By Kevin Oakes

You may have missed this when it happened - that's okay, I'm sure most people reading this did. There's now a human capital software company called "Lumesse." I have no idea how to pronounce it (and I searched hard on their website), but I think it rhymes with "new mess." The point is, it's not a new company. Lumesse, formerly known as StepStone Solutions, said in their press release that "...the new brand is the first step in making Lumesse an increasingly high-profile, global player in the fast-growth talent management sector."

I can't wait to hear what the second step will be.

This one may have also slipped by you last month: "PeopleFluent" emerged on the talent management software scene. This company isn't new either; it was formerly called PeopleClickAuthoria (if you're thinking that they must have been going for the world record for most syllables in a single company name, you're not alone). PeopleFluent's message is that the new brand "sets out to establish a new identity that better reflects the customer-inspired vision it conceived and began to build more than a year ago." I'd have to agree. But then again I think I'd have agreed that "Charlie" would have been a better identity, too.

All of this renaming, of course, is in the name of being the biggest name in the game of the most overused HR category name: Integrated Talent Management.

Any way you name it, most practitioners find this confusing. And I'm not just talking about vendor name changes; I mean the whole category of Integrated Talent Management.

While so many companies know that talent is critical to competitiveness, managing it as a comprehensive strategy is still rare. It's not like this idea is new - remember the "war for talent" concept that was introduced nearly 15 years ago? - but it's seemingly taking FOREVER for companies to integrate the various silos that typically exist in HR departments around the world.

Surprisingly, with all of this renaming going on, in many companies the name "talent management" is often misused, or at least misunderstood. Several think of it as just another term for succession planning and executive development. While almost every research study i4cp has done on this subject clearly shows that truly integrated talent management is linked to high-performance organizations, and functions such as performance management are most often integrated with learning and development, it's frustrating that we don't have lots of examples of companies doing this in the market.

So what do you do when a subject frustrates you? Put a book together about it, of course. With long-time friend and co-editor Pat Galagan, I recently finished The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management, a book designed to provide clarity to a muddy subject. And while success stories aren't abundant, we were fortunate to find several, and have top executives from those companies lend their expertise and their stories to this book.

These organizations are clearly using integrated talent management to improve upon their strengths. For example, at 3M - where innovation is the lifeblood of the organization - there's a strong focus on engaging people and encouraging them to stretch in the context of holistic people management. At Edwards Lifesciences, where CEO Michael Mussallem drives a culture of execution and accountability, SVP of HR Rob Reindl showcases how talent management focuses strongly on succession planning to put at least two candidates in line for every key job. And at GE, the mecca of leadership development in our time, the emphasis on "judgment capacity" is arrived at through industry-leading practices such as leaders teaching leaders and action learning as part of a comprehensive talent system. From Hertz's focus on rewarding knowledge transfer, to Cisco's linkage of performance plans to the CEO's vision, and Agilent's embrace of evidence-based HR, we can see the variety and complexity of talent management practices in today's corporations.

But Pat and I didn't stop at just a few good corporate examples. We also picked the brains of several industry gurus, such as Tom Rath, Peter Cappelli, Dave Ulrich, Marshall Goldsmith, Noel Tichy, Bev Kaye, John Sullivan, Jon Ingham and Ed Lawler. Each of these luminaries wrote chapters, sharing their own views, which were developed over years of working with many organizations. To a person, they describe truly integrated talent management as a critical future component of high-performing organizations. As Dave Ulrich succinctly points out, "Talent differentiates, drives productivity, determines customer service, and increases intangible shareholder value. Talent matters. Talent is too important to be left to uncoordinated events."

Hopefully the book sheds some light on coordination of disparate HR silos, which is the first thing companies should do before even thinking about technology vendors. While I believe technology ultimately plays a big part in successful integration in order for critical data to be shared across functions, if you aren't organized before putting a system in place you will simply have expensive non-coordination. Even among the companies that have achieved a good level of integration, there are many examples of over-promising and under-delivering from well known suppliers.

The bottom line? Few companies are truly there when it comes to integrating talent management. Some are close, but most have yet to realize the true potential of a fully integrated TM system. Those that have are typically higher-performing organizations overall. True integrated talent management is a comprehensive approach that leads to and sustains higher organizational performance and workforce productivity.
No matter what you name it.

Kevin is the CEO and founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp). Kevin has been a leader in the human capital field for the last two decades, and was previously the founder and president of SumTotal Systems. Kevin is currently on the board of directors for KnowledgeAdvisors, a human capital analytics firm, and serves on the advisory board for Intrepid, a Seattle-based provider of outsourced workplace productivity solutions, and Longworth Ventures, a Boston-area venture capital firm. Kevin is a frequent author and international keynote speaker on talent management and using human capital strategically in organizations and recently released a new book, titled The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management, published by ASTD Press.