What do you mean when you say integrated?

 Those who have been reading for awhile know I’ve been pondering integrated talent solutions 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 today. 

In general, I think we all find ourselves a bit concerned that we might be attempting to solve the wrong problems.  This is not to say that we are solving bad problems, or even that we are solving problems badly but the question is are we solving the most important problems?

I’m personally beginning to come to some ideas on the topic, brace yourselves as they are pretty raw, but I am starting to believe that there are two distinct things that we need to be thinking about and both fall under the common theme of please make it easier.

The first thing is strategic view of people.  NOT looking at HR metrics and trying to make them business.  Looking at business metrics and understanding how people impact them.  This gets to the idea of alignment.  Goal alignment is one tool to attempt to help on the execution side.  The problem is that people are not really clear what they should be using to define their goals.  Giving greater business insight is critical for applications to be giving real strategic value. 

The second thing is addressing the leadership gap.    Helping develop managers who can successfully execute the line-level coaching.  I believe that any Talent strategy needs a plan to execute a solid ground game.  You cannot do that without a focused effort to improve manaegment skill.

So what does this all have to do with integration?  In my mind it has everything and nothing to do with it.  Integration is a tactic, an important tactic but still a tactic.  What we [application vendors] need to focus on is making it easier.  Easier to apply what we know about people, to the problems of the business and easier for line managers to execute the strategic goals of the company.  To make this easier we need integration.  Not just system integration but process integration. 

To get this right we need to know more and we need to innovate more.  We cannot continue to do the same things and expect different results.  We need to do better.  We need to make it easier.  We need to question our assumptions and push for more.

When asked why we blog here at TalentedApps you will find that it is exactly for this reason.  We want to keep a conversation going to continue to learn, to share, to grow and to improve.  Thanks to everyone that is helping us on that journey, a journey to help us all get the promise of technology, to make it easy.