No one can observe the turmoil in our economy without taking a good, hard look at how it impacts us personally and professionally. I’ll spare you my version of ‘have you looked at your 401k statements lately?’ (I haven’t.) but I will say that professionally, it’s been a wild ride over the past 60 days. There are many dimensions to this, but for today, I’ll focus on how it’s impacting the way we look at HR technology strategy – from the perspective of the customers we talk to every day. Last week, I was running around the country for various purposes, and had the opportunity to meet with two customers and a business partner. As you would expect, the question I asked everyone was the same – ‘How is the economy impacting your business and more importantly, your HR technology plans?’ The answer from the two customers? Not much. In fact, they recognize that their talent management strategies are immature enough that they believe that they have no choice but to make a bold move soon. Lucky for them (and for us), their initiatives are funded. That certainly won’t be the case for many other companies. From the business partner? A blind focus on rethinking how their products and services need to adapt to the changing economic landscape.
But funded or otherwise, it’s important to recognize that in this climate (probably more so than in the boom times we’ve enjoyed for several years) every initiative is going to have to demonstrate a higher standard of value. And that threshold will be even higher for HR as it competes with initiatives from the more mission-critical sides of the business. So as I think about these elements (and will dedicate a few blog posts to further developing them), here are the major trends I’m mulling over:
- Can projects that aren’t self-funding in some reasonable period of time have any chance of getting approved?
- While cost reduction will be a strong driver for projects in the near-term, everyone knows that managing talent is a long-term initiative – how do HR executives manage that balancing act?
- The name of the game is about demonstrating INSIGHT into the workforce – that’s not just about getting a talent profile developed about people – it’s about showing direct correlations between information about people and the measures of interest to the organization.
- Organizations have to look at how they are positioned on the talent management maturity curve and make sure that the investments they are making are aligned with the objectives they seek.
I firmly believe that near-term talent management technology initiatives that are not aligned with an integrated TM data management strategy are doomed to mediocrity. You might solve some operational problems, but getting the CFO’s attention because talent strategies are demonstrating correlation to operational KPIs (in my view, the holy grail) will be elusive.
And that has never been more important than in this ‘new’ economy, which we don’t yet truly understand.
