ORLANDO — Will the real integrated talent management stand up! In the last several years, we’ve seen solution providers and buyers alike spin their wheels trying to obtain the greatest impact from solutions that were put forward as the answer to our integrated talent management needs. The options for most integrated talent management buyers ranged from:
- Purchasing all in one suites with limited capabilities
- Purchasing kludged together systems that were superficially connected when solution providers merged multiple products.
- Simply choosing to stay with best of breed and make their own connections.
Today our world is changing. Integrated talent management is a real possibility. We now have both a better understanding of the needs and new technology that is making it easier than ever to achieve. Social technologies, advanced APIs, and cloud-based delivery are just some of the concepts behind this change. So the unknown element falls back to the providers: Where is the strongest integrated talent management coming from? LMS providers? Performance providers? Enterprise systems? How about an HCM provider?
The biggest miss for most organizations in the previous chaos was the connection between their workforce management, payroll, or HCM systems and their recruiting, succession, development, and planning processes.
At its annual customer forum this week, Ceridian essentially threw its hat into the integrated talent management ring, and from a strong position. Not content competing with ADP, Ultimate Software and others for payroll and tax customers, Ceridian is rolling out more strategic, less transactional modules over the next couple of years, including succession planning, compensation and rewards, and performance management.
The strength of Ceridian’s position is that an HCM, payroll, and workforce management system already has more total and frequent contact with employees than a performance management platform or an LMS. When organizations look at their needs beyond payroll and scheduling, recruiting, compensation and rewards, and performance management are often next on the list for stabilizing a high performing workforce.
The interesting wrinkle in all of this is the existence of Dayforce Touch. While vendors of all stripes are pushing mobile delivery, Ceridian has gone so far as to deliver an actual device. Launched a little over a year ago, the Dayforce Touch is a tablet-like device used for capturing time and attendance data – a punch-clock for the era of apps, if you will. It’s cool enough that the device can accept card swipes, near-field communication (NFC), bar code scans, radio frequency identification (RFID), fingerprints and soon facial recognition; but it is essentially an Android-based tablet. So in addition to clocking in and out, employees could potentially use the device to run apps from the company’s LMS, or perform app-based performance management tasks.
The ability to physically integrate a series of talent management processes on a proprietary but open platform device is potentially a game-changer, especially for organizations struggling with BYOD, disparate workforces, or a lack of mobile-ready workers.
Is your organization diving into integrated talent management? Are you looking to connect the dots for both employees and your business leaders? Time and technology are on your side then – the power of really integrating your HR, Talent, and Business data in a single environment may be just down the road.
