"To retain skilled talent and attract new recruits, organizations must show clearly that the work these individuals do or will do has value - that it will align with and further the goals of the business. Creating this picture requires cohesive workforce management processes and easy access to information about employees' work and how they are evaluated and rewarded. Our benchmark research on managing performance to motivate talent
confirmed that this is important: More than two-thirds of organizations participating in our research said it is very important to them to have a comprehensive view of performance. However, fragmented systems and processes work against developing one."
"To retain skilled talent and attract new recruits, organizations must show clearly that the work these individuals do or will do has value - that it will align with and further the goals of the business. Creating this picture requires cohesive workforce management processes and easy access to information about employees' work and how they are evaluated and rewarded. Our benchmark research on managing performance to motivate talent
confirmed that this is important: More than two-thirds of organizations participating in our research said it is very important to them to have a comprehensive view of performance. However, fragmented systems and processes work against developing one."
"To retain skilled talent and attract new recruits, organizations must show clearly that the work these individuals do or will do has value - that it will align with and further the goals of the business. Creating this picture requires cohesive workforce management processes and easy access to information about employees' work and how they are evaluated and rewarded. Our benchmark research on managing performance to motivate talent
confirmed that this is important: More than two-thirds of organizations participating in our research said it is very important to them to have a comprehensive view of performance. However, fragmented systems and processes work against developing one."
Copyright Ventana Research 2012 Do Not Redistribute Without Permission
The Business Case for
Unified Talent Management
Identifying Benefits and Justifying Investment
Research Perspective Sponsored by
Aligning Business and IT To Improve Performance Ventana Research 2603 Camino Ramon, Suite 200 San Ramon, CA 94583 info@ventanaresearch.com (925) 242-2579 www.ventanaresearch.com
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More than two-thirds of organizations said it is very important to have a comprehensive view of performance, but fragmented systems and processes work against developing one. Fragmentation in Talent Management To retain skilled talent and attract new recruits, organizations must show clearly that the work these individuals do or will do has value that it will align with and further the goals of the business. Creating this picture requires cohesive workforce management processes and easy access to information about employees work and how they are evaluated and rewarded. Our benchmark research on managing performance to motivate talent confirmed that this is important: More than two-thirds of organizations participating in our research said it is very important to them to have a comprehensive view of performance. However, fragmented systems and processes work against developing one.
Most organizations operate with a disparate array of systems to manage recruiting, compensation, performance assessment, succession planning, learning, workforce analytics, contingent labor management and other aspects of employment. This collection of tools, which often work together only after customization, impedes coherent end-to-end talent management processes. It also has the potential to undermine employee engagement, As employees may be frustrated by difficulty in finding information important to their careers and understanding how their work contributes to business goals.
Organizations operating with heterogeneous systems for aspects of workforce management should assess the benefits of migrating to a common platform that integrates all their talent management applications and ensures that all relevant informa- tion is readily available to every- one who needs it. Doing so also can reduce the costs and effort of managing applications separately and improve the quality and con- sistency of data.
In addition, unifying talent man- agement can make it easier to introduce new tools to boost pro- ductivity and encourage talent. This is particularly important with the advent and increasingly important role of social media. Participants in recent research said that using social media-based methods and tools to share knowledge (cited by 49%) and to collaborate (37%) is important to achieving their workforce goals. A stable platform can enable these tools and provide the information to feed them; it also will support accessing them through Web browsers and mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, which are important to the new generation of workers.
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Keep in mind that in realizing benefits from any new system, users are the key; they must be willing to use it.
The Business Case for a Unified Approach Making a case for investing in a comprehensive approach to talent management should begin with an analysis of the drawbacks of the current situation. These typically include inaccurate data or data conflicts across applications, duplication of effort needed both to use and maintain them, separate costs for each software license, and wasted time and frustration for employees. Then determine the benefits you want to gain by bringing together disparate applications; these will include eliminating issues identified in current systems, integrating them to share the same sources of data, establishing a common, easy-to-use interface for all and enabling interaction among employees and managers. Once these two analyses are in hand it will be possible to evaluate cost benefits.
The analyses also will enable you to specify with precision your technical and user requirements for a unified talent management system. Be sure to validate the ability of the applications to support the range of roles and technical skills needed by your organization, both currently and foreseeably in the future.
To sharpen the evaluation, we recommend that you create metrics that will enable you to measure the success of the anticipated investment. These should include changes in productivity, time savings and quantifiable improvements in employee satisfaction. Our research shows that the top-ranked workforce metric for talent management activities is employee satisfaction and engagement, according to 69 percent of organizations.
Throughout the development of the business case, keep in mind that users are the key to maximizing the benefits projected to be realized from any new system; they must be willing to use it. Therefore include in the product identification and evaluation process representatives of all stakeholders whose buy-in will be necessary for approval and adoption.
Talent Is the Reason for Investment Smart managers at all levels and in all lines of business know that acquiring, engaging and retaining the right talent can reduce the risk of failing to achieve business objectives. Skilled people who are in demand seldom stay where they dont feel appreciated. On the other hand, employees who understand how their jobs support business goals and believe they are being evaluated fairly and compensated appropriately remain satisfied and loyal.
In todays distributed and geographically disparate workforce, communicating and collaborating are essential to engage and retain talent. Having a unified Ventana Research The Business Case for Unified Talent Management
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management environment can make this easier to provide and can save time, improve workforce productivity and contribute to employee satisfaction. With respect to the most tangible aspect of managing human capital, pay, more than three-quarters of organizations in our research on total compensation management said it is important to integrate that aspect with other talent management applications.
Tighter integration of applications and elimination of the time lost in navigating across products from multiple vendors make it easier for employees to feel in control of their work environment to get what they need to complete tasks and understand the relation of their jobs to the companys goals. Unified talent management thus can promote stronger engagement and satisfaction on the part of the people you rely on to improve business potential and deliver business results.
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