This week we talked about Taleo, Hirevue and Slideroom. And we continued talking about software analysis.

First we talked about security, this would be the number one concern for most companies especially when employee data is concerned. If you’re at a company that has people that are not comfortable with having data in the cloud, it would be very important to find a way to get buy in from sr management (if you’re looking at cloud computing as a solution). We also talked about how Saas is different from on premise software. They both have their pros and cons and we discussed those last week. The bottom line is that either one would work depending on what problem you’re trying to solve.

We also talked about SLA’s and speaking from experience, it is VERY important. If there’s a problem with your software, this is pretty much your support. With Taleo, we started with general support, which was great but it did not feel like we were getting the level of support that we needed, so we had to upgrade to dedicated support. This shows that you really need to think ahead when researching vendors because if you don’t have a flexible budget. Last thing we talked about is integration. This could be a good or bad thing. On one hand, it would be beneficial because it streamlines the process, on the other hand, it has the potential to get chaotic because there would be “too many cooks in the kitchen” resulting in duplicate data or losing sight of the scope of your problem/process. Integration would be a good thing to think about in the downstream portion of a problem charter.

Definitely would apply all of what we talked about to my strategy if I ever were doing research for a potential software vendor. Looking forward to more software analysis next week.

Later!