Synygy Introduces Innovative Solution for Workforce Performance Management

VentanaMonitor™

Summary

Ventana Research sees the biggest challenge facing companies today as effectively linking corporate strategy to employee execution to improve individual and organizational effectiveness. Synygy has released a new Performance Management application, Synygy Objectives Management Solution, that goes a long way to help companies meet this challenge. Ventana Research believes this new solution will bring new market competition to existing enterprise scorecarding solutions and introduce new opportunities for Synygy in Workforce Performance Management. Ventana Research is advising our clients that want to implement a Performance Management initiative that links corporate strategy to goals and objectives to consider Synygy Objectives Management software.

Assessment

Linking corporate strategy to employee execution is essential to reach the highest level of Performance Management. This may sound simple, but Ventana Research sees this as the largest performance improvement challenge for global 2000 companies. With this challenge in mind, Synygy, a leading provider of enterprise compensation and incentive management software, has brought to market a new scorecarding solution, Synygy Objectives Management Software.

Synygy designed this new solution to help organizations link strategy to employee execution and to link compensation to performance. Ventana Research believes the introduction of this software is a critical step towards enabling effective Workforce Performance Management (for more information see "The New Workforce Performance Management").

Synygy Objectives Management software provides a web-based environment to define and manage strategic objectives to targets and to assess issues that impact performance. With this software, corporate goals at any level can be defined and grouped together and then cascaded to individual or group-based scorecards. To align performance and manage to objectives, managers can define quantitative or qualitative key performance indicators and link them to the goals.

The application supports strategy maps that link strategy and objectives to group or individual measures. This is a critical diagnostic tool to perform root cause analysis, allowing management to align strategy-execution analysis directly to individual performance appraisals. The application empowers managers to handle organizational goal setting and performance reviews in any organization. Ventana Research sees this application bringing strategy management to a practical level to improve employee performance.

Synygy Objectives Management Software supports varying management methodologies such as Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma, Malcolm Baldrige and Manage by Objective (for more information see "Scorecarding for Total Business Performance Management"). This flexibility is important to organizations that have been unable, due to cultural issues, to adopt a full cycle of Performance Management methodologies and initiatives. Synygy's new software can adopt and deploy at varying levels of organizational Performance Management maturity and with just about any type of Performance Management initiative.

Ventana Research has developed the PerformanceCycle, a Performance Management methodology that is a three step repeatable process — Understand, Optimize and Align — for businesses to improve organizational and individual performance. While most applications supporting Performance Management fail at adequately supporting inter-organization collaboration, a critical component for successful Performance Management, Synygy has succeeded in embedding support for multi-step workflow and collaboration to ensure that individuals' feedback and direction are integrated into the application.

Market Impact

After a decade of false starts, the market for strategy management, objective and goals management and linking pay to performance is beginning to establish its importance in corporations worldwide. Still holding back the inevitable wide-scale adoption of these solutions are organizational readiness — cultural barriers and lack of executive sponsorship — and information technology that can support large enterprise deployments to thousands of users and integrate these applications into existing transactional applications. Synygy has addressed these business and IT issues with the assessment and feedback loops built into the software.

Synygy Objectives Management Software puts pressure on other enterprise compensation and incentive management providers and business intelligence and ERP providers that want to compete in the Performance Management market, a market that Ventana Research asserts will be the defining competitive differentiator for companies in the coming years. Synygy's unique solution of linking compensation to performance through Synygy Enterprise Incentive Management (EIM) solution is an integrated application offering.

Ventana Research considers Synygy's methods of linking quantitative and qualitative goals to company objectives a critical component missing from most scorecard applications. The next steps for Synygy should include further expansion into supporting the performance improvement techniques of learning management systems to ensure that all major aspects of helping individuals attain their goals are leveraged. The market consolidation in this area will provide Synygy more opportunity to partner or acquire existing solutions (see "Market Consolidation in Workforce Performance Management").

Recommendation

Organizations now have the opportunity to link corporate strategy to employee actions to understand, optimize and align organizational and employee performance. Ventana Research believes that Workforce Performance Management, improving the effectiveness of employees using a common set of goals and objectives, is one of the most critical business initiatives an organization must undertake to be competitive in this decade.

Synygy's Objectives Management software begins the next wave of Performance Management, which will focus on integrating and leveraging business intelligence, enterprise learning and enterprise incentive management systems to implement pay-for-performance programs. Ventana Research is advising our clients that want to implement a Performance Management initiative that incorporates our "Understand — Optimize and Align" PerformanceCycle methodology to link corporate strategy to goals and objectives to consider Synygy Objectives Management software.