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Managing the Human Supply Chain
It is difficult to find a company that doesn't get poor marks for its performance management, especially for formalizing employee goals and performance reviews. A service company CEO believes that technology is perfectly suited to this purpose: "This stuff is so conducive to huge improvements through good pieces of technology. The disconnect is that HR does not think of using technology for improving the performance management process."
This CEO attributes such technology aversion to a deep reluctance on the part of HR execs to treat talent more like a resource than a material. HR doesn't like to treat people as entities stuffed with skills that require categorization.
But as one supply chain executive put it, "We're going to categorize them. We're going to figure out how to optimize our use of those resources in the same way we optimize use of memory chips, etc."
The natural next step toward world-class IT resource management is bringing sophisticated information management tools to bear. The CIO at an energy company points out that business intelligence tools, for example, "enable better performance tracking," making it easier to identify the best and worst employees and to use that data to make staffing decisions.
The former CIO at an office supply company wonders why organizations tolerate such a disorganized approach to handling their greatest asset. "Organizations have a lot of people. Wouldn't you think they would want to know an awful lot more about them in a systematic, actionable way?"
A New Kind of HR Must Emerge
The foundational principles of the HR profession came into being more than half a century ago, as laid out in The Organization Man by William Whyte. But the world of the 1950s no longer exists: The global economy has ushered in competitive pressures and logistical challenges; the Chinese are now the global economy's most fervent entrepreneurs; and Republicans have generated large budget deficits. Indeed, the world has changed.
It is time for a new, switched-on form of technology-enabled human capital management. Access to talent and application of talent will soon become the competitive high ground. And who will prevail is not a matter of size. Large enterprises are actually at a significant disadvantage in the talent wars to come. Who will prevail also isn't determined by money (i.e., by companies wealthy enough to afford the right talent).
Who prevails will be determined by organizational smartness. Are you smart enough to create an environment in which the next generation of highly skilled, top-performing IT people want to work? What can and should you do to get IT and HR on the same page?
SURVEY METHODOLOGY: We surveyed 151 thought leaders and practitioners on the state of the relationship between IT and human resources departments. The sample comprised large enterprises (51%) and midsized companies (49%). Among respondents, 10% work for companies located in Asia, 10% for companies in Europe, and 80% for firms in North America. Researchers followed up with some respondents by e-mail.
Thornton May is a respected futurist, adviser and educator whose insights on IT strategy have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and numerous computer industry publications. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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