After a long week of meeting with many clients from Texas to Florida to California, I wanted to take a minute to make a quick post on something that has come up four times this week while working with Knowledge Infusion clients.

Whether you are using your ERP software for Talent Management transactions or you have chosen what I like to call a “best of need” solution to serve these needs, your Core HR solution MUST play a role in what will be deemed a successful Talent Management program deployment.  You may ask, if I choose a “best of need” solution, who cares about the ERP or the Core HR, here is why you must care:

• Your Talent Management solutions will leverage the Core HR database for items such as organizational structure, job codes, and other HR foundational elements.  A large mistake many make is duplicating these items by entering them into the “best of need” solution and creating large data integrity issues.
• Your Core HR database is more than likely a more complete source to generate reports from combining general “people” data with Talent Management data.  Do not continue to try to “bypass” the Core HR and hope to have a central data repository unless you are ready to spend big bucks on a data warehouse.
• Your Core HR solution is the major artery that connects your talent acquisition process to all internal talent management functions within the enterprise.  If you do not send complete data from your talent acquisition tools to your Core HR, you will be left with incomplete data downstream without question and left with the inability to create reports.

Do not get stuck letting a vendor or consultant try to “jam” in a solution without looking holistically at how to combine your Core HR solution with what you are looking to do from a talent management standpoint.

Another infusion of knowledge…