We’re at a wonderful place with technology. In the early 90’s, you had to depend on some pretty bad interface mechanisms if you didn’t want to have a single ERP. Recruiting and other systems like performance or payroll were barely integrated at all. Then we got more sophisitcated and at least systems started talking to each other in the mid-90’s.

Today, with web services, you can find the best in class solitions for every part of the HR technology market and (if the applications are up to W3C standards) hook everything together real time and fairly seamlessly.

I’m not going to say that centralized single database is dead. However, It’s a whole lot easier to have SAP as a central repository, but also have apps like SuccessFactors all providing a single view of the organization for decision support.