Customers Speak: Integration Matters
I’ve been on the road the last few weeks promoting the next phase of the charter implementation program for our new product, Strategic Human Capital Management (SHCM). This week it’s London and Oslo (Norway). For the fifth time (in a row) I sat across the table from a customer who told me how important integration is to them in talent management. The most important part: HR and IT seem to agree, albeit for different reasons. It goes something like this:
IT: As HR considers implementing individual best-of-breed talent solutions (such as performance from one vendor and recruiting from another), the integration challenges escalate. Trying to synchronize competency, org structure and supervisor data (among others) is a ton of work — never mind having to manage all of those vendor relationships….
HR: We need to recruit, evaluate and develop employees based on collaboration with managers and through the use of a consistent, measurable set of attributes (competencies or whichever artifact delights you), and reconciling that functionally across siloed technology platforms looks difficult.
Same problem, different perspective — and in either case, solving the problem will make the difference. Not necessarily between success and failure, but companies that bite the bullet and choose real integration will see returns that are orders of magnitude greater.
Nicholas Higgins characterized this from a functional perspecitve in an interesting way when he said:
From an HRM process perspective there is very little new in terms of what talent management brings. However, talent management appears to be interpreted as more focused on the optimised integration of existing HRM processes relating to TM (even though technically this should be covered under strategic HRM). This has been skewed from a software supplier perspective. Our definition of integrated is much more than just data importing and exporting.
Nicholas: I’m with you.
That’s it for me for this year — I wish you a happy holiday and the most prosperous of new years (emphasis on your definition of prosperity!).
Tags: talent management, nicholas higgins, integration, software suppliers
December 20, 2007 at 5:55 am
[...] It even becomes symphony under Lawson’s Larry Dunivan’s pen (er, keyboard). [...]
December 20, 2007 at 5:57 am
Larry, this is symphony to my ears.
You are making the perfect synthesis of what integration and interoperability bring to both IT and HR departments
From an IT perspective, integration is all about efficiency. Any system needs to communicate/collaborate with tons of other systems. In recruiting only that would involve an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) coupled to an HRIS (Human Resource Information System, a.k.a. ERP) at the bare minimum. Then you start to add resume extraction, assessment, external search, background check, competency management, tax elegibility, …
Integrating with all these systems is costly and labor-intensive (opportunity cost). So systems that provide standard-based integration out-of-the-box add an extra-value to the IT department.
For HCM modules, a standard exist for most transactions (payroll, benefits, recruiting, …). You can find them on the HR-XML web site (disclaimer: I am on the board of directors of HR-XML).
From an HR perspective, integrated systems is a source of innovation and collaboration.
Collaboration, because when systems talk to each other, so can their users. By accessing the same data in disparate systems, managers and HR professionals can now share the same perspective. And they can collaborate more effectively.
Innovation, because when all the data from one system becomes available to another, you can figure new ways of using it, ways that are not possible or even conceivable in non-integrated systems.
Of course, integration does not automatically generate collaboration and innovation.
But integration is both a collaboration-enabler and an innovation-enabler.