Talent Management is a Journey - Not a Destination

Why Should we be Concerned about Talent Management

Consider your annual IT budget. At least one-third is people cost. More of our budget is allocated to people than any other single item - hardware, software, security, governance ...! But, do organisations really apply the same rigour to the issues of acquiring and managing talent as is applied to the aquisition and management of hardware and software? If not .... Why NOT?
Consider also the impact of "talent" on the organisation. This is the "Information Age" - the "Source of Revenue / Output" for virtually all IT organisations today is it's talent. The "richness" of the talent of the organisation - creativity, productivity, integrity, knowledge, ability, attitude, motivation - are fundamental to organisational success today.
Yet, with all of this, so little real strategic thought is given to the issue of Talent or Human Capital Management.

So What is Talent Management?

There are a number of definitions of Talent Management - also referred to as Human Capital Management. Our favourite definition is:

"Having the right number of the right talent (competencies) in the right place at the right time."

Easy to say, but what does it all mean? It means that we need to look more closely at both the Human Capital Process flow AND the Talent Life Cycle within the organisation and the processes that link these, and align them all more closely for the benefit of both the organisation and its people.
We need to measure and evaluate, tweak and make changes and measure again - all the time, on a continual basis, all the time focussing on delivery of organisational goals and objectives.
Since the first Gallup survey in the 1990's, a number of further surveys have confirmed that the better an organisation manages it's talent, the better the organisation performs.
But this is a Journey - NOT a Destination! A journey of discovery - of successes and failures, of right things to do and wrong things to do, of doing things right and doing things wrong. And this journey needs to be walked carefully, but deliberately.
And Talent Management is not the domain of just HR. It is the domain of Senior Executives and Line Management, assisted and facilitated by the HR department. Good Talent Management is about Good Leadership - they go hand in hand!

How TalentAlign can be of Assistance

Because we have indepth understanding of both the IT environment and HR issues relevant to IT people, we are in a unique position to be able to provide tools, processes, information and consulting services to IT organisations.
We focus on "strategic issues", rather than "operational" issues, using the information available from operational systems to provide strategic information for better management decision-making.
The image below shows the full spectrum leading to optimised management of the organisation's "talent" showing the position within the overall Human Capital Process flow. Each "section" has processes and information of its own, and these are addressed in the different parts of this website.

It is neither possible nor feasible to contemplate implementing this all at the same time. Critical to the success of implementation is:

• Identifying the critical areas to start the process,
• Taking a phased approach to the implementation within the critical area,
• Creating check-points along the way to assess impact, and
• Conducting a review on completion that provides input to implementation in other business areas and/or other Talent Management areas.

Fundamental to the success is having a good foundation - good organisational structure, good job descriptions, and a good competency framework.

TalentAlign.com concentrates on providing information, tools, advice and consulting to ensure that, on completion of one area of Talent Management, the whole system is poised to move on without having to rework areas already completed. We save you significant time and money in the overall implementation.

So, whether you are an IT Executive, a Line Manager, an HR practitioner, or an IT practitioner, TalentAlign.com will provide information helpful to you.

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