If your talent-related presentations to the board need more punch, The IBM Institute for Business Value’s recently released report, “Analytics in the Boardroom,” will be helpful. It focuses on corporate boards’ increasing need for, and reliance on, data-supported answers to tough business questions and the ways that the most advanced, analytics-minded organizations are responding.

The analyses and recommendations, while not developed specifically for corporate talent acquisition and management leaders, speak directly to the problems of credibility, relevance and impact faced by so many of those leaders when trying to position their departments as indispensable corporate partners.

Some Organizations are Indeed Different

Every business organization is analytically minded to some extent, but the range of sophistication is very broad. IBM’s collaborative study with MIT/Sloan Management Review documents this range in a number of ways:

• 57% — The increase from 2010 to 2011 in number of organizations using analytics to create competitive advantage.
   
• 2X — Organizations using sophisticated analytics are more than twice as likely to substantially outperform their peers than those who aren’t. 

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With respect to technology, the pressure on corporate talent acquisition managers continued to rise in 2011. Performance remains an issue (1 in 5 HRMS clients would change vendors).  The legacy issue of ownership—how IT and HR share control—remained largely unresolved. New generations of software continued to raise the ante on system integration and data sharing (only 15% of clients can multi-source data). And change management—coming to terms with social media (29% growth), cloud services (50% growth) and mobile platforms—challenged everyone.

Change management dominated the conversation and probably will again in 2012. ”Don’t miss the boat; don’t be left behind” is the favored message of vendors seeking market traction, of news outlets crafting headlines and of pundits punditing, but it’s not the critical issue.

In most organizations a wall still separates IT providers and IT users. As we explain in our upcoming Technology Report, that wall was built for sensible reasons but one unforeseen consequence was that users’ knowledge of the working tools they relied on steadily diminished. Relinquishing responsibility meant gradually relinquishing expertise.

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The annual fall HRTech conference is always a geek’s delight: all that nifty new software to review in an application area that’s as complex and volatile as the Middle East. Blink and you’re apt to have missed a revolution, which makes attending akin to playing an online multi-player game. Strategy, focus and competition footwear are crucial.

Two takeaways from this year’s event: 1) HR has finally entered the Promised Land 2) Technical fluency is HR’s number one competency challenge.

Two presentations crystalized these points: Laurie Bassi’s discussion of her new book Good Company, Business Success in the Worthiness Era; and Lexy Martin’s review of the 2011-12 CedarCrestone HR systems survey.

Bassi writes about the new criteria for durable business success. According to her research, Nobel Lauriate economist Milton Freedman’s argument that the only social responsibility of business is to maximize profits is outdated.

To succeed in today’s fluid, globalized, hypercompetitive, increasingly socially conscious business environment companies must adopt a broader set of responsibilities that embraces all stakeholders, including customers, employees and communities, not merely owners.

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