One more post about my experience at the HR forum two weeks ago………….
Some of you are probably aware that this event has a ‘pay for play’ element to it — suppliers pay to participate, and the delegates attend for free in exchange for a commitment to a certain number of meetings to hear about offerings from the various suppliers. There’s an elaborate (and I would say effective) matching process to get folks with like interests talking to each other. But with the goal to make sure that every supplier gets a certain number of ‘meetings,’ you always have a few with someone you quickly discover couldn’t care less about what you have to offer (or vice versa).
Knowing there would be some of that (and in some cases I could even tell in advance), these delegates became my ‘focus group’ targets — I tested our strategies to see how these folks would react eventhough they probably wouldn’t be our target customer. A particularly insightful meeting was with a large, national retailer with over 100,000 employees who’s identity I will opt not to disclose. The delegate, a senior HR person, was telling me about their talent management technology strategy, and the conversation went something like this (paraphrased for brevity, and might slightly miss on a detail or two):
Supplier (me): How are you addressing your talent management technology needs?
Delegate: We have a enterprise-wide LMS installed that’s having a real impact on delivering training in the stores, we just started an implementation of a recruiting system, and performance management is next.
Supplier: How many vendors are providing that technology?
Delegate: Three.
Supplier: Are you concerned with the issues of technical integration? Do you hope to leverage infrastructure like organizational and supervisor structure across those products?
Delegate: Definitely.
Supplier: How are you going to do it? Is IT engaged in the process?
Delegate: <moment of silence>.. IT is looking at it
And so went the discussion..we also explored how they anticipated leveraging data for decision-making across the full organizational development value chain, and concluded that while those issues had been discussed, these integration elements (see my previous post) are not central to the creation of their technology strategy — at the moment.
I would anticipate that this organization has a real shot at efficient and effective management of their core transactional business processes in talent management. For training, they’re already doing it. But at the end of the day, after all those operational benefits are achieved and they want to really get those systems talking together they are either going to spend a fortune consolidating data into one of those systems (and hope that the one is good enough to manage the data from the others) or they will be building the mother-of-all-data-warehouses. And let’s face it — HR is always number 11 on a priority list of 10, and after all of the money they’ve spent on getting the operational stuff right it will require real clout to get the funding for yet another major HR technology initiative.
Everyone knows about my bias here — that an integrated, ERP-class talent management solution aligned with the system-of-record data about people is the only realistic way for organizations to do breakthrough talent management. It’s about great operational efficiency AND actionable data about people, and the organizations that get both right will be at a significant advantage.
