It has become quite clear in the last several years that human resources (HR) organizations have been advancing their ability to deploy new processes for recruiting, on-boarding, compensation, performance and succession or now is commonly called Talent Management. I have seen no shortage of positive steps of improvement and examples across all industries and sizes of companies and a business priority as I discussed earlier this year. As part of this transformation that HR has been leading is expanding the ability for the workforce to be more actively engaged into utilizing human capital assets more effectively for achieving highest levels of workforce performance. Unfortunately under tight budget constraints by the CFO and CIO, HR in the last three to five years has procured many applications to support these Talent Management processes from many different technology providers in the so many dollars per employee per year subscription model. This method to operational expense software and what is commonly referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS) is part of the larger Cloud Computing advancements which has also become a business priority and establishment in enterprises across the world. This business model and approach to enterprise software is where the applications operate in an off-site and secure facility and made available via the web-browser. This has helped tremendously in speed the time to deployment and access of these applications but now has also exposed the dark side of the investments.

The dark side of this rapid adoption of Talent Management utilizing Cloud Computing has now placed your employee and workforce data across the clouds of application providers with in most cases little direct access to it. This issue started to become more noticeable over the last year as the need to understand the complete view of an employee that I refer to as a Employee’s ‘performance profile’ became difficult to understand the complete performance to the role and competencies of the individual. Unlike in the 90’s where many organizations had centralized most of their data in the HRMS, now it resides in data repositories under these Talent Management applications and silos of spreadsheets. Unfortunately this has done little to help HR, finance and operations ascertain the complete set of key metrics and data required to determine improvements and apply forward looking workforce planning and analytics like that seen by vendors like InfoHRM or IBM Cognos.

How to rectify the workforce information anarchy? Well a data to information strategy to establish workforce information and the profile of which you will need to integrate data into a common data foundation or across applications. In either case you will need to have efficient data integration technology from vendors like Informatica or Boomi and be able to profile, match and clean it with data quality technologies before placing it a common and consistent form using master data management processes. Of all of this could be established in a single integrated project that establishes new data governance processes and integrate into a prebuilt data model and set of metrics like that from DoubleStar or as part of a integrated into a new Talent Management application platform and suite like that from Softscape There are a lot of choices and each path has it’s opportunity for you to eliminate your information anarchy and get back to the business of managing workforce performance instead of being a gopher burrowing across the network looking for your data. Now HR must lead with the help of their CIO and CFO leadership teams the next step to gaining certainty and control of the data about your people and workforce.

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Regards,

Mark Smith - CEO & EVP Research