It was interesting to hear Kenexa in a sense moving back toward its roots. They certainly will compete on product capabilities, but their service offerings were definitely on equal footing at this event. In his opening address, Troy Kanter did a nice job laying out how Kenexa’s software, content, and services had worked together to deliver significant value to customers. Unfortunately, the customers were not named specifically (one example focused on movie theater chain). I thought it would have been more effective to have their customers tell the story in their own words, but, nonetheless, the case studies were compelling examples of the power of talent management to drive important business outcomes.

One of the challenges I find working with clients is that they often leap too quickly to a discussion of the feature/functions of various talent management vendors as an answer to an ill-defined or often undefined business problem. Linking software capabilities (and content and services) to the business problem(s) is/are crucial to successful talent management application investments.