Salesforce, Rypple, social this, social that, social the other thing.  Did I say social enough times?  Yeah, it’s déjà vu all over again.  Last week, we were fed a diet of empty cloud rhetoric; this week, the waiter has delivered “Social Performance Management,” the first in a five course meal described as “Social HCM.” Unfortunately, this first course doesn’t even quality as an aperitif; it’s more like a condiment.  Yet a number of analysts and mainstream press are treating Salesforce’s planned acquisition of Rypple as if it’s “the next big thing” (with notable exceptions Naomi Bloom and Jim Holincheck).

While Salesforce may or may not decide to get serious about the talent management space, if “Rypple as Performance Management” is a proof point for their understanding of this space, I think it’s going to be awhile before we see any credible solutions from them.

There are any number of logic failures in the rosy coverage of this planned acquisition, but there are three big ones that immediately jump out:

• Rypple is not a Performance Management solution
• Rypple is a feature layer disguised as a solution
• “Social” HCM is not new and it’s not separate from HCM

Rypple is not a Performance Management solution

Within the larger Talent Management solution set, Performance Management is a “glue” solution, much like Learning and Development, Competencies, and Talent Profiles.  Each of these solutions is more than the sum of its parts, both literally and figuratively.  They send and receive data from other talent solutions (or even third party business applications) and their value is at least partly derived from their ability to focus and aggregate activity and data across the suite.  In the case of Performance Management, there are obvious connections to every other part of the talent suite:

• Learning and Development – skill gaps mapped to learning and development
• Succession and Mobility – career gaps mapped to bridge roles or L&D activities
• Recruiting – gap analysis between current competencies and the required ones as a driver of recruiting needs and strategies
• Leadership Development – identification of hi-pos and high performers
• Compensation – “pay for performance” and annual focal reviews (which usually include a compensation element)
• Onboarding – once a new hire moves beyond the first phases of onboarding, many companies begin managing subsequent onboarding activity in their goal plans

The list above just scratches the surface of the role that performance management plays in the larger talent suite.  But even in just the few scenarios noted above, the depth of the UI, data and logical connections between the various solutions should be pretty obvious.  To my knowledge, Rypple doesn’t do any of the above, at least in any real world, meaty way.  It’s basically social goal management supported by a “thumbs up” model and behavioral economics models like badges.  Cool stuff to be sure, but an application?  Not so much.  Which brings me to my second point…

Rypple is a feature layer disguised as a solution

Social goals, badges, social feedback – all nice innovations in the way people deliver and receive feedback, and set priorities.  But are these an app?  Or ways to achieve the larger objectives found within a performance application.  Here’s why I ask:

Taleo actually pioneered the idea of continuous coaching and peer feedback about a year before Rypple was founded. To support these concepts, we launched Outlook and Lotus Notes plug-ins that let users capture emails about themselves or their team.  We also let our users solicit feedback in this way, not just at focal reviews points but at any time.  More recently, we launched something called the Conversation Hub which takes all of this a step further by enabling any user to drag and drop conversations and feedback straight from email and tag them to a goal, competency, or development plan. To us, these are features, not an application unto itself.  We see all of the above as a natural extension of the collaborative goal and review process.

Given the above framing, it’s not surprising to see Salesforce buy Rypple, not because it launches them into HCM, but because it plugs a hole in Chatter.  Unlike Jive, SocialText, or even Mzinga, Chatter is relatively new to the analytics game.  They just launched Chatterlytics last month, years after other social platforms.

In my view, Rypple is really just another piece of their social analytics strategy: first Radian6, then Chatterlyitcs, now Ryyple.  One handles external analytics, another internal analytics, and the last handles social rank within the enterprise.  Rypple is really about the social layer of reputation management.  If you look to the social space or even eCommerce space, you quickly notice the growing importance of third party credentialing – crowd-derived identifiers like “trusted seller” or “top contributor”, or assigned badges / titles like “expert” or “certified.”  Rypple serves the same purpose inside the enterprise.

