Gartner (IT) is the preeminent IT research firm. With 650 analysts covering over 1,000 subspecialties, the firm wields mighty influence over the IT industry. Their value proposition is nicely summarized by a customer (who i quoted on their website):

“Without Gartner, we’d likely find ourselves perpetually overspending on technology and taking more time to complete technology-enabled business initiatives.”

Famous for its magic quadrant and hype cycle view of technology adoption, a positive review from Gartner can make the critical difference for companies entering the market. The company specializes in creating a simple view from the complex barrage of information that overwhelms its customers. One way of thinking about the company is that it creates intelligence out of chaos for its clients.

Sellers need Gartner’s approval. Buyers depend on the firm for everything from contract analysis and acquisition guidance to environmental scans of business intelligence about emerging tech trends. These two complementary realities create a powerful niche for Gartner in the operations of its clients.

Jim Holincheck is the head of the Gartner operation that covers Human Capital Management. As the Managing VP – Applications: ERP – Finance, HCM, and Procurement, Holincheck is singularly powerful in the Enterprise software arena. That he has such dramatic impact in the HR ecosystem is a testament to his incredible capacity to cause things to happen.

Holincheck’s blog lists the following categories of interest in the HCM space:

* Call Center Workforce Management * Compensation Management * Contingent Workforce Management * E-Learning * E-Recruitment * Employee Performance Management * Global Solutions * High Performance Workplace * HR BPO * HRMS * Human Capital Management * IT Workforce Management * Retail Workforce Management * Sales Workforce Management * Service-Oriented Architecture * Software as a Service * Software Market Consolidation * Talent Management Application Suites * Workforce Analytics * Workforce Management

After a career on the partner track at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in the software intelligence group, Holincheck got his feet wet as an analyst at Giga Information Group.

These days, analyst firms point heavily to the data that drives their conclusions. The role is so powerful that there is a constant pulling and shoving between the firms and the marketplace. Gartner has been particularly adept at navigating this dynamic.

In his current role, Holincheck spends an enormous amount of time on the phone with individual or groups of clients. Coupled with writing and public speaking demands, you start to wonder where he ever finds the time to manage his team, let alone think coherently about the future.

We talked for some time about the flood of data that is about to hit the HR operation. We have an enormous store of information about what people know and what they do. Still, the applicability of this data to the workplace remains hard to clearly envision. Jim is very aware of the difference between a pioneer and a practitioner. It’s very easy, he says, yo let your view of the future get too far out in front of the real world.

As he looks towards the future of HR, he believes that practitioners will want:

• Social Media as a Sourcing Mechanism: Finding and connecting with the people you really want to hire
• Data Driven Innovations That Improve the Quality of Hiring Decisions
• Next Generation Performance Management: Moving beyond the automation of 20th century MBO programs to flexible performance leverage that continuously meets dynamic business objectives
• Next Generation Workforce Planning: Dynamic systems that facilitate the development of agile talent pipelines and scenario based acquisition plans

Most importantly, Holincheck sees an emerging end to the idea that people are all one thing. “The same people play different roles. They can be a candidate, an investor, a customer, an employee, a neighbor or a supplier. Often they play multiple roles. The fact that we are starting to have enough data to differentiate these aspects means that there will be ongoing pressure on internal silos to share decision making.”

That’s a clear vision for the future of HR as a fully functioning organizational peer.

Last week, we published the Top 25 Most Influential Online Recruiters list on the HR Examiner. Each of the 25 people profiled are major contributors to the online dialog. They have large followings, generate significant traffic and make a powerful impact in the niches in which they operate.

The list created a small stir with critiques ranging from cronyism to a runaway algorithm. Lists always produce sour-grapes, Monday morning quarterbacking and conversation on the topic. The idea behind the influencer lists is to build an ongoing dialog about who has influence, why they have it, how they got it, what they do with it and whether or not doing whatever it is that they do will be useful in your career.

I am extremely curious about the way that ideas move around the HR Industry. As the recovery slowly takes shape, I think that budgets will get pressed, outsourcing will be on the rise and different people will be doing old HR/Recruiting jobs in new and different ways.

Talent Management can mean anything from ’succession planning’ to ‘the cultivation and harvesting of the human capital investment”. It ranges from an afterthought to the central reason for being in the HR department. Where it is shortchanged, people are treated like a physical supply. Where it is fertilized and matured, it is understood as renewable and worthy of ongoing examination and support.

HR spans a similar gulf. At the street level of maturity (a very large percentage of all firms, maybe 60%), HR is nothing more than the old personnel department, processing forms and polishing procedures. In 30% of firms, SHRM drives the performance standard with committed professionals who want to know how to make a contribution. At 10% of all companies, HR is a competitive weapon; these operations redefine the basic components of the profession as adjunct components of an offensive strategy.

The people who influence Recruiting range across these dimensions. Many of their views on recruiting are contradictory and hard to reconcile. Recruiting ranges from filling a well worn requisition to identifying the next leader of a powerfully innovative new company. Is there any question that generalizations about the discipline will come up short?

But, the web is an exercise in making things measurable. As we move through the experiment in trying to articulate and measure influence, a number of things are getting clear. We find nuances in the data long after it settles out.

