I was just alerted to this gem over at Red Herring. As you may know, SuccessFactors was one of a small group of companies presenting at the DEMOfall show in San Francisco (more on this, including video hopefully, later on). While it’s great that RedHerring noticed we were there, it’s unfortunate that they were not paying all that much attention.
From the article: “A couple of Big Brother-esque startups, SuccessFactors and Workshare, presented their plans for employee surveillance and controlling confidential information, respectively.”
Now, setting aside Workshare, categorizing what we do as “employee surveillance” is a gargantuan stretch. While some detractors might feel that performance management can be a somewhat impersonal process – there’s a huge diffrence between paying employees for their performance and big brother-like surveillance. Like the difference between an elephant and a mouse, for instance. Or between someone focused on getting it right, and someone who’s not paying that much attention.
I love Red Herring. It’s one of my favorite publications. But this time, they got it wrong. And I want them to say they’re sorry.
UPDATE: Red Herring has updated the article to reflect that what we do is “Workforce Performance Management.” Kudos to them for being big enough to make the change
September 21st, 2005 at 2:48 pm
Max,
The Red Herring article was pretty silly, but for those of us who were paying attention at DEMO, there are some pretty cool things to see – nothing wildly revolutionary, but encouraging to see companies continuing to “out innovate” one another. The opportunity to see all this new stuff was a reminder to me how important it is for us to continually innovate and improve the user experience our customers have when using our products. The Workforce Performance Dashboard is an example of this as are several other enhancements that have been implemented this year. We are fortunate enough to have a scalable platform delivered on-demand. That’s the good news. The wake up call for me was how critical it is to maintain a relentless focus on product innovation. There is no reason why SuccessFactors should not be at DEMO every year showing off our continuous innovation that delivers real customer value.