Rypple’s real value isn’t performance management, it’s internal rank and reputation. As such, there is tremendous value to Chatter in this, particularly to complement existing purchases, and far less to any company that views Performance Management as a strategic driver (unless of course these features are layered into an existing world-class performance solution).  This is not meant to suggest in any way that social is not a valuable aspect of talent management.  Which brings me to my last point…

Social HCM is not something separate from HCM

As many readers may know, I’ve been in the social HCM game a long time, longer than most.  In the early 2000’s, while at Knowledge Impact, I led a team to develop a SaaS-based social knowledge capture tool called “Knowledge Exchange” that enabled users to share “insights,” develop socially created FAQ’s, discover and “ask” experts, share files, launch discussion forums.  In other words, a lot of the stuff we now consider social enterprise.  In 2006, while at Mzinga, I started leading the current charge into social HCM when I effectively adapted the term “social learning” to describe the next generation of learning solutions that were powered by social media and social networking technologies and concepts.  I then designed and oversaw the launch of the industry’s first social LMS.  Since then, I’ve keynoted conferences on this stuff and consulted at some of the world’s largest companies.  Needless to say, I know social HCM: what it was, what it is, what it could be.  And here’s one incontrovertible fact about social HCM – there is no social HCM.  Social is just another way that HCM gets done.

I suppose a few years ago you could say “social HCM” with a straight face, and I suppose that for uninformed buyers, it sounds kind of cool, but at this point in the game, social learning and social recruiting are mainstream.  And social collaboration within the enterprise is past the tipping point.  Whether we’re talking marketing, support, innovation, or product development, social is just part of the deal.  In fact, performance management may be one of the few areas where social isn’t yet a fundamental part of the model.

But here’s the thing, with all of these antecedent business groups, we don’t talk about “social” as a separate thing.  Social is just part of the DNA of marketing: skillsets, budgets, priorities…  Social is an everyday part of how support gets done.  It’s integrated into formal and informal learning plans.  It’s part of the mix in recruiting.  So “social HCM” is a non-starter.  The real question is: how do you effectively infuse existing top-down, formal, and informal HCM models with social concepts and technologies so that you have peer feedback that informs a yearly focal review or manager feedback that happens weekly?  How do you create a solution that combines manager assessment with peer assessment?  And maybe even overlays the two to note differences?  How do you surface hi-pos and successors based on peer feedback while still properly weighting manager input and insights?  This is where the magic happens.  And it can’t happen as long as “social HCM” lives as a separate solution set that doesn’t link to any other parts of the talent ecosystem.

By the way, there is one other aspect to social that industry analysts and vendors seem to forget with amazing regularity: social software and social concepts are awesome for tech companies and other knowledge workers, but not so obviously useful to the folks who do “real” work – nurses, doctors, policemen, manufacturing workers, miners, plumbers, electricians… You get the idea.  Rypple’s client list is a who’s who list of fun, tech start-ups in the valley.  Yet there isn’t one hospital, manufacturing, and financial company among them.  Not surprising in any way, but nevertheless, a nice reminder that social HCM as a concept is pretty limiting, not just in the value add but in the addressable market as well.

Summary

The Salesforce Rypple acquisition is much ado about nothing, at least for now.  Until one or both companies realizes that Rypple isn’t really a performance management application and that even if it were, social HCM is at best a “red herring” statement on its face, there isn’t much here.  It’s universally accepted that performance management is the easiest talent management solution to build due to the absence of regulatory and compliance issues and the relative simplicity of the object model (absent of course the deep integration across the suite).  Given this, I suppose we could see Salesforce get serious about building out the rest of the performance management solution, but until they do this or acquire a true ATS or LMS, the real news here is that Salesforce has found a way to plug a competitive hole in Chatter while taking a fun poke-in-the-eye at SAP with their “Successforce” naming strategy (which I happen to love).