One of my favorite industry bloggers at Systematic HR made a comment yesterday that's worth drilling down on. In his review of a 2006 Tech Outlook piece in Benefits and Compensation Solutions magazine, Dub Dubs writes,
At their core, both web services and on demand are about shifting power from the aristocrats and clergy (vendors and IT departments) to the people (end users). Jeff Hunter illustrates this in Web 2.0 to the Rescue over at his blog Talentism:
1. Set up a new website and content management system (his blog)
2. Create a structured data feed of jobs from EA's website
3. Incorporate a real-time data feed into his website
What is most exciting is that (I'm assuming) Jeff did all this without involving his IT department or playing diplomat between the TypePad and SimplyHired professional services teams. You don't get much more user-driven than that. It's going to take a long time to develop the platforms to accomplish more intricate and valuable tasks (HR-XML still strikes me as too complicated for instance) and more importantly to educate consumers. But the future clearly belongs to this approach, and On Demand delivery is a critical enabler.
[The author's] observation is right on until you start reading the detail. I'm not sure he knows what web services is. At the very least, it is not dependent on on-demand software.This is 100% true, but it begs making a larger point about why these things matter to end users.
At their core, both web services and on demand are about shifting power from the aristocrats and clergy (vendors and IT departments) to the people (end users). Jeff Hunter illustrates this in Web 2.0 to the Rescue over at his blog Talentism:
I can't get a decent XML feed out of our ATS. So I use SimplyHired instead.Just to recap, Jeff was able to:
1. Set up a new website and content management system (his blog)
2. Create a structured data feed of jobs from EA's website
3. Incorporate a real-time data feed into his website
What is most exciting is that (I'm assuming) Jeff did all this without involving his IT department or playing diplomat between the TypePad and SimplyHired professional services teams. You don't get much more user-driven than that. It's going to take a long time to develop the platforms to accomplish more intricate and valuable tasks (HR-XML still strikes me as too complicated for instance) and more importantly to educate consumers. But the future clearly belongs to this approach, and On Demand delivery is a critical enabler.