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-Dubs

Large Investments in Technology

Perhaps I’m just a nerd, but I’ve been following the developments of the Hadron Collider for a while now.  In terms of physics, there have been many theories abounding, but with the lack of ability to look into the tiniest known particles within an atom and see how they re/act, it’s quite impossible to find insights that either reinforce those theories or otherwise.  The Hadron Collider being built allows scientists to see something like 10-19 of actual size  (if memory serves me right).  Perhaps “seeing” is not quite the right term, but alt least it can record evidence occurring at that tiniest of special levels.

For now, the collider is reported to be $8 billion in cost and took 14 years to build.  Physicists around the world await the next couple of years to see what new insights it brings.  The first measurements will be simply to obtain the accuracy of the collider by remeasuring already known observed events in nature.  Then they move onto more interesting and new things.

Perhaps more on the collider and string theory next time.  I’m continuously annoyed by business executives who want data from HR in the form of real time dashboards and analytics, but are not willing to spend the cash or time that is necessary to build them.  Lets face it, tying together a HRMS solution, bringing in multiple countries on disparate HRMS data sources, then getting all of your talent applications and even financial metrics pumped into a single data warehouse is very difficult.  You have all sorts of timing issues, data scrub issues, and that’s before you even get to standardizing data definitions and creating facts and dimensions.

So HR sits around with nice little observable facts like turnover reports.  Ohh… Ahh…  Don’t I really want to know about turnover in my populations that contribute most to the business’s overall growth or profitability?  And even within that employee segment, how about the highest performers?  And within that, how about breaking it down by competencies?  And the other 100 ways to slice the data that you just can’t see on an Excel spreadsheet.  But you need a OLAP tool to slice and dice to your heart’s content.

Data Warehouse and analytics technologies can be expensive.  Sure, every software vendor says they deliver a reporting and analytics tool, but if it’s not sitting outside the software and allowing the convergence of multiple data sources within a standardized set of definitional parameters, it’s not doing what you or your business leaders need it to do.

Perhaps this post is mis-timed.  HR budgets might be feeling the pinch, but as our talent fortunes rise, we simply can’t move to the next level of insights without these analytics.  At some point, we’re going to have to spend the money and time to develop the warehouse.  I’ve seen thing happen in a year within a couple $M or over 3-4 years and $10M depending on the scale and complexity of the organization.  But the reality of the situation is that we’re putting in great automation technologies tile talent and self service, but still not delivering on the insights.  Don’t be afraid to ask for money – we’ll have to at some point.

Changing Talent Strategies for HR Strategies

So how many people do you have?  What are their competencies?  What is the total aggregated of any particular competency in your entire employee base?  What is the engagement level for each of those employee populations for those competencies?  Do those engagement levels change by generation, location, or line of business?  Do you even care?

Well of course you care, but chances are (like most organizations) the talent strategy means that you try to answer all of these questions for all of your many customers.  Every business thinks they are the most important and wants the top level talent acquisition support.  Each business wants their employees to be the most engaged and to be the best trained.  But the reality is that there are specific places that the business has defined to be the growth engines, or are the profit centers.  It is these parts of the organization that your talent equation should be executing at the highest levels and at the highest priority.  Listen, if the CEO wants to grow the (retail) business in (Texas), as the major part of the profit equation, guess what your main job is?

So we look at growth and profit, but we also have to look at the overall strategy.  It’s not always about getting the best people to fill profit centers.  Sometimes the growth is about a specific avenue for growth.  If the strategy is to grow by M&A, HR has a much different role in evaluating acquisition targets and their talent profile they will bring to the combined organization.  If instead, your organization strategy is innovation or scientific discovery, how you source and create a talent infrastructure for your innovators to collaborate, share knowledge, and just not be distracted from that will be quite different from the M&A strategy.  And of course there is the customer service strategy, or retail growth and sales, etc.  Each of these requires a different focus when it comes to talent management, but often I simply see the same thing from company to company: Talent means catering to all people.  It does not.  As in the rest of HR, you need to pick your spots and realize what the broader organization is doing to be most aligned.