Over night I received the results from Cedar Crestone’s 2008-2009 HR Technology survey, while I am yet to digest the full report, a quick review of the document and the assocaited press release reveal some interesting facts. Oh, the statistics are mainly North American focused but if history has shown me anything they predict a general trend for Australian organisations.
Some of the interesting points:
- Use of administrative applications are obiovusly mature, however the results are showing an initial movement from in?house to software?as-a?service (SaaS) solutions. Now is this driving vendors or are vendors driving this move, not sure.
- Talent management applications are very important and that these applications are helping organisations deliver higher financial performance.
- The Employee Self Service and Manager Self Service trend is still deliverying value and reducing the size of HR departments and improving transaction cycle times.
- Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is still the arena of early adopters, with the biggest area of usage being recruiting and branding. The survey shows that organisations using these tools had double the sales growth of organisations that did not. This reminds me I really need to push/define my Enterprise 2.0 services more.
- A final theme change management is the one key differentiator towards achieving a successful HR technology project. Which is good news as this is another key services of Inspecht.
Some points emerged in the results that I want to cover further.
those taking an integrated talent management approach strongly outpace organizations with a best of breed approach on operating income growth nearly three times (13.1% vs. 4.8%)!
Now it is important to understand the definition of integrated; “If two or more of the talent management applications are from the same vendor as the underlying HR management system, they were designated as having an “integrated” talent management approach.”
This little nugget seems to go directly against previous research reports that we shoud be moving towards a Core HRIS vendor and a Core Talant Management vendor. Could it be ouch for folks like Taleo who are heavily pushing their Unified Talent Management approach? Or one could say the Cedar’s history as an ERP implementation consulting firm might bias the results? I don’t think so.
Why?
Today’s talent management tools from best of breed vendors tend to focus mainly of recruitment, preformance management and sometimes compensations management. What they miss is learning management, which is key for developing one’s internal talent pool. Could this missing link be the key to why organisations who have a fully integrated environment are returning greater financial results?
Another result showed that organisations with comptency management achieved significant sales growth. Comptencies form the core of being able to manage your employees, aka talent. With separate systems it is very hard to have a consistent comptency framework so most organisations either do it very poorly or not at all.
Some further reading and analysis of the full report is in order.
Michael Specht 
Michael,
Thank you for taking the time read through a bit of the report. I know it is long and summarization is hard. I try very hard to let the data speak in the report and not let other research sway my thinking. But I have three key takeaways from this year:
1. Change management is critical to successful technology deployment (read last page or so of the report)
2. An integrated solution from the transactional system, through service delivery, to talent management applications AND business intelligence functionality yields a lower total cost of ownership and is a best practice just like moving to service centers has been.
3) Succession planning needs to have a BROAD scope beyond just top management and should include middle managers and even all employees. This sends a message that everyone matters in the organization and will lead to employee engagement and ultimately improved financial performance.
Yes…CedarCrestone is primarily an implementation and hosting company of PeopleSoft, Oracle and SOA applications. (624 people to 1 person..me..who gets to be totally unbiased in this work:)).
I would welcome some honest feedback on the report in case we do it again next year.