Tagging talent via SaaS

CEOs biggest worry is often said to be finding the right talent for their organizations. Sometimes it's already there, they just can't locate it.

That's one of the potential advantages promised by a suite of tools being released in beta on Monday by nGenera Corp. of Austin. According to Stephen Douty, president of platform applications and marketing, the company will offer its Leadership, Talent and Customer products as software as a service with the goal of giving C-level executives insight into internal and external resources. For example, nGenera Talent will be a collaborative setting with the latest Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis and tags, where individual employees (or consultants, business partners and others) can contribute knowledge about the skills they have or pass judgment on the talents of others based on real-world experience. Douty says everyone using Talent has their own tag cloud that is "self-organizing." The best people in specific skills are will rise to the top of those clouds and be easily identified for projects or jobs, Douty says. Your basic human-resource applications don't give you similar insights, he claims. Subscription  pricing starts around $100,000 per year.