SAP announced a broad set of plans to become a player in cloud computing, spanning from a "loosely coupled suite" of business applications to data integration and PaaS (platform as a service) Tuesday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando.

Salesforce.com is set to unveil new products for employee performance management and rapid website development on Thursday during the Cloudforce conference in San Francisco.

Oracle moved quickly on Friday to lay out its plans for the HCM (human capital management) software market, a couple days after rival SAP did the same thing.

An SAP-based human resources software system implemented last year by Kentucky's government suffered from a series of "material weaknesses" that could result in significant financial misstatements, according to a report released this week by the state's auditor.

Oracle is buying cloud-based talent management and employee recruitment software vendor Taleo for roughly US$1.9 billion, the company announced Thursday. The move comes shortly after SAP's move to acquire SuccessFactors, a close competitor of Taleo, for US$3.4 billion in a deal that has yet to close.

What department heads and line managers think of HR, what employees think, and what HR managers think.

Stephanie Christopher, national director of SHL Australia New Zealand, a company which assists companies — including recruitment firms — in their recruitment activities, says that for the more technical positions HR has to fill, “it would lean toward the line manager for advice; it would be the line manager who would have final say”.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: “Managers aspire to be strategic, but they are required to fulfil their duties as a functional expert.”

In the business world, describing your boss as “ape-like” is not typically considered a compliment. But it turns out there is a lot we can learn from chimpanzees about effective leadership. Applying human instincts to the corporate jungle can help IT leaders bring out the best from their team or manage technology change for end-users. Chimpanzees share 98 per cent of our DNA, making them more closely related to humans than gorillas. So it is little wonder that we have a lot in common.

With several multi-million dollar IT projects running concurrently and a headquarters relocation thrown in, 2009 was a busy year for Aristocrat CIO Angelo Grasso. Good project governance and short project timeframes, Grasso says, helped Aristocrat’s IT organisation to act as an enabler and ensure success.