Photo from the excellent cc stream of pupski.thanks.
I’ve not posted much recently, I’d been meaning to post on HR tech, but several other blogs have done an excellent job of summarising the event(See Brian, Larry,Jim, Bill, Jason, HRmarketer and Zach for starters).
I have been thinking a lot about integration recently. I’m back from HR Tech, and Jim and I are in the middle of the employee performance management magic quadrant process. I’m hearing a whole lot about integrated talent management at the moment. The list of ‘unique’ integrated solutions is now rather long. Someone listening in from another planet would think that word unique means we do the same stuff the other guys are talking about.
HCM vendors of all varieties are talking about how they have integrated the stuff together that they own. My succession talks to my performance, my performance talks to my development, my development talks to my learning and so on. Yes this is all good stuff.
I’ve spent some time this week talking with several multinationals here in Europe. They are also asking lots of questions about integration.
The integration they are worried about is a different one.
They are concerned how to connect their talent management applications to the rest of their applications. They are worried about building parallel universes. Silo 2.0.
HR IT leaders are beginning to realize that they need to learn a whole lot about data governance, data semantics and masterdata management. Chucking a CSV file over the firewall and hoping for the best isn’t really going to cut it. Managing and syncing core HR organisation data is what will keep HR IT awake.
It is good to see vendors getting their own applications talking to each other, but I sense they have been neglecting the real customer challenge. HCM applications should work closely with the rest of the business applications out there.
Vendors that focus and take responsibility for integration beyond applications they build. Now that would be unique.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Sue Massey // Oct 30, 2008 at 3:01 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
2 Thomas Otter // Oct 30, 2008 at 4:08 am
Thanks Sue.
3 Pondering Integration « Vendorprisey // Oct 30, 2008 at 4:30 am
[...] posted on my Gartner blog) [...]
4 Chuck Allen // Oct 30, 2008 at 11:12 am
Thomas,
There is start on specifications for integration of talent management systems at arms-length:
http://www.hrinterop.org/schemas/OAGi-BPI-Platform/org_hr-xml/3_0/Documentation/Guidelines/pt06.php
http://www.hrinterop.org/schemas/OAGi-BPI-Platform/org_hr-xml/3_0/Documentation/Guidelines/pt05.php
http://www.hrinterop.org/schemas/OAGi-BPI-Platform/org_hr-xml/3_0/Documentation/Guidelines/ch11.php
I know you just read Jason Corsello’s related post. If you buy into his analysis, the strongest differentiators among EPM vendors are integration and user experience. If this is true, what are the incentives for vendors to really advance any notion of a common information model to integrate arms-length talent management components? This is particular unlikely if there aren’t any customers in the room in which these standards discussions take place.
I agree with your point about HR IT leaders needing to learn a whole lot about the nitty-gritty of data governance, data semantics and masterdata management. However, those are dark, deep woods that some have strolled into and have never emerged… I’d like to believe the best way is for HR IT leaders not to stroll into the woods alone, but in some cooperative manner. This might lower risks for everyone and also might encourage the right sort of engagement by vendors.
5 Thomas Otter // Oct 31, 2008 at 11:57 am
Chuck,
Thanks for commenting. The intra-HCM integration is important, but I really would like to see things like employee performance management and corporate performance management integrated, finance budgetting and compensation budgeting working seemlessly together, and skills data driving operational systems.
The sooner HR can become less HR centric and more business centric the better. HR tech needs to do the same. I’m not a big fan of silos, and I welcome any efforts to improve integration.
HRIT needs to enter that dark wood, but it has the benefit of following the well trodden path of other functions like finance and supply chain. THey have been doing a lot of work on cross functional integration. HR could do worse than chat to the SRM follks down the corridor.
6 What do you mean when you say integrated? « TalentedApps // Nov 3, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] for some time. I was happy to see the conversation continue when my good friends Jason and Thomas took a hard look at where we are in the industry [...]
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