It's no secret that, for years, HR departments have too often been considered cost centers and service providers, there to handle a broad range of day-to-day administrative tasks, ranging from record-keeping and benefits administration to recruiting and resume processing. Such tasks, while undeniably essential and time-consuming are fundamentally transactional and require extensive amounts of management time and resources, leaving little time to focus on broader strategic issues. The scope of the work overwhelms the process itself, challenging quality and frustrating hard-working HR practitioners who struggle to get ahead of year-to-year traditional tactical HR cycles.

Longstanding concentration on HR's tactical aspects caused practitioners to focus heavily on productivity and cost reduction. In some companies this focus resulted in HR being disconnected with the most critical aspect of the business, the suitability of talent to drive operational and strategic success.

The emergence of HR applications meant real efficiencies in benefits and payroll administration, job applicant tracking, and compensation planning. Still widely used, many of these applications were designed as add-ons to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Developed by a variety of vendors with no common set of standards, they are rarely able to exchange data effectively or conveniently, reinforcing the HR "silo" mentality.

Despite the newfound benefits of ERP, HRIS, and applications, HR professionals still lacked the depth of workforce insight they needed to become strategic contributors to their organizations. More importantly, they also restricted senior management's ability to manage and optimize talent.

The next step in this evolution towards strategic talent management centers around application integration, metrics, and increased manager and employee empowerment.

Figure 1: The Evolution of Talent Management