How Have Different Vendors Achieved Integrated Talent Management (ITM)?

If you are in the market for an Integrated Talent Management solution, one of the many items you should consider is how the ITM vendor is expanding their functional footprint – by organic development, or acquisition. I say one of the many items you should consider because when evaluating a Talent Management solution, HRchitect recommends the use of Decision Drivers, which I will discuss in a future blog.

 

Acquisition of one or more niche solutions provided a quick way for many vendors (e.g., Authoria, SilkRoad, SumTotal, Vurv, Plateau, Workstream) to expand their functional footprint and offer more functionality to current and prospective customers. It also provided a marketing advantage for these firms, as they could tout these expanded capabilities to build awareness as a ‘true’ ITM vendor. There is definitely a downside to this approach, however — it has often resulted in a hodge-podge of user interfaces, data models, workflow, and reporting engines residing “under the hood,” with vendors and customers struggling to meet expectations for integration from predominantly non-integrated applications. HRchitect generally expects a minimum of three years before an acquired solution is fully integrated into a vendor’s infrastructure, with interim delivery of “messaging” level data integration (i.e., two applications passing data back and forth), a common user interface, and (finally) a unified data model, fully integrated processes, workflow, and reporting.

 

Other vendors in the market (e.g., Cornerstone OnDemand, iCIMS, Softscape, SuccessFactors) chose to build additional capabilities organically rather than take the acquisition route. While it has often taken longer to bring new capabilities to market, once delivered they are already integrated and have a common user interface and more holistic processes, with one workflow engine, data model, and reporting platform. It should also be noted that organically developed functionality may take several releases to approach parity with market leaders.

 

So, is it better to wait for fully integrated functionality, or implement an acquired but not-yet-fully integrated module? The answer depends on the customer situation, including the criticality of the need and the level of requirements that need to be met versus the priority of process integration across functions. Potential customers should not underestimate how long it will take for the vendor to fully integrate an acquired module into the ITM suite, and plan for additional time after full integration has been theoretically ‘completed’ for bugs and kinks to be completely resolved.

 

 

Solving a piece of the puzzle… 
Matt Lafata, HRchitect