Empowering Clients to Build Learning Organizations
In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge defined a learning organization as “… a place where people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn”. Senge described the core of a learning organization’s work as based upon five learning disciplines that represented lifelong programs of both personal and organizational learning and practice.
I agree with Peter’s vision of the learning organization, but have rarely witnessed the phenomenon occur in practice as he described over 30 years ago. Why? It appears that this is primarily due to: a) an abundance of consulting groups who are too greedy to help clients become empowered and potentially operate with fewer consulting resources, and, b) managers who place short-term productivity goals ahead of long-term organizational learning strategies. I will address the latter of these points in a separate blog; here I will speak to the first point. As a part of the NAMC leadership, we purposefully don’t lock ourselves into having clients rely on us for service and support. Instead, we work hard to empower our clients by helping them better leverage technology to support their overall business objectives. Many of our projects actually end with our taking the time to train our clients to do a job for which we could easily charge a lot of money. It’s like old proverb of teaching a man to fish… we want our clients to eat for a lifetime.
HR Technology Solutions
The world of HR has received more than its share of attention from technology providers over the past 20 years. In some cases, technology provided useful solutions to rote human resource administration processes. However, in many other cases, the quality of the process outcomes was lost when converted into a technology solution. NAMC has focused on the latter–complex HR processes that have not been successfully aided by technology. Working with our research partners and clients, we have developed a set of HR technology solutions for complex HR processes that are of high quality and reliability. Of the three priority functions for talent management in 2013 (Bersin, 2013), NAMC is addressing two with their HR technology solutions: social networking and analytics.
Private Talent Network Portals
The online social networking phenomenon has permanently changed the information sharing landscape around the world. Underlying the change are cultural shifts such as a growing need for connection to others in a personally disconnected world, increasing expectations of controlling one’s own information and career path, and a massive increase in the amount of information that is produced for consumption daily. These shifts will not reverse in the foreseeable future, and there has already been widespread adoption to online social networking by the public.
With this in mind, the HR community has identified online social networking as a valuable tool; although most are unclear as to how it can be used to improve their processes. To inform this situation, Dr. Davies has conducted research on the application of online social networking to HR processes. He found that there are definite potential benefits to employees, such as enhanced opportunities for informal collaboration; increased visibility, personal accountability and responsibility; richer training experiences; and improvements in data collection and use. He also found that of those vendors currently offering HR solutions with a online social networking component, few, if any, are integrating the HR component with social networking in such a way that the potential benefits will be realized.
Based on Dr. Davies findings, NAMC developed the Private Talent Network Portal (PTNP) as a useful integration point for the PointLeader TMS, the NAMC LMS, and the online BIRT reporting tools. The PTNP platform provides rich media, collaboration, visibility, and tracking in a flexible solution. Currently, four clients are using the PTNP for a variety of enhanced HR processes.
Predictive Analytics
Analytics is a natural business area for NAMC, given that we already gather, manage and provide reports on critical TMS data as a part of our other services. The predictive models used by Dr. Davies in his TMS solutions provide the framework for our databases and for adding streams of business data from clients for analyses and reporting. As is our approach for other services, we provide client access to database dashboards and our BIRT reporting solution for running our predictive models. NAMC provides support to clients as is needed for understanding and using our analytic solutions.
