Transitioning to Tomorrow: Product Evolution from JDM to TIH

Unless you have been working on the same product area throughout your career, there is high probability, for the ones who work on the different modules/areas across different projects, to lose track of the updates for a specific feature and over a period of time, it evolves into a new feature with a different name serving the same need or maybe beyond that. Then one day, you might get an opportunity to see that evolved feature and may not recognise it though it's grinning right at you.

The same thing happened to me, I worked with JDM long back and around that time it asked me if I want to try its better version of it i.e. JDM 2.0 aka JPB. I politely said “No” and moved on to meet new features. Then unexpectedly, a few months back I met CoC due to some project needs and worked together for a couple of months without realizing its roots though there were fleeting glimpses of the past. Later during the recent release party, I met TIH which introduced itself as a friend of JPB & others and mentioned it's going to replace CoC, seeing me not budging it took time to explain what all happened since I left JDM.

I felt bad as I couldn't recognise CoC and decided to publish its story right from its origin to future developments so it doesn't get unrecognized whenever it bumps into you either in the same or new form. Enough of the backstory, here are the supplemental details before jumping into the main discussion

Abbreviations:

• JDM : Job Description Manager

• JPB: Job Profile Builder

• CoC: Center of Capabilities

• TIH: Talent Intelligence Hub

• CEA: Closed Early Adoption

• OEA: Open Early Adoption

• GA: General Availability

Color Legend:

• Blue : Scope is confined to job families and roles

• Green: Scope is confined to competencies

• Purple: Covers complete skill management

JDM:

• It was a non-MDF based model where only competencies can be mapped to job roles.

• Competencies used to be handled using competency libraries and mapping them required job families & roles along with job codes

• It was more of a vanilla framework which is not being used by most of the companies currently

JDM 2.0: 

• It's an expanded version of JDM introduced around late 2015 with the name JDM2.0 aka JPB

• It supports skill management which consists of skill library, competency library, qualifications etc. along with job families and roles

• It's an MDF based framework with associated MDF objects including job Profile, skill Profile, skill, competency etc.

• As per this model, skills are job centric i.e. mapped to job code as per job profile needs, ignoring the skills acquired by a person

JPB & CoC: 

• In 1H 2021, Center of Capabilities (CoC) introduced with the intention of moving complete skill management out of JPB to make it from job to person centric to create a whole-self model which gives the complete insight into an individual's skills, competencies, qualifications, preferences, aspirations etc.

• The umbrella term capabilities was introduced to cover the breadth of whole-self model but later confined it to refer only skills and competencies

• It includes capability library which combines both skill and competency libraries coupled with a capability portfolio to show all the capabilities of a person in one place collecting across suite

• As per current status, only competencies migrated to capabilities library along with the option to include person’s competencies from PM form in read-only mode in capabilities portfolio but eventually it was decided to be deprecated due to some product planning preferences or issues. JPB will continue to serve the needs of job families and roles

JPB & TIH: 

• In 2H 2022, TIH was introduced in a CEA model and updated to OEA in 1H 2023 and planned to make GA from 2H 2023

• The purpose of TIH is same as CoC i.e. to make skill management from job to person centric to create a whole-self model

• TIH includes 3 components, Skill ontology, Attribute library and Growth portfolio, here is a single line explanation for each of the components

• The Umbrella term capabilities replaced with attributes to define whole-self model

• Skill Ontology: Its a large invisible centralized collection of skills/attributes, maintained by SuccessFactors curating from different sources, that acts a recommendation engine for attribute library and growth portfolio

• Attribute library: It's a renamed capability library which is company specific into which attributes can be updated manually or imported with the future possibility of adding through external APIs and even from skill ontology

• Growth Portfolio: It's a renamed capability portfolio which shows person’s attributes from different areas of SF suite along with the possibility to add them directly in portfolio

• As of now TIH only supports competencies and would be expanded further with other attributes in future releases and eventually limiting JPB to handle just job families & roles part of job profiles

Eventually, the attribute library will become the common source for both job & person use cases and the growth portfolio of a person would be integrated with all the concerned areas across the SF suite helping the managers and HRBPs to make informed decisions.

— — — — — —