"Watchoo talking bout, Willis?"
Two or three years ago, I was working with a talented product manger who had a great analogy to explain to customers the value of a move to an integrated talent management system. With my apologies for paraphrasing a bit, it went something like this. Think of the way you commute to work. You get into your car in the morning by yourself. On the way to work you get to decide the route you take, where to stop for coffee, even what station to listen to on the radio. One day, your CEO asks all of your team to start commuting to work together on the bus. Sure, you’ll have to give up some things. You’re no longer in control of the route, the speed of the car, or even the music on the bus. But, the CEO points out, the time you’re not driving you can work on other things, you’ll be saving costs, helping the environment, and…you’ll all arrive where you’re going at the same time.
A few years ago this wasn’t such a bad pitch. There certainly are cost and efficiency benefits of moving toward a single set of talent management products from a single vendor. However, now in 2010 I’ve decided I no longer subscribe to this view of integrated talent management. Here’s why. In that view, the move to a single solution is all about compromising for the overall good. HR has of course been around for a long time, and the individual domains of HR, whether they’re compensation professionals, Leadership Development and O.D, or recruiting, they all have grown up and optimized for the services they deliver. The “all ride the same bus” theory is about compromising that expertise for the greater good. It’s like asking a patient to replace their prescription heart medication with a daily multivitamin – they’re going to be skeptical.
Compromise is the wrong focus. Instead, focus on opportunity. Look for “leverage.” The great thing about an integrated system that automates various talent management systems is that it can connect processes whose manual nature made them too large, too unwieldy, and too inefficient to connect. What I mean by “leverage” is finding out how you can leverage the expertise of people inside your company, but outside your domain, to meet your own goals better.
The “classic” example we’ve been preaching for years is allowing Recruiters to increase their quality of hire in a particular role by leveraging predictive indicators identified and measured by O.D. professionals they’ve never met. Ask yourself what other data or methods might exist inside your four walls that if brought to your own tasks at hand would better inform your decisions. “Ask not, what you have to do to conform to a talent management system, ask what it’s going to do for you!” (yes, I’m totally embarrassed I just wrote that, but I can’t bring myself to edit it out).
This sounds great, I know, but there’s a bit of a gotcha inherent to proposition, it requires the right integrated talent management system. As someone who has been involved with defining and building talent management solutions for five years, I can tell you that not all software is the same. In many ways, it’s harder than ever to find “real” integrated talent management. Virtually all of the vendors out there have almost “one of everything,” but your question should be “how’d they get there?” So in that spirit I offer a new integrated talent management analogy…
A friend of mine lives in a desirable neighborhood in Austin, TX. It’s very central to downtown and close to Town “Lake” (I keep telling these Texans it’s the Colorado River!). The location is very desirable, but there is not much land to expand new construction in this neighborhood that has attracted a lot of affluent people. Consequently, when you drive around this neighborhood you find many houses that have been expanded upon their original plan. There are a bunch of extra additions, added bedrooms, and interestingly placed second stories above that garage.
The point of my analogy is this– There’s a difference between a house that has been added upon, and one that was designed from the start by a single architect. Building additions to a house that is already in place inherently means compromise. Okay, so the paint on the addition is obviously different from the older brick of the house. Not a big deal. Where you really want to look is under the foundation. What piece of the foundation had to be broken through to feed plumbing and electrics through? When you laid the foundation for the addition, which parts of the originally house needed to be shored up or reinforced? Did it get done right?
Okay, okay, the analogy only goes so far. What I hope to convey is that integrated process is where “leverage” and opportunity lie. When you’re searching for leverage in talent management, it’s the process that needs integration, the system software should not need “integration,” the software should have been purpose-built for integrated process from the start.
Very nicely put…
Good one Mike.