Digital CIOs’ Agenda IX: IT Talent Management Innovation

Measuring knowledge worker’s performance is challenging because there are many variables to leverage.

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People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. “Hiring the right person to the right position at the right time,” is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right? Traditional Performance Management focusing on measuring what an employee does (mainly being told to do) in a quantitative way is not sufficient to identify high performance or high potential, should we see through talent from different angles? And from IT workforce management perspective, is IT skill gap fact or fiction, how to fill it, and how to innovate IT talent management?

IT Talent Management Innovation

• Is IT skills Gap Fact or Fiction? Part I, Part II: Close IT Skill Gaps Part III: Filling IT Skill Gaps:  There’s always a debate regarding IT talent supply and demand, does IT skills gap really exist? Or is it due to any management issues such as misunderstanding or miscommunication upon talent value chain? What is the root cause and how to solve the problem? According to industry surveys, IT skills gap is a significant challenge facing IT leaders today, what are exactly the skills gaps and what are the resulting symptoms? For example, business have job openings, but cannot find people with the right skill set; or the talent people they current have do not have the right competencies to adapt to the changes; or their business partners do not understand IT. Sometimes, the gaps people usually pick are not root causes, they are symptoms of specific best practices not being used. So what are the organizational best practices/ways that have been deployed to close the gap?

• CIO’s Talent Strategy: Are People the Weakest Link in IT? The speed of business is accelerated; the talent demand for IT department is also never ending. However, the crux of the problems is that IT tends to employ the wrong people, and HR often plays 'buzzword bingo' because they don’t really understand what they have been tasked to the source. So, are people the weakest link in IT, and to what extent is your IT function let down by your talent supply chain? If so, why and where?

• How to Define IT Talent Competency? Measuring knowledge worker’s performance is perhaps more tougher than measuring IT performance, because there’re many variables and intangible factors to leverage, traditional competency model more focuses on quantified result, with ignorance of qualified or innovative effort; or only measure short-term productivity, without enough consideration of long term skill set matching, and most of performance management systems today rewards mediocrity rather than encourage excellence. So how to define IT talent competency, how to move into people 2.0 –to unify talent’s heart, mind, and hands, and build up long term talent solution?

• Data-Driven Talent Management: Information is the lifeblood of digital business, and makes an impact upon all different aspects of business, especially in talent management space, as people are the most invaluable asset in business, rather than following traditional subjective HR model, forward-looking organizations should experiment, develop and mature data-driven talent management for leaping through digital transformation.

• Performance vs. Potential - Which One is More Crucial? Performance is how someone has performed in the past plus the present in various related contexts/ jobs. The potential is how one might perform in a different context or within the same context as a result of growth, maturity, skill development, or capability shaping etc. Performance keeps the business running; and potential moves the business to the next level; so performance vs. potential, how shall you assess them objectively; are organizations really buying-in to talent development? In this day and age of instant up-to-the-minute information of stock performance and earnings reports that are due on a quarterly basis, what are the real odds of companies that actually put in the time to develop their human capital so employees would achieve their full potential, and ultimately organizations can grow into a Digital Master?

• How to Measure ROI on Talent Management? People are the most critical asset in organizations today, business is also moving from treating talent as a human resource to thinking talent as human capital, not just the cost, but the investment for the future, and from extended research, there are clear linkages between strategic talent practices and improved corporate performance. However, what’re the guidelines to measure ROI on talent management effectively?

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