
    
3. Enhancing the review experience by converging the usability of the web into a regularly used business application – like performance management or goal management – is another important consideration in your decision making.  The selected provider should provide a consistent, user friendly experience.  This is particularly true if a) it is a Cloud application and b) it is not used on a daily basis.  The User Interface is the on-ramp to these types of applications and the experience must be memorable.
    
4. Make sure you understand productivity capabilities that exist in the application you select.  For example, at SuccessFactors we’ve invested heavily in the area of the ‘review assistant’.  This capability will increase the adoption and productivity of the management team as well as provide the memorable user experience your customers are looking for.  This is a primary example of the convergence of the positive user attributes associated with the web and the productivity for people using the application.  The review process, all too often, is considered laborious, hard and tedious.  Empowering your managers with an easy and fun to use ‘assistant’ embedded in the application will dramatically improve the experience and the application’s adoption!
    
5. An integrated solution is the key to moving your application into the category of mission critical.  Multiple use applications, like the ones typically found in the domain of HR, must be tightly integrated – meaning they share the same database and the same code base.  However, this goes beyond just sharing data and includes the user experience.  Your customers learn application functionality and do not want to repeat that learning process.  Therefore be sure and select an application provider that is built on a common platform.  For example, goals must easily cascade down through the organization while being used for performance management.  Performance management should feed into compensation management and all of these feed into succession.  Finally, an integrated solution should empower your managers to track the critical metrics to support your work and analyze how the company is doing overall.  Bottom line – look to an application provider who has years of experience in this field, is considered an industry visionary and spent the money researching and developing solutions for the environment to be a key guidepost in your decision making. 
    
6. Like everything else in business – your investment is in people.  Your job, as an HR professional is to make sure you understand who’s ‘behind the scenes’.  It’s perfectly okay for you to ask – who’s running the show and how do you measure them?  For example, SuccessFactors has an outstanding operational team who’s maintained a 100% uptime for the past 6 months – this is crucial data for you to have in your decision making.  It represents the basic availability of the application to your customers. 

The Cloud is relatively new and heavily depends on the deepest technical expertise available to make the experience as rich and as risk free as possible for users.  It’s critically important to make sure that, when considering a Cloud provider or enterprise Cloud application, you ensure that the team driving your requirements has the depth to be able to meet your needs. 

For example, SuccessFactors has continuously added experienced and deeply knowledgeable resources to our base to insure that our customers have the best and brightest focused on both their application requirements and the critical infrastructure that it runs on.  Adding leadership from such industry giants as eBay, Google, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Yahoo focused on technology has enabled us to move faster and scale more nimbly than our nearest competitors.

Finally, remember that one of the greatest advantages of working in the Cloud is that as a user, you can just access what you need and ‘get on with it’. As a user, you don’t need to be technical or even understand all of the IT architecture behind it. It should just make your job easier for you and make the performance evaluation processes more transparent to employees. That’s the real litmus test of a Cloud-based HR application.

Tom Fisher is Vice President of Cloud Computing for SuccessFactors www.successfactors.com. He can be contacted at tfisher@successfactors.com