Perceptive HR Technology

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.

Last week was a flurry of customer meetings — and measurement in succession management seemed to be on the minds of more than one HR executive.  There’s are real desire to more effectively measure individuals with high potential (HI-POs, as the organizational development folks call them), but a plethora of challenges in doing it.

I’ve written about the issues related to capturing and maintaining data (here), but it’s more than that.  While organizations seem to be able to ‘manually’ identify hi-pos, the ongoing activities that need to be done to keep track of them consistently falls through the cracks.

The Institute for Corporate Productivity did a survey  tracking high-potential employees and the results didn’t disappoint:

• 69% of the responding organizations had a tracking process in place;
• 70% said that development planning was part of the process;
• but only 47% said that they are tracking the effectiveness of their assessment activities

Organizations have multiple challenges with measuring hi-pos — they don’t have clear success profiles for their jobs (and thus a way to measure great performance), measures of potential are often subjective and oriented in point-in-time assessments (rather than on a recurring basis), and almost no one can easily (meaning quickly and at low cost) correlate behavioral characteristics of hi-pos to business outcomes.

The result:  some high level data about hi-pos, in a spreadsheet that gets updated occasionally is as good as it gets for most companies.  It’s going to take a long-term commitment to integrated talent management combining good measurement with reliable data collection (and some decent technology to keep track of it all) to gain a differentiated advantage in managing top talent.

Jack Welch, the long-time (former) CEO of General Electric has always been an evangelist for the importance of HR in leading businesses.  He writes a column in Business Week where he answers reader questions, and this week’s post was a great one.  The reader asked what to do when a top performer gets a great offer from a competitor.  I loved his answer.  Paraphrased, he said two things:

1. If you’re taking care of your best people at all times from all the right dimensions, it doesn’t matter.  When they decide to go, let them — there probably isn’t anything else you can do to keep them.
2. Anticipate the possibility that just such an event will happen and have a strong succession plan in place so that you could replace a departing star with someone ready to do the work in eight hours.  Yes, eight hours!

This is a provocative idea, and for most organizations you could only manage it on behalf of a handful of people.  But from the HR executives I talk to, more progressive organizations see a need to manage at this level (ok, maybe not the 8 hour SLA!) for dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people.  It isn’t going to happen without technology.

To effectively do this, organizations will need tools that support robust measurement of what people did (performance management) as well as measures of their readiness and potential for target jobs (a key element of succession management).  This requires an integrated database of employee data, performance results and data about future plans.  Plus the analytics to distinguish between people and make fast (for Jack, very fast) decisions when critical positions become vacant.

Hmmmm…maybe a software company should solve that problem for HR leaders around the world!  Oh wait, that’s us!~

I read with some interest Gerry Crispin’s post this week about succession planning.  Some have suggested that succession planning is a futile exercise — the collection and analysis of data is complex and time consuming.  But more importantly, it’s obsolete a month later, because it’s all based on a point-in-time.  Plus, information is stored in a remote silo called an Excel spreadsheet (ok, the execs only saw the PowerPoint presentation).

The real challenge is in building an organizational process that exists on its own, supported by a data repository that lives and breathes.  That means a consistent effort towards collecting the data (at a minimum an annual assessment that speaks to potential and readiness) and a focus on identifying target jobs for individuals followed tracking each individual’s progress towards that next assignment.

Finally, it fails without the kind of technology that captures the data and effectively allows employees and managers to collaborate with flexibility and ease.  Just wait — a couple of companies are going to figure that out, and we’ll be hearing about it on the cover of Business Week.  If we’re doing our job right, that company will be a Lawson customer!