Integrated Talent Management - Expensive Paperweights?

Have you heard….? Integrated or Unified (depending on the marketing materials) Talent Management is all the rage. Combined with “big data”, “machine learning” and “insert other witty catchphrase of the moment” these systems will save the business and make HR executives the undisputed hero of any organization!!! Well…. That’s the hype that seems to be running around HR technology events these days.

Now, before my sarcastic wit gets the best of me, understand that I am a huge fanboy of these systems. But let’s be clear, and this is really the point of my piece… these are really great, expensive and DUMB  software systems. It’s worth repeating, the systems are really awesome PAPERWEIGHTS and as standalone systems, will not solve your business problems. Still with me?

The story of talent software really begins in 2009-10 with the consolidation and cannibalization of the traditional standalone products. Without boring you with a history of how talent systems came to be, the short story is Cornerstone OnDemand had an organically built connected platform and the other players in the field felt the need to compete. So we saw Taleo buying Learn.com and Oracle buying them both. SAP buying SuccessFactors which bought Plateau. Sumtotal buying click2learn, Pathlore and geoLearning… the list goes on and on.

Actually the technology isn’t new. It’s been consolidated, repackaged, repurposed and cannibalized with slick marketing into what we now refer to as Talent Management Software. The product set is now comprised of ATS (Applicant Tracking), Comp (Compensation), Performance Management, Learning Management, Succession Management and in some cases Social Learning. I do not include HRIS systems although we’re now seeing a move by some of these vendors to include an HRIS-lite in their suite for those organizations that do not need the heavy, robust and expensive HRIS systems like SAP, Oracle and Workday.

But these systems do not work without YOUR business strategy and processes driving the implementation, configuration and use. They are (for the most part) cloud-based solutions and therefore are highly configurable but NOT customizable. They can do pretty much 80-90% of what you like….depending on these 2 critical factors: you KNOW what you want and you have the DATA to drive those processes.

I’ve worked with some clients who are really disappointed when they go to configure the system and only then learn that they need to have a “Succession Process” in order for the system to work. Or they want the system to automate performance review workflows to a HR Business Partner but don’t have any HRIS data that aligns the HR person to the employee or manager. Or worse, when they can’t understand how the system doesn’t know who needs what learning, but yet they haven’t fed any training requirements, by role, into the system. You can’t get upset at the product when you haven’t told it HOW you want it work… that’s both a DATA issue as well as a Business Process issue.

The moral of the story is yes, integrated or unified talent management makes sense. But only if you have the data, process and overall strategy that governs how you configure and use the system. So be very careful when the Sales Person proclaims that of course their system can do this or that – of course it can. But only IF you have the data that supports that intention and only IF you're willing to adjust your business processes to leverage the efficiencies of the system.

My next article will address the misalignment between how HR is structured, and how to best use these talent systems. The tail is wagging the dog and in a lot of cases, that dog just won’t hunt!