In times of abundant resources and balanced competition, flash and dash often wins the day because most choices have good outcomes to the premium for picking style is not heavy. In times of stress and pointed competition, versatility and hardiness win because the premium for style is unaffordable.

In our biz, style means sexy features, high-concept, and sometimes high finance. Talent Management often is all three of those. But our niche has some conditions all its own; HR’s history as a cost-center, as a reactive agency, and a ghetto for women executives. The search world has its sub-conditions as a buffer to prevent open poaching and transparency as to who is getting what, which would be a negative condition for businesses in general.

HR has never led technologically and it remains underserved by just about every corporate IT department I have encountered (some selection bias there- they find us because they have little support otherwise).

The interesting part to me is what if the proposition holds: that in a deep, deep recession, effective talent management is among the key competitive pivots?

It means that as the reality takes hold, more corporate IT resources would be turned toward HR, including the much more highly evolved analytics capabilities normally associated with stuff like production and material handling, financial modeling, call-center automation, and marketing. As to what gets measured, that’s a question for the mindset of individual managers. As to how HR data is treated, it should be a whole new ballgame.

I think the natural master record for a corporate employee would be the ERP/HRIS system, but only a relative few users need to be involved with master records. All talent related data should be connected and modeled in a data warehouse maintained by the corporation or third-party vendor. The warehouse should be the source of the views and workflows for end-users associated with the talent function. Some of those views and workflows will be actually supported with outside tools- widgets for job- posting, or background checking, or phone-calling or dataset building for salary info, job descriptions and competency models, tax information, etc.

The future for vendors in our space is probably not building huge systems pre-loaded and connected with a specific array of services, but rather as subject specialists able to seamlessly interact with both the warehouse and end-users.

Vendors are showing stresses. Price dropping is rampant. It’s a risky time to select a vendor, especially those dropping all upfront costs and promising long term costs remaining suppressed- you don’t want to find yourself working with a slowly drowning vendor, unless they can hold their breath for a very long time!

It’s high time for disruption, John.

Much of what passes for truth in the HR-Recruiting space is really a stew of conjecture and convetional wisdom. Much of it was more appropriate a generation ago.

I’m anxious to see the emerging generations of analytic based insight and decision support tools.

One of the big questions is how you dig generalized principles from the sea of data. How do you bootstrap a system like that into place? In order to get it right, you have to be willing to make some pretty big mistakes.

The data and insight is flowing. I’m seeing tons (one or two a week) of new players who have data-centric models. The notion that software isn’t complete unless it comes populated with the right usable information is starting to take root.

My sense is that the industry is poised for real disruption. What do you think?

It remains quite unproven that Talent Management as an industry will outperform data warehousing and analytics as up and coming corporate competencies to make sense of the 200+ databases.

The deep flaw (it seems to me) with the TM approach is that no matter how comprehensive an offering, there still will be outlying data sources and tools that HR will end up wanting to use or actually using, which means there will remain the need/overhead/effort to apply analytics to the case anyway….

We are at a technical moment where the notion of using many data sources to derive the right views and actions for each end-user is becoming an everyday possibility. Should be interesting