The Issue: Managing Tomorrow Today

Global competition, market volatility and declining labor pools make investing in people a high risk gamble. Still, future success is dependent primarily on your ability to attract, retain and productively manage a shrinking pool of talented, motivated people.

Currently, human capital investments are sub-optimized by three factors:

• Each human resources (HR) unit operates primarily within its own silo at its own pace resulting in nonintegrated and mistimed outcomes.
• Pressure to perform concentrates HR on daily operations with little attention devoted to future consequences leaving many companies continually behind the curve in human capital management.
• There is no future-focused, strategic HCM model. Unlike production, finance and marketing, HR does not have an integrated model from which to design strategies, carry out operating initiatives and drive competitive advantage.

The lack of a strategic, unifying model limits HR's internal efficiency and greatly inhibits its ability to positively affect the people and organizations it services.

 

State of the Art

All major organizational functions from production (MRP) through finance (GAAP), marketing (CRN) and information technology (ERP) operate on the basis of a professional, strategic model. Still, HR is noticeable for its lack of such a strategic model and operating system. HR has a body of knowledge, a code of ethics and numerous theories of human and organizational behavior. Yet, a strategic model, operating system and generally accepted principles of evaluation have not been available. Therefore, we feel it is very timely to launch this initiative.