Last week, the Financial Times published a special report titled, “Human resources goes technical.” Among the articles was “Talent management: Software highlights stars and slackers.” Here’s a key quote. Note: to read either of these articles in full requires registration and may require payment.
“Business leaders often say that people are their company’s greatest asset. But as the private-sector job market improves, they will need to back up those words with strong “talent management†strategies, or risk seeing that asset slip through their fingers. Talent management is designed to help companies attract and keep valuable employees. An integrated software suite addresses what Claire Schooley, an analyst with Forrester Research, calls the “four pillars†of talent management: recruitment; performance management; learning and development; and compensation management.”
There is great hope here, but before we start planning the party for dramatically improved talent management courtesy of software, we should review some historical precedents. The programs usually aren’t the problem.
Take the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP). The program “is designed to collect and analyze information about homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and other violent crimes involving unidentified human remains” and spot patterns across jurisdictions. It works well and has improved our ability to identify and track serious offenders, but it’s not nearly as effective as it was designed to be.
The problem is with the source data. Multi-page data gathering forms with questions about crime scenes require data to be gathered accurately and completely in a very short time frame because once the crime scene data is gathered, the scene is no longer protected.
The data must then be transferred without error to a form which is sent in a timely fashion to the FBI. That simply doesn’t happen all the time in often-overworked local police departments. The peak effectiveness of the system also demands that every important definition is interpreted in the same way by every person involved in the process. That doesn’t happen either.
The problems with sophisticated talent management programs are likely to be similar. They’re more likely to involve the timeliness, consistency, and quality of source data than they are to involve problems with the programs themselves. It won’t be “garbage in, garbage out” but it is likely to result too often in “inaccuracy in, unfairness out.”