Here are some of the questions I’m asking:

• Is influence really different from popularity?
• Do the people we are identifying on the Traackr lists really have influence or are they just the loudest mouths on the block?
• It seems like the people who make their way on to these lists are getting better jobs. Are the lists measuring something that has to do with career momentum?
• We believe that the measurement process will more closely correspond to actual influence over time. What else do we need to know?
• Some of the critics have great ideas. What’s the best way to involve them in the process?
• Is it true that influence will become more and more important as organizations continue to flatten?
• Will the current bits of web architecture last long enough to have institutional style consequences?
• About 60% of the HR leaders profiled in the On The Go Section of the HR Examiner do not have LinkedIn profiles. Is this because they already have all the influence they want?

The idea behind this experiment and the HRExaminer is to take a fresh look at the way that HR and careers within its disciplines actually work. If you have input, ideas or insults, we’re happy to get them.

John Murabito credits his success to the fact that he got big jobs fast, ahead of his capacity. Development was a matter of people showing confidence in him when he was 22. Early identification as a leader coupled with great development programs helped him turn his raw talent into a finished product.

“I was out of the nest really early,” he says, “Leaving home in Chicago to chart my course forced me to become independent. That’s where maturity comes from. I worked in a number of different industries and developed a broad foundation rather than a limited view that comes from working in one company.”

These themes pepper Murabito’s narrative. “Risk builds confidence; Independence is the foundation of maturity; Breadth yields competence; search for risky opportunity; Take personal responsibility.” The simple slogan-like messaging seems essential to his trajectory.

Currently, Murabito is the Executive Vice President, Human Resources and Services at CIGNA. He’s been there for nearly seven years.

Prior to joining CIGNA, Murabito served as Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Corporate Services at Monsanto. His background includes more than 30 years of extensive related experience with the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, Symbion, Inc., and The Trane Company.

This fall, he was named Human Resources Executive of the Year by Human Resources Executive magazine. The article describing his award details the work of a visionary HR Leader. Murabito integrated, streamlined, measured and made accountable the sprawling disconnected HR function he found at CIGNA. He moved, in fact, to be a part of the turnaround

The essential skills of great Human Resources Executive leadership are:

- Communication that Stays on Target and On Message
- Evidence Based Decision Making (driven by Workforce Analytics)
- Effective Outsourcing
- Program Management
- Contracts Administration
- Solid Leadership Development

Murabito excels in each area. Like Rusty Rueff and Brian (Skip) Schipper, Murabito is a graduate of the Pepsi HR Leadership development ‘laboratory’. In it’s time, the Pepsi system produced an enormous number of powerfully influential Human Resources Executives. The keys were:
- Bigger jobs than the leadership candidates merited based on age and experience (trust and confidence) and
- Job Rotation in rapid succession through different functions

The Pepsi approach taught these aspiring leaders how to rapidly adapt, find problems worth solving and feel good about moving on.

Murabito is exercising a kind of influence that only an Human Resources Executive can deliver. As a champion of data driven decisions and analytics, Murabito is one of the people who is actively changing the way HR is executed. To be influential in this sort of operational way requires that you:
- actually do the work and accomplish something and
- find ways to bring visibility to the arena.

At the bottom line, Murabito is a team player. For every compliment I volleyed his way, he returned some form of “you can only do that with a team.”

Next week, as a part of the launch of the HRExaminer, we’re going to release a ranked list of the Top 25 Online Influencers in HR. This list is completely generated by algorithm (think Google). The list ranks the Top 25 voices in HR based on their online footprint.

In the larger Top 100 project, we’ve been looking at the question of whether and how someone is influential in the HR Industry. As we’ve worked through the question of who is influential and who isn’t, some interesting things came to light.

• It’s not really possible to remove all of the subjectivity from a human generated list. The Top 100 methodology requires that each influencer be referenced in by five other people in the interview pool. That winnows down the subjectivity but doesn’t eradicate it.
• People who are influential tend to work in industry jobs (vendors, consultants, trade shows, publications, online communities, associations).
• People who do the real work of HR and Recruiting are generally too busy and focused to have broad industry impact (there are some who can transcend the limitation but they are exceptions)
• People who have great influence online are rarely seen as influential offline.

So, we figured out how to measure the influence of people whose work is online.

The process involves spidering a huge segment of HR related content on the web and then sifting and sorting until it’s clear whose material is most influential.

There are three elements of the ranking which are combined to make a final score.

• Reach: This score (a percentile) is an estimate of the number of people who see the material. It’s a measure of the eyeballs or audience size.
• Resonance: This is a measure of the number of inbound links, mentions, blogroll listings, community participation
• Relevance: This score describes the fit of the persons work with a cloud of keywords

The three scores are combined to make the final ranking.

We are going to do a similar analysis every other month. Here are the categories:

• December: Top 25 Digital Influencers in HR
• February: Top 25 Digital Influencers in Recruiting
• April: Top 25 Digital Influencers in Talent MAnagement
• June: Top 25 Digital Influencers In Learning and OD
• August: Top 25 Digital Influencers in Comp and Benefits
• October: Top 25 Digital Influencers in Third Party Recruiting

HRExaminer is in a partnership with a company that does this sort of analysis for a living. The tool is especially useful for identifying influential members of tightly defined communities (power engineers in Pittsburgh). Once you have the list, you can start to think about building community and communications around the people whose voice is most likely to be heard.

One thing is worth mentioning.

Social media is full of early adopters. The community of early adopters is really distinct from mainstream culture. As the rest of the world gets the hang of the new communications tools, the list will change rapidly. We’re going to update each of the six segments once a year (and maybe a little more often).

The Top 25 Digital HR Influencers list will be released on Thursday the 17th at Noon Eastern.