According to a Blue Paper produced by Morgan Stanley, public-cloud environments are on track to grow by 60 percent through 2013. In a report by the IDC, it is forecast that employees using mobility solutions will increase to 1.3 billion by 2015, from about 1 billion in 2010. In the world of mobility and cloud, why is there even a need for development in legacy systems on premise? The question is not if companies are going to make the move to mobility and the cloud, but it is how are they are planning to make the move, and when. Then the issue becomes the strategy and pace and how best to achieve this transition.

Big-Bang or Hybrid Approach?

One option for companies is to go full-cloud immediately. This big-bang approach has advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that it allows faster innovation and is easier to upgrade. On the downside, however, this approach requires a total replacement of existing HR system foundations, which can be extremely disruptive and costly. This plan is mostly linked to a deliberate cloud strategy on the part of the company to accelerate growth through more modern and systematic IT systems. As a result of the increased effort and costs incurred by going big bang, many companies choose to use a hybrid strategy instead. They do not want to jeopardize their on-premise core HR foundations in which they have invested a lot of time and money, and their goal is to try to leverage these existing foundations to deliver strategic analytics and talent management on the cloud. One disadvantage of this hybrid solution is that employees often balk at the mismatch between features in new applications and legacy ones. One answer is to use on-premise innovation to enhance the foundations to improve hybrid and mobile solutions.

SAP User Experience (UX) Renewal

UX Renewal was delivered in three phases. In enhancement package 5, SAP cleaned up the employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS) portals by providing an add-on that included the Corbu theme. The Corbu theme (named after the European architect Le Corbusier), is mostly focused on improving the system’s look and feel by introducing new fonts, colors, and layouts. In September 2012, SAP delivered the new landing page for the HR professional as an add-on on top of enhancement package 6. This add-on incorporates the part of UX Renewal that is designed specifically for the HR professional. As of June 2013, these same concepts will be available in enhancement package 6 for employees and managers, as part of UX Renewal for the casual users. Companies can deploy those add-ons in SAP NetWeaver Business Client (NWBC) or SAP NetWeaver Portal.

Later in 2013, SAP is rolling out mobile applications centered on user roles and complementing UX Renewal on NWBC and SAP NetWeaver Portal to ensure that HR processes can be accessed anywhere, anytime, from any device.

As SAP’s official program for enhancing core HR on-premise solutions and improving the deployment of hybrid solutions, UX Renewal features three components: an optimized navigation, a new look and feel, and the integration of social concepts. These are all embedded inside the solutions that employees use daily.

Optimized Navigation

The optimized navigation is based on the fundamental concept of a landing page, centered on the needs of the user. There are three types of users: managers, employees (who together constitute casual users), and HR professionals. There is one landing page for managers, one for employees, and one for HR professionals. Figure 1 shows the employee landing page. Navigation is optimized to be quick, with every task available with a few clicks. Entry aids, cut, copy, paste, and type-ahead (e.g., a Google search, when the user is automatically offered suggestions that extend what was already typed). These tools speed up data entry, and needed information is organized and prioritized in lanes. Those vertical components that are named Work Feeds or To Do are easily accessible. Finally, user-friendly capabilities, such as search and save-as-draft, help users work more quickly and efficiently.

Figure 1

The landing page for the employee

New Look and Feel

Figure 1 shows the appearance of the new screens as well as the social concepts that are a second key part of UX Renewal 1.0. The colors, fonts, and overall layout have been designed by usability experts to make them easier to use and view, and are very similar to what employees see every day in the consumer-grade apps they use on their smartphones.

Integrating Social Concepts

There are four key social concepts: updates, feeds, collaboration, and profile. Embedded updates and feeds allow employees to share information easily. Collaboration tools, with a complete integration to SAP’s collaboration platform, allow employees to ask the broader community for information on how to do something or how to interpret something. As a result of this collaboration, users are able to reach a consensus. The user profile, another concept borrowed from social networking, aggregates everything there is to know about an employee on one page (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The employee profile

UX Renewal Integration with Cloud Talent Management

The single entry point remains the ESS or MSS portal for companies that decide to use their on-premise HR foundations and deliver cloud Talent Management. As shown in Figure 3, ESS and MSS are the unified access points to cloud solutions. It means that every HR task starts inside the MSS or ESS portal, even if it is continued inside cloud components. That way, employees continue to use the portal they have been using, but they get a whole new set of Talent Management functionality along with it (e.g., performance management and learning and analytics). This integration is preconfigured (click here for an example of how DZ Bank is using the hybrid cloud and on-premise solutions). Programs, tools, and methodologies help users combine on-premise and cloud HR processes in a loosely coupled suite, which means the solutions remain independent without platform interdependencies.

Figure 3

Hybrid deployment results in unified access