Our initial review of the talent management system customer satisfaction survey results shows that more and more organizations want an entire suite of talent management applications from a single vendor. This means that companies like Plateau, which have delivered world-class learning management systems, are now high on the list as providers of solutions for integrated talent management.
In Plateau 6.1, the company's newest release, Plateau has taken integrated talent management to the next step. While we think the name isn't very exciting, the product really is. In this release Plateau is unveiling its Flex-based user interface (Flex is a new development environment from Adobe which allows browser based applications to be much more interactive). This new interface lets employees, managers, and admlinistrators manage large amounts of data (e.g. lists of employees, talent pools, courses) with a variety of graphical filters, tabs, and icons. More than a full year in development, 6.1 really goes to the next step in making all the functions of integrated talent management easier to learn and use.
In addition to innovation with talent pooling, organizational dashboards, and predictive analytics, two improvements we felt deserved the most recognition include employee performance reviews and the user interface.
Performance Reviews - Improvements to user scoring
- Enhanced employee collaboration
- Ability to assign different review templates to different groups in the organization
- Streamlined screens with point and click rating slides to review each goal and competency
- Expanded detail options available for users that want to view more information on goals and competencies
- Enhanced text editor capabilities including spell check and legal compliance
- Transparency and sharing of scores.
User Experience - Simple and modern look and feel, with widgets to minimize clicks needed
- News and information page when users login, to enable HR or L&D to promote important changes in business processes or programs
- To-do-lists with learning, performance, assessment and survey information
- Easy to understand status buttons on the home page, telling managers precisely what they need to do next and what activities remain open
- Managers can directly access employee information from the home page
- Access to a wide variety of other functions from the home page with live links which are all controlled by enterprise security.
We believe this release will start to raise the bar for user interfaces in highly functional talent management systems. We will include a detailed profile on Plateau in our upcoming Talent Management Suite Systems 2010 report…stay tuned.