For HR professionals, human capital management (HCM) is not a tactic, it is a strategy that enables organizations to cultivate talent to meet the evolving skill requirements of a given business. As such, HCM is not something that is simply ‘done’ with a single decision. The underlying concept behind HCM presupposes a staged, evolutionary approach to building skills maturity within a workforce. To reap the rewards of an effective HCM strategy—improved employee satisfaction, increased productivity and competitive differentiation of a business itself—organizations need a linear model of maturity to deliver a successful HCM initiative.

Beyond the core transactional based systems that automate conventional, time-consuming HR processes such as payroll, employee contact information, and benefits administration, HCM technology challenges HR professionals to move, deploy, and integrate solutions that deliver strategic business advantage.

Just as employee perceptions should not be expected to shift overnight from a traditional transaction-based HR mindset to viewing themselves and their co-workers as strategic contributors to organizational success, neither can the underlying technology that supports the transition between HR systems and HCM.

In the growing war for talent, organizations in all industries face the temptation to purchase and speed the deployment of HCM point solutions to mollify the demands of executives, shareholders, or employees.

How many times have we heard of companies that jump the gun to deploy sophisticated HCM technology without the proper core infrastructure and company culture in place? How many times have we heard of these initiatives failing? For experienced HR leaders, the correlation between the two is clear.

Without an overarching strategy that charts the planned evolution of HCM technology, organizations risk prematurely deploying costly technology that cannot effectively integrate into existing HR or HCM IT assets. Poorly implemented HCM solutions threaten to alienate employees with technology that lacks a clear connection to their day-to-day interaction with the workplace. Worse still, an unplanned approach can create a HR technology infrastructure that lacks cohesion and will ultimately fail to deliver the promised business results that drove HCM investments, thereby undermining the credibility of HR and training leaders alike.

To avoid the pitfalls of non-strategic HCM deployments, organizations require a logical, stage-based approach to transforming their workforce to create competitive advantage.

By adopting a linear model of HCM maturity, HR leaders can cultivate organizational change, deliver real business value over time, and ensure fiscal responsibility by investing in solutions when an organization is prepared to absorb and leverage them. Ultimately, HR leaders that stay the course can deliver on HCMs promise of increasing workforce performance.

While the order of precedence for deploying HCM technology may be debatable, there are fundamental principals that organizations must follow to help ensure the success of their HCM programs.

Organizations at the initial stage of HCM adoption should target e-learning as their first initiative to cut costs, expand class sizes, and accelerate companywide learning through the use of virtual classrooms. Beyond simple cost savings, e-learning provides organizations with clear value proposition to employees that will encourage technology adoption beyond basic self-service applications in their day-to-day work life. A successful e-learning implementation also provides significant proof of concept and financial returns for HR and training leaders as they begin to work with senior executives and finance to secure the necessary funding for later stages of HCM maturity.

Knowledge targeting

Before compliance and other issues, e-learning was viewed by many organizations as 'nice to have’ but not a business necessity that could deliver significant value or protect a company from severe financial risk. Knowledge targeting can help mature organizational HCM by enabling specific, department-level training that builds on an established core e-learning foundation. Knowledge targeting can address specific challenges that concern line-of-business managers, providing skills assessment for key job titles and a clear direction of how to fill skill gaps. By enabling line-of-business managers to collaborate with HR and training departments to tailor learning to their people, real business value begins to emerge as employees extend their knowledge beyond basic skill sets to specialized talents that have a direct impact on business performance.

The knowledge targeting stage of HCM provides HR and training leaders a unique opportunity to connect with business leaders, understand their challenges and deliver tangible value to them. Gaining credibility with managers and executive staff is a critical, even necessary, outcome of knowledge targeting—as success here can build momentum and executive sponsorship for further HCM investment.

Enterprise LMS

While an individual solution can accelerate the ability of a business unit to deploy e-learning, from a companywide perspective, the long-term effects can be disastrous. Differing user interfaces, and multiple, costly integrations to a core HR administration system can breed inconsistencies and duplicate costs for content generation and tracking that can cripple the maturity of a companywide HCM initiative.

