Yet another way today’s organizations are finding new approaches to saving time, money and headaches is by using the integrated functionality of learning and performance management systems to tie all of their human capital processes together.
Technology that addresses such processes has been around for some time. Until recently, however, nearly every talent management solution on the market supported these business processes with separate solutions that weren’t tightly integrated, if they were integrated at all. As a result, processes were automated but occurred in isolation, which made bringing it all together a difficult and time-consuming proposition.
Consider the case of Zions Bancorp., a rapidly growing U.S.-based financial institution headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, with more than 11,700 full-time employees dispersed across 10 West Coast states.
As recently as 2007, the company used a wide array of automated technology platforms to accomplish its human capital objectives. It had one human resource information system, one payroll system, one applicant-tracking and recruiting system, three LMSs, four performance management systems and a host of manual tracking systems such as spreadsheets and databases.
These systems possessed few common metrics and there was no means — apart from good old-fashion human brainpower and many man-hours spent sifting through data — to tie everything together and create an integrated view of what was happening across the enterprise from a human capital perspective.
That all changed last year, when Zions adopted a unified talent management practice across the organization and implemented a technology platform to support it. Using the new system, Zions is now able to tie all of the components that impact human capital and organizational development into a single platform for the first time — including recruiting and organizational planning, competency and performance management, employee learning and development, compensation and incentives, succession planning and more.
For Zions, these capabilities translate into enormous potential for cost-savings and operational efficiencies. Not only will the entire organization now work from a single platform for all of its human capital needs, everyone will speak the same language when evaluating people, positions and future talent requirements.
Last but not least, the new system jettisons the need to devote precious man-hours to mining and analyzing multiple databases every single time someone within the organization — be it a CLO or a line manager — needs access to critical information to improve decision making or streamline a process. By breaking down these barriers of data accessibility and knowledge sharing on an enterprise-wide scale, more effective communication between the functional components of the organization can occur, allowing critical business processes to move forward, whether that process is the CEO communicating annual objectives to the entire organization or a line worker developing a personal career plan.
