As companies in all industries implement digital transformation programs, the war for tech talent is heating up worldwide. That means it’s more important than ever to keep good employees and help them develop their talents and skills. TM is tackling the talent dilemma head-on by digitizing human resources.
The company’s new cloud-native employee experience app, ERA, is a centralized application that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to facilitate internal sourcing of talent and help employees develop skills and manage their careers. The single application replaces more than 10 in the company’s previous HR ecosystem. Managing those disparate systems and a wide assortment of content tools and platforms made it impossible to compare data sets and integrate approaches in order to reduce complexity, confusion and inconsistency in employees’ experiences.
“ERA digitizes employee management end to end, including tasks such as managing the talent pool, advertising job openings, managing the job rotation processes and identifying employees’ competencies gaps,” says Dr. Sharlene Thiagarajah, Chief Executive Officer, TM R&D. “The app can also be customized, packaged and deployed in the cloud to serve organizations of any size and industry, which means that TM R&D could market it to other organizations. This bodes well with our strategy to create and commercialize solutions with a global outlook.”
ERA uses AI to analyze HR and employee data with a goal of improving employees’ productivity and job satisfaction. ERA’s corporate social network feature enables employees to engage with each other and take on tasks beyond their routine jobs to earn extra cash or develop their talent. ERA also matches employees to job openings within the organization to promote job rotation.
The ERA app is connected to a microservices-based cloud platform that can easily be scaled up or down as demand fluctuates. Hits to the platform usually go up when a new job is posted or a new division opens. So far, the highest hit rate on the platform has been 4,000 requests per second.
The ERA platform also uses TM R&D APIs to allow other systems to connect to the platform and pull employee profile information for purposes like promotion, updating the employee directory and in-depth analytics on employees’ profiles.
ERA was developed using the TM Forum Business Process Framework (often referred to as eTOM), which is a comprehensive, industry-agreed description of the key business processes required to run an efficient, effective and agile digital enterprise. The business processes cover the whole lifecycle of a services-focused company, from conceptualizing a service to ordering, billing, customer care and assurance, and retention. The framework delivers a hierarchical catalog of the key processes, focusing on strategy, operations and management.
Specifically, TM focused on reviewing job rotation processes with a goal of digitizing manual processes and optimizing them to improve talent management. The idea is to identify gaps and the upskilling or reskilling necessary for each job profile.
