Intelligent Enterprise

VentanaMonitor™

Summary

Siebel Employee Relationship Management (ERM) suite and a set of employee performance management applications were somewhat hidden among Siebel's recent announcements surrounding its latest version of its CRM applications suite, Siebel 7.7. Siebel has made significant progress in going beyond the efficiency and automation aspects of employee self-service to provide an employee lifecycle-centric performance management solution. If your organization is serious about building an employee performance culture that positively influences and improves employee behavior and results, Siebel ERM is a credible suite of applications that should be examined.

Assessment

Organizations trying to drive better alignment between employees and their functional roles must use tools other than traditional business intelligence or human resource systems. Organizations must have an integrated view of the employee and their qualitative and quantitative goals. Ventana Research refers to this as workforce performance management — understanding, optimizing and aligning every employee to corporate initiatives and goals by setting individual objectives.

Siebel ERM is the umbrella for a suite of applications that originally was a set of employee self-service applications focused on enabling better efficiency in the organization. Through extensive analysis of customer requirements, Siebel came to market in 2002 and 2003 with Siebel Performance Management, which has three integrated modules: Siebel Objectives and Review, Siebel Compensation and Planning and Siebel Career and Competencies Management. Siebel Learning Management is still evolving as part of the larger Siebel ERM suite of capabilities.

Included in the Siebel 7.7 release is Siebel Performance Scorecard, intended to be used by employees and management to support simple and sophisticated methodologies, like balanced scorecards, that require graphical presentation of employee and organizational performance. In addition, as a result of the acquisition of a compensation management software provider Motiva, Siebel has enhanced its Siebel Compensation Planning module with additional management and user functionality for managing bonuses, providing visibility across employees for a single view of compensation, integrating Microsoft Excel, and making modeling and forecasting more flexible.

Organizations that want more flexibility in managing objectives for employees who change roles in the company will like the 7.7 release of Siebel Objectives and Reviews. Organizations starting out more simply by providing information to employees through rapid deployment of dashboards with pre-built reports and analytics will find value in Siebel Executive Analytics and Siebel Workforce Analytics.