There is a lot of buz around the subject of 'Talent Management', with any number of seminars, workshops and white papers available. As ever, the software world has latched onto this potentially huge market place and solutions are available from many vendors.
What I don't understand though, is that this new breed of system seems to be being implemented independently from an organisations HR system. This leads to an organisation having two (or more) silos of employee related information that may or may not speak to each other. Surely the business world knows that this is a bad idea so why is it happening?
The problem seems to lie somewhere between a lack of clarity as to what a talent management system (TMS) should look like and a lack of flexibility in many HR systems. Gartner have identified that many organisations implementing TMS, are doing so as a toe in the water effort to replace spreadsheets or Word Docs ('Unlocking the Strategic Value From Talent Management Application Investments' - Dec 2007). It is also well known in the HR world that traditional HR systems are cumbersome (aka expensive) to adapt so are not being tailored to handle TM.
Organisations are spending vast amounts of money joining up business systems, removing silos and sharing information. Lets hope we don't have to go through the whole process again combining HR data. HR and talent management systems must not be separated - information about the employee should be held in one place.
An organisation adopting talent management strategies is making an important investment but lets not forget that the ideas are not completely new - they draw on lessons from the past. In that same spirit, lets not forget the great IT lesson of the 90s not to create data silos.
What I don't understand though, is that this new breed of system seems to be being implemented independently from an organisations HR system. This leads to an organisation having two (or more) silos of employee related information that may or may not speak to each other. Surely the business world knows that this is a bad idea so why is it happening?
The problem seems to lie somewhere between a lack of clarity as to what a talent management system (TMS) should look like and a lack of flexibility in many HR systems. Gartner have identified that many organisations implementing TMS, are doing so as a toe in the water effort to replace spreadsheets or Word Docs ('Unlocking the Strategic Value From Talent Management Application Investments' - Dec 2007). It is also well known in the HR world that traditional HR systems are cumbersome (aka expensive) to adapt so are not being tailored to handle TM.
Organisations are spending vast amounts of money joining up business systems, removing silos and sharing information. Lets hope we don't have to go through the whole process again combining HR data. HR and talent management systems must not be separated - information about the employee should be held in one place.
An organisation adopting talent management strategies is making an important investment but lets not forget that the ideas are not completely new - they draw on lessons from the past. In that same spirit, lets not forget the great IT lesson of the 90s not to create data silos.
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