An enterprise-wide learning management solution (LMS) will confront and eliminate disparate standards and duplicate technology often acquired by separate business units. However, from a HCM maturity perspective, the greater value of an enterprise LMS lies beyond improving the total cost of ownership. The enterprise LMS is the fulcrum point in the HCM maturity model, because it provides a standardized, consolidated platform to unify an organizations assessment of workforce talent.

This comprehensive view provides HR and training leaders with a voice more likely to be heard at the executive level as discussions regarding workforce performance can be raised to higher, company wide level. Moreover, with success—based on real performance metrics from previous stages in the HCM maturity model—HR leaders can speak with authority as the profile of their work grows within the organization.

Enterprise blended learning

By virtue of creating a centralized repository for learning content with the LMS, HR and training leaders will have unprecedented version control to ensure that only current, approved training is offered. In addition to buttressing the role of the e-learning with respect to compliance, improved version control provided additional cost benefits by allowing virtual, just-in-time production of printed course material eliminating both postage and inventory storage costs.

However, the greatest benefit that enterprise blended learning offers an organization is the ability to leverage virtual classrooms. The technology behind virtual classrooms provides a forum for real-time interaction between employees and instructors. With students, peers and instructors all on the same page, virtual classrooms encourage inter-departmental teamwork and build a consensus of understanding between teammates and managers. The impact this type of learning has on workforce performance can be profound, as organizational goals defined through course content begin to have a direct impact on the cultivation of skills and sharing of overall company goals.

Integrated HCM

To understand the function of competencies at this stage in the HCM maturity model, think of our previous four steps as building a strong, seaworthy ship. Competencies give our ship a rudder, allowing HR and training leaders to respond to changing business conditions by directing the performance of an organization by delivering training to employees how and when they need it.

The addition of competencies allows employee learning to be directly aligned to the performance goals of an organization. Importantly, the connection of learning to performance based compensation creates a feedback loop between effort and reward for employees. Further, competencies permit organizations to accurately forecast succession planning which will bring greater knowledge retention and stability to their workforce.

With a fully integrated HCM environment, HR and training leaders can finally have a solution that fulfills the true promise of HCM: The ability to quickly and accurately disseminate company goals to employees through the use of cost-effective training, and thereby making a significant contribution to organizational success by improving workforce performance.

By adopting a linear model of HCM maturity, HR and training leaders can avoid many pitfalls of HCM deployments while accelerating the success of their HCM initiatives. Beginning with basic e-learning provides immediate, verifiable cost savings. Leveraging targeted learning will engage LOB managers and mitigate compliance concerns. An enterprise LMS will provide a unified platform for company wide learning and eliminate the expense of duplicate content and technology. Blended learning can build on this technology foundation with rich media applications to create more interactive and valuable training. Finally, integrated HCM adds competencies to provide far reaching direction and business intelligence to your HCM strategy.

The reward of fully integrated HCM creates a coordinated, motivated, and nimble workforce that relies on HR and training leaders to facilitate their success. From an organization-wide perspective, an integrated HCM strategy insists that business managers interact with HR and training staff to ensure company goals and needs are properly built in to educational curriculum. It is at this point, that the alignment of employee skills and organizational goals intersects.

For this critical point of intersection to have actionable meaning, a strong technology foundation and culture of learning must first exist. The creation of such an environment requires hard, diligent work from HR and training leaders to build their infrastructure in a measured, strategic and fiscally responsible fashion. To succeed with HCM, you must start with the basics, prove ROI as each stage of the process, and build trust with line-of-business and executive management. The HCM maturity model provides an integrated, staged approach that can help you and your organization do exactly that.

Vicki Morris is vice president of marketing for Saba. She brings more than 15 years of enterprise software marketing experience from industry leading companies. Prior to Saba, Ms. Morris served as senior director of global product marketing for PeopleSoft, where she led the Total Ownership Experience marketing initiative spanning the full suite of PeopleSoft products worldwide. She previously served as vice president of marketing at SmartWare, where she built a million dollar marketing services practice and helped Symantec, Intuit and Sun with global launches.