This is the final day (half-day actually) of the KnowledgeAdvisors’ 7th Annual Analytics Symposium. The general sessions as well as breakouts yesterday and today continued to focus on ways companies are collecting data for better decision making. I’m pleased to see the focus of discussion move beyond the Kirkpatrick 4-levels of measurement (as in “Are you measuring levels 3 and 4?”), beyond Phillips’ level 5 ROI (as in “What was the ROI for that program?”), to collecting data to make better informed decisions and making analytics and fact-based decision making a integral element of strategy and competition. So, the questions are: what are your talent initiatives intended to accomplish; why are those outcomes important to business success; what decisions do you want to be able to make about your initiatives and when do you want to make them; therefore, what do you need to know about the initiatives and the circumstances of their implementation, what will your standard of evidence be, which data will you collect and how, and what type of analyses will you perform? Kirkpatrick’s 4-levels and Phillips’ ROI method can be useful frameworks for specific purposes, but alone they do not constitute a purposeful decision strategy.Two more things:

• As noted in my post yesterday, Josh Bersin has created a comprehensive framework for thinking about measurement and decision-making across the entire process of creating, implementing, and evaluating human capital initiatives. Josh’s Training Measurement Book does a fine job of explaining his framework and guidelines for using it.
• All of this discussions about measurement, analysis, and dedcision-making inevitably take you back to the fundamental need to manage talent strategically. That means creating human capital plans aligned in detail with:
  • with your business strategies
  • the processes that enable those strategies
  • the human capabilities needed to execute those processes successfully
  • the drivers of and gaps in those capabilities
    • now
    • in the next 1 to 2 years
    • in the next 3 to 5 years
• Creating those written plans annually, including your measurement objectives and strategies, and reviewing them quarterly enable you to manage forward, quarter by quarter, toward that 1 - 2 year horizon as well as the 3 - 5 year horizon. They enable you to create a portfolio of short-term and long-term, operational and strategic human capital investments that you can then measure and adjust as your future becomes your present and as your internal and external environmental scans enable you to forecast new 1 -2 year and 3 - 5 year horizons.

These are the indispensable perspectives and competencies that Human Resources or Talent Management or Human Capital Management (whichever term your business uses) must have to fulfill its executive leadership role.State Parkway Partners can help you create such a capability in your organization. See the other sections of this website and the service offering presentations for more information.

This week I am attending KnmowledgeAdvisors’ 7th Annual Analytics Symposium. KnowledgeAdvisors is a great company focused both on its own and its clients’ business success and the advancment of human capital management as a business discipline. Wednesday’s opening Keynote was delivered by Cedric Coco from Lowe’s Companies. He posed and answered the question: How do we measure the value of, then optimize our company’s most strategic asset…our employees? Cedric described the Human Capital Business Model he and his team have built, and are continuing to develop. He begins with the view that people are the largest unmanaged asset in a company. “Unmanaged” doesn’t mean there are no managers: it does mean that companies do not have enough specific knowledge of the role people play in the company’s value proposition to effectively manage the recruitment, hiring, onboarding, engagement, development, and assessment of their people. The idea - which will be further developed today and tomorrow by Heather Maitre, Chris Hardy, Tom Davenport, Laurie Bassi, Dave Vance, Jac Fitz-enz, and Nick Bontis - is that people create value and those who invest in people create greater market value than those who don’t. The key, of course, is defining what precisely to invest in. So, Cedric’s team has done a lot of work and have determined: (a) that the factor that correlates very highly with specific business results like revenue, customer satisfaction, and lower costs is “employee engagement”; and (b) that there are very specific factors that constitute “engagement” in their company. They now know that if they invest in A, B, and C they can optimize engagement, and that engagement optimized to a specific measured level will produce a predictable level of revenue, customer satisfaction, and cost. This basic Human Capital Business Model is now the foundation of a very specific HR strategy, a focused creation of a specific employee experience, and an analytics strategy that will keep the company on top of changes in the factors that drive engagement and business results. Interestingly, Cedric and his team have also drilled down into the “employee experience” element in their strategy and, through lifecycle research, have defined what that experience should be like at each phase of the emploment lifecycle and how to measure it: acquisition, onboarding, engagement, and transition (to another role, to another company, or to retirement).It’s terrific to see such a disciplined approach to defining, developing, and rewarding the specific roles people play that drive specific business outcomes. As a bonus, Josh Bersin (Bersin & Associates) concluded the day with a view of trends and issues in the L&D and Talent Management worlds. The sad aspect of Josh’s research is how few companies have set goals for themselves to manage the acquisition, engagement, development, and retention of their most strategic asset…their employees. By the way, Josh published a book last year titled The Training Management Book. Josh has developed a framework for planning, managing, and measuring any intervention designed to improve the performance of people in a business. While it focuses specifically on training, you can immediately see how you can use the framework for other change initiatives. I highly recommend Josh’s book to all HR professionals.

