Utilizing SuccessFactors PMS solution without saving any employee master data in SF

Question

Hi Friends,
We’re implementing SuccessFactors’s Performance Management Solution only at one of the client location in Saudi Arabia and trying to integrate with the On-Premise SAP HCM and Push the employee data to SF.
However, due to security concerns customer doesn’t want to store any data on SucessFactors cloud solution to run the PMS cycle.
During the purchase of license for SuccessFactors SAP has demonstrated client that, in SF a unique Id will be created for each employee, which will not be the actual UserID(PERNR)from SAP, and with this unique ID actual employee data will be tagged/linked  in SF which will fetch the data from SAP On-Premise system to run  the PMS cycle.  Once the user logins in SF, based on the unique ID data will fetch from SAP On-Premise system to SF on a real time basis and when the user logged out from the SF system, data should be cleared/deleted and nothing will be saved or stored in SF with respect to employee Master Data.
I understand SAP has provided the standard add-on for the Employee Data Scenario between SuccessFactors and SAP HCM, which could have been leveraged here for integration, however with the above limitation this solution is absolutely out of scope.
  Please advice, if anyone has faced any such requirement.
Thanks,
Farhan

Answer 1

Dear Farhan,
I'm with Luke on this. This is against anything we know about SAP and SF.
However, taking a step back, I would really, really urge you to trigger a strategy discussion with your HR, IT and data privacy leaders.
Let me be very blunt here:
Even if such a process could be made possible at considerable cost and inconvenience, it is incosistent at its very core.
If your strategy and culture are anti-cloud, there is a simple strategy execution: don't use cloud (yet).
If your strategy is cloud, but your culture is anti-cloud (if I had to make a guess, that would be it), what you will see is your culture having your strategy for breakfast very soon, if I may use this old truism. I.e. it's not going to work.
To be cloud-ready, culture, strategy and capabilities must be in line. Pushing capabilities by building very complex solutions will get you into a complexity spiral, which will eventually get the better of you.
The decision to use cloud for such a key process (which soon, if not today, will probably be the right decision for most organisations), can't just be triggered by someone appreciating some screens being a bit prettier than in on-premise applications. The foundation needs to be there first. Your organisation has the opportunity to use the Performance Management Process to align culture and strategy with the changing business and technological environment - but to do so, you need to acknowlegde that the organisation is currently NOT cloud-ready and that this needs changing.
Some good, provokative questions to start with could be:
Why are some organisations (put in some names of well renowned companies, ideally leading organisations in your industry, using cloud HCM) successfully using cloud HCM, but we think we can't?
Which advantages of cloud services are left, if we have a very complex custom solution built to avoid storing data in the cloud?
Can our IT team demonstrate that they have better expertise in protecting data in systems accessible through the internet (and your SAP system will have to be accessible in some way, if SF is supposed to access the data) than world leading organisations like SAP and SuccesFactors?
What is our roadmap for HR systems in the future and how does this weird architecture lead us along that road?
Do the relevant decision makers actually understand, what cloud in general and Software as a Service in particular are?
You may find it difficult to find an employee ready to ask your CIO, HR-Director and Data Privacy Lead these questions, unless they want to be fired anyway So, a 3rd party change agent may come in handy for that task.