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Performance Management Perspectives

Published April 2007

Human Capital Management in the Great Wide Open

Ben Warden

Since the earliest post-independence days, the Bureau of Land Management has provided for the survey, settlement and care of America's rustic Western terrain.

Today, it administers more than 200 million acres, which consist of a mix of forests, streams and rivers, as well as national scenic and recreational trails.

The bureau's headquarters is in Washington, D.C., but only 500 of 10,000 employees work there. The other 9,500 are spread out across the bureau-managed lands in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. This can make it difficult to determine HR needs and maximize performance management.

Clark C. Collins, HR information resources management adviser, oversees what is needed from a technical standpoint to ensure employee needs are fulfilled.

With so many employees with a wide range of skills, Collins implemented a human capital management system to merge the needs, skills and wishes of all employees. The system helps plan future workforce needs, as well as measure and improve productivity.

"Basically it's a staffing and position analysis system," Collins said. "We're looking at the employees' careers, employment status, retirement, skills, acquisitions, succession planning — who's moving up the ladder of experience, and who's in line for a management position. On a biweekly basis, we capture the work of the employees, and we measure their work based on what particular job they're doing."

It's easy to see how a profit-based company could benefit from the system, but accurate and congruent employee information is at a premium for any organization, regardless whether it's profit-based or nonprofit in either the public or private sector.

In the bureau's case, information often doesn't match from one state to another, which can be cause for concern.

"When you have a true decision support system, management sees the value of knowing exactly what those positions are targeted for," Collins said. "In the case of succession planning, skills and advancement, the tool has been of value for management for planning and restructuring, repositioning the organization. Management has found value in being able to pinpoint certain positions in certain states that need attention."

With an organization as expansive as the Bureau of Land Management, it is especially important for bureau leaders to know where strengths and weaknesses lie. The bureau is not going to shrink anytime soon, but using the SAS Human Capital Management system makes it easier to navigate the organization.

It also helps ensure that when employees and managers look for information on a certain state or project, it will be correct.

"It has been a challenge to make sure the data is accurate," Collins said. "That's the one thing I think was critical in choosing our solution — it helped me improve upon the quality of the data and to produce those reports that gave us accurate numbers. Before, every time we'd do a state call, we would get different numbers from different states, and our numbers didn't look like other states, so the quality of the data has improved immensely."