One of the many things that I truly LOVE to do in my role as CEO of Knowledge Infusion is to showcase some of the best thinking in the HR and HR technology space and conferences, forums and summits around the world. The LOVE of this has probably come from a friend, Bill Kutik, and his mastery of the "panel facilitation" domain. At the HR Technology Conference 2010 in Chicago in a short 3 weeks, I get the opportunity to moderate the 4th annual Talent Management panel which is made up of Knowledge Infusion customers and I am very excited about taking a bit of a different approach.
To me, the value of conferences and panels is not to hear the "love fest" stories of vendors; but to hear the reality about what goes into success in a specific area of focus. This reality is not always positive and not always "music to the ears" of many; but I truly feel it is the only way we continue to move our profession forward.
The topic around talent management this year deals with how organizations have failed (not met expectations) of their initial deployment of talent management processes and solutions and what they are doing to "turnaround" a failure to a success. The panel pre-discussions have been truly fascinating to me and wanted to share some of the highlights. Hopefully you will be able to make it to the session on Thursday September 30th from 1:45p - 3:00p, but if not; I am sure the Twitter stream will be flowing.
A few nuggets of interest:
- None of the companies on the panel COMPLETELY blame their failure on a technology vendor but more on a lack of an integrated plan and approach to actually reach the outcomes they were looking to achieve
- Many of the panelists note that during an implementation, their vendor looks to get them live quickly without truly understanding the big picture of what the organization wants to do with data in the long-term
- Consolidation into single "talent management suites" or back to the "ERP" talent management function is the only way to truly achieve the success an organization is looking for without tremendous spend in other technologies
- Change Management has been completely underestimated and overlooked in the talent management space and has killed deployments and caused vendors to lose customers
- The world of Software as a Service (SaaS) makes switching costs lower than previous technologies; therefore more movement from vendor to vendor in the market
- The talent management leaders in an organization DO NOT see the integration points between talent management processes and therefore blame the vendor when the solution does not meet their needs
- The only way to be successful in a talent management deployment is to "break" old school processes and redesign processes to meet desired outcomes
We have panelists who have left SaaS vendors, we have panelists who have left ERP vendors only to come back, we have panelists who have tried to use their talent management suite as a Core HR solution and we have panelists who have replaced one SaaS vendor for another.
Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating...
This is what I love about the space. People willing to share their stories and giving a community the opportunity to learn from mistakes and not make them within their domain.
Visit http://www.hrtechnologyconference.com to learn more about the conference (it truly is the best in the world for the HR/talent management space and it is NOT all about IT and technology). I believe you can still use Knowledge Infusion discount code KNOW10 to save registration dollars.
I hope those that attend find the panel of value and for those that cannot, follow hashtag #ki or #hrtechconf on Twitter where I am sure there will be coverage.
Another infusion of knowledge...
