More than 1,500 HR/talent/learning professionals are gathered this week in Los Angeles for the Cornerstone Convergence 2015 conference. Cornerstone OnDemand — a global leader in cloud-based talent management software solutions – is providing 60-some learning sessions over the next three days, offering insights and solutions to talent and workplace challenges and opportunities. While the conference population and session topics seem to grow each year and adapt with grace to the changing demands of the market and our organizations, Cornerstone’s leadership and solutions seem to keep an unchanged pulse on client centricity.
CEO Adam Miller opened the Conference this morning with a 150-minute keynote – well over the allotted time — but no one (ok, a couple, but extremely few) walked out on his interesting remarks. He oriented his opening story around maximizing employee potential. He shared at least four paths Cornerstone has developed to enable employee empowerment and performance excellence, and employee potential:
- Collaborative Learning – In the migration from formal classroom-based learning to informal learning, Cornerstone’s solution now leverages cohort-based community pages featuring expert Q&A functionality, learning tabs for relevant content selection, and a focus on video learning that allows asynchronous learner commenting.
- Modern Content – Knowing that more than half of what learners learn is from Internet-based video (YouTube, NetFlix, Hulu, etc.), Cornerstone is moving to a MOOC-like next generation content library. This solution will enable user-generated content and “browse for training” in a just-or-me fashion, ensuring the content is much more usable and relevant than their content library ever has been.
- Analytics – With Cornerstone’s machine learning platform, clients are well-positioned to predict who will stay longer (recruiting), how to accelerate new hire ramp-up time (onboarding), anticipate who will be out of compliance (learning), forecast talent differentiators to drive up performance (performance management), anticipate incentives that improve performance (compensation), and forecast skills requisite for mobility and promotion (succession).
- Platforms –Cornerstone Edge purposefully exposes the Cornerstone platform building blocks to more easily enable the addition of unique and client-specific functionality. One of the most interesting features of the new Edge solution is the Cornerstone App Builder, which allows any user (no need for coding skills) to create apps (time-off, absence management, etc.) for mobile devices and laptops with the click of a button.
Several Cornerstone clients took to the stage and offered key insights to corroborate how the new functionality Miller revealed met and accelerated achievement of their business goals. Chief Learning Officers, VPs of Talent/Learning, and other senior leaders from organizations like Louis Vuitton, Team Rubicon, Spark, and others described how the Cornerstone global employee data repository, compliance training tracking, and mentorship platforms provided game-changing impact on their business results.
Our businesses don’t stand still and it seems evident neither does Cornerstone. Committed to lifelong learning as an underlying foundation of its business model, CSOD demonstrates the evolution of its solution year over year in alignment with the voices of their partners, their customers, and their own employees.
First-generation Cornerstone was reporting, and 9-box grids, classroom-based learning tracking, e-learning, and other traditional talent process functionality. Today, we have collaborative learning and user-generated content, analytics tools and a new Edge platform. Tomorrow, is what? While press releases just hit the market today on Cornerstone unlocking big data, and their Edge platform-as-a-service solution, I’m sure the Cornerstone Team is already working on designing and testing the next offering on their agile and innovative global product roadmap. Any guesses what we may be hearing next year during Convergence 2016?
Today’s Convergence 2015 crowd is looking forward to a lively social networking concert tonight with Lenny Kravitz and tomorrow’s keynote with Daniel Pink! If you are missing this week’s Cornerstone Convergence 2015, watch the blog posts, and tweets and other social venues to keep you informed.
Until next time…
Laci Loew
Vice President and Principal Analyst, Talent Management
Brandon Hall Group
