Oracle Continues to Develop PeopleSoft HCM

With a new feature pack for PeopleSoft Human Capital Management 9.1, Oracle brings a more consumer-like feel to its core software for human resources processes.
Six years after one of Oracle’s biggest acquisitions, users of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management software continue to receive updates to their core HR package, as they did again late last week with the release of a new feature pack for Oracle PeopleSoft HCM 9.1.

    Under its “Applications Unlimited” program, enterprise software purveyor Oracle has vowed to support a raft of applications it has acquired during a multi-billion-dollar spending spree that dates back to the middle of the last decade. Early in 2005, Oracle closed its vigorously contested, $10 billion takeover of leading human capital management software vendor PeopleSoft, a move that cemented the HCM component of Oracle’s E-Business Suite. Later that year, Oracle went on to swallow Siebel Systems, which substantiated the ERP vendor’s CRM credentials.

    Late last week, Oracle released Feature Pack 2 for the 9.1 version of PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, an update that Oracle said delivers a “consumer-like self-service” experience to HR personnel and business users. Embracing the “consumerization of IT”—the trend of imbuing enterprise software with the fluid user experience found on smartphones and tablets—Oracle has added a search-based navigation function that allows users to perform quick lookups from any page to receive contextual results. A department manager might type a worker’s name into the search function, Oracle said in a statement, to pull up documents on that employee’s performance, salary, career planning, and related activities.

    In an effort to improve the user experience in the HCM software, Oracle also added pagelets into the latest version of PeopleSoft, a feature said to deliver a more personalized experience through fewer clicks. Meanwhile, managers can customize the new PeopleSoft Manager Dashboard to display key data on their reports, unit, and projects, and can use drag-and-drop technology to customize the page to their needs.

    Also new in the second 9.1 feature pack is PeopleSoft Talent Summary. “Administrators can select the content of pagelets that will appear on the Talent Summary based on the organization’s priorities,” Oracle said, “and managers personalize the page based on their preferences for presentation layout and areas of emphasis.”

    As Oracle continues to develop its core HCM software, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield, who left the company when Oracle took over in 2005, continues to grow SaaS HCM vendor Workday. The vendor has recently added adjacent cogs of functionality to create a more robust suite of enterprise software, bringing it into competition with Oracle and other ERP vendors.

Source: Chris Chiappinelli at http://www.managingautomation.com