Who knows what around here?

A week or two back over on the PsyBlog a post called 'Why Groups Fail to Share Information Effectively' caught my attention. The post cited a 1985 research study that found that people trying to make decisions in groups spend most of their time telling each other things that everyone in the group already knows.

This of course leads to ineffective decision making, as people tend to withhold information known only to themselves that may hold the key to solving the problem and making the best decision.

One of the remedies that the PsyBlog piece offers is to make members of a group aware of each other's expertise, so they know (broadly speaking) what everyone else knows. In 1985, there were really no technologies available to organizations to support this 'expertise awareness'. 

Today the problem might be too many options that support finding and contacting 'expertise' in an organization. Software tools that support expertise locating and store employee talent profile Flickr- Omnosinformation seem to by multiplying by the week.

Here are just some of the options available

Core HRIS - This seems like a no-brainer, right?  All the necessary 'core' and demographic data for employee profiles should be a part of the HRIS. And job and assignment history, and potentially information on past performance and training might be in the HRIS. But most HRIS lack really detailed and granular information on competencies, projects an employee participated on, and thinks like interests, goals, and other unique and distinguishing attributes. After all, the main function of the HRIS is to make sure the employees are paid properly, administrative tasks like transfers, salary adjustments, and benefit enrollments can be entered efficiently.  The HRIS vendors do have plenty of opportunity in the talent profile area, but most have not focused heavily in this space.  Recently the Oracle HRMS 12.1 release was expected to include a more robust Talent Profile capability and this does give some indication of what is possible in the profile realm from the core HRIS vendors.

Talent Management Systems - employee profiles that are part of integrated talent management systems can give insight as to the expertise of employees by focusing on key elements like competencies, performance history, and training and development taken. Profiles built inside Talent Management systems might lack some 'core' data from the HRIS like educational background, resumes, and job history however. Some good examples can be seen from Halogen Software and SuccessFactors.

Corporate Social Networks - Software for internal corporate social networking from vendors like SelectMinds, Nobscot, and Jive all have the 'profile' as an essential element of the solution set. In most of these applications, the employees themselves create and maintain their own profiles, and the accuracy and reliability can vary from employee to employee.  The key in these types of tools is for the organization to arrive at the optimal blend of 'professional' vs. 'personal' data in the profile. Some research suggests that it is actually very important to allow and even encourage some levels of strictly personal content like hobbies and other outside interests as they can serve to make employees more approachable and provide a means for new members of the organization to make introductions to more seasoned employees.

Collaboration Platforms - Wikis from Socialtext, community platforms from Tomoye, and Neighborhood America make the employee profile accessible, searchable, and valuable for expertise locating. One of the strengths of housing employee profile data here is that skills, interests, and background can also be combined with specific information on projects the employee has worked on, links to work content (blog posts, wiki pages, white papers, etc.) and visibility to the employee's main connections in the network.

External Social Networks - some companies might consider leveraging external network information that employees have posted on LinkedIn or Facebook. The argument being that since such a rich repository of information exists on these networks that the organization could simply exploit what is already there, and work to enhance the corporate presence and engagement with employees there.

Connecting employees in search of information to the right colleagues that are likely to possess the needed answers as efficiently as possible is increasingly important in today's environment.

Lots of choices, and not easy for the organization to come to the best decision as to 'where' expertise and profile information should be maintained and leveraged.

Are you using expertise locators or talent profiles in your organization?  If so, what type of system are you using?

Finding the right talent (that I already have)

How can I find the right employee (one I already have)?

Recently, I heard high ranking information technology leader complaining about the lack of completeness of Flickr - Tambako the Jaguaremployee information (correct office phone number, IM names, etc.) in the corporate LDAP directory.  This leader was relying on the technical system used to provision corporate network computing resources to be a data store for employee 'profile' related information.

