A study has just been published by Bersin & Associates (The Convergence of Learning and Performance: Has Talent Management Arrived?) that brings up some interesting points, and a few debates, around this market. According to this report, Talent Management brings together learning management and employee performance management processes. Naturally following is the coming together of the applications associated with these processes. As a consultancy primarily focused on enterprise learning, this study positions learning management as the center—or core—of a Talent Management solution.
Human Resources and Training departments have traditionally been separate functions within an organization, so getting them together to select and implement a total “Talent Management” solution would be nothing short of a challenge. As a matter of fact, many organizations have multiple silo-ed training organizations (i.e. sales training, customer training, corporate training, partner training) so they find it difficult to even settle on a single learning platform.
Some customers have even experienced heated debates among training groups to select an integrated, company-wide Learning Management System.
Meanwhile, performance management (and its most basic element, the performance review) is usually driven from Human Resources and pushed to all areas of the organization. Rarely are performance reviews a line-of-business initiative. Same with the other elements of workforce performance management, such as goal management, compensation management and succession planning, which are closely linked to performance reviews. Goals and competencies feed into reviews, and review results feed into compensation and succession, and back into competencies. It makes sense that these processes live together within a single, integrated system.
But do the workforce performance management and learning management systems need to come from a single vendor, or does best-of-breed make more sense? Considering the complexity of learning management systems, and the deep functionality most customers want from their performance managment systems, I’d say the latter. Leave it to the experts in each process area to select the system that best addresses their needs, while ensuring that industry standards are met for integration of the systems. It will be a long time before LMS vendors can offer a workforce performance management solution that meets the robust functionality standards of the workforce performance management vendors, and vice versa.
That being said, learning management won’t necessarily be the center of a total Talent Management solution. As a matter of fact, organizations may need justification for learning investments for their workforce, and a workforce performance management system can provide the business case for one. There is a classic chicken and egg scenario going on here.
Anecdotally speaking, every company I have worked for has had a corporate-wide performance appraisal initiative. On the other hand, no company I have worked for has had a company-wide learning or training initiative (this could just be indicative of the industry in which I work). Automated or not, many, many organizations have some form of a workforce performance management process. For a large proportion of them, it’s a matter of reducing the company’s liability exposure with the workforce. From my perspective, the high growth of performance management initiatives across industries will drive learning initiatives for a lot of companies.
Finally, this report lists some vendors that offer integrated Talent Management solutions, and the SumTotal/SuccessFactors partnership is named. SumTotal is a Leader in Gartner’s 2005 Magic Quadrant for E-Learning Suites. SuccessFactors has received the highest rating (Strong Positive) for two years in Gartner’s Employee Performance Management MarketScope report. Best of breed, anyone?