I invite you to participate in what I hope will be an ongoing series of lively conversations about mangaging talent and investing in human capital. There are a myriad of topics related to all of the aspects of acquiring, developing, and retaining the talent your business needs now and in the future, and we would like to address them all as our thinking and your thinking evolves through dialogue, research, and experimentation. So, where to begin?

The bottom line is a good place to start. At the KnowledgeAdvisors’ 6th Annual Analytics Symposium early in March, I particularly enjoyed being exposed to the work of two organizations doing great work in this area. The first was McBassi & Company. Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer http://www.mcbassi.com/ have developed methods for measuring human capital capabilities and then connecting them to a company’s bottom line outcomes - see “Maximizing Your Return on People” (by Bassi and McMurrer) in the March 2007 Harvard Business Review. The second is the Institute for Intellectual Capital Research and its Director, Dr. Nick Bontis http://www.nickbontis.com/main.swf who has developed methods to causally connect human capital investments to specific financial outcomes. You can see his papers and books at http://www.nickbontis.com/Research.htm.

So, the challenge to business leaders is to be more transformational than transactional. That means recognizing that the overarching and constantly repeated question for HR has to be how to make human capital more productive. The place to start always has to be with the human capital performance the business needs today and in the future to execute on its strategy, run its operations, and achieve specific measures of success. The art and science of human capital management is then to work backwards to identify the leverage points that will produce the performance needed. I’m anxious to hear your thoughts and examples!

State Parkway Partners recommends the following companies to enhance services and strategies:

• Q2 Learning provides speed-to-proficiency solutions for high value learning initiatives to corporations using our collaborative learning platform, the xPERT eCampus.
• KnowledgeAdvisors is the global leader in Human Capital Analytics. They help organizations measure, communicate and improve the impact of their learning and development investments.
• LearnShare was founded in 1996 by Fortune 500 companies who were seeking to join together to transform the way their companies research, design, purchase, package and communicate career development and skill enhancement. This visionary group, the Owners, included General Motors, 3M, Motorola, Owens Corning, Deere & Co., O-I, Eaton, Northwest Airlines, Pfizer Inc, Pilkington, UnitedHealth Group, and Chevron. Since that time, the owners have been joined by more than 30 of the largest, most diverse corporations in the world representing more than 2.5 million employees around the globe.
• Bersin & Associates is an organization of senior analysts and consultants with extensive experience in corporate learning, e-learning, performance management, leadership development, talent management, and enterprise systems.  Their WhatWorks® research methodology allows them to identify unique and powerful business solutions which enable learning and HR managers to drive dramatic improvements in their organizations.
• NIIT Cognitive Arts is a leading Global Talent Development Corporation, building skilled manpower pool for global industry requirements. The company which was set up in 1981, to help the nascent IT industry overcome its human resource challenges, has today grown to be amongst world’s leading talent development companies offering learning solutions to Individuals, Enterprises and Institutions across 40 countries.