Now an employee office phone number probably does belong in an LDAP system, I can't argue with that, but external IM user names?  Surely, the LDAP system is not the best place for these.  And how about elements of the profile that are not related to 'devices' (phones, computers, etc.).  Things like experience, skills, interests, connections, and career plans.  All these, and many other attributes, combine to paint the full picture of the employee talent profile.

It is no secret that companies are under extreme pressure to leverage their internal talent, when faced with enormous marketplace challenges, and for most, little to no ability or funding to seek external talent, either new hires or contractors. 

So let's take an example of a possible situation where an organization might need to rapidly leverage the 'rich' employee profile data it needs to capitalize on an opportunity. A logistics and distribution organization, in an effort to expand to a new line of business and capitalize on a market opportunity, enters into agreements to begin supplying services to a high-end retail chain, it had not previously served. The challenge - identify rapidly a project team with the necessary skills, competencies, experience, and contacts to support sourcing new product, developing new distribution strategies, and with an understanding of the higher end of the market than they usually support.

Employee Profile Data - Sources

Legacy HRIS systems - These are typically decent repositories for basic information about the employee profile that may help our company assemble their project team.  Things like position or assignment history, demonstration of growth in salary grade or level might assist the Project Leader in assembling a team. But key information would certainly not be present in a typical HRIS, thing like career aspirations, competencies, training plans, and experience prior to joining the company. Many of the larger ERP-based systems may have the capability to 'fold-in' this kind of talent profile data, but most implementations of ERP do not extend very deeply into these areas.

Talent Management Systems - all good Talent systems will contain aspects of the key data needed to build the project team: information on past performance, current skills and capabilities, and possibly information on training and development that the employees have taken. These are all key pieces of the puzzle. Recently some larger Talent Management vendors have developed more rich 'profile' capabilities, SuccessFactors being one. Usually missing from these types of systems, especially ones that very rigidly look to automate performance management processes, are indications of employee 'fit' or perhaps desire to be included in this type of project team.  The information gleaned from these systems can tend to the strictly analytical, and not give the Project Leader any 'soft' insight.   And finally, these systems are not in place today in many, many organizations.

Internal Social Networks - In the last couple of years the market for so-called 'Corporate Social Networking' has grown rapidly. The idea is to deploy a platform or solution that provides the employees sort of a 'Facebook' like experience, usually augmented with the knowledge management and creation features of blogs, wikis, rss, and forums.  These systems usually have a profile feature that allows the employee to supply much of the same data they would typically post on popular external social networks. They can also utilize the Twitter concept of 'following' other employees to keep aware of the contributions of content, comments, and other information for the key influencers in their internal network.  These systems provide the Project Leader with a wealth of information relevant to the building of the team, they can review specific work products and content created by employees, they can see feedback left by other employees, and the profile data can typically be mined for keywords or 'tags' that may indicate the right experience or inclination for participating on the new project.  Some vendors to consider in this space are SelectMinds, HiveLive, and Socialcast. This really is an emerging space, and relatively few organizations have deployed these internal networks.

External Social Networks -  Jason Averbook from Knowledge Infusion has stated 'LinkedIn knows more about your employees than you do'. The truth is, many (or most) of your employees are providing vast quantities of personal and professional information on external sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. Key information like employee authored statements of skills and aspirations, former employers and assignments, third-party recommendations of their work, and some insight into their networks both inside and outside the company that they may be able to leverage to make the new project a success. Did any of your employees formerly work for the high-end retailer you need to serve? This information is likely on LinkedIn.

Should your company simply encourage employees to register for these sites, provide their information, while you take advantage of the information and profile data for essentially almost no cost? Of course the downside could be your competitors for the same talent could mine the information as well, but honestly they probably are already doing just that.

That really just scratches the surface of the various options that organizations face when trying to develop a strategy for capturing, analyzing, and making actionable their strategic talent data. Most larger organizations may be utilizing some kind of combination of the above approaches, or may have even built custom systems to help locate talent and deploy talent (the big professional consultancies for one).

Lots of options, lots to think about, a complicated topic.

I would love your thoughts and comments.