Last week I attended Kenexa’s annual industry analyst day. Bill Kutik did a nice job summarizing some of the key highlights. He also alludes to some of the emerging competition in talent management from consulting firms offering their own technology (the recent partnership between Mercer and PeopleclickAuthoria as an example) along with pre-packaged content and services.
It was interesting to hear Kenexa in a sense moving back toward its roots. They certainly will compete on product capabilities, but their service offerings were definitely on equal footing at this event. In his opening address, Troy Kanter did a nice job laying out how Kenexa’s software, content, and services had worked together to deliver significant value to customers. Unfortunately, the customers were not named specifically (one example focused on movie theater chain). I thought it would have been more effective to have their customers tell the story in their own words, but, nonetheless, the case studies were compelling examples of the power of talent management to drive important business outcomes.
One of the challenges I find working with clients is that they often leap too quickly to a discussion of the feature/functions of various talent management vendors as an answer to an ill-defined or often undefined business problem. Linking software capabilities (and content and services) to the business problem(s) is/are crucial to successful talent management application investments.
Kenexa’s customer engagement philosophy is a good one to help avoid the business problem disconnect trap. Through its service offerings, Kenexa (and other vendors that offer these kinds of services) can help a customer define the business problems to be addressed before moving to the technology enablement. The challenge for Kenexa is to manage the transition to a next generation product (x2) and convince buyers that not only do they need to look beyond just product capabilities, but also that Kenexa is the best-suited to provide that holistic software, content, and service solution.
That is a tall order in a market with strong competitors and investors rewarding a more software-centric business model. However, by focusing more attention on its services core competency, Kenexa does provide a different alternative to most talent management application vendors today. Different is good in a market like talent management where messaging from most of the vendors is the same